Pete Buttigieg and Husband Make History on Cover of TIME

Even as the Trump/Pence regime announces yet another attack on LGBT Americans through a regulation that would allow "Christian" healthcare workers - perhaps even ambulance drivers - to refuse to treat LGBT patients and others who offend their religious sensibilities, something remarkable has happened.  Pete Buttigieg and his husband (to the abject horror and character assassination attempts of Christofascists and those who prostitute themselves to them politically) have made the cover of Time Magazine with a caption  "First Family."  Where Buttigieg's campaign will go is anyone's guess as more and more Democrats, many totally unknown to the general public, throw their hats in the nomination ring.    Here are some excerpts from a very lengthy story:  

As Pete Buttigieg addressed supporters off a back porch in Marshalltown, Iowa, the Devil was whispering his name. “Pete,” the Devil hissed into a microphone. “You’re sooo smart, Pete.”

Buttigieg ignored the heckler, plowing forward with his stump speech about American decency as his husband ­Chasten looked on. “Pete,” the Devil whispered. “I want the heartland, Pete.”

The man in the devil costume was Randall Terry, an antiabortion activist. He had traveled to Iowa to torment the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., the early breakout star of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

Four years after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed his right to marry, Buttigieg has become the first openly gay person to make a serious bid for the presidency. And Terry is hardly the only right-winger worried about the rise of “Mayor Pete.” Buttigieg’s saying that “God doesn’t have a political party” prompted evangelical leader Franklin Graham to tweet that being gay is “something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized.” Concerned by the campaign’s rise, right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl was recently caught trying to fabricate sexual-­assault allegations against Buttigieg to slow him down.

But to some Americans, Buttigieg may just be the man to vanquish America’s demons. In a field of more than 20 ­candidates­—including six Senators, four Congressmen, two governors and a former Vice ­President—Buttigieg (pronounced Boot-edge-edge) has vaulted from near total obscurity toward the front of the Democratic pack, running ahead of or even with more established candidates and behind only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

Buttigieg is a gay Episcopalian veteran in a party torn between identity politics and heartland appeals. He’s also a fresh face in a year when millennials are poised to become the largest eligible voting bloc. Many Democrats are hungry for generational change, and the two front runners are more than twice his age.

But Buttigieg’s greatest political asset may be his ear for languages. He speaks eight, including Norwegian and Arabic, but he’s particularly fluent in the dialect of the neglected industrial Midwest. Buttigieg is a master of redefinition, a translator for a party that has found it increasingly difficult to speak to the voters who elected President Donald Trump. The son of an English professor and a scholar of linguistics, he roots his campaign in an effort to reframe progressive ideas in conservative language. “If the substance of your ideas is progressive but there’s mistrust about them among conservatives, you have three choices,” Buttigieg tells TIME, sitting on his living-room couch in South Bend. “One is to just change your ideas and make them more conservative. The second is to sort of be sneaky and try to make it seem like your ideas are more conservative than they are. And the third, the approach that I favor, is to stick to your ideas, but explain why conservatives shouldn’t be afraid of them.”

His platform is “Freedom, Security and Democracy,” which wouldn’t sound out of place coming from a Bush-era Republican yet actually harks back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But in order to maintain his momentum, Buttigieg will have to do more to flesh out those ideas. Unlike many of his opponents, he hasn’t posted any detailed policy proposals on his website. He’ll also have to convince Democratic voters that his experience running South Bend (pop. 102,245) is adequate preparation for running the world’s most powerful country. And he’ll have to make inroads with black and Hispanic voters who have so far appeared unimpressed with his campaign.

Buttigieg likes to say he has more government experience than Trump, and more military ­experience than any ­President in 25 years. And Trump’s victory in 2016 proved that many Americans were willing to elect a President without a traditional Washington résumé. But some voters long for stability after three years of chaos, and it’s not clear whether the Trump presidency has made it easier or harder for outsiders.

