08/12/2013
'We're the victims' is anti-LGBT crowd's broken record; here's Joseph Farah's latest track
If WND publisher Joseph Farah is consistent, he will start advocating against nondiscrimination protections that speak to race, religion,
gender, national origin, disability, etc. But he of course won't do that. Like all social conservative voices, he knows that nondiscrimination protections that speak to sexual orientation or gender identity are the only kind whose exploitation still holds some sort of political sway in certain camps.
Exploit away, Mr. Farah:
It’s why America’s founders established a Bill of Rights. These were not “special privileges” bestowed by government. Instead, they were recognized as God-given rights. Whenever government starts handing out special protections of classes of people, especially based on their behavior, you are no longer protecting rights, you are denying them.
That’s where the homosexual agenda is rapidly heading.
The movement started with this slogan: “It’s nobody’s business what I do in the privacy of my own bedroom.” It has become a movement that is obsessed with what people do in their own bedroom – a movement that seeks to identify people based on what they do in their own bedroom, or anywhere else for that matter.
Yet, few Americans have yet realized how far off the rails this train has veered.
The popular culture loves, adores and worships all things “gay.”
In such an environment, is it really that tough to imagine Americans being victimized because of their most heart-felt religious convictions?
FULL: When NonDiscrimination Spells Bigotry [WND]
And of course there's never any answer for where this leaves LGBT people. The social conservatives are so hellbent on portraying themselves as the victims that they no longer even address the actual issue at hand. Whether its marriage, where they focus on the straight people who are supposedly maligned rather than the same-sex couples at the heart of the discussion, or conversations like these pertaining to nondiscrimination laws, where the exalt the desire to turn faith-based condemnations into special public policy exceptions, the paid thinkers and spokespeople who carry this "pro-family" water have stopped trying to knock down our arguments. Their game, in full, is to ignore our welfare and instead "explain" why their own rights, safety, and peace of mind is of supreme importance, and to twist that "explanation" into an exercise in "religious freedom" rather than discrimination. They don't answer the pertinent questions.
Of course we know their ultimate answer. Joseph Farah is on record saying that homosexuality will bring "national judgment," and he's an advocate for so-called "ex-gay" "change." If you follow any prominent social conservative's thread long enough, you will end up with gay people "changing" or at least suppressing who we are. Almost always. And that, my pals, is the main (and often undresses problem). If you don't even believe that we should be LGBT, there is virtually no chance that you will support any policies that ensure our basic protections. And this being the truth, you start to understand why the opposition arguments are so reliably disingenuous/inadequate/twisted/unfairly framed. They are trying to hide what is really at the root of this whole thing.
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08/09/2013
FRC's VP of Church Ministries: We may have to use armed resistance against our government; God 'not a pacifist'
What you are about to hear is a ten minute audio clip of the Family Research Council's Vice President of Church Ministries, Kenyn Cureton, scaring congregants of a Tennessee church into believing that our nation could devolve into a bloody battle in the streets. So grab your guns, folks, before that pesky President takes them from you. Oh, and do it for your warrior lord:
Gods, Guns, and Government [First Baptist Church of Morristown, TN]
Just to remind you, Mr. Cureton has previously said that gay people are "pawns in the hands of their malevolent master" the Devil and has called the same-sex marriage fight "a great spiritual war with the forces of evil directed by the prince of darkness himself." He has also called on preachers to rise up in "spiritual revolution" against us.
So when you hear Mr. Cureton say God is coming to "wage war on evil with a sword flashing out of his mouth" and say that this same God is "looking for warriors today," you would not be an alarmist if you feared what his implications might mean for LGBT Americans. In fact, you'd be downright ignorant if you overlooked what this top FRC surrogate is so clearly saying/fomenting here. It's truly scary stuff.
**Also be sure to note, at 8:29, where Kenyn descries the "limp wristed wimps" who would run from the battle he's suggesting. One doesn't arbitrarily choose that phrase.
**Oh, and in this same sermon, he told the congregants that gay people's marriages will "never be right in the high court of heaven":
In case you had any remaining questions about which side of God's army he puts us on.
FRC's latest 'tragedy': Soldiers who obtain freedoms for which they fight
Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis (USA-Ret.), a Family Research Council Senior Fellow, is still reeling over the fact that the Supreme Court essentially destroyed the Defense of Marriage Act. In his disbelief, he goes after the "tragic" and "travesty"-making soldiers who simply want to enjoy the American freedoms for which they risk life and limb:
“[The Pentagon is] going to grant free 10 days of paid vacation for these service members to go to a state where they do perform same-sex ‘marriages’ so that they can come back to their duty installation and claim marriage benefits,” [Maginnis] laments. “I believe that's a tragedy and a travesty as well.”
[ONN]
Let's think about this.
In terms of tragedy—what part of this plan, exactly, does this FRC staffer see as registering on the tragic scale? For the soldiers, this freedom to marry hopefully
means a lifetime of love and commitment. It certainly means rights on par (or closer to par) with their heterosexual peers, none of which come at the expense of those same peers (or anyone else). So where, exactly, is the "tragedy." Even if you oppose marriage equality (and we all get it, FRC—you're happy on the wrong side of history!), how is an American solider's legal union a "tragedy" that affects your life in any way? And I mean a real way, too, not those fake ways that the far-right's talking point machine has been trying to fib into the book of truth for the past few decades.
