Finding Love Again, This Time With a Man

I have been giving thought to former U.S. Senator  Harris Wofford's op-ed in the Sunday New York Times before sharing my thoughts.  Having been married to a woman for 24 years in a marriage that had its share of love notwithstanding my own self-hate and denial of my own sexual orientation and now having been married to a man for over two years, a couple of things struck me.  The first is that Woffard is right: one falls in love with the person - the soul, if you will.  The second is that physical sex takes a back seat to the love and attraction to the other person as a whole - something seemingly lost on Christofascists who focus solely on the physical aspects of gay sex with no thought of the emotional, soul to soul connection.  I love my husband not simply because of some physical activity, but instead because of his being a sweet, thoughtful, kind, genuine and loving person.  Here are excerpts from Harris Wofford's op-ed:

AT age 70, I did not imagine that I would fall in love again and remarry. But the past 20 years have made my life a story of two great loves.

On Jan. 3, 1996, the telephone rang just before midnight, interrupting the silence of the hospital room. From the bedside of my wife, Clare, I lifted the receiver. “Please hold for the president.” Bill Clinton had heard that Clare, struck by acute leukemia, was fading. She listened and smiled but was too weak to speak. Some hours later, I held her hands in mine as she died.

During 48 years of marriage, we had spent a lifetime together. Clare and I fell in love trying to save the world during World War II. . . . Our romance and adventure continued for five decades. . . . . We spent a happy half-century together with different perspectives on life.

For our three children and me, Clare was at the heart of our family. When I told her, “You’re my best friend,” she would reply, “and your best critic.” And when I said, “You’re my best critic,” she responded, “and your best friend.”

We were both about to turn 70 when she died. I assumed that I was too old to seek or expect another romance. But five years later, standing on a beach in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., I sensed a creative hour and did not want to miss it.

I swam alone in the water, attracting the attention of two bystanders near the shore. They came over to say hello, which is how I met Matthew Charlton. As we talked, I was struck by Matthew’s inquisitive and thoughtful manner and his charm. I knew he was somebody I would enjoy getting to know. We were decades apart in age with far different professional interests, yet we clicked. I admired Matthew’s adventurous 25-year-old spirit.

When he told me that I was “young at heart,” I liked the idea, until I saw a picture of him on a snowboard upside down executing a daring back flip. The Jackson Hole newspaper carried the caption, “Charlton landed the jump without mishap.

We took trips around the country and later to Europe together, becoming great friends. We both felt the immediate spark, and as time went on, we realized that our bond had grown into love.

Other than with Clare, I had never felt love blossom this way before. It was three years before I got the nerve to tell my sons and daughter about Matthew. Yet over time my children have welcomed Matthew as a member of the family, while Matthew’s parents have accepted me warmly.

To some, our bond is entirely natural, to others it comes as a strange surprise, but most soon see the strength of our feelings and our devotion to each other. We have now been together for 15 years.

Too often, our society seeks to label people by pinning them on the wall — straight, gay or in between. I don’t categorize myself based on the gender of those I love. I had a half-century of marriage with a wonderful woman, and now am lucky for a second time to have found happiness.

For a long time, I did not suspect that idea and fate might meet in my lifetime to produce same-sex marriage equality. My focus was on other issues facing our nation, especially advancing national service for all. Seeking to change something as deeply ingrained in law and public opinion as the definition of marriage seemed impossible. I was wrong, and should not have been so pessimistic.  . . . . It is right to expand our conception of marriage to include all Americans who love each other.

Matthew is very different from Clare. The political causes that continue to move me do not preoccupy him, nor have I turned my priorities to design, the focus of his driving talent. Still, the same force of love is at work bringing two people together. Twice in my life, I’ve felt the pull of such passionate preference.

At age 90, I am lucky to be in an era where the Supreme Court has strengthened what President Obama calls “the dignity of marriage” by recognizing that matrimony is not based on anyone’s sexual nature, choices or dreams. It is based on love.

All this is on my mind as Matthew and I prepare for our marriage ceremony. On April 30, at ages 90 and 40, we will join hands, vowing to be bound together: to have and to hold, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.

 My last thought is this: do fundamentalist Christians see their own marriages and loves based solely on physical lust and sex, or do they believe it is based on more.  If it is based on more, then why can't these people see that for gays the situation is no different. It is in the end all about love.

