Box Turtle Bulletin

Paul Cameron Denies Being Gay

Jim Burroway

May 16th, 2012

Paul Cameron appeared on David Pakman’s TV program, where he finally fessed up to what many of us had thought all along:

Anti-gay activist Paul Cameron, Chairman the of Family Research Institute, explains why he thinks President Obama is gay, why homosexuals want to rape all young boys, and incredibly, denies being gay himself after admitting he was attracted to men as early as age 3.

Before Cameron came along, religious gay rights opponents stuck mainly to religious-based arguments. It was Cameron who worked up tracts with copious footnotes which purported to lay out a “scientific” explanation why LGBT equality was bad for society. One classic example is his pamphlet, “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do,” which contains 33 footnotes from otherwise often-reliable medical, psychological and sociological sources. The casual reader would likely see those footnotes and conclude that the pamphlet was well-researched and backed by sound scientific data. But in one of my first projects — a project that gave birth to this very web site — I examined that pamphlet closely and found that nearly all of the source material was mischaracterised, and that some of sources actually contradicted Cameron’s claims.

Yet his work was hugely influential to the growing anti-gay political movement, and his discredited “research” is still cited by a large number of other anti-gay activists and writers today — despite his having been denounced by the American Psychological Association in 1983, by the Nebraska Psychological Association in 1984, the American Sociological Association in 1985 and 1986, the Canadian Psychological Association in 1996 and, more recently, the Eastern Psychological Association in 2007.

Oh, and he believes that the Nazis did a swell job in “dealing with” homosexuals during World War II.

This interview really explains a lot in my mind. I’m pressed for time, but I’ll have more on this later.

Update: I’ve truncated the headline. It used to read “Paul Cameron Denies Being Gay Despite Being Attracted To Men.” But having finally had the chance to listen to this all the way through, I don’t believe the hype surrounding this video is accurate. But I do think this interview is very revealing for other reasons. That’s what I want to touch on later.

(If anyone has any guesses about where I want to go with this — and it does relate to his childhood — go ahead and leave your thoughts in the comments. Maybe I’ll use them, with credit of course, in my upcoming post.)

Do I Have a Demon?

Rob Tisinai

May 16th, 2012

Some time back I presented you with Reverend Bob Larson and his $9.95 online demon test:

Taking the Demon Test® may be the most important spiritual decision you make. This Test is the result of more than 30 years of research and thousands of hours in personal ministry with troubled souls. Through this vast experience we have been able to design this test so that we may quickly determine an individual’s spiritual condition.

I promised if I could get just one of you to sponsor me in the next AIDS/LifeCycle for $10 (or more), I would take the Demon Test® and report back on it.

So here’s the result: I don’t have a demon. Seriously. Rob Tisinai, confirmed homosexual, gay blogger, not a Believer an any conventional sort of diety, and one of the officially designated “homomafioso of Queer, Incorporated who oversee the image of Faggotry love.” And I don’t have a demon.

Not even me.

The test, obviously, is a fraud. Also, it shows how sadly mundane the Rev. Larson is. You can see a screenshot of the questions here, but a bunch of them sound like they come out of a standard psychological exam:

1)  Do you sometimes exhibit uncontrollable outbursts of anger or violence?

7)  Have ever attempted or contemplated suicide?

Others are more cliche:

2)  Have you experimented with two or more forms of the occult?

13) Have you asked Satan to take your life in exchange for something?

And a few are just funny:

6)  Do you commit immoral or illegal acts, contrary to your customary values?

See it only counts if they’re contrary to your customary values. But If your values usually tend toward the immoral and illegal, then apparently you’re fine.

I answered the questions honestly and came back at “low risk for demonic oppression/possession.” I experimented a bit, and realized that to get a high-risk diagnosis, I’d have to be so effed-up that I wouldn’t be capable of clicking a mouse. I began to suspect  the test is rigged to reassure people that they’re okay. Where’s the angle in that? I wondered. But if the best advertising is word-of-mouth, then you might want to let people brag: I don’t have a demon; the test told me so. I’m not sure about you. And that’s when I realized:

This test was written by a demon.

