Today's GOP: Pigs All the Way Down

Students, faculty members and staff members walked out of Yale University’s Sterling Law
Building on Monday to protest Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. 

Like women, gays are looked down as some form of lesser human by the macho "boys club" that rules much of the nation's political system and most of corporate America.  Of course, once one is viewed as "other" or "lesser," it becomes easy for the privileged class - in this case, heterosexual white males - to mistreat those they deem their inferiors.  For gays, we are often targeted for abuse and continued discrimination.  For women, less than equal rights and having their lives/bodies controlled by men are a consequence.  Over the years, I have experience such males in high school, the fraternity scene at the University of Virginia, and, of course, in the Virginia legal community and large law firms.   A column in the New York Times looks at this ugly reality in America and why male Senate Republicans are desperate to confirm Brett Kavanaugh if for no other reason than to reassert that they are privileged and gays, women, minorities are not.  Indeed, we are less than equal.  Here are column excerpts: 

Over the weekend, the controversy over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination evolved in a way guaranteed to create maximum partisan bitterness and mistrust.

Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, however, this scandal has given us an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be.

Let’s start with Kavanaugh’s high school, Georgetown Prep, also the alma mater of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court pick. There’s now a wealth of reporting painting the private school as a bastion of heedless male entitlement. Kavanaugh’s high school friend Mark Judge — who Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s first accuser, says was in the room when Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her — has written extensively of his drunken teenage debauchery. According to The New Yorker, Judge confided in an ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Rasor, about an incident where he and other boys took turns having sex with a drunken woman. (Judge denies this.)

From Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh went to Yale. There he joined the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, or DKE, which was, according to The Yale Daily News, “notorious for disrespecting women.” (Long after Kavanaugh graduated, the fraternity, once headed by George W. Bush, was banned from campus after video emerged of pledges chanting, “No Means Yes! Yes Means Anal!”) Kavanaugh was also a member of an all-male secret society called Truth and Courage, which had an obscene nickname affirming its dedication to womanizing.

It may not be fair to judge Kavanaugh by the company he kept. But it’s telling that these were the crucibles in which he and other members of our ostensible meritocracy forged their identities and connections.

The Problem With the Word "Queer"

Yet another internal controversy has reared its ugly head in the LGBT community: attempts to use the word "queer" to describe the community at large.  The tempest has been launched by certain activists and the Huffington Post's decision to change "Gay Voices" to "Queer Voices." An opinion piece in The Advocate - which I agree with 100% - makes the case that the move is a huge mistake and that rather than unifying the LGBT community, it will alienate many.  I for one won't use it and believe the term plays directly into the hands of our Christofascist enemies.  It could likewise dampen my enthusiasm to support organizations that use the term, which I despise.  Here are excerpts  from the column:

There seems to be yet another controversy in our community this week. The issue du jour is The Huffington Post changing its dedicated LGBT site’s name from Gay Voices to Queer Voices. While there are strong opinions on both sides of this issue, when I heard about it, it brought a smile to my face.

Since the beginning of my activism back in 1969, I’ve witnessed our community’s attempts to unite over a word or term to define ourselves. There was “homosexual,” “homophile,” “gay,” “gay and lesbian,” and most recently, and most accepted, “LGBT.” So what about “queer”?

HuffPost’s reasoning? “We, like many others before us, have chosen to reclaim ‘queer.’ ‘Queer’ functions as an umbrella term that includes not only the lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people of ‘LGBT,’ but also those whose identities fall in between, outside of or stretch beyond those categories, including genderqueer people, intersex people, asexual people, pansexual people, polyamorous people and those questioning their sexuality or gender, to name just a few.”

While the word “queer” is popular with young LGBT activists, many in our community detest it. Reclaiming a derogatory word is not a new trend. Some of us used to use the word “faggot.” 

It’s popular with only one segment of our population, and that segment is overwhelmingly activist-driven. Most in our community do not consider themselves activists and still feel hurt when they hear that word. Are we trying to teach our own community, or are we trying to fight for equality? Are we trying to hurt the seniors in our community who suffered harassment by the use of that word and give them another barrier to overcome? 

Maybe we should attempt to solve some of the hard-core issues in our community rather then spending time debating semantics. While all individuals have the right to identify with whatever term or image they wish for themselves, and that should be respected, the word-reclaiming, like that in the black community, will eventually be passé.

So if you spend any capital or time on this, you’re ignoring issues such as homelessness, poverty, employment discrimination, the need for housing to protect our seniors, and anti-trans violence. Those are problems I’d rather address, not a word — and especially not one that some of the most endangered people in our community see as another barrier.

