Pope Francis Warns of ‘Culture of Hate’ Targeting LGBT People

Pope Francis remains utterly inconsistent on the treatment of LGBT individuals.  He recently hatred directed at LGBT individuals and stated that that government leaders targeting LGBT people remind him of the Nazis.  Yet at the same time, the Roman Catholic Church's dogma that demonizes gays and refers to us as "intrinsically disordered."  I'm sorry, but Francis doesn't get to have it both ways especially when he, as Pope has the power to change the Church's position by pronouncing "ex cathedra" a new position on homosexuality by relying on Roman Catholic doctrine that a Pope speaking ex cathedra on issues of faith or morals is infallible.  The reality is that Christian missionaries (and Islamic fundamentalist) exported anti-gay hatred across the globe and until all religious leaders reject this agenda of hate, LGBT people will continue to suffer, sometimes losing their lives. A piece in The Advocate looks at Francis' welcomed statements and his failure to change the Church's condemnation of gays:

Pope Francis said on Friday that government leaders targeting LGBTQ people remind him of the Nazis.

In Rome, the pope warned members of the International Association of Penal Law, "I confess that when I hear some speeches by someone responsible for public order or a government, I am reminded of Hitler's speeches in 1934 and 1936,” according to CNN.

"They are typical actions of Nazism which with its persecutions of Jews, gypsies, people of homosexual orientation, represent a negative model 'par excellence' of a throwaway culture and a culture of hate,” he continued.

Francis did not refer to any specific governments, but LGBTQ people are subject to persecution all over the world. This month alone, five men in Malaysia were sentenced to caning and jail time for attempting gay sex. Ugandan police rounded up more than 100 people at an LGBTQ-friendly bar in Kampala. Activists went on trial after being arrested at a Pride march in Ankara. Marriage equality was overturned in the Cayman Islands. And trans women of color continue to face an epidemic of violence in the United States.

DignityUSA Executive Director Marianne Duddy-Burke . . . . said she hopes Francis’ remarks “are also understood to be applicable within the Church, and that Catholic leaders who say hateful, disparaging and dehumanizing things or act to limit the human rights of LGBTQ people and others immediately change their ways.” [M]any point out that the Catholic church’s teachings on LGBTQ issues have not changed. As The Advocate reported in April, Francis “has also said gay priests are not welcome in the church. He has met with gay and transgender people who described his manner as loving and supportive, yet he has said same-sex couples don’t meet the church’s definition of family and denounced gender-affirmation procedures. The church remains intractably opposed to same-sex relationships; Catholics with same-sex attractions should never act on them, according to church doctrine.”

Is Francis a hypocrite?  You decide, but I am inclined to say "yes."

The Ongoing Stigma of Male Intimacy

Yes, things have come along way for LGBT Americans over the last 10 to 15 years.  Perhaps the most notable, of course, being the extension of same sex marriage nationwide.  Despite these advances, there remains an effort to stigmatize same sex intimacy, particularly male intimacy, particularly by Christofascists and their "family values" organizations and their political whores in the Republican Party dating back to the days of hate merchant Sen. Joe McCarthy.  But the problem doesn't stop there.  As noted, NBC has been accused of a form of homophobia in its coverage of gay athletes at the 2016 Olympic Games.  Then, of course, there is the ongoing homophobia across Hollywood and the difficulty faced by out actors.  A piece in Salon looks at the problem.  Here are highlights:

What’s the matter with a hug? Nothing, unless it’s between two men. 

