The Republic of T.

It's been said before, but it always bears repeating. Horace Griffin said it when he declared, “This black-church-sanctioned homophobia produces a lot of twisted black people," in his book about black church homophobia. I've pointed it out myself, in reference to guys like Ted Haggard and Paul Barnes.

But I haven't heard it put as eloquently as Bruce says it over Crablaw, in response to Dorothy Donahue's letter to the editor in the Boston Globe.

If you hide your body inside a twisted hole for years, it will become twisted. If you hide your mind inside a twisted hole for years, it will become twisted. If you hide your soul inside a twisted hole for years, it will become twisted. You don't have to be GLBT to understand that a mind, body and soul cannot live life inside a twisted hole.

If you want people to walk upright and straight, so to speak, you cannot cram them – any part of them – into a twisted hole. Your GLBT neighbor is your sister, your brother. If we forget their humanity, may humanity forget us, until we return to humanity.

I'd just add that you cannot cram them into that twisted hole, or require them to cram themselves in and stay there, and claim to love them. Not honestly, anyway.

It feels good to know I’m not alone.

Mentioned earlier that I have a penchant for procrastination. Not that I particularly like procrastinating. It’s just that it comes with the territory as far as some aspects of my life are concerned. I know it’s a trait I share with Scarlett O’Hara (“I’ll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day!”). But apparently it’s a trait I share with many of my fellow Americans.

My name is Terrance. I’m a procrastinator, and I’m not alone.

Overall, more than a quarter of Americans say they procrastinate. Men are worse than women (about 54 out of 100 chronic procrastinators are men) and the young are more like to procrastinate than the old, Steel said. Three out of four college students consider themselves procrastinators.

… The causes of procrastination combine temptation, sense of immediacy, the value of doing the job, and whether you believe you can get the work done, Steel found. He even created a complicated mathematical formula, complete with Greek letters, to figure out when a person is likely to procrastinate.

Temptation is the biggest factor. And it’s why procrastination is getting worse, Steel said, citing technology.

Far be it from me to argue with science, but I think I’ll have to disagree with the guy who did the study, as far as the why of procrastination. At least in my own case.

(more…)

My penchant for procrastination (more on that later) frequently bleeds into my blogging. I’ll bookmark something I plan to blog about, and keep putting it off until I’ve gathered enough information or figured out what I want to say. By then, it’s usually not news. Fortunately, everything has a way of coming around again. So I have Virginia Delegate Frank Hargove to thank for this opportunity to get back to what I intended to post, via his remark that blacks should “get over” slavery.

A state legislator said black people “should get over” slavery and questioned whether Jews should apologize “for killing Christ,” drawing denunciations Tuesday from stunned colleagues.

Del. Frank D. Hargrove, 79, made his remarks in opposition to a measure that would apologize on the state’s behalf to the descendants of slaves.

In an interview published Tuesday in The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Hargrove said slavery ended nearly 140 years ago with the Civil War and added that “our black citizens should get over it.”

The newspaper also quoted him as saying, “are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?”

Hargrove’s remarks reminded me of a similar statement that caused a furor not long ago.

(more…)

I wrote about my gaming habit earlier. Well, I’ve acquired a new gaming distraction. It started last week on our company retreat, when I had fun with the Nintendo Wii and joined in another game that everyone seemed to enjoy. It wasn’t something I’d have ever tried in public of in front of strangers. But once I tried it, I wanted to do it again and again. And since then I have.

(more…)

This is making the rounds of the gay blogosphere, and after reading it I can’t help but join in.

I’m a pretty emotional person. In fact, I wear my emotions on my sleeve a lot. Oddly enough, despite that trait, I’ve rarely been moved to tears. In fact, for a long time I couldn’t cry even if I wanted to. (Being a husband and father seems to have opened those floodgates, and now I sometimes even get misty while watching commercials.) I think it was a defense/survival mechanism, given the anti-gay harassment I faced growing up gay in an environment that was hostile at best and non-supportive at worst.

One thing that always moved me to tears though, was when I spotted the PFLAG contingent in any Pride parade. I had a habit of sometimes rushing out into the PFLAG marchers to give and receive hugs. (And was always welcomed and hugged in return, by the way.) I don’t know if the mom who wrote this letter to the editor, which is is one of the Boston Globe’s most emailed articles, is a PFLAG mom, but I’d like to give her a hug anyway.