In many ways, Buttigieg is Trump’s polar opposite: younger, dorkier, shorter, calmer and married to a man. His success may depend on whether Democrats want a fighter to match Trump, or whether Americans want to “change the channel,” as Buttigieg puts it. “People already have a leader who screams and yells,” he says. “How do you think that’s working out for us?”

Buttigieg met Chasten Glezman, then a Chicago grad student, on the dating app Hinge in 2015. They talked over FaceTime for a few weeks before Chasten drove to South Bend for their first real date, at an Irish bar famous for its Scotch eggs. Less than three years later, Pete proposed in gate B5 of Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the exact spot where Chasten had first noticed his dating profile.

Both men grew up closeted in conservative Midwestern communities. “Being gay was not culturally acceptable where I grew up, mostly for a lack of understanding,” Chasten says. “And so my family and I were just at a crossroads, and we didn’t really know how to talk to one another.” When he came out after his senior year of high school, tensions at home forced him to spend months crashing on friends’ couches and sleeping in his car. His parents ultimately changed their minds, welcomed him back home and now fully support their son and his marriage.

It was a sign of how rapidly public opinion on LGBTQ issues has changed. In 1996, only 27% of Americans supported same-sex marriage; today 67% do, including 44% of Republicans. Some of Buttigieg’s fellow officers who had used gay as an epithet in his presence reached out to express their support. “I bet some of them still go back and tell gay jokes because that’s their habit, you know?” he says. “Bad habits and bad instincts is not the same as people being bad people.”

All this informs his belief that it’s still possible to reach across America’s political divide. “We’ve got to get away from this kill-switch mentality that we see on Twitter,” he says. He has seen once disapproving parents dance at their gay son’s wedding and homophobic military officers take back their words, and so he believes in the power of redemption and forgiveness. “This idea that we just sort people into baskets of good and evil ignores the central fact of human existence, which is that each of us is a basket of good and evil,” he says. “The job of politics is to summon the good and beat back the evil.”

Other black leaders in South Bend say Buttigieg listened to the concerns of the community and adjusted when he was wrong. “I trust him,” says Stacey Odom, founder of a local organization that helps families on the West Side repair their homes. “I asked him for five different things, and he gave them all to me.” Buttigieg created an office of Engagement and Economic Empowerment to help address the wealth gap, and issued an executive order on diversity and inclusion in response to local demands, Williams-Preston said. When local leaders asked for $3.5 million to renovate the Charles Black community center, Buttigieg came up with $4.5 million, according to ­Cynthia Taylor, the center’s director. “You’re gonna have to invite him in, you’re gonna have to sit him down, you’re gonna have to show him the issue,” she says. “Because he definitely will listen.”

Buttigieg’s sexuality has imbued his campaign with a sense of historical promise. After the valedictorian at Brigham Young University, a conservative Mormon school, came out as gay in his commencement speech in April, he cited Buttigieg as his inspiration. (“I know that kid is going to make it easier for somebody else,” Buttigieg told BuzzFeed News.) Buttigieg’s campaign has also gotten a boost from a network of wealthy LGBT donors.

The millennial mayor’s call for generational change could also prove to be a powerful one. Even as young voters stay enamored with Sanders, older voters seem attracted to Buttigieg’s youth: according to an April 29 Morning Consult survey, his highest polling numbers come from baby boomers. “I like the idea of a millennial,” says Alice Mayer, 62, who voted for Sanders in 2016, as she waited for Buttigieg’s speech in South Bend. “He’s looking at the future, while Bernie’s been there, done that.”