Last week, the U.K.’s Daily Mail raised its proverbial eyebrow at an embrace between Chris Mears and Jack Laugher, a pair of British Olympians who had just won the gold medal for the 3-meter synchronized dive. In a photo of the two, Laugher appears to pounce on his diving partner, wrapping his arms around Mears’ neck. The moment is sweet and a bit silly, the kind of rapturous gesture that doesn’t seem out of the question when someone has earned the highest possible honor in his sport.
But to the Daily Mail, there was something questionable — even girly — about their prolonged cuddle, contrasting their elation with a more subdued exchange from the Chinese team. “Britain’s victorious synchronised divers hug for joy after winning gold,” the Mail wrote, “while China’s bronze medalists settle for a manly pat on the back.” Twitter users decried the gaffe as distasteful, but the Mail is hardly the only outlet to express discomfort at a display of affection between two men, even heterosexual ones.
Kory Floyd, a researcher at Arizona State University, suggests that the maximum length for a male-on-male embrace is one second, and anything longer is coded as being romantic or sexual in nature.  To put it bluntly, men shy away from hugging one another not because it’s “unmanly” but because they’re worried about being perceived as gay.
 Following last week’s controversy, Laugher’s girlfriend went so far as to make a public statement about her boyfriend’s sexuality. (After all, the Olympic partners do share an apartment together.) The stigma surrounding male-to-male intimacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, a product of the lavender scare of the 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who some speculate was a closet homosexual himself, led a purge of gay employees from government offices, as it was believed that queer people were inherently communist sympathizers. In McCarthy’s America, gay people became a pathologized class of individuals, with homosexuality classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973. (In many countries, being transgender is still defined as such.)
Before the postwar era, homosexuality was on the minds of few Americans; many might have associated being gay as the effect of a biblical plague, the curse of Sodom. Gay people weren’t a real-world threat. When France decriminalized sodomy in 1791, homosexuality as a lived identity wasn’t thought of. Homosexuality was defined as a behavior not a discrete way of being. Openly gay writer Marcel Proust didn’t introduce the concept into French literature — in his expansive “In Search of Lost Time” series — until 1913.
Without the cloud of anti-gay suspicion around male friendships, same-sex intimacy was extremely common in the 19th century, when it was customary for men to walk around holding hands and even sleep in one another’s beds.

The most famous example of this is President Abraham Lincoln, who shared a bunk with his best friend, Joshua Speed. Carl Sandburg, the revered American poet, was the first to suggest that there had been anything sexual between the two men. He wrote euphemistically in “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years,” a 1926 biography of the 16th president, that their kinship was defined by “a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets.”
 Lincoln’s sexuality remains an open question, but expressions of affection that break with modern notions of homosociality were many and varied. Daniel Webster, who served as the secretary of state under Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, was known to refer to some of his male friends as “my lovely boy” in correspondence.
The best illustration of changing gender mores is in “Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography,” a book by John Ibson, a California State University, Fullerton professor. . . . . Reviewing Ibson’s collection, Alecia Simmonds of Australia’s Daily Life wrote that the lack of similar patterns in relationships today is not merely a product of homophobia but the emergence of women in public life. “The photos in Ibson’s collection were taken during a time when life was incredibly gender segregated,” she said. “Your primary emotional identification was with people of your own gender.”
Women have taken the place of other men as the objects of that affection, as outlets for the male need for human touch and intimacy. A 1997 study from Purdue University showed that 75 percent of men relied primarily on women — particularly their wives or girlfriends — as their sole source of close companionship. While relationships between women were often confessional, based around conversation and disclosure, the study showed that male friendships were less intimate and more driven by activity.
These findings correlate with the overall reality of male friendships: A 2006 survey in American Sociological Review showed that adult heterosexual men have fewer friends than any other population in U.S. society. As Salon’s Lisa Wade has previously suggested, it’s not that straight men don’t want more friends. They do. “Men desire the same level and type of intimacy in their friendships as women, but they aren’t getting it,” Wade wrote.  
Not having those desires met can have a deeply detrimental impact on heterosexual males. In a 2013 essay for The Good Men Project, writer Mark Greene called it “touch isolation.”

“American men can go for days or weeks at a time without touching another human being,” Greene wrote. “The implications of touch isolation for men’s health and happiness are huge.”  Gentle platonic touch is key to the early development of infants, Greene noted, adding that it continues to play an important role throughout men’s and women’s lives for their “health and emotional well being, right into old age.”

Men’s desire for intimacy from companions of the same sex is repressed at a young age, Greene said, but this is reinforced throughout their lives through stigma — the suggestion that there’s something less than masculine or abnormal about male-to-male intimacy. When two Russian men filmed themselves walking the streets of Moscow holding hands, they were repeatedly harassed by passersby — called “bitches” and “faggots” and even told to leave the country. Another man forcibly ran into them, hoping to start a fight.
Things are changing, however, along with the advent of a new generation that views homosexuality in a more positive light, thus lessening the shame around potentially being seen as gay.