Perhaps I’m too much under the influence of slacktivist and C.S. Lewis, but I think one of the best strategies for ruining a soul and sending it to Hell would be to make a person smugly secure of their own salvation. Especially if you’re pushing them into a hateful and intolerant attitude. And here the trifecta: Especially if their hateful and intolerant attitude is the very thing makes them smugly secure of their salvation.

This test isn’t really hateful, but smug security does look to be its goal. So I wondered: What would a real demon test look like, one that tried to expose the damnation strategy I outlined above? Here’s what I came up with:

• Do you focus your outrage on sins that don’t tempt you?

• Does condemning others enhance your feeling of virtue?

• Do you call opponents liars when they merely are wrong?

• Do you more quickly credit stories of evil than of good in those you don’t like?

• Do you condemn whole populations on what a few members do?

• Do you casually harm others in the name of God’s love?

• Do you treasure moral preeminence over moral humility?

• Do you identify the flaws of human nature with the character of your enemy, instead of common to us all?

• Do you take delicious and gluttonous pride in chastity and self-denial?

• Do you believe in a flawed and fallen human condition while claiming certainty in your moral beliefs?

• Do you feel more ire than compassion at the failings of others?

If you answered yes to a few of those questions, then you may have a demon. If you answered no to all of those questions, then you certainly have a demon. It’s better to know your demons and wrestle them than to pay $10 for assurance they aren’t there.

Which takes me back to where I started. If you like my version of the Demon Test better, then please help support AIDS research and prevention by donating $10 — or 100, or 1000, or even just 1 — to my AIDS/LifeCycle effort. It’s an extraordinary event, a week of 2000 regular people bicycling 540 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles, in a huge tented community of love and support.

And I ought to admit one selfish thing: I spend a lot of time blogging in a state of high moral dudgeon, but I’m a better man the week of the LifeCycle than any other week of the year, and writing this test has only fortified my grasp of how much a guy like me needs experiences like that.

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, May 16

Jim Burroway

May 16th, 2012

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Durban, South Africa; Eskilstuna, Sweden; Kiev, Ukraine; Long Beach, CA; New Hope, PA; Oklahoma City, OK; and Springfield, IL.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Buffalo, NY; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; London, UK; Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis, MN; New York, NY; and Orlando, FL.

Other Events This Weekend: California Music Festival & AIDS Walk, Los Angeles, CA; Tijuana Cultural Days Against Homophobia, Tijuana, BC; and Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival, Toronto, ON.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Homosexual Coed Tries to End Life”: 1950. That was the headline of a brief United Press article, datelined May 16 in Seattle:

A 25-year-old University of Washington co-ed, who police said admitted being a homosexual for the last eight years, was in jail today after threatening to kill herself.

The pretty coed, whose name police refused to divulge, telephoned the police department late yesterday and told officer Kenneth Dahl she had a high-powered 30.06 rifle “and I’m going to use it.”

“I haven’t anything else to live for,” she sobbed hysterically.

Dahl persuaded her to give him her address and he wold try to help her out of her trouble. Meanwhile, four prowl cars were sent speeding to the rooming house district adjacent to the university campus. In the basement of one of the houses officers found the woman with the rifle she had taken from a locker.

Detective L.W. Webb said she begged to be locked up. She said she just “gave up” and after quitting school last week decided she might as well kill herself. The woman told officers she had wanted to become a social worker but every time she applied she was turned down because of her affliction. She said she was from Los Angeles and that she had been studying zoology at the university before she quit.

Webb said the girl would be examined by a psychiatrist today and “probably be committed to a mental institution.”