Virginia GOP Family Values: Throw Your Wife Under the Bus

The criminal corruption trail of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen seems to get more and more tawdry and night time soap opera like with each passing day of the trial.  One thing that has become abundantly clear is that to be a good Republican family, one needs to play act in public even as shrew like behavior and estrangement are the norm behind closed doors.  Or at least that is the take away if one believes Bob McDonnell - who opposes gay marriage despite the sanctity free nature of his own - and his defense team.  Oh, and let's not forget the greed and avarice that seems to have had free rein.  Here are highlights from the New York Times on the tawdry reality  of  Virginia GOP family values in action:

Defense lawyers have portrayed the couple as incapable of conspiring with Mr. Williams, who gave the couple and a family business $120,000 in low-interest loans, paid for much of their daughter’s wedding, took Ms. McDonnell on lavish spending sprees, bought a Rolex for the governor, footed the bill for golf outings and made his Ferrari available to them. 

The defense painted Ms. McDonnell as a vitamin-obsessed “nutbag” smitten with Mr. Williams, and Mr. McDonnell, once considered a contender for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, as at once a naïve Boy Scout and an accomplished governor too busy to notice Mr. Williams’s entreaties.

The initial shot the former governor took at his wife was a teaser, devised by the defense lawyer Henry Asbill at the very beginning of his client’s testimony. Mr. Asbill then turned to Mr. McDonnell’s career and his interactions with Mr. Williams.

Even in those early biographical sections, client and lawyer mustered a few veiled shots at Ms. McDonnell. The former governor spoke at length of the difficult times the family faced when he quit his business job and went to law school. He rejoined active duty in the Army Reserve, helped distribute newspapers in Virginia Beach and sold toys with his wife, who pitched in by waiting tables.

After he graduated, Ms. McDonnell “was a little surprised, maybe disappointed, when she looked at the salary” her husband would be making as a local prosecutor, which was lower than his paycheck four years before.

Mr. McDonnell’s main task on Wednesday appeared to be showing that for all his largess, Mr. Williams received no quo for his quid. The Richmond-based insurer Genworth Financial won a $7 million tax savings from the McDonnell administration. A local brewery here got a bill-signing ceremony. The governor pulled out all the stops to help an Israeli firm partner with Pepsi-Cola to make Sabra hummus in Virginia. A DuPont battery facility in Chesterfield County got a visit from the governor.

In contrast, Mr. McDonnell said, Mr. Williams’s Star Scientific company got no grants, no earmarks in the Virginia budget, no economic development assistance, no governor’s visit — just one event in the governor’s mansion, one of “300 or so” where 25,000 people were invited.

But the fireworks still lie with the marriage, which has looked picture-perfect in public but is being portrayed as icy, roiled by a mercurial wife who loathed her role as first lady.

A management consultant hired in 2011 to calm the first lady’s ready-to-revolt staff testified Wednesday that he had discussed reducing her time at the governor’s mansion, limiting her public speaking and getting her therapy, possibly for depression.

Indeed, only in this soap-operatic trial would evidence of affection between the McDonnells be seen as a victory for the prosecution. Prosecutors on Wednesday tried to undermine the defense’s contention that the McDonnells’ marriage had become a sham, highlighting an email exchange between Ms. McDonnell and Mr. Burke in January 2012 as they hashed endlessly over getting her through a coming public event.

Mr. Burke testified that he was brought in to calm “an undue amount of chaos” in the first lady’s suite. He spoke of shouting matches over telephones while trying to stop Ms. McDonnell’s entire staff from quitting, a private appeal to the governor to get his wife into therapy, and hours coaching Ms. McDonnell through speaking engagements and public appearances.

The McDonnells quickly exchanged high-interest credit card debt for Mr. Williams’s lending terms: 2 percent interest to be paid after three years, with no monthly payments necessary.

Sadly, I suspect that many of the marriages of the "godly Christian" crowd are shams and psychodramas like that depicted by the defense team.  The irony is that, if this is true, having gays legally marry could only help the status of marriage across the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Think about it, what kind of marriage can a hate filled, perpetually lying, frigid bitch like Victoria Cobb have? 