In a 2014 study published in Men and Masculinities, British researchers Mark McCormack and Eric Anderson found that 98 percent of college-aged men surveyed in the U.K. had slept in the same bed with another man. And 93 percent of those surveyed said they had cuddled a male classmate. “They don’t realize this is something that older men would find shocking,” McCormack, a professor at Durham University, told The Huffington Post. “It’s older generations that think men cuddling is taboo.”
The shifting tides are evident in the embrace of friendships that skirt the line between what might have been considered outré even just a decade ago.  Real-life best friends Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart went on an extremely affectionate tour of New York after finishing their 2014 run in Broadway’s “Waiting for Godot” in a honeymoon that inspired a million BuzzFeed lists. Members of the former One Direction boy band were often known to affectionately kiss one another or slip their hands into each other’s butt pockets. Those public displays of affection weren’t jeered. They made the band’s female fanbase go apeshit.
It might seem like The Daily Mail’s homophobic flap is a reflection of the current cultural era, but this lingering distrust of close male friendships is increasingly behind the times. Hugging it out doesn’t just feel good. Embracing the bromance makes the world a better, cuddlier place.

Gay Marriage and an End to Stigma

The Husband and I with my late father-in-law at our wedding

Today's landmark ruling striking down all same sex marriage bans across America is something I never thought I'd live to see.  Here in Virginia, engaging in same sex relations could expose you to a felony prosecution until as recently as 2013.  Anti-gay laws have ALWAYS been about punishing gays for not conforming to Christofascist religious beliefs and the goal has been to dehumanize us and stigmatize us so that the modern day Pharisee crowd could feel superior and falsely pious.  In the process, so many lives of LGBT individuals were damaged or ruined.  And our enemies sadly cared nothing about the harm they did - and still seek to do. There is still much work to be done - Virginia still allows gays to be fired at will - but the pain and stigma that younger generations will encounter will have to be better than what mine experienced.  Andrew Sullivan sums up much of what I am thinking and feeling today.  Here are highlights:

For many years, it felt like one step forward, two steps back. History is a miasma of contingency, and courage, and conviction, and chance.

But some things you know deep in your heart: that all human beings are made in the image of God; that their loves and lives are equally precious; that the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence has no meaning if it does not include the right to marry the person you love; and has no force if it denies that fundamental human freedom to a portion of its citizens.

This core truth is what Justice Kennedy affirmed today, for the majority: that gay people are human. I wrote the following in 1996:

Homosexuality, at its core, is about the emotional connection between two adult human beings. And what public institution is more central—more definitive—of that connection than marriage? The denial of marriage to gay people is therefore not a minor issue. It is the entire issue. It is the most profound statement our society can make that homosexual love is simply not as good as heterosexual love; that gay lives and commitments and hopes are simply worth less.

We are not disordered or sick or defective or evil – at least no more than our fellow humans in this vale of tears. We are born into family; we love; we marry; we take care of our children; we die. No civil institution is related to these deep human experiences more than civil marriage and the exclusion of gay people from this institution was a statement of our core inferiority not just as citizens but as human beings. It took courage to embrace this fact the way the Supreme Court did today. 

I think of the gay kids in the future who, when they figure out they are different, will never know the deep psychic wound my generation – and every one before mine – lived through: the pain of knowing they could never be fully part of their own family, never be fully a citizen of their own country. I think, more acutely, of the decades and centuries of human shame and darkness and waste and terror that defined gay people’s lives for so long. And I think of all those who supported this movement who never lived to see this day, . . .

I never believed this would happen in my lifetime . . .

What is so sad is that the Christofascists still care nothing about the harm they do.  Nor do their political whores in the Republican Party who are falling all over themselves condemning today's ruling and promising to work to make our lives less equal.  Some on the right have said the ruling was Satanic.  If there is anything Satanic , it is the Christofascists and their sycophants.  They and other religious fundamentalists are a face of evil in the world.