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Tamara de Lempicka: 1898. The polish Art Deco painter known as “la belle Polonaise,” she personified the glamor of the Great Gatsby society of the interwar years. In 1978, The New York Times called her the “Steel-eyed goddess of the automobile age.” Her famous self-portrait, Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) portrayed a woman who was utterly free, independent, and self-assured. Automobiles provided women with a freedom and mobility that they had never known before, and the portrait’s depiction of a 400 horsepower Bugatti added raw speed and power to the mix. During the roaring twenties, Tamara lived the bohemian life in Paris, hanging out with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. She was famously, infamously bisexual, and she was uncompromising in her very public affairs in a way that was scandalous at the time. She reveled in it. “I live on the fringe of society,” she announced, “and the rules of normal society have no currency for those on the fringe.”

In 1928, she earned a commission to paint a portrait of the mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner. By the time she was finished, she replaced the mistress’s position, and eventually became Kuffner’s wife in 1933. In 1939, the couple took an “extended vacation” to America, and ended up staying through the Second World War, where she became a favorite in Hollywood. But by the time the War ended, her style was no longer popular. She switched from using a brush to a pallet knife, but critics savaged her work. She retired from active painting in 1962, determined never to show her work again.

In subsequent years, she not only complained that the paints and materials were now inferior to the “old days,” but that people in the 1970s lacked the qualities and “breeding” that inspired her art. After her husband died, she moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1978 to rejoin the society of aging artists and aristocrats. By then, the art world was rediscovering the Art Deco era and her paintings were rediscovered and became highly sought after. She died in 1980, and her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl.

Liberace: 1919. Born Wladziu Valentino Liberace, he was known as Lee to his friends, Walter to his family, and Liberace to everyone else. His father, a french horn player, loved music but his mother saw it as an unfordable luxury. His father prevailed, taking his children to concerts and insisting on excellence in their music lessons. Liberace later recalled, “My dad’s love and respect for music created in him a deep determination to give as his legacy to the world, a family of musicians dedicated to the advancement of the art.”

On “Mr. Showmanship’s” terms, the advancement of the art took on an entirely new meaning. The word “synonymous” doesn’t do justice to the connection between Liberace’s name and flamboyance. He raised eyebrows by wearing a relatively simple white tuxedo at the Hollywood Bowl in 1952, and he continued to wear it so he could be easily seen in darkened concert halls. But it didn’t take long before that gave way to sequined jackets, then entire rhinestone-encrusted, fur-trimmed monstrosities that were “just one tuck short of drag,” as he put it. In the 1950′s he installed a Plexiglas lid on his piano so as to not obstruct the view; by the 1960s his pianos were often encrusted with jewels and mirrors. And then there was the candelabrum. Always the rococo candelabrum. His entrances at the start of his Las Vegas shows were legendary. Sometimes he’d step out of  a sequined limousine that rolled onto stage, sometimes he flew in by invisible wires. After making a grand runway walk, he’d hold out his arms to show off his outfit and yet, “I hope you like it! You paid for it!” The audience roared back their approval.

He was as out as any closeted gay man could possible be, and as closeted as every fearful performer was determined to be. But the difference between Liberace and everyone else is that, his verbal denials aside — he even sued London’s Daily Mirror in 1956 when they questioned his sexuality in print and, incredibly, won! — he didn’t otherwise put a lot of effort into trying to fool his audience while on stage. Art critic Dave Hickey, in his essay “A Rhinestone as Big As The Ritz,” I think, put it best:

He never came out of the closet; he lived in it like the grand hypocrite that he was, and died in it, of a disease he refused to acknowledge. But neither, in fact, did Wilde come out of it, and he, along with Swineburn and their Belle Époque cronies, probably invented the closet as a mode of subversive public/private existence. Nor did Noel Coward come out of it. He tricked it up with the smoke and mirrors of leisure-class ennui and cloaked it in public-school double entendre. What Liberace did do, however, was Americanize the closet, democratize it, fit it out with transparent walls, and take it up on stage and demand our complicity in his “open secret.” …”A bit like cousin Ed, ain’t he,” my grandfather said. Getting it but not saying it.