Catholic Marriages in America Are on a Steep Decline

While the bitter old queens men in dresses - i.e., the Roman Catholic hierarchy - in America are still throwing tons of money at efforts to bar same sex marriages (I continue to suspect the National Organization for Marriage is a front group for the Catholic Church) and remain fixated on controlling women's wombs, they apparently have been ignoring what ought to be perceived as a far larger problem: the number of church weddings among straight Catholics has been plummeting,  Like many other young people, young Catholics are simply not having church weddings.  Part of it is the fact that younger Catholics are leaving the Church in droves even if the Church keeps them listed as "members" absent a formal withdrawal such as I undertook when I formally notified the Diocese of Richmond to strike me from the membership rolls.  Another part of the phenomenon is that the always rule obsessed Church throws many obstacles in the way of those seeking a church wedding.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the precipitous drop in church weddings:

Many elements of the archetypical American wedding echo the formality and traditions of the country’s largest single religious tradition, Roman Catholicism. But Catholic weddings themselves are becoming rarer and rarer. 

 In 1970, there were roughly 426,000 Catholic weddings, accounting for 20 percent of all marriages in the United States that year. Beginning in 1970, however, Catholic marriages went into decades of steady decline, until the turn of the new century—when that decline started to become precipitous: Between 2000 and 2012, Church weddings dropped by 40 percent, according to new data from the Official Catholic Directory. 

According to Catholic doctrine, marriage is a sacrament, or holy rite of passage, that can only be received if both husband and wife are baptized in the Church. In many cases, bishops can grant a special dispensation for interfaith couples, which allows them to be married in a church by a priest. But for faithful Catholics who want their marriage to be fully recognized by the Church, the options are either marrying a good Catholic girl or boy, or convincing their partner to convert.

Between 2000 and 2012, adult baptisms declined by nearly 50 percent, which, Gray said, probably has something to do with the declining rates of marriage.

 So why are couples choosing to get married outside of the Church? . . . . "More people are choosing to get married in country clubs and at the beach," said Gray.

Meanwhile, fewer Americans are getting married generally.  But while that's a factor in declining Catholic marriage rates, the deeper cause is the changing relationship between people and traditional institutions, Gray says. "It's not just churches, but all kinds of institutions have experienced detachments from the 'brick and mortar,'" he said. By “brick and mortar,” Gray means in-person religious communities: people physically coming together in churches to worship together. In general, Americans are becoming less affiliated with traditional religious institutions, not just the Catholic Church

Still, Gray said, "I do think what we're seeing is different among Millennials. They are seeing their social networks across the Internet rather than across geography. So much of parish life takes place in brick and mortar, and for Millennials, so much of their social life is not in brick and mortar.” Among Millennials, defined here as 18- to 33-year-olds, religious disaffiliation is higher than it has been for any generation

it’s also possible that beach weddings are an early sign of a generational shift among religious Americans, with more and more people finding meaning beyond the walls and words of a church. 

Of my children and nieces and nephews, all of who were raised Catholic, five have married.  None have had a Catholic wedding and only one was married by a minister.  Equally telling, only one remains a sometimes church goer.  The others have more or less walked away from Catholicism - as have many of their friends.  The irony, if anything, they are more moral in their standards and treatment of others than the "godly Christians" and "good Catholics" who make a show of churchgoing and condemning "sinners" while otherwise acting in a manner that make the Biblical Pharisees seem upstanding.

One in Three Virginia Children Live in or Near Poverty

Virginia is among the more wealth states in America.  Yet, a new study released by the University of Virginia indicates that 1 in 3 Virginia children either are living in poverty or close to poverty the level.  The response of the Virginia GOP?  Block Medicaid expansion and continue to oppose spending on programs that help the poor and less fortune even as Virginia Republican's cannot prostitute themselves enough to Christofascists by claiming that they revere Christian values.  The hypocrisy is nearly complete, but sadly that is what should expect from both today's Virginia GOP and Virginia Christofascists.  Their agenda is about as far away for the theme of the Gospel message as one can get.  Indeed, as I have noted many times before, they make the Pharisees of the Bible look like wonderful, generous people in comparison.  Here are some highlights from the report's findings:

Child poverty in Virginia is of concern, not only for its current effects, but also for its future consequences. Today’s poor children are likely to have lower educational attainment, lower projected lifetimes earnings, and generally poorer health outcomes as adults—negative outcomes affecting not only these individuals, but also the vitality of the Commonwealth. This report provides a fresh perspective on childhood poverty and family structure in the Commonwealth by using the Virginia Poverty Measure and focusing on three questions:

1. How prevalent is childhood poverty in Virginia?
2. How does family structure relate to childhood poverty?
3. Are current poverty amelioration strategies — particularly those promoting marriage — sufficient given what we know about childhood poverty?