Why The Advocate's Choice of Pope Francis for Person of the Year is a Mistake

I will concede that compared to his predecessor the Nazi Pope, Benedict XVI, Pope Francis is a breath of fresh air.  But that is not to say that Pope Francis is the answer to the plight of gay Catholics, Catholics who have divorced and remarried, and/or Catholics who use contraception.  A change in tone does not equal a change in Church dogma.  Despite this reality and the fact that nothing has changed doctrinally (and that no one in the Church hierarchy who participated in the sex abuse cover up has been punished), The Advocate followed Time Magazine and named Pope Francis as it person of the year.   A column in Religion Dispatches rightly takes The Advocate to task for this mistaken choice.  Here are column highlights:

In case the editors of The Advocate did not notice, the Pope’s statement flying back from Brazil for World Youth Day was not a change in Catholic teaching, but in tone.

The Pope’s “If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge” is not an encyclical, but a statement. Granted, it was a statement that shocked the world with its compassion, but the follow-up proved that it was not a change in church teaching.

What Pope Francis is doing is walking a tightrope. Instead of pushing dogma, he’s pushing a change in tone, not in substance. Because he is carefully eliding the church’s teaching and focusing on compassion, many liberals and media pundits—including The Advocate—believe that he is opening a door to a changed theology. That is not the case. What the Pope is doing is opening a door for discussion, but not necessarily change.

If a mere change in language can move The Advocate to make Pope Francis their Person of the Year over Edie Windsor, whose case helped DOMA to crumble, I’m stunned.

The disappointment that will come in the future when Catholic church teachings do not change will not be a surprise to those of us who know the history of the glacial pace of change in the Catholic church. Personally, unless Pope Francis calls a council on human sexuality, I very much doubt his papacy will change much about the corpus of Catholic teaching on homosexuality—defined by that tradition as ‘intrinsically disordered,”

While I very much appreciate the change in focus and tone from Pope Francis, I would caution everyone: “don’t get it twisted.” Pope Francis is still the Cardinal Bergoglio who opposed same sex marriage in Argentina.

As for a meritorious person of the year in the realm of religion, the column author says this:

If I had to pick my person of the year for the intersection of religion with LGBT justice, it would be a neighbor of mine, Rev. Frank Schaefer of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, who has decided not to give up his United Methodist credentials for performing a same sex marriage ceremony of his son earlier this year.

By refusing to give up his credentials, he is forcing the United Methodist church to perhaps take him to trial and strip him of his credentialing—simply because of his belief that the Methodist Book of Discipline is discriminatory.

Rev. Schaefer is not just talking, but he is walking the walk—standing up for his son, same sex marriage, and his deeply held beliefs. That is the mark of a person of the year. While I like Pope Francis as much as anyone, I need concrete actions to back up the sentiments. Until the dogma changes, talk is cheap.