In 1982, Scott Thorson, Liberace’s 24-year-old bodyguard, limo driver, and boyfriend of five years sued Liberace for $113 million in palimony after they broke up, but wound up settling for a pittance. Liberace’s closet remained sealed right up until he died in 1987. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest due to congestive heart failure brought on by sub-acute encephalopathy. Before he died, Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, wrote in a front-page story that Liberace had AIDS. Greenspun said he had known Liberace for 40 years and that he had the medical records, laboratory reports and other documentation to prove it. Liberace and his handlers stood by their denials despite Betty White’s recent revelation, Wikipedia still has an entire section devoted to his “alleged homosexuality” to this very day.

Tonéx: 1975. Born Anthony Charles Williams II, the preacher’s kid, gospel rapper, producer and preacher himself, Tonéx’s first release, Pronounced Toe-Nay, was sold mainly out of the trunk of his car. The eclectic mix of hip-hop, funk, jazz, mellow grooves, and soul-style gospel quickly caught on and garnered the attention of major gospel labels. While his music had cross-over appeal into secular markets, Tonéx remained committed to making gospel music. His 2004 double CD Out The Box debuted at number one on Billboard’s Gospel Album chart, and featured Kirk Franklin and Prince percussionist Sheila E.

But that same year, things started to unravel. His father died, forcing him to take on the responsibility of becoming senior pastor of their family’s church. He also divorced his wife of 5 years and was sued by his record label for one million dollars citing breach of contract. That led to Tonéx’s announcement that he would retire gospel music, “an industry that is only built to make money, not heal broken souls.” He continued to record, produce and appear in the San Diego cast of Dreamgirls. When he publicly came out as gay in 2009, his transformation was complete, and he officially retired his stage name, restyled TON3X, shortly in favor of his new stage name, B.Slade.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

White House Objects to Congress’ Anti-Gay Appropriations Amendments

Jim Burroway

May 15th, 2012

While President Barack Obama was announcing his support for marriage equality, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives were busy attaching anti-gay provisions to two appropriations bills and Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act (VAWA).

In the first statement (PDF: 123KB/1 page), the White House cited several reasons threatened to veto the VAWA reauthorization if it reaches the White House in its present state. Among the several objections to the bill, the White Hose notes that “the bill also fails to include language that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT victims in VAWA grant programs. No sexual assault or domestic violence victim should be beaten, hurt, or killed because they could not access needed support, assistance, and protection.”

In the second statement (PDF: 274KB/8 pages) objects to a provision added to the Defense Appropriations Act. One provision (Section 536)) would provide “conscience protections” for chaplains and troops who express anti-gay animus or statements based on religious beliefs. Another provision (Section 537), which the White House says is “potentially unconstitutional,” would actually violate the religious consciences of chaplains and troops who approve of same-sex marriage by prohibiting marriage ceremonies from taking place on military bases. According to the White House statement:

Protection of Certain Religious and Moral Beliefs: The Administration strongly objects to sections 536 and 537 because those provisions adopt unnecessary and ill-advised policies that would inhibit the ability of same-sex couples to marry or enter a recognized relationship under State law. Section 536 would prohibit all personnel-related actions based on certain religious and moral beliefs, which, in its overbroad terms, is potentially harmful to good order and discipline.  Section 537 would obligate DOD to deny Service members, retirees, and their family members access to facilities for religious ceremonies on the basis of sexual orientation, a troublesome and potentially unconstitutional limitation on religious liberty.

Last week, the House of Representatives added an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act to prohibit the Obama administration from taking any action that could be seen as opposing the Defense of Marriage Act.