Nearly one in three Virginia children lives in economic distress —  either in poverty or near poverty.   The immediate consequences of poverty, such as inadequate nutrition, persistent anxiety, and impairments to intellectual and emotional development, affect the daily lives of too many children.

Equally troubling, the legacy of poverty follows poor children into adulthood in the form of lower educational attainment, lower projected lifetime earnings,  and higher likelihood of certain health problems, among other negative outcomes.

Because children are dependent on those who raise them, strategies to address child poverty typically begin with families.  In particular, the marital status of parents has been identified and emphasized as significant in ameliorating childhood  poverty.

While  children in single and cohabiting parent families make up one half of all children in and near poverty,  the other one half of all poor and near poor children lives with married parents.

While marriage promotion may play a role in anti-poverty policy, it fails to address the needs of children in poor married parent families.   Initiatives aimed at providing a secure financial foundation for all children should include strategies that  would benefit children in all family structures.  Such proposed strategies include better child support enforcement, childcare subsidies for poor working  parents, and universal pre-kindergarten.

There is more in the study, but the take away is that the Chrisofascist/GOP obsession (here in Virginia, The heinous Family Foundation is a prime example) with promoting marriage as a magic cure all missing roughly half of Virginia's poor and near poor children. Worse yet, the types of programs that would help these children and their families are typically anathema to the Virginia GOP.  

 

The "Down Low" Sex Life of Jesus

When I was relatively new to blogging I was lucky enough to be invited to the LGBT Blogger Summit orchestrated by Mike Rogers and underwritten in part by Progressive Insurance and Microsoft.  Among the bloggers I got to meet was Irene Moore, an ordained minister and someone who resisted the anti-gay message so often associated with American Christianity.  As a woman, she also found the patriarchal structure of Christian churches less than appealing, not to mention inconsistent with the true history of early Christianity before that history was rewritten to fit the agenda of those seeking power over and control of the Church's message.  Irene has an interesting piece in the San Diego Gay & Lesbian News that uses the recent stories on the apparent antiquity of the so-called "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" to review the Church's historic problem Jesus' sexuality.  Here are some highlights:  

While many biblical scholars have ignored non-canonical texts like the gnostic and apocryphal gospels that suggested Jesus had a wife, they are now not ignoring the 2012 discovery of a faded fragment of papyrus that suggest he did.

According to this month's New York Times article, "Papyrus Referring to Jesus' Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say" the papyrus is now known as the "Gospel of Jesus's wife."

This discovery, however, disrupts the Christian church’s depiction of Jesus for many reasons. The Church doesn't want to say that Jesus had a wife because his evangelizing with 12 disciples clearly points to the fact that he wasn't a family man.

Also, the Church doesn't want to accept that Jesus might have been married to Mary Magdalene -- the second most important woman in the New Testament Scriptures after Mary, the mother of Jesus -- because the misogyny written in the patriarchal narratives of Jesus's ministry cast her as a whore.

New evidence suggests that Mary Magdalene may have been one of Jesus's disciples, may have bankrolled his ministry, may possibly have been his wife, and that Mary Magdalene was clearly Jesus's go-to-girl for a lot of things.

This discovery, also, reopens the “down-low” secret about Jesus’ sexuality that not only attacks the pillars of Christianity, but also profoundly plays into the oppression that women as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people face today in both church and society.

And that open secret about Jesus’ sexuality — suggesting that he was gay or married, not that the two are mutually exclusive if Jesus was on the “down low” — points to the cultural war issues we are wrestling with today, namely the institution of marriage, women in the church, and gay clergy.

However, the debate about Jesus’ sexuality takes him from his mother’s womb to his tomb. The Christian depiction of Jesus as that of a life-long virgin who had no sexual desire and who never engaged in sexual intercourse raises anyone’s suspicion, because by today’s sexual standards, Jesus’ homosocial environment of 12 men suggests, according to the law of averages, that at least one out of the bunch was gay.

Given the nature of compulsory heterosexuality playing in Jewish marital laws during Jesus’ time, Jesus might have been forced to be on the “down low” -- if gay.