45 Years Ago: TIME Magazine: Homosexuality “A Pernicious Sickness.”

Times do change and a post at Talk About Equality looks at an article from Time Magazine published 45 years ago when I was 14 years old. Reading the original piece which can be found here, it explains why so many gays my age and older did everything possible to not be gay and bought much more easily into the religious brainwashing that the Christianists and Catholic and Mormon Churches still shamelessly disseminate caring nothing about the severe damage they do to young LGBT individuals. Thankfully, medical and mental health knowledge has moved on and the views of homosexuality being a "sickness" have died - that is outside of the money grubbing, control seeking and guilt/hate merchants of the religious right. This change in understanding of sexual orientation to me explains why so many gays and lesbians who once married and tried to be straight have come out after failing to achieve the impossible. I know, because I am one of the many. I do not actively recall reading the article, but since we subscribed to Time at home for many years, it is likely I did see it and read it. Here are highlights from the Talk About Equality piece followed by the batshitery that passed as legitimate knowledge 45 years ago:
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45 years ago this week, Time Magazine published a 2-page essay titled “The Homosexual in America.” As you would imagine, the ideas presented in the article would now be considered arcane, but in order to understand the strides we have made as individuals and as a community – we must consider our history. We cannot move forward without understanding how far we have come in a relatively very-short period of time.
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This article was written when my father was 20 years old and certainly these ideas were part of the norm opinion of Americans at that time. In reading this essay, one must do one’s best in trying to understand society’s impressions of homosexuality at the time. We were hated, but we were starting to become visible. It’s clear in the article that we had become noticed – specifically within the artistic fields.
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We are alive now, at a time when our voices are being heard, when our friends and family have become increasingly supportive and embracing of who we are. We live in a time where our actions can create more and more change. I ask you all to go read the whole article and show it to others. Tell your friends and family just how far we have come and encourage them to make change in their own communities.
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The following are highlights from the 1966 article that some may find shocking give the changed knowledge of today outside of reactionary religious and societal groups (warning: it reads like something Scott Lively or Peter LaBarbera might write):
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IT used to be "the abominable crime not to be mentioned." Today it is not only mentioned; it is freely discussed and widely analyzed. Yet the general attitude toward homosexuality is, if anything, more uncertain than before. Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity—but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him. A vast majority of people retain a deep loathing toward him, but there is a growing mixture of tolerance, empathy or apathy.
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Homosexuals are present in every walk of life, on any social level, often anxiously camouflaged; the camouflage will sometimes even include a wife and children, and psychoanalysts are busy treating wives who have suddenly discovered a husband's homosexuality. But increasingly, deviates are out in the open, particularly in fashion and the arts.
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The notion that the arts are dominated by a kind of homosexual mafia—or "Homintern," as it has been called—is sometimes exaggerated, particularly by spiteful failures looking for scapegoats. But in the theater, dance and music world, deviates are so widespread that they sometimes seem to be running a kind of closed shop. Art Critic Harold Rosenberg reports a "banding together of homosexual painters and their nonpainting auxiliaries."
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[T]his raises the question of whether there is such a thing as a discernible homosexual type. Some authorities, notably Research Psychologist Evelyn Hooker of U.C.L.A., deny it—against what seems to be the opinion of most psychiatrists. The late Dr. Edmund Bergler found certain traits present in all homosexuals, including inner depression and guilt, irrational jealousy and a megalomaniac conviction that homosexual trends are universal. Though Bergler conceded that homosexuals are not responsible for their inner conflicts, he found that these conflicts "sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted by a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person."
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The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual's parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him.
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Who in their right mind raised in a conservative area under conservative religious influences would not have been traumatized to realize that they were gay? Needless to say, I contemplated suicide often in my teens and early 20's. Yet today this same poison continues to be peddled by self-congratulatory and false Christians.

Virginia's PR Disaster Continues

Bob "Jobs Governor" McDonnell has a unique way of advertising that Virginia is open for business: make the state look like a reactionary backwater and with of the help of his, in my opinion, delusional Attorney General create a firestorm that has swept all of the campuses of Virginia's nationally prominent colleges and universities. As if that will make businesses eager to relocate to a state where many of their employees would have less legal protections than household pets. One heck of a job, Bob. McDonnell's empty gesture in signing Executive Directive 1 (2010) - which contradicts his own previous Attorney General opinion and the argument his office made in a pending case involving a gay man fired because of his sexual orientation - is basically worth no more than the paper it is written on. It affords gay employees zero enforceable protections. Although the anti-civil rights agenda coverage has already been in every major newspaper in the state and literally world wide on the Internet, now Time Magazine has chimed in with an article entitled "Virginia Is for Lovers. But How About Gay Ones?" Here are highlights from the Time story:
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It's been a turbulent few weeks for gay rights, the Virginia attorney general and college students across the Old Dominion.
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First, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell issued an executive order last month that "specifically prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, religion, age, political affiliation, or against otherwise qualified persons with disabilities." Left off the list, notably, was a mention of sexual orientation.
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Then five days ago, Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli Jr. sent a letter to public colleges and universities advising them that state law prohibits "a college or university from including 'sexual orientation,' gender identity,' 'gender expression' ... as a protected class within it's non-discrimination policy."
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Cuccinelli, in his earlier directive, had acted on his own accord, building on the governor's previous executive order, but went too far, says a state political analyst who preferred to remain anonymous. The governor's clarification amounted to "a public spanking of Cuccinelli," says the analyst.
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The back and forth came after more than 1,500 students and supporters rallied Wednesday at Virginia Commonwealth University to protest Cuccinelli's letter. Waving rainbow flags, chanting "Down With Hate" and wielding signs that read "Jesus Had 2 Dads, Too" and "Homophobia Is A Sin," the animated band assembled near the student union, before 200 later broke away and marched down a main road within blocks of the Virginia State Capitol.
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"It's just a huge slap in the face to treat schools that poorly, and lesbians and gays in general," says Seth Kaye, a sophomore computer science major and president of the Queer and Allied Activism group at the University of Virginia. "We are being singled out. People are upset. It's really frustrating." Specific wording protecting gays, he contends, is important to help remind the UVA community to exercise better judgment.
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The letter was seen as a blow to the independence of the state's education institutions, which normally have "a great deal of autonomy," says Kirsten Nelson, spokeswoman for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. "Changes must be made by the General Assembly.
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More people in Virginia need to demand that their legislators clean up the mess and grant gays protection which is the last analysis religious based discrimination.

