Wow. After a week or so of writing mostly about race and ethnic diversity, it was something of a relief to get back to talking about LGBT-related issues. (Trust me. Talking about this stuff is a walk in the freaking park compared to talking about race. At least in my opinion.) Of course, you can imagine, I can never fully escape one or the other.
At the beginning of the week two different people emailed me about a book that’s already on my Amazon wishlist, Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians And Gays in Black Churches. After reflecting on the number of times I’ve blogged about the subject, I picked up the phone, called the publisher and got them to send me a review copy. (It’s in the mail.) Then there was the anti-gay rant by Wellington Boone at the Values Voter Summit, that reminded me of a few other black ministers who’ve sounded off on the subject. On that I can only echo the author of the book I mentioned earlier, ““This black-church-sanctioned homophobia produces a lot of twisted black people.” Then there was the matter of the (black, gay, Christian, ordained minister) of Palm Springs welcoming the “Love Won Out” conference to his city, and the question of whether the tolerance of intolerance is the new tolerance. And that was just my week. There was lots going on elsewhere.
There’s one story I haven’t touched all week: the torture compromise. I stayed away from it for two reasons: (1) because it was already thoroughly covered by every major progressive blog in existence, and (2) I got tired of blogging about torture it once realized that a majority of Americans supported it anyway. Turns out I was almost right. Nearly half of Americans support the use of torture. Oh well. I can take some comfort in knowing that the entire House delegation from Maryland voted against torture, including the Republicans.
Torture. That’s who we are now. That’s what we want. Might as well enjoy the music.
Local police today charged the director of human resources at The Washington Times with one count of attempting to entice a minor on the Internet, the newspaper reported.
Randall Casseday, 53, was arrested late yesterday in Northeast Washignton, D.C., where police said he had arranged to meet who he thought was a 13-year-old girl.
He had actually exchanged Internet messages and photographs with a male police officer posing as a girl, the newspaper related, adding, “The conversation included discussion of an explicit sexual nature.”
Brian Bauman, a spokesman for The Times, said Casseday had been suspended without pay. The paper added: “It is not clear from the affidavit whether the online conversation took place on company property or on a company-owned computer.”
That reminded me of a couple of stories I blogged about a while back.
I've written about this before, and I'll just reiterate that in the past few years I've noticed more than a few moments when we seem to have gone through the looking glass. For example, we seem to have stumbled into an age where the tolerance of intolerance is the new tolerance. In other words, unless you are tolerant of those who are intolerant of — and perhaps even advocate discrmination against — you and others like you, you cannot be truly tolerant.
Take a look at the interesting bit of theater that went on in Palm Springs, where "Love Won Out" held it's conference and was officially welcomed by the Mayor, who also happens to be black, gay, and an ordained minister.
"It's a pleasure to welcome you," the mayor wrote to the notoriously antigay Christian group Focus on the Family, which organized the conference. "We are so proud to have you here in the Palm Springs area."
Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., teaches that gays and lesbians lead "deviant un-Christian lifestyles" and that with the group's help, they can "change" their sexual orientation. Officials with the group were pleased with the mayor's letter. "We were refreshingly encouraged that here was a city official walking out genuine tolerance," said Melissa Fryrear, director of the group's Gender Issues division. "He's public about being a gay man, which made it even more significant that he was showing us so much respect."
I understand the mayor says he was simply being "a good Christian" by welcoming Dobson' s the group, but would he have shown the same "Christian courtesy" to the Klan? (And yes, I meant to make that comparison, as they've also been known as the "Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.) Jay, over at The Zero Boss wondered what I thought about the whole thing, and I've been trying to figure it out myself.
— if it will help me understand people like Wellington Boone, the latest black minister to join the ranks of anti-gay bigotry.
In the last QKos round-up I link to Right Wing Watch, which noted one Values Voter Summit Speaker stating that the gay rights movment was “birthed and inspired by the anti-christ” and that the anti-christ himself will be gay. But somehow I missed Wellington Boone’s inspired oration. Fortunately, PageOneQ led me to Think Progress which has audio (for those who can stomach it) as well as a transcript of Boone’s speech which I’ll offer here as evidence of … Well. It speaks for itself.