Encrypted in Leonardo Da Vinci’s 1498 painting “The Last Supper” is a spiritual and sensual narrative about both the sacred feminine and homoeroticism found in religious life.

And while many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals find Da Vinci’s sensuous painting blasphemous, Da Vinci’s gay male homoerotic subtext pries open the door to the alluring quality about the Roman Catholic Church that gay men find both rabidly homophobic and ravenously homoerotic.

It is unlikely, given Jewish marital customs, that Jesus was not married, and he probably was assigned a wife long before he became an itinerant preacher and met up with male and female disciples on the road.

I refuse to believe that an itinerant rabbi with a gang of 12 horny men, they were virgins, celibate and not married.
- See more at: http://sdgln.com/commentary/2014/04/18/down-low-sex-life-jesus-comes-light#sthash.FOvFWaGS.dpuf

I refuse to believe that an itinerant rabbi with a gang of 12 horny men, they were virgins, celibate and not married.

 I am in agreement with Irene.  Like so much else in the Bible, the true story - if Jesus really existed - was revised and modified to meet the needs of fallible men who were motivated by a desire for power and most importantly control over others. 

 - See more at: http://sdgln.com/commentary/2014/04/18/down-low-sex-life-jesus-comes-light#sthash.FOvFWaGS.dpuf

The Christofacist War on Divorce

It's not just gays who need to be fearful of the agenda of the Christofascists and their political whores in the Republican Party.  Heterosexuals in failed marriages need also worry as do women who want control over their own bodies and straight couples who want to use birth control.  Divorce and contraception are prime targets of those who believe that women are to be subordinate to men and ought to be required to stay in marriage no matter how horrible they might be.  An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at this often overlooked aspect of the Christofascist/GOP war on women and modernity.  Here are excerpts:

For years, social conservatives have been fighting to prevent certain people from getting married. But they’re waging a parallel battle, too: Trying to keep married couples together.

In cooperation with the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage, socially conservative politicians have been quietly trying to make it harder for couples to get divorced. In recent years, lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced bills imposing longer waiting periods before a divorce is granted, mandating counseling courses or limiting the reasons a couple can formally split. States such as Arizona, Louisiana and Utah have already passed such laws, while others such as Oklahoma and Alabama are moving to do so.

If divorces are tougher to obtain, social conservatives argue, fewer marriages will end. And having more married couples is not just desirable in its own right but is a social good, they say. During his presidential campaign, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) emphasized finishing high school and getting married as cures for poverty. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically,” he declared at a 2011 event in Iowa.

A legislative movement against divorce may seem like a non-starter in a country where half of married couples avail themselves of this right, but as with legal challenges to Obamacare and the rise of the tea party movement, today’s fringe idea can quickly become tomorrow’s mainstream conservatism.

Divorce has long been a cultural touchstone in America. Social conservatives regularly advocate a return to a more traditional system of divorce — namely that it be extraordinarily difficult to get.
No-fault divorce has been a success. A 2003 Stanford University study detailed the benefits in states that had legalized such divorces: Domestic violence dropped by a third in just 10 years, the number of husbands convicted of murdering their wives fell by 10 percent, and the number of women committing suicide declined between 11 and 19 percent. A recent report from Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress found that only 28 percent of divorced women said they wished they’d stayed married.

Yet the conservative push for “divorce reform” is finding sympathetic ears in statehouses, where Republican lawmakers have regularly introduced bills to restrict the practice. Their rationales range from the biblical (God bemoans divorce in Malachi 2:14-16) to the social (divorce reduces worker productivity) to the financial (two households are more expensive to maintain than one). Leading conservatives such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have also argued that marriage is a solution to poverty.

While some studies show that children of divorced parents do experience worse life outcomes — including diminished math and social skills, a higher chance of dropping out of school, poorer health, and a greater likelihood of divorce themselves — Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld points out that there is no way to test definitively whether children of divorced parents were already more likely to experience such outcomes. And as Stephanie Coontz, a historian and the author of “Marriage, a History,” explains, what’s most critical is the high-conflict environment that kids grew up in before their parents separated. 

[I]nherent in that argument is an unfortunate and unavoidable reality: Making divorce less accessible harms women most. The right to divorce was a victory women fought for in the culture wars of the 1970s, and women today are twice as likely as men to ask for a divorce, according to Rosenfeld.