Louisiana Police Arresting Gay Men Under Unconstitutional Sodomy Law

In various posts this blog has noted GOP gubernatorial candidate for Governor of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli's obsession with gays and re-instituting Virginia's sodomy statue which was invalidated by the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Lawrence v. Texas and more recently by a ruling of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.  Why some ask is this so important to Cuccinelli?  A situation out of Louisiana demonstrates why maintaining sodomy statutes is so important to the Christofascists and zealots like Cuccinelli.  It allows them to entrap gays and hit them with felony charges rather that the mere misdemeanor charges that would apply to prostitution and/or soliciting for sex.  The Virginia statute governing prostitution and solicitation reads as follows:

§ 18.2-346. Prostitution; commercial sexual conduct; commercial exploitation of a minor; penalties.

A. Any person who, for money or its equivalent, (i) commits adultery, fornication, or any act in violation of § 18.2-361 or (ii) offers to commit adultery, fornication, or any act in violation of § 18.2-361 and thereafter does any substantial act in furtherance thereof is guilty of prostitution, which is punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor.

B. Any person who offers money or its equivalent to another for the purpose of engaging in sexual acts as enumerated in subsection A and thereafter does any substantial act in furtherance thereof is guilty of solicitation of prostitution, which is punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor. However, any person who solicits prostitution from a minor (i) 16 years of age or older is guilty of a Class 6 felony or (ii) younger than 16 years of age is guilty of a Class 5 felony. 

Virginia's sodomy statute which applies to married heterosexual couples too as written reads as follows:

§ 18.2-361. Crimes against nature; penalty. 

A. If any person carnally knows in any manner any brute animal, or carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony . . .

Note that ONLY when a minor is involved does the charge increase to felony status.  However, under the sodomy statute (which is still on the books in Virginia thanks to the efforts of Cuccinelli and Del. Bob Marshall), any solicitation is a felony even when a minor is not involved.   As a result, the sodomy statute is the preferred vehicle to harass and prosecute gays.  Cuccinelli claims the sodomy statute is needed to protect minors, but in fact the current prostitution statute already covers minors and increases the offense to the felony level.

But back to the situation in Louisiana.  As John Becker at The Bilerico Project report, Louisiana is doing precisely what Cuccinelli wants to do: target gays under an unconstitutional law in order to charge them with more serious offenses with much more severe punishments:

Sheriff's deputies in the Louisiana parish (county) of East Baton Rouge are entrapping, arresting, and booking gay men in undercover sex stings, according to an investigation by the Baton Rouge Advocate.

It's not about prostitution, as no money ever changes hands and no sex-for-money deals are worked out prior to arrest. It's also not about public sex (although such a sting would still be problematic, for reasons I've discussed previously). No, these men are being targeted, solicited, and then arrested simply for consenting to sexual activity at a private residence.

Since 2011, the newspaper found that least a dozen men have been arrested in East Baton Rouge Parish in similar sting operations, the most recent taking place just ten days ago. And how does the office of Sid J. Gautreaux III, Sheriff of East Baton Rouge (right), justify them? Why, by pointing to Louisiana's anti-sodomy law, of course! Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Office, told the Advocate:

"[The anti-sodomy law] is a law that is currently on the Louisiana books, and the sheriff is charged with enforcing the laws passed by our Louisiana Legislature. Whether the law is valid is something for the courts to determine, but the sheriff will enforce the laws that are enacted."

When Lawrence was handed down in 2003, Louisiana's then-attorney general issued a statement declaring the state's anti-sodomy statute unenforceable. The unconstitutional ban remains on the books because legislators have so far refused to repeal it, but the state legislature's obstinance doesn't miraculously grant local officials the power to enforce voided laws.

In each of the cases examined by the Advocate, District Attorney Hillar Moore III has refused to press charges due to the absence of any actual criminal activity. So this clearly has nothing to do with enforcing the law or preserving the peace, and everything to do with singling out and humiliating gay men.

Sheriff Gautreaux's shameful stunt has disturbing echoes of an earlier time in America when gay sex was illegal and LGBT establishments and cruising grounds were frequently raided by police in order to shame and intimidate the local LGBT community, satisfy the public's lust for all things salaciously taboo, and fulfill society's seemingly endless desire to claim moral superiority.