Jim sent me an email yesterday about the current issue of Shambhala Sun — which I subscribed to for a year or so, back when I had time to read magazines — and I was intrigued by the focus on mindful politics. I might just pick up this issue tomorrow, in order to read the full articles, because something jumped out at me from the excerpt of John Tarrant’s article “Return to the (Political) World”. Towards the end of last week I wrote that it was rather funny that someone as conflict averse/avoidant as I am would end up a political blogger, much less in the middle of a conflict like the one that broke out that week.
Then I read this.
Politics belongs in the general realm of imperfection, self-deception, desperate hope, and congenial affection we call civilization. That’s where the bodhisattva, who is interested in the fate of others, hangs out. Also, if you indulge in politics, certain personal implications accompany you; you don’t get away without being transformed by the material you are working with.
To consider politics is to open yourself—your mind and body, your naked and apparently unoffending skin, your naive hopefulness, and your joy in human company—to a tsunami of lies, humbug, drivel, false promises, masquerade, hypocritical piety, prejudice, greed, murder, and fattening food. To consider politics is to dive into this Hokusai wave of inauthenticity and to say, “Hmmm, this seems like a situation I can work with.”
Now, I don’t define consider myself a bodhisattva (it’s a lot to live up to). But it does help me make sense of an otherwise unlikely and crazy decision to engage in something that invariably leaves me tense and tied in knots. (Not that I haven’t given some thought to just starting a blog about vegetarian cooking, and just call it a day.)
But even if that brief excerpt. Tarrant’s article was right about something else; that you can’t help being transformed by it, and sometimes brought back to what you already knew.
Interesting. Democrats have launched an online Christian community called Faithful Democrats.Now, if it had an RSS feed that I could find, I might even read it regularly. Why start a blog or an online community and leave out the RSS feed? I'm not going to visit your URL every day to see if you've got something I want to read. If I can't get it in my RSS reader, I'm probably not going read it very often. Nice idea, though. The online community, that is.
I haven’t blogged about this yet, but looks like someone had made a movie about the people I’ve been reading and writing about lately. And, it’s something to see.
And if seeing kids this your declare themselves in training to be “the army of God” and “the key generation to Jesus coming back” doesn’t worry you a little (and it didn’t help that at the moment I’m reading The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, about folks who want to help armageddon along by rebuilding the Third Temple) consider seeing Jesus Camp as a part of a double feature.
Well, I'd hope so. Anyone stupid or careless enough to put an uzi inthe hands of an eight-year-old ought to be charged with something. The D.A. looking into "whether anyone committed a reckless or wanton act" by allowing the child to fire a weapon. Oh, I'd say that qualifies as reckless and wanton. If it doesn't, then nothing does.
I admit it. My first thought when I saw this was, "Honest, officer. I don't know what happened. I totally meant to hit the brakes. I guess my foot just slipped."
I'm not saying its the kind of thing that anyone should base their vote on, but I gotta admire a campaign when I find out about the candidate's economic plan on an LGBT social network, and then get a link to read or download the entire plan on Scribd. It tells me that a campaign is making a special effort to reach out to people like me, and that the campaign is up to date on the latest ways to disseminate information.
If you haven't yet, take the time to stop by Box Turtle Bulletin, where they have been doing a great series of day-by-day posts on the Matthew Shepard murder. Today's post is a particularly heartbreaking one, about the moment ten years ago when Dennis and Judy Shepard walked into their son's intensive care room and saw him for the first time since the attack. It also links to the earlier posts in the series.
Its sounds like a joke, but it's true. You know the economy has gone South when folks around in Macon (or anywhere else in the south) are going to restaurants and not ordering sweet tea.
Big news. Clay Aiken is gay. Bigger news. So is Lindsey Lohan. Or, at least, she's been dating a woman "for a really long time." I don't know what counts as "a really long time" for Lohan. But kudos to Aiken, at least, for finally coming out. The closet is no place to raise a kid.
See, stuff like this is the reason I don't use Google Ads already. I tried it for a while, but I kept getting advertisements for James Dobsons' books on my posts, and I never found an easy way to block them other than entering the URL into the Google Ads filter every time I discovered one. No thanks.
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