Would making divorce less accessible encourage partners to stay together, as conservatives hope? Probably not. Waiting periods and mandatory classes “add a new frustration to already frustrated lives,” Rosenfeld notes. In other words, a cooling-off period isn’t cooling anybody off.

More problematic, these roadblocks “could easily exacerbate the situation and harm kids,” Coontz says, noting that divorcees are “more likely to parent amicably if they haven’t been locked into a long separation process.”

The push to restrict divorce is a form of paternalism — expanding government in pursuit of socially conservative ends. Marriage is a conservative institution, the thinking goes, and married straight couples provide a backstop against the creep of government. Any public policy that encourages the creation and persistence of married straight couples therefore merits support; any policy that deviates, including same-sex marriage or no-fault divorce, is hostile to the institution.

The irony is, of course that evangelical Christians have the highest divorce rate of anyone.  Moreover, if one truly cares about children, you don't leave them in homes wracked by strife and discord.   Like so much else the "godly folk" bloviate about, they actually do not give a damn about children after they leave the womb.  The Christofascists need to stay out of other peoples' lives and, if they want to remain in their own miserable marriages, they are welcome to do so.  Just leave the rest of us alone. 

Why The Idea Of "Traditional Marriage" Is Total Fiction

To listen to the Christofascist, one man and one woman marriage has been the ideal since the beginning of time.  Like pretty much everything else that comes from the lips of the Christofascist, the claim is a lie.  First, one need only read the Old Testament to see that polygamy, not monogamy, was the true form of "Biblical marriage."   This inconvenient truth is, of course, utterly ignored by the self-proclaimed "godly folk."  But there are many other reasons why the form of marriage lauded by the self-congratulatory pious ones is not consistent with the manner in which marriage has been redefined through the centuries.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at some of the history of marriage.  Here are some excerpts:

As state after state -- most recently Utah and Oklahoma -- battles to legalize gay marriage, opponents of the push for equality continue to argue that marriage itself has remained a static institution that would be destroyed if redefined. But there's a big flaw in that logic. Because while marriage has existed as a central element of life in nearly every global culture in recorded history, its definition has already been changed. Repeatedly.

Before legal systems and international economies, noble and ruling classes used marriages instead of treaties to create diplomatic and commercial ties. "You established peaceful relationships, trading relationships, mutual obligations with others by marrying them," writes Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History.
So for anyone who claims that gay marriage will defile "traditional" marriage's supposed long-standing and unchanged legacy, have a look at just a few of the ways marriage has already been redefined over the years.

Ancient Greece: Marriage is for making babies.
Like most ancient governing bodies, Athens didn't legally define marriage for its citizens. Producing offspring was pretty much the only reason to get hitched -- as one man put it, "We keep hetaerae (courtesans) for pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our body, and wives for the bearing of legitimate children and to keep watch over our house" -- because the state did control movement of wealth through inheritance. It was so important to keep property within the family, Coontz writes, that a girl whose father died without leaving another male heir could be forced to marry her nearest male relative, even if she had to divorce her current husband.

Marriage wasn't even considered the most ideal union, at least according to the elite members of society. That honor went to -- drumroll, please -- homosexual partnerships, since married men and women weren't expected to provide emotional fulfillment for one another.

Indigenous peoples: Life is hard, so marry whomever you need to.
In some cultures, men took several wives so they could help each other with all the work needed to sustain the family. Women in Botswana had a saying: "Without cowives, a woman's work is never done," Coontz writes.

Some Native American tribes highly respected "two-spirit" individuals, or those who could do the work of men and women. Two-spirit people could be married to someone of the same sex, since all the tasks needed to maintain the household could be performed easily, making marriage more of a labor concern than a gender concern.

Ancient Egypt: Marriage in pursuit of super-legit bloodlines.
Rulers of Alexander the Great's splintered empire used marriage as a political tool, Coontz writes, taking more than one wife in order to establish alliances with other kings. Unlike Botswana's co-wives, though, Hellenistic co-wives typically hated one another, since each was seen as a threat to the others' ascension to power. Children schemed with their mothers against step-mothers. Siblings schemed against siblings. To produce heirs that could remove all doubt of legitimacy, some brother-and-sister marriages also occurred.