The world would be a better place if there were more parents like this. Or at least maybe there’d be fewer homeless gay youth. Maybe there’d be fewer murders of transgendered people. Maybe there would be fewer stories like those of Ted Haggard, Paul Barnes, and Mark Foley. Maybe there’d be fewer stories like Brandon Teena, Gwen Araujo, Sakia Gunn, Arthur Warren, Michael Sandy, and Matthew Sheppard.

Here’s to you, Dorothy Donahue. Now, if only we had a million more like you.

(more…)

I realize I’m running behind on the news. Having been work-related retreat for four days, and then catching up with the family upon my return left little time for blogging about much. But there are several marriage-related items that have flitted across my radar, and now seems like as good a time as any to catch up on them. What it boils down to is this: the religious right, having pretty much run out of steam on the gay marriage issues, is coming for heterosexuals next.

The married ones, that is. I don’t know what kind of twisted logic makes people work overtime to make sure that gay couples who want to be married can’t, and heterosexual couples have to stay married even if they don’t want to be married anymore, but that’s what they’re working on. And, of course, it’s in Virginia.

(more…)

I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Geez. WTF am I talking about? “Shouldn’t come as a surprise”? It’s been nearly a forgone conclusion since the 2004 Democratic convention that Barack Obama would make a bid for the White House in ’08. Now that Obama’s officially sticking a toe in the water, I guess it’s news.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama said Tuesday he is taking a first step toward running for president next year.

“I will be filing papers today to create a presidential exploratory committee,” the Illinois Democrat said, adding that he will announce his final decision February 10 from his hometown of Chicago.

He made the announcement in a video posted on his Web site.

“The decisions that have been made in Washington over the past six years and the problems that have been ignored have put our country in a precarious place,” he said in the video.

In addition to citing “the tragic and costly war that should never have been waged,” Obama mentioned health care, pensions, college tuition and “our continued dependence on oil” as issues that need work.

But he said it is the “smallness of our politics” that most bothers him.

You can see the announcement on his website as well. As a political blogger, I suppose I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about it. But, to be honest, the best I could do upon hearing the news was to stifle a yawn. If that counts as commentary, great, because I don’t have much more to say that I haven’t already.

Well, maybe just a little more.

(more…)

Well, at least now I know why I did it.

On December 31st, the four-year-old PC I used almost exclusively for gaming up and died on me. I turned it on to find that it wouldn't load Windows XP and made a strange clicking noise for several minutes before telling me the second hard drive was fried. Shortly afterwards, the mother board joined the hard drive in its demise. I knew then it was dead. I'd added a second hard drive, upgraded the RAM and the video card, but a new mother board was beyond my capabilities.

By January 1st withdrawal and depression started to set in. By January 2nd, I was out buying a new PC, just for gaming. I felt silly at the time, but now I know I was just fulfilling a psychological need.

(more…)

The facts of this story are appalling enough all by themselves, without going where I’m about to go with it. So, before I go there, I’ll just let them speak for themselves. Suffice it to say, if you’re gay and having heart failure in West Virginia, you may not get CPR if the chief of police has anything to say about it. At least, that’s what happened to Claude Green.

Claude Green was driving his truck in Welch on June 21, 2005, with Billy Snead as a passenger, when he suddenly suffered heart failure. Snead was able to guide the truck to a stop and administer CPR, reviving Green who gasped for breath. While Snead continued to minister to Green, Chief Bowman arrived at the scene and physically pulled Snead away from Green, exclaiming that Green was HIV-positive.

Bowman called 911 for an ambulance and blocked Snead from attempting to resume attending to Green. When the ambulance arrived, Bowman told the emergency workers that Green was HIV-positive, which they recorded, but it appears that they attempted CPR while driving him to the hospital. Bowman also went to the hospital and informed the emergency staff there that Green was HIV-positive. Green died shortly after reaching the hospital from heart disease.

Green was not HIV-positive.

According to the complaint filed by Helen Green, Bowman assumed that Green was HIV-positive because he knew Green had a sexual relationship with another man.

Helen Green filed wrongful death claims on behalf of her son’s estate against the city and Bowman, asserting violation of his right to due process and equal protection of the law in violation of the 14th Amendment, and also wrongful denial of services in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act and the West Virginia Human Rights Act. She also asserted a claim under West Virginia’s Wrongful Death Act.

So, when you think about it, Claude Green died of ignorance, because he was gay or at least was known to have had a sexual relationship with at least one man. From that the police chief extrapolated that Green was (a) gay and therefore (b) must have AIDS, and (c) HIV can be easily transmitted while performing CPR. Green’s mother file a wrongful death suit on her son’s behalf, and the latest ruling in the case will now allow her suit to go forward.

