Pope Continues Anti-Gay Jihad

The Nazi Pope, Benedict XVI (pictured at left saluting Hitler) , is continuing his anti-gay jihad this time working to interfere with the civil laws of Spain which has abandoned the 13th century level of knowledge and Thomist "natural law" so popular with the Pope and the other nasty, bitter old queens within the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. In my view, if Benedict wants to restrict scientific/medical knowledge of sexual orientation to a 13th century level, he should be consistent and refuse any medical treatments not in vogue at that point in history. With any luck, we'd be rid of the old geezer in no time. I know that I am harsh with the Catholic Church, but I believe that in its current form and with its current leadership, it is in many ways a force for evil in the world today. Here are some highlights from the Washington Post's story on the Catholic Church's latest efforts to deprive segments of Spanish society from civil legal rights:

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Hundreds of thousands of people attended a Mass in central Madrid on Sunday designed to promote traditional family values in a predominantly Roman Catholic country that has legalized gay marriage and made it easier for people to divorce. The service started with a message from Pope Benedict XVI, who urged Spanish Catholics to keep their families strong. . . . . The archbishop of Madrid, Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, added: "the future of humanity depends on the family, the Christian family."

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Spain's Socialist government has angered the church by legalizing gay marriage, making it easy for people to divorce and instituting a public school course in which children learn about homosexuality and same-sex marriages. It is also considering easing Spain's restrictive abortion law.

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A similar Mass and rally were held at this time last year in the same square, and organizers put attendance at well over a million. Then, bishops criticized the Spanish government over its social policies but this time there were no such remarks.

Final Sunday Male Beauty

Lizard Pope

This photo via Pam's House Blend was just too good to pass up. Frequent readers know that I hold Benedict XVI in extremely low regard as both a fraud, hypocrite and one who has utterly failed to punish bishops and cardinals who enabled and/or covered up the sexual abuse of minors. Benedict XVI has no moral standing to pretend to give moral guidance to anyone.

And as Pam noted: The Prada Papa Ratzi opens his trap again, and the homophobia stinks like trash piled up during a NYC garbage strike.

Milk the Movie

A reader wrote "We saw the movie "Milk" on Christmas Day, and we hope that many, many people will see it, especially the young people. Inspiring! It has to help the cause! Did you write about it? I may have missed a post..."

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Actually, I did see the movie and thought it was wonderful and a "must see" not only for LGBT Americans, but for everyone. I was very moved and will confess that at times I felt myself tearing up. It was at the LGBT Blogger Summit on December 5-7, 2008, that the boyfriend and I had the unique opportunity of seeing a special screening of the movie Milk and then engaging in a panel discussion session where Cleve Jones (one of Harvey Milk's fellow activists), Dustin Lance Black (the screen writer) and Bruce Cohen (the producer) took questions from the audience. The movie is now playing in Norfolk and we intend to see the movie again. As indicated in my post at the time:

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One message that I took away from the whole experience - not to mention specific portions of the movie itself - was that LGBT citizens need to come out of the closet and live openly. The fastest way to dispel the lies put out by our enemies is to allow friends and neighbors to come to realize that we - their doctors, lawyers, fellow business owners, etc. - are just like everyone else save and except who we fall in love with.

More Sunday Male Beauty

A Look Back at Senator John Warner

John Warner - who I got to meet a number of times during my incarnation as a Republican - is leaving the U.S. Senate next month after serving 30 years (he will be replaced by Democrat Mark Warner who is not related to him). Warner is perhaps one of the last Republicans that symbolizes what the GOP used to be about before the lunatic "Christian" Right obtained a strangle hold on the Party. Warner was never loved by the Christianist set, but enjoyed high approval ratings by moderates and independents - the keys to winning elections. Moreover, Warner never bought into the anti-gay wedge issues that have become the hallmark of today's GOP and voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, albeit on technical issues, to the horror of the Christianists. Warner has also been pro-choice, supported embryonic stem cell research, and on June 15, 2004, was among the minority of his party to vote to expand hate crimes laws to include sexual orientation as a protected category. Here are some highlights from the Virginian Pilot on Warner's career:

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Work and luck and sometimes a dash of bluster have sustained Warner through a political career that spans four decades, the terms of seven presidents, six other Virginia senators and 11 governors. A second-choice nominee after the Republican Party’s original candidate died in a plane crash, Warner won his seat in 1978 by the narrowest margin in Virginia history. But when he retires next month at 81, he will have cast more Senate votes – 10,728 – and received more votes – 5.36 million in five elections – than any other Virginian.

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In 2006, as the Senate headed toward a partisan showdown over judicial appointments, Warner joined a moderate “gang of 14” senators who brokered a deal to secure confirmation of several controversial GOP nominees but preserved the Democrats’ right to use Senate rules to block others.

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Independence has been central to Warner’s own Senate career, sometimes imperiling him. He was personally and politically close to Ronald Reagan, but infuriated Reaganites by refusing in 1987 to back Reagan nominee Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. In 1994, he effectively threw Virginia’s other Senate seat to the Democrats, refusing to back Republican nominee and Iran-Contra figure Oliver North. Incumbent Chuck Robb won the race.

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More recently, Warner showed his independence by backing a package of state tax hikes championed in 2004 by then-Gov. Mark Warner, the man who will succeed him next month. “I remember the day he came to Richmond” to deliver his endorsement, Mark Warner said. “He just said, 'Mark, I think I’m going to come down and say a few things.’ … That was the day he got up, as only John Warner could do, and said: 'Politics be damned. ’ It’s time to put Virginia first.”