I hope Huffington Post will rethink its idiocy.  Many of us have worked hard for changed attitudes and put ourselves on the line socially and at work and do not need to be labeled by a derogatory term. As for organizations that are stupid enough to adopt the term, they can plan on seeing a stop in the flow of checks from me!!

Pope Francis Talks Out of Both Sides of His Mouth on Gays

The National Catholic Reporter - which is not controlled by the Vatican and one of the few sane Catholic news outlets - is reporting that Pope Francis has explained his "who am I to judge" statement on gays which, if one looks at only his words and not his actions, sounds positive.  Meanwhile, of course, the Church has opposed gay rights and supported the repeal of same sex marriage in Slovenia.  Sadly, Francis' duplicity and dis-ingenuousness is typical of the Church hierarchy.  Until the Church makes doctrinal changes and apologizes for centuries of homophobia and horrors inflicted on gays, Francis' words are meaningless, in my view.  Indeed, the word hypocrite springs to mind.  Here are story excerpts:

Interviewing Pope Francis in July, Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli asked the pope how he might act as a confessor to a gay person in light of his now famous remarks in a press conference in 2013, when he asked: "Who am I to judge?"

Francis' reply appears in a new book The Name of God is Mercy to be released Tuesday.

"On that occasion I said this: If a person is gay and seeks out the Lord and is willing, who am I to judge that person?" the pope says. "I was paraphrasing by heart the Catechism of the Catholic Church where it says that these people should be treated with delicacy and not be marginalized."

"I am glad that we are talking about 'homosexual people' because before all else comes the individual person, in his wholeness and dignity," he continues. "And people should not be defined only by their sexual tendencies: let us not forget that God loves all his creatures and we are destined to receive his infinite love."

"I prefer that homosexuals come to confession, that they stay close to the Lord, and that we pray all together," says Francis. "You can advise them to pray, show goodwill, show them the way, and accompany them along it."

Keeping gays second class citizens, opposing CIVIL LAW marriage for same sex couples, and championing license to discriminate laws seems utterly inconsistent with Francis' statement that gays should not be marginalized.  If one is gay and Catholic, the best thing one can do is to leave the Church as quickly as possible and to encourage friends and family to do likewise.

Utah AG Emergency Stay Request: Recognizing Gay Marriages "Harms" State

The disingenuousness (can we say lies?) of anti-gay bigots and their whore like minions in the Republican Party at times seems to know no limits.  In the wake of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Utah must recognize same sex marriages performed in Utah before the stay of the U.S. District Court ruling striking down Utah's gay marriage ban, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes (pictured above) has filed a 35-page emergency stay request U.S. Supreme Court.  In the filing, Reyes claims that recognizing the roughly 1000 marriage would cause harm to the state of Utah. How?  The same old usual bullshit arguments that have been rejected by U.S. District courts across the country, not to mention the 10th Circuit.  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at Reyes' batshitery:

The 10th Circuit federal Court of Appeals Friday evening ruled that a stay requested by the State of Utah will indeed expire and the State will have to recognize the legal civil marriages of about 1300 same-sex couples performed in December and January, unless the Supreme Court were to intervene.
This evening, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes filed a 35-page emergency request for a stay with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

"Absent a stay," Reyes' petition claims, "there is a likelihood—indeed, a certainty—of irreparable harm to the State" should it be forced to recognize the 1300 legal civil marriages of same-sex couples.

Reyes claims recognizing the 1300 "interim marriages," as he calls them, will "moot the novel issues involved," denying the courts an opportunity to examine them.

The Utah Attorney General forgets that these marriages do not represent legal issues, but people -- the very citizens he claims "are better served by obtaining complete, final judicial resolution of these issues."

Reyes also seemingly chastises the Supreme Court in advance -- declaring the State of Utah "will be irreparably harmed without a stay. In denying a stay pending appeal, this court is running roughshod over state laws which are currently in force. It is disingenuous to contend that the State will suffer no harm if the matter is not stayed; undoing what is about to be done will be labyrinthine and has the very real possibility to moot important issues that deserve serious consideration."

Despite the Supreme Court's decision last summer in Windsor, striking down Section 3 of DOMA, and despite several dozen rulings in federal courts -- all favorable to same-sex marriage -- Reyes claims "the State has shown a likelihood of success on the merits."  Hardly.

The Salt Lake Tribune tonight reminds that just last week at the 10th Circuit, a "panel of three judges — the same panel which upheld another federal judge’s ruling that invalidated Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage because he found it violates citizens’ Fourteenth Amendment rights — declared Utah failed to prove it would suffer irreparable harm in recognizing the marriages and didn’t demonstrate that the state is likely to prevail in its appeal."

The reality is that the only "harm" will be that Christofascists will not be able to deprive 1000+ same sex couples equality under the civil laws and not be able to inflict their toxic, hate based religious beliefs on all the citizens of Utah.