But while the "tragic" claims are intended to be personally slighting, it's the "travesty" claim that might be even more offensive. When we talk about military personnel, we are talking about human beings who, quite literally, sign up to potentially die for this country. These are men and women who take on this weighty job in order to protect and defend our liberties. The travesty is that we have been operating in a culture that has denied some of these individuals of rights and freedoms that they deserve! The way we treated our LGBT soldiers (and citizens at large) will go down in history as astounding tragedy—one that will seem increasingly unfathomable with every passing generation. No FRC spin is going to change that.
NOM EXPOSED: Thanks for the shout out, Brian Brown—but scrutiny is not ‘harassment’
Thanks for the shout out, Brian Brown—but scrutiny is not ‘harassment’[NOM EXPOSED]
Happy Friday! Here's the AFA's top surrogate calling for my criminalization
In a column where he both suggests "that we take whatever public policies we have adopted with regard to IV drug abuse and use those same policies with regard to homosexual behavior" and that we use policies governing adult film workers to govern the everyday gay population, the American Family Association's most visible (and viciously vocal) spokesperson, Bryan Fischer, restates his support for the criminalization of gay sex:
As they say, the law is a teacher, and it’s wise to keep an anti-sodomy law on the books, even if unenforceable due to judicial tyranny, to express the state’s official disapproval of that kind of conduct. The fact that it is against the law provides an additional reason not to give it special legal protections in discrimination law. It’s schizophrenic to give special legal protections to behavior in one part of your code that is illegal according to another.
As Antonin Scalia correctly pointed out in his dissent on Lawrence v. Texas, sodomy was always contrary to public policy everywhere in the United States, going back to the very beginning. It was a felony offense in every state of the union until 1962, and still a felony offense in the other 49 states until 1972, when the sexual revolution started causing the moral pillars to crumble. Sodomy is immoral, unnatural and unhealthy and should remain contrary to public policy. [SOURCE]
Extreme and downright scary. But hey, it's not like this prominent GOP senators still rush to speak to this guy or anything.
Oh wait.
08/08/2013
The freedom to marry (*and not feel like part of the problem)
The Associated Press is running a fairly interesting report on everyday supporters of marriage equality who are now feeling more freedom to enter into their own different-sex marriages now that same-sex marriage is an increasing legal reality:
NEW YORK (AP) — No, it wasn't just an excuse to avoid getting hitched: Some heterosexual couples who postponed their weddings until gay couples had the right to marry are now making plans to say "I do."
KEEP READING: Queer marriage for the straight couple? I do! [AP via Yahoo!]
I would caution these couples against believing that this fight is over. Gay people still have far more states where we cannot marry than we have states where we can. The federal component was an AMAZING victory that is a crucial step in the ongoing push forward, but it does nothing to change the ability of same-sex couples in thirty-seven states to enter into a locally granted and recognized union.
We are at a very interesting time in this fight, one where celebration is understandable, necessary, and fantastic. But this eagerness to raise a glass mustn't come at the expense of the work that still needs to be done.
Video: President's birthday party? A gay orgy, natch
Nancy Pelosi should be arrested, and the President (an "arab Muslim," of course) is a secretly gay man in an Reverend-Wright-arranged marriage who surrounded himself with other men at his recent birthday celebration for obvious reasons. So says this obviously objective person who has clearly—CLEARLY!—been gleaning his past five years of political information from the most trusted of sources:
I'm not hostile to those non-existent, deep-end-dwelling sinners!
It's no surprise that every last one of the comments is hostile to LGBT equality. After all, the Christian Civic League of Maine framed Equality Maine's efforts to create safe and inclusive schools as a "reeducation" plan. When people who are already opposed to equal rights for LGBT people hear purposely loaded terms like "reeducation," you can only expect their replies to trend toward the vehement.
But this one reply really caught my eye:
FULL SET OF COMMENTS: Readers comment on reeducation by homosexuals [CCL of Maine]
Really, anonymous Mainer? You're not homophobic, the term widely accepted to mean anti-gay, but you believe gays (a) don't even really exist and (b) are just fallen sinners who reside in some sort of deep societal dredges? Seems like your self-assessment might be just a tad off, dear.
Anti-LGBT conservatives of the modern era spend as much time denying that they are animus-driven as they do actually fighting LGBT rights. It's understandable why they feel the need to do this. With every passing day, more and more Americans realize just how unfortunate, misguided, unfair, and offensive the past few decades' onslaught against LGBT rights has been. Citizens are starting to see the modern LGBT rights fight for what it is: The civil rights fight of our generation. The same citizens are casting the opposition movement's role off of this, the widely understood script of this 21st century tale.
But self-declaration does nothing to change the merit. If you go so far as to say that gay people just don't exist at all, then you're probably going to have a tough time defending your role in this civil rights fight. And if you truly do believe that, then it's not "reeducation" you need on this subject. The "re-" part is superfluous.