That’s the end of the story, until the next step in the legal process. The judge had determined that Claude Green’s estate has a valid claim and that Helen Green has legal standing to file a wrongful death claim on behalf of her son’s estate. I guess because she’s his mother, and nearest surviving relative. But I couldn’t help thinking when I read the story, how might it have turned out if Claude Green had left behind a male partner?

(more…)

Well, it looks like I beat the rush a bit with last week’s posts defending Richard Dawkins and asking questions about whether humility or hubris dominates among the loudest voices in the American brand of political religiosity. Since those two posts, the apparent backlash on nonbelievers began over the weekend, while I was away from the blogosphere, and it’s not just conservatives getting in on the act.

Progressives are putting distance between themselves and the loudest voices among today’s brand of atheists. RJ Eskow notes that a all out blowar has broken out in response to his post “15 Things Militant Atheists Should Ask Before Trying to Destroy Religion.” I’ll get back to RJ’s piece in a minute. But first I wanted to take on this Wall Street Journal op-ed that declares “Without God, Gall Is Permitted.”

(more…)

Well, not us, technically. It’s Iran, but can you imagine a circumstance in which an Israeli nuclear strike against Iran doesn’t blow up into World War III? Need me to draw you a picture? Step 1, Israel strikes at Iran. Step 2, Iran and probably half a dozen other countries strike at Israel. Step 3, he U.S. gets involved.

Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.

This is not news I want to hear when I’m about to set off on a three-day work retreat. It’s not news I want to hear any time, really, given who’s in office. But the thing is, I wasn’t likely to hear it from any major U.S. news sources, though it’s been churning in the blogosphere for two days now. Plus, it’s not even news.

(more…)

This may be old news, but after that last post I couldn’t resist sharing it anyway. Remember the urban legend about that old “Newlywed Game” episode? You know, “Up the butt, Bob”? Well, the couple in that clip may have been ahead of their time, but the rest of the heterosexual population is starting to catch up. Not only are heterosexuals not abstaining, they’re taking up … um … taking it up the ass. According to no less than the CDC.

The survey, released last year, showed that 38.2 percent of men between 20 and 39 and 32.6 percent of women ages 18 to 44 engage in heterosexual anal sex. Compare that with the CDC’s 1992 National Health and Social Life survey, which found that only 25.6 percent of men 18 to 59 and 20.4 percent of women 18 to 59 indulged in it.

And even some straight guys are considering, um, taking it up. They’re even buying the accessories. For health reasons, of course.

Though the report is chock-full of all kinds of straight, gay, and lesbian sex in fairly graphic detail, there’s absolutely no research on female-to-male anal play. It turns out that the straight-male fear of reciprocal anal play is a potent mix of sexism and homophobia; a straight man can do it to someone else, but having it done to him isn’t okay.

But the newly discovered anti-cancer benefits of prostate stimulation are giving straight guys—especially the progressive New York breed—a legitimate excuse to be more, shall we say, open to exploration. And men’s magazines, which until recently discussed anal sex only in terms of how to trick a girlfriend into giving it up, now publish articles on the Aneros—the doctor-created, FDA-approved prostate stimulator—and the male G-spot, a.k.a. the P-spot, a.k.a. the He-spot.

The New York Magazine article doesn’t mention it. But this news brings to mind something else I read yesterday.

(more…)

This got a “Hey! Wait just a minute!” response from me when it drifted past my radar yesterday. It concerns a Florida student attempting to start a Gay-Straight Alliance in her school, and the resistance she got from school administrators. But what blows my mind is the reason school officials gave for blocking a Gay-Straight Alliance.

[Yasmin] Gonzalez is suing under the 1984 federal Equal Access Act, which ironically was initially pushed by evangelical Christians after some public schools banned after-school prayer meetings. It says that if a public school allows any extracurricular activities to meet on campus it must allow all groups to do the same.

Gonzalez says that when she tried to register her club administrators first told her the school didn’t allow any despite listing more than a dozen on its Web site. Gonzalez says she was later told there were too many clubs, and finally that the school had an abstinence-only policy.

Um. No pun intended, but … Come again? I can’t have read that right, because it sound like the school is suggesting that gays can’t practice abstinence or — as Jessica says — only heterosexuals can.

Not that it probably matters much to matters much to them, but the evidence hardly supports that assumption.