Virginia's Split Personality Towards Gays

Living in a state that had a sodomy statue until 2003 and which otherwise has some of the most anti-gay laws in the nation - Arkansas may now be worse with it's new anti-gay adoption law - is often not easy. One finds them self frequently encountering bigotry - even at the hands of some judges who are supposed to be unbiased even in matters of sexual orientation under the Canons of Judicial Conduct. In contrast to this nasty legal reality, one does encounter open and accepting people. My experiences over the holidays to date is a case in point.

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The boyfriend is somewhat the social butterfly and we have been to a number of dinner parties at the homes of his friends - in some cases as the only non-family members - and in every instance we have been accepted as a couple and no one has had a second thought about the fact that we are gay. Last night for instance, I had a wonderful conversation with a member of the House of Delegates who has a progressive track record at a dinner party and the experience was light years away from the hate and homophobia that prevails in the minds of other members of that legislative body.

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What is the defining difference? I believe that one is that all of the people we have encountered are well educated - religious bigotry and anti-gay attitudes correlate with lower education levels. The second is that all of these people know gays socially and/or in the professional realm and know that we are "just like them." The message to be learned? That it is ever so important for gays of all walks of life to be "out" and open about who they are. Being out and living your life openly is our most powerful weapon against those who would seek to marginalize us. Yes, it is scary at times and not without challenges, but it is something that we all need to do to the maximum extent practicable.

Sunday Male Beauty

Why Court Action is Needed to Protect Gay Minority

Looking back over America's history it has often been the Courts who have been the first to uphold the legal equality of minority groups. Obviously, Brown v. Board of Education decide in 1954 is a prominent example of that phenomenon as is Loving v. Virginia in 1968, or even Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. The sad truth is that the majority of citizens have historically demonstrated a very poor track record of treating members of minorities as full, equal citizens. Eventually, the majority has followed the reasoning of the Courts, but often many years after the fact. The quest for gay rights and marriage is but another incarnation of this process which is well stated in a recent letter to the editor by Dane Youngblom of Duluth, Minnesota, that I came across via one of my google alert engines. Here are some highlights:

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A majority of folks are born straight. Most of us also realize there is a minority of folks born gay. It saddened me to read the Dec. 3 letter, “Don’t let the courts decide gay marriage issue,” which seemed to be an attempt to rally the straight majority to hurry up and prohibit the right of the gay minority to marry. The idea of the letter seemed to be to act before the courts have a chance to rule on the constitutionality of denying rights to this group of citizens.

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The writer seemed afraid the courts could rule that the issue is one of civil rights and as such cannot and should not be decided based on its popularity with the majority. The writer was probably correct in seeing that our courts do have a tendency to protect the minority from the majority in cases of oppression. The courts made this clear by outlawing segregation and racial, sexual and age discrimination, which were all favored by the voting majority at the time.

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Someday, we will be embarrassed by efforts we’ve made to classify any people as second class. Until then, we will have to rely on our courts to rule on the rights our founders wrote into the constitution, that the majority would not trample on the rights of the minority. We are not a democracy where majority rules, but rather a representative republic where we choose responsible, knowledgeable leaders to protect us from ignorant impulses.

Frank Rich on Obama and Rick Warren

Frank Rich at the New York Times is one of my favorite columnists. He has an amazing flare with words and can ever so eloquently slice and dice politicians, Christianist wingnuts and others that it's most pleasurable reading his columns. In today's New York Times, Rich turns his sights on Barack Obama and obese, gay-hating, Christianist snake oil merchant Rick Warren. And, as usual, it's a fun read. He also rightly takes Obama to task for his hubris and arrogance in the selection of Warren as the presenter of the inaugural invocation. He even equates Obama's hubris with that of the Chimperator. Personally, Obama has lost my confidence and unless and until he delivers on policy and legislative promises made during the campaign, he will not win it back. To me, it's telling that one of his first actions was to insult LGBT Americans who worked so hard for his election. Here are some highlights from Rich's column:

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Barack Obama has little in common with George W. Bush . . . But for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month. As we saw during primary season, our president-elect is not free of his own brand of hubris and arrogance, and sometimes it comes before a fall: “You’re likable enough, Hillary” was the prelude to his defeat in New Hampshire.

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He has hit this same note again by assigning the invocation at his inauguration to the Rev. Rick Warren, the Orange County, Calif., megachurch preacher who has likened committed gay relationships to incest, polygamy and “an older guy marrying a child.” Bestowing this honor on Warren was a conscious — and glib — decision by Obama to spend political capital. It was made with the certitude that a leader with a mandate can do no wrong.

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Unlike such family-values ayatollahs as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, Warren is not obsessed with homosexuality and abortion. He was vociferously attacked by the Phyllis Schlafly gang when he invited Obama to speak about AIDS at his Saddleback Church two years ago. . . . But there’s a difference between including Warren among the cacophony of voices weighing in on policy and anointing him as the inaugural’s de facto pope. You can’t blame V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an early Obama booster, for feeling as if he’d been slapped in the face.

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Warren, whose ego is no less than Obama’s, likes to advertise his “commitment to model civility in America.” But as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reminded her audience, “comparing gay relationships to child abuse” is a “strange model of civility.” . . . Equally lame is the argument mounted by an Obama spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, who talks of how Warren has fought for “people who have H.I.V./AIDS.” Shouldn’t that be the default position of any religious leader? Fighting AIDS is not a get-out-of-homophobia-free card.

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Obama may not only overestimate his ability to bridge some of our fundamental differences but also underestimate how persistent some of those differences are. . . . Warren’s defamation of gay people illustrates why, as does our president-elect’s rationalization of it. When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable. It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely such fears.

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By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.

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[I]t’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.”