SBC has some bad news for itself

Timothy Kincaid

May 15th, 2012

For many years, conservative Christians have played a word game with themselves and the public. When it came to discussions about sin and love, there was a careful distinction between the person and the behavior. They could joyously love the sinner (but not his sin) so much that they longed for his soul to know God (and give up all that sin). But when it came to individual rights and civil liberties, that distinction evaporated. When talking about whether someone should have job security or the right to rent an apartment, suddenly the Bible declared “it’s a sin”.

This allowed conservatives the comfort of convincing themselves that the American public still agreed with them, still deferred to them on matters of religious conscience. Should Connecticut allow marriage or should Lincoln choose to ban anti-gay employment discrimination, well at least they know that they are accommodating immorality.

But now they are losing the sin debate. After decades of seeking intentional civilly enforced discrimination against gay people because “the Biiiiible says it’s a siiiiiiiin!!”, the public isn’t buying it.

Gallup, for the third straight year, has found that Americans find “gay and lesbian relations” to be “morally acceptable”.

But that’s the liberal secular press, you know, so not all that impressive to conservative Christians. And besides what is “gay and lesbian relations”? We are talking about homosexual behavior, not relations!

But now LifeWay Research (a project of the Southern Baptist Convention) has conducted a poll about American attitudes about homosexuality. And it is most decidedly not good news. Or, at least, not for those who have convinced themselves that real Americans know in their heart of hearts that sin is sin and Baptists can be trusted to tell you what it is.

They didn’t ask about “gays” or “relations” or “morally acceptable”. They asked about sin. Homosexual behavior and sin. And they discovered that a majority of Americans no longer believe that homosexuality is sin.

Do you believe that homosexuality is a sin?

44% – Yes
43% – No
13% – Not sure

And the news went downhill from there. Not only are Americans split on the sinfulness of homosexual behavior, it turns out that being anti-gay is a hindrance to church growth.

If you were considering visiting or joining a church, would knowing that the church taught that homosexual behavior was sinful impact your decision positively or negatively or have no impact?

Who cares? I mean, really, do that many people really decide their church based on it’s views on homosexuality? Really?

Yep. A whopping 58% said that it would impact their decision and the split didn’t go to the anti-gays. While a third of respondents wouldn’t consider a church’s views on homosexuality when making their selection, 36% said such teachings would negatively impact their decision while only 26% considered it a positive.

And as for evangelizing, it turns out that the non-churched really do care about Teh Ghey and they don’t want to hear you preach against it. Only 3% said they’d prefer a church that is anti-gay, while 72% of Americans who never attend a place of worship would rather not sit through Sodomy Sunday, thank you very much.

And even the good ol’ fashioned literalist believers aren’t as committed as they used to be. Just over half of them would consider a ‘homosexual behavior is sin’ stance to be a positive factor in their church selection.

And, of course, there are the discouraging facts that younger people and urban people are increasingly less tolerant of anti-gay theology, along with city dwellers and the educated. The future looks grim for the anti-gay moralists.

But we’ll have to see how this report impacts the Southern Baptist Convention. They are not exactly known to be theological trend setters. And many Baptists possess an ability to choose what they wish to believe, irrespective of, oh, polls or studies or reports or nonsense like facts and are quite convinced that they speak for real Americans.

For example, the good Baptist folk in Jacksonville, Florida, are fighting a proposal to ban employment discrimination.

The measure will “further infringe on the religious freedoms of Christians, and the majority of mainstream Americans who do not accept such alternative lifestyles as normal.”

Of course, the Baptists in Jacksonville also believe that there is no “protection under the ordinance for followers of Jesus Christ”, that it would impact “clubs, such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts” and that firing gay people is a “Christian belief”, so it may just be that Jacksonville Baptists are a whole separate brand of stupid. (To be fair, two Jacksonville Baptist churches are endorsing the measure.)

Ultimately, I’m guessing that there will be a lot of talk about “doing what’s right, not what’s popular” while quietly toning down the rhetoric. And in, oh a few decades or so, the SBC will apologize for “failing to affirm the civil rights of the homosexual person”.