(more…)

OK. One more religion post today and I’ll get off it. For today.

Yesterday I linked to this post by Jim Wallis about how Christian faith, as he sees it, should inspire humility.

Jesus being the Son of God does NOT mean that Christians are better, more right, more righteous, more moral, more blessed, more destined to win battles, or more suited to govern and decide political matters than non-Christians. Instead, believing that Jesus was the Son of God would better mean that people who claim to believe it ought to then live the way Jesus did and taught. And on that one, many of us Christians (who believe the right way) are in serious trouble when it comes to the way we live. Those who believe that Jesus was the Son of God should be the most loving, compassionate, forgiving, welcoming, peaceful, and hungry for justice people around—just like Jesus, right? Well, it’s not always exactly so.

What’s interesting is how he’s taken to task by his coreligionists in the comments. Particularly when he approvingly recounts how Billy Graham responded to the state of non-believers.

(more…)

I guess this is, in some ways, a continuance of the previous post. The two stories that caught my eye today aren’t necessarily directly related to the previous post, but they both involve religion functioning in ways that brought to mind something I blogged about when Terry Schiavo was in the news. They both feature people in power claiming knowledge of “God’s will,” and making decisions for other people on the basis of that knowledge.

The first one involves an Italian man stricken with muscular dystrophy as a teen and bedridden since 1997, begged the Italian government to allow doctors to remove his respirator so he could die. Not only was the request denied, on religious grounds, but soon after his death (once he found a physician willing to defy church and state) insult was heaped upon injury.

One consequence for Welby, however, was immediate: The Roman Catholic Church denied him a religious funeral ceremony on the grounds that by seeking to end his own life he was in violation of Catholic doctrine, which rejects both suicide and euthanasia. Pope Benedict XVI even alluded to Welby during his traditional Sunday blessing, reaffirming the church’s belief in the sanctity of human life all the way to its “natural” end.

Which begs the question: What’s “natural” about keeping someone hooked up to life support when, without extraordinary technical intervention, he would simply die?

The comparison with Schiavo is obvious, but Piergiorgia Welby was lucid enough to communicate his wishes himself.

The other story is more bizarre, and involves a nine-year-old American girl who — due to severe brain damage — has the mental development of a three-month-old and parents who employed medical technology to “protect her” by altering her body and body chemistry.

(more…)

I mentioned earlier that I recently finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Despite having never finished The Blind Watchmaker, I decided to pick up a copy of because I was curious about what he had to say, given the amount of press he’s been getting of late. So, I went looking for the book, only to spend a week looking before I could find it, because every bookstore I visited appeared to be sold out of its compies. I asked a clerk in one of the stores, and he confirmed they’d sold out, and indicated that the publisher may have underestimated the book’s potential popularity.

Of course, I was already a fan of Sam Harris, so I didn’t think all of what he’d have to say would be new to me. (When Dawkins delved into physics and other esoteric matters, however, I discovered I was wrong.) I finally went out and bought a copy after reading an article about Dawkins with the puzzling title “An Atheist Bullies the Faithful.” How, I wondered, could Dawkins alone bully entire groups of religious believers? For that matter, were there enough atheists anywhere to bully anyone?

(more…)

I’m off to a slow start with blogging in the new year, but have a couple of posts coming up tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s an interesting tidbit I came across while searching for a reference for an upcoming post. Apparently, there are two Buddhists among the new members of Congress who will soon be sworn in.

Representative-elect Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat who ousted Representative Cynthia McKinney in the Democratic primary, became a Buddhist decades ago, though his family does not share that faith. A spokesperson said that Mr. Johnson plans to use a Bible, citing tradition.

Besides, there is no book in Buddhism that’s equivalent to the Bible or the Koran, said Representative-elect Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat. She said she probably would not use any book, but that in the past, when she was sworn in as lieutenant governor, she used a friend’s family Bible.

Ms. Hirono does not practice daily, but she is influenced by Buddhist values. It is “characteristic of Buddhism that there is respect and tolerance for other religions,” she said.

It’s the first one that gave me pause. Hank Johnson, a black Buddhist, got elected in Georgia? The only thing I can guess is that he kept that on the down-low, while making the obligatory rounds to churches on Sunday. He must not have told anyone, because I can’t imagine that a majority of Georgians in almost any district would elect a non-Christian to office.

Then again, it’s Cynthia McKinney’s district, so it probably leans progressive anyway.

But still. That just kinda blew my mind for a minute.

Kudos to the congressman-elect, tho’.