New Time Poll: Gay Marriage Gaining Support

A new Time magazine poll shows those for and those against gay marriage to now be evenly split. It also shows that 58% of respondents are AGAINST amending the U. S. Constitution to bar gay marriage. Obviously, this information will merely increase the hysterical efforts of the far right Christianists to do all they can to throw up bars to gay marriage since it is clear that time is NOT on their side, particularly with younger voters supporting marriage equality for gays by a significant margin. Thus we can expect all kinds of shrill warnings and dire predictions of the end of civilization form Daddy Dobson, Tony Perkins and similar demagogues who make a living demonizing gays, immigrants and other who are not white evangelical Christians. What will these gay haters do to shake down money and live off the gullible without working a real job once gay marriage is widespread around the country? Here's a breakdown of the poll results insofar as they apply to the issue of gay marriage:

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Do you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban same-sex couples from getting married? All respondents:

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Favor 35%

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Oppose 58%

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No answer/don't know 7%

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Should gay and lesbian couples be allowed to marry, giving them full legal rights of married couples, or not? All respondents:

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Should be allowed 47%

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Should not 47%

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No answer/don't know 6%

Time Magazine's Delusional View of Gay High School Life

The main stream media has finally done as story on the Lawrence King murder. Sadly, the article in Time Magazine (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1714214,00.html) is in my view less than sympathetic to the abuse suffered by gays on a regular basis and the article’s author, John Cloud, seems to be living in a delusional Never Never Land. The entire tone and outlook of the article is that anti-gay abuse and bullying is not the norm and that Lawrence King’s experience was some incredibly rare aberration. Would that the world that Mr. Cloud thinks exists in his mind existed in reality. It surely does not exist in most areas of the USA – certainly not in most of the South. I was sufficiently disturbed that I wrote the following letter to the editor of Time, which no doubt will ever see the light of day:

I was shocked by some of John Cloud’s conclusions, particularly the statement that “the [National Gay and Lesbian] Task Force is exaggerating the frequency of assaults on gay kids, the vast majority of whom make it through school safe and happy.”

As an older gay male, let me assure Mr. Cloud that surviving high school as a gay student even when one is in the closet is not easy and the psychological scars last for decades if not for life. The higher incidence of suicide, psychological problems, drug and/or alcohol abuse among many LGBT students is one of the direct consequences. If blacks, Jews, and other minority groups had to put up with what LGBT students experience on a regular basis, there would be wide scale outrage something would be done and quickly. Anti-gay abuse seems to be one of the last remaining forms of prejudice and discrimination that gets a wink and a nod, but no real remedial action.

Perhaps my statements are on the strong side, but for the record I STILL recall from time to time being beat up a few times and harrassed more often for being a"faggot" during my junior-senior high school days even though I never concede that I was gay.