Meanwhile, in other news, wackadoodle extraordinairre Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association had this advice for presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, May 15

Jim Burroway

May 15th, 2012

TODAY’S AGENDA:
President Obama Appears on “The View”: ABC. President Barack Obama will make an appearance on “The View,” where it is almost certain that his announcement last week that he now supports marriage equality for LGBT people will somehow make it into the conversation. At least, that’s what appears likely given the talk on “The View” yesterday:

“The View” is at 11:00 a.m. EDT, 10:00 a.m. CDT and Pacific. (Why do they leave out Mountain Time?)

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Writhing Bedfellows”: 1826. Few intimate letters between men survive from the early nineteenth century, which makes this one so remarkable. Back when the nation was young, Jeffrey Withers, 22, wrote to his dear friend, James Hammond, 18, a letter which is both frank and playful — even “campy”:

Dear Jim:

I got your Letter this morning about 8 o’clock, from the hands of the Bearer . . . I was sick as the Devil, when the Gentleman entered the Room, and have been so during most of the day. About 1 o’clock I swallowed a huge mass of Epsom Salts — and it will not be hard to imagine that I have been at dirty work since. I feel partially relieved — enough to write a hasty dull letter.

I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole — the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling? Let me say unto thee that unless thou changest former habits in this particular, thou wilt be represented by every future Chum as a nuisance. And, I pronounce it, with good reason too. Sir, you roughen the downy Slumbers of your Bedfellow — by such hostile — furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him — when he is least prepared for defence against the crushing force of a Battering Ram. Without reformation my imagination depicts some awful results for which you will be held accountable — and therefore it is, that I earnestly recommend it. Indeed it is encouraging an assault and battery propensity, which needs correction — & uncorrected threatens devastation, horror & bloodshed, etc. …

[The letter goes on for two more pages on unrelated matters, then signs off--]

With great respect I am the old
Stud,
Jeff.

Withers would later become a judge in South Carolina and delegate to the conferences that established a provisional government for the Confederacy. Hammond would later become a Congressman, Senator and Governor of South Carolina, and a major apologist for slavery. Hammond responded in kind to Withers’s letter the following September. If you want to see Hammond’s response, you’ll have to do as Withers did: wait until September.

[From Martin Duberman, "'Writhing Bedfellows': 1826." Journal of Homosexuality 6, no. 1 (1981): 85-101]

Homosexual Drives As Menstrual Cycles: 1950. This was a time when Congress was preoccupied with two color-coded scares: The Red Menace of imaginary communists hiding in every cupboard and The Pink Menace of homosexuals working in federal offices. Congressman Aurthur L. Miller (R-Nebr) was particularly incensed over the latter. He was also a doctor and a surgeon, which made this speech during a committee hearing particularly strange:

Some of these people are dangerous. They will go to any limit. These homosexuals have strong emotions. They are not to be trusted and when blackmail threatens they are a dangerous group. … It is found that the cycle of these individuals’ homosexual desires follow the cycle closely patterned to the menstrual period of women. There may be three or four days in each month that this homosexual’s instincts break down and drive the individual into abnormal fields of sexual practice.

Episcopal Church Allows Ordination of Gay Deacons: 1996. An Episcopal Church court threw out a heresy charge and ruled that an Bishop Walter C. Righter, did not violate the church’s core doctrine when he ordained openly gay Barry Stopfel as a deacon, the rank below that of a priest, in the Dioceses of Newark in 1990.

California State Supreme Court Strikes Down Ban on Same-Sex Marriages: 2008. In a 4-3 decision, the California State Supreme Court ruled:

“[T]he language of section 300 limiting the designation of marriage to a union “between a man and a woman” is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples. In addition, because the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples imposed by section 308.5 can have no constitutionally permissible effect in light of the constitutional conclusions set forth in this opinion, that provision cannot stand.”