Early Christians: Marital sex is a necessary evil.
"Many early Christians," Coontz writes, "believed that marriage undermined the rigorous self-control needed to achieve spiritual salvation." Celibacy was therefore preferable over marriage, but sex was tolerated for purposes of procreation -- so long as you weren't marrying your cousin, second cousin, stepmother, stepdaughter, widow of your uncle or brother, or anyone within seven degrees of separation from yourself.

Medieval Europe: Life is still hard, and marriage makes business sense.
For the rich, marriage was again a political arrangement between two families who wished to cement their ties and merge assets. Queens arranged marriages for siblings, relatives and ladies-in-waiting in order to create international support networks for themselves. In the 12th and 13th centuries, people believed that "love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other," as the Countess of Champagne once wrote. Adulterous relationships, on the other hand, were the pinnacle of romance.

16th Century: Marriage is now a sacrament.
In 1563, the Catholic Church decreed that marriage was a sacred ritual to be performed in a church. They talked about doing this a few centuries earlier, Coontz says, but it would have rendered a lot of marriages invalid, because no one got married in a church. 

Meanwhile, Protestants declared clergymen's right to marriage while warning not to love one's spouse too much. A lot of people were still weirded out by the concept of affection in marriage -- one Virginia colonist wrote that a female friend was "more fond of her husband perhaps than the Politeness of the day allows."

Late 20th Century: Marriage is a human right.
Feminist groups fought to ease pressure on women to find a man and settle down, helping to cement the idea of marriage as a partnership between equals. Marital rape was outlawed. States began repealing laws preventing some marriages -- interracial marriages were legalized in 1967 and marriage of prison inmates in 1987 -- as the idea of a perfect wedding became more and more of a billion-dollar commercial enterprise.  In 2001, the Netherlands became the first in a growing number of nations to grant same-sex couples the right to marry.

There's quite a bit more in the article that shows the lie of the Christofascist claims.   Civil Commotion has perhaps the most realistic assessment of Christofascists' version of "traditional marriage":

The relationship that conservative Christians call ‘marriage’ consists of cosmic permission for sexual intercourse in order to make babies and perpetuate the cult — and that’s all; it is clergy-supervised animal husbandry. They specifically, and relentlessly, condemn the mutual loyalty and shared ambitions that make a relationship a marriage.

 Oh, and let us not forget that the evangelical Christian crowd has the highest divorce rate - even though the Gospels have Jesus condemning divorce.  The hypocrisy is, as said before, complete.

Whore Like Republicans Rush to Support "Duck Dynasty" Bigot While Decent People are Repulsed

Proving once again that there are no limits to how low today's Republican elected officials and Tea Party mouthpieces will go in order to prostitute themselves to the Christofascist element of the GOP base, one Republican after another has rushed to support redneck bigot, Phil Robertson of "Duck Dynasty" notoriety after he was suspended indefinitely by A&E for his verbal diarrhea in a recent GQ Magazine interview.  These Republicans  - and fame seekers like the mindless Sarah Palin - literally fell all over themselves rushing to defend Robertson.  Politico looks at some of the pandering whore-like behavior.  Here are excerpts:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Thursday criticized the “politically correct crowd” following the suspension of “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson over comments he made about homosexuality and religion in a recent interview with GQ magazine.

“Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the State of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with,” Jindal said in a statement released by his office. “I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views.”

Not surprisingly, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and others stampeded to join the parade of willing political prostitutes.  It is little wonder that the younger generations are turning their backs on the GOP in drovers. 

Meanwhile, serious thinking people are feeling revulsion towards Robertson and the hate-filled and bigoted mindset he represents.  Civil Commotion summed up well the reality that anti-gay animus is only part of the larger racist and bigoted world view that now permeates the GOP and the far right:

The Wartburg ladies give that bunch the heave-ho they deserve.

We believe that things said in public get to be critiqued in public. While many “gospel” conservatives are jumping up and down about A&E’s response to Phil Robertson’s views on homosexuality, they seem to be quite silent on some other views expressed by Robertson in GQ.  In the January issue of GQ, the Duck Dynasty star also comments on growing up in a pre-civil-rights-era Louisiana.

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person,” Robertson claims. “Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash.”