The decision took effect on June 16, 2008, when gay rights pioneers Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin’s 55-year relationship was solemnized by the first official same-sex wedding in San Francisco. But two weeks earlier, California’s Secretary of State reported that marriage equality opponents had turned in enough signatures to place a proposed amendment banning same-sex marriages on the November ballot. Prop 8 passed, but was later declared unconstitutional in Federal Court. That decision is now working its way through the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where a three-judge panel has upheld the lower court’s ruling but narrowed its reasoning. Prop 8 proponents have request an en banc review by eleven of the Ninth Circuit’s judges. The court has yet to act on that request.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Jasper Johns: 1930. He probably best known for his 1955 painting Flag, which is, just as its name implies, simply a painting of an American Flag. His focus on the mundane as subjects have led some to consider him a pop artist with an abstract impressionist streak, but it’s probably more accurate to see him as a ne0-Dadaist. Flag exemplifies the movement by taking an object or popular imagery that is imbued with intense meaning and removing it from its context and thereby reducing it to a simple abstract design. Maps (1961) does the same thing. It’s an ordinary map of the United States portrayed in an abstract impressionist style which reduces the iconic image to a series of color splotches and shapes. Flags, maps, stenciled words and numbers — all of these mundane yet symbolic images were subjects for Johns’s paintings.

Johns was born in South Carolina and studied for three semesters at the University of South Carolina before moving to New York to study briefly at the Parson’s School of Design in 1949. After a stint in the military during the Korean War, Johns returned to New York where he met Robert Rauschenberg and they became lovers for eight years. It was through his connection with Rauschenberg that Johns was discovered by the art world.  When prominent gallery owner visited Rauschenberg’s studio in 1958 and saw Johns’s work, he offered Johns a show on the spot. At that debut show, the Museum of Modern Art anointed Johns as a major figure in the art world by purchasing three of his paintings. By the 1980s, John’s paintings fetched higher prices than any other living artist in history. In 2011, Johns was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, making him the first painter to receive the award since 1977.

Andy Towle: 1967. His last name is pronounced “toll,” not “towel,” making his blog, Towleroad, a homophone for the New Jersey Turnpike. That’s right, I said homophone. Anyway, before becoming a full-time blogger, Towle was editor-in-chief for Genre magazine. Today, Towleroad (a site with homosexual tendencies) has become one of the highest trafficked LGTB blogs with its focus on popular culture and the arts with a heavy dose of politics thrown in.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Colorado House in Special Session Kills Civil Unions

Jim Burroway

May 14th, 2012

When Republican Colorado House Speaker Frank McNulty declared that the special session called by Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper was a “reset” on the legislation, he wasn’t kidding. Defying the will of the majority in the House, McNulty sent the civil unions bill to House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee, despite the bill having passed through three House committees during the legislature’s regular session. But in sending the bill to the third committee, McNulty carefully selected a destination where the bill was sure to die.

And so die it did. The House committe tonight killed the civil unions bill on a straight party-line vote of 5-4. Rep. Don Coram (R-58) felt compelled to vote against his own gay son to kill the bill. That’s how badly House leadership wanted this bill dead.

Update: Daniel Gonzales, who attended the hearing, sends this account:

Rep. Coram had not previously been public about his gay son until his pre-vote remarks when he went public. Also seated next to him was Rep. Lois Court (D-Aurora) who in her pre-vote remarks had to alternate between restraining herself from crying and swearing.

Update: Daniel Gonzales has also posted this video of Rep. Mark Ferrandino’s formal statement to the media following the death of his civil unions bill in The House State, Veterans, and Military affairs Committee tonight.

So Who’s Crazy Now?

Jim Burroway

May 14th, 2012

Last week, I posted video of a woman from Lincoln, Nebraska, who testified before the city council against a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance. It had all of the hallmarks of a an anti-gay extremist’s diatribe, but little did I know (and I probably should have caught it), the poor woman was actually schizophrenic.