He adds, “They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

While not totally condemning Robertson - given the freakish reality show format that his show represents - Andrew Sullivan takes umbrage that Robertson only equates homosexuality with a specific sex act:

This is a fascinating glimpse into the fundamentalist mind. You’ll notice that, for the fundamentalist, all sin – when it comes down to it -  starts with sex. This sexual obsession, as the Pope has rightly diagnosed it, is a mark of neurotic fundamentalism in Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity. And if all sin is rooted in sex, then the homosexual becomes the most depraved and evil individual in the cosmos. So you get this classic statement about sin: “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there.”

This emphasis is absolutely not orthodox Christianity. . . . And to posit gay people as the true source of all moral corruption is to use eliminationist rhetoric and demonizing logic to soften up a small minority of people for exclusion, marginalization and, at some point, violence. . . . . What we’re seeing here – and it’s very much worth debating – is how fundamentalist religion seizes on recognizable, immoral minorities to shore up its own sense of righteousness.

 

All we’re seeing here is the effect of cultural isolation. The only thing I find objectionable about it – and it is objectionable – is the reduction of gay people and our relationships to sex acts. Mr Robertson would not be happy – indeed, rightly be extremely offended – if I reduced his entire family life and marriage to sex with a vagina.

Bob Felton also chimed in to remind us of the depraved view of marriage held by the fundamentalist Christian crowd:

Sullivan is right about the cultural isolation and the reductionism, but it shows that he hasn’t spent much time amongst southern fundamentalists. If he had, he would know that they define marriage as sex — or, more precisely, as cosmic permission for sex. The mutual loyalty and shared ambitions that actually make a relationship a marriage are specifically and relentlessly condemned, for those things are presumptions upon … Him, who is to have all your loyalty and who will let you know what are your ambitions.  It’s childish, and it’s odious, but Robertson’s exposition of southern fundamentalist ideals is definitely authentic.

These fundamentalists - and this includes Robertson - are not nice, decent or moral people.  Hate and bigotry are the stock in trade.  More Americans need to recognize this reality and treat these people like the pariahs they deserve to be.

Tennessee Church Kicks Out Family For Supporting Lesbian Daughter

The Christofascists go on and on about the importance of heterosexual marriage and raising children, but in truth, they care little or nothing for married couples who don't tow the official line of denomination dogma and they would have parents throw their gay children on the trash heap.  As Bob Felton at Civil Commotion likes to point out, obedience to the cult and the ignorant, unscientific writings from 2500 years ago trumps all else, including family ties.  The recent behavior of a church in Tennessee underscores this reality.  A family that had been church members for three generations has been expelled from church membership because they family has supported their lesbian daughter.   The Tennessee Free Press has details.  Here are highlights:

Collegedale's decision to grant benefits to same-sex couples was a victory for Kat Cooper, a gay detective who championed the months-long effort that made the Chattanooga suburb the first city in Tennessee to offer benefits to same-sex spouses of its government employees.

Cooper's mother, Linda, stood by her side throughout the process. She held tight to her daughter's hand at a July meeting over the issue. And the two embraced after the City Council's 4-1 vote on Aug. 5.

But those small acts of support translated into collateral damage that left Linda Cooper and other relatives separated from their church family of more than 60 years. 

Leaders at Ridgedale Church of Christ  met in private with Kat Cooper's mother, aunt and uncle on Sunday after the regular worship service. They were given an ultimatum: They could repent for their sins and ask forgiveness in front of the congregation. Or leave the church.

Their sins?  "My mother was up here and she sat beside me. That's it," said Kat Cooper. "Literally, they're exiling members for unconditionally loving their children -- and even extended family members."

But the family's support of Kat Cooper was as good as an endorsement of homosexuality, said Ken Willis, minister at Ridgedale Church of Christ.

Linda Cooper's parents were practically founding members of the Dodds Avenue congregation, Hunt Cooper said. Her father was a church elder and his picture still hangs on the wall there. Kat Cooper grew up helping her grandfather clean the pews and helped her grandmother hang bulletin boards for Sunday school.  "This is not just some casual church they dropped in on," he said.

Hunt Cooper said his family rejects the notion that being gay is a lifestyle choice. And his wife, along with her brother and sister, believed repentance would be hypocritical. So the decision to leave, devastating as it was, was a simple one.

"There's no sin to repent for," he said. "And she's not going to turn her back on her daughter."

Good for the Coopers!!   Conservative Christianity has become a pervasive evil.  It's fruits are hate, bigotry and hypocrisy.  The world will be a better place when it ceases to exist.