But as many of you pointed out in the comments section, it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s crazy and who isn’t when it comes to anti-gay rhetoric. Exhibit A is Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, who we haven’t heard from in a while. He is a discredited “researcher” who has been cited by a large number of other anti-gay activists and writers, despite having been denounced by the American Psychological Association in 1983, by the Nebraska Psychological Association in 1984, the American Sociological Association in 1985 and 1986, and, more recently, the Eastern Psychological Association in 2007. Oh, and he believes that the Nazis did a swell job in “dealing with” homosexuals during World War II.

Last week, Cameron appeared on VCY America (Voice of Christian Youth). You tell me: is he any saner than the lady from Lincoln?

Well, the timing is I think miserable for his re-election. I would have expected him, as you did, to wait until he was the new president and say, “Guess what? I’ve changed my mind,” or, “I’ve evolved.” But homosexuality is the one sin, or the one habit, that is 24/7. It is homosexuality all the time. And actually, while I’m not sure about the claims by the various people who have reported that Obama has at least participated at times with them in homosexual acts, this certainly lends some credence.

…Mark my words clearly: the long term goal of the homosexual movement is to get every little boy to grab his ankles and every little girl to give it a try. They will not rest until every one of our children at least gets to try, has the opportunity and maybe is forced to at least once experience homosexual acts. There is no retreating from that, they made it very clear earlier on -— now they don’t take about it —- but that’s what they want, they will not be happy until they get it, marriage is just a step along the way.

According to Right Wing Watch:

Cameron later said he “partially agreed” with a caller who said, “they gave blacks equal rights and that was a bad path and now look where we are, if I don’t feel like I want to hire a black man for my business I’m in all sorts of trouble and now it’s going to be some homo who is gonna have to get a job because I can’t do nothing about it.” Cameron claimed the push for LGBT equality “brings into question the civil rights mentality” because it created “special rights on the basis of certain characteristics,” calling gays and lesbians “mentally deranged” and transgender people “people that are really strange.”

Right Wing Watch has more here, including Cameron’s repeating his demand that gays be rounded up an imprisoned.

The Song Remains The Same

Jim Burroway

May 14th, 2012

Flip:

“I know many gay couples that are able to adopt children. That’s fine. But my preference is that we … continue to define marriage as the relationship between a man and a woman”

Flop:

On Friday,he was asked, in an interview with CBS affiliate WBTV in Charlotte, N.C., how his opposition to gay marriage “squared” with his support for gay adoptions. Romney told anchor Paul Cameron, “Well, actually I think all states but one allow gay adoption, so that’s a position which has been decided by most of the state legislatures, including the one in my state some time ago. So I simply acknowledge the fact that gay adoption is legal in all states but one.”

The video of that interview is here. This kind of reminds me of when I was in college and there was a group called the Romantics who had a hit with “What I Like About You.” Another Romantics tune had the line, “I hear the secrets that you keep when you’re talking in your sleep.” I came home from college one weekend and had my seven-year-old brother in the car with me when the song came on the radio and he began to sing along. “I hear the secrets that you keep when you’re talking to your sheep.” I corrected him, we laughed, and he kept right on singing.

I think this is as good an explanation for Romney’s constant flip-flops as anything. He’s singing the songs that he knows his audience wants to hear, but sometimes he gets the words wrong. He also has trouble pulling them off in a way that his audience finds convincing. Sort of like that fifth-tier Vegas lounge singer with the gig at the Airport Rodeway who gamely takes on every song that’s popular regardless of whether it’s a good stylistic fit for him — it could be “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Straight Outa Compton” or the Star Wars Theme. It all depends on what he thinks his audience wants to hear.

And Romney, to his credit, has tried all of them. Back in 1994 when he ran a quixotic campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Kennedy, Romney sang that he’d be better on gay issues than Kennedy. I like to imagine that it came off sounding something like Donny Osmond-meets-Gloria Gaynor. But it was a good enough rendition that he left the local Log Cabin Republicans with the impression that he was more or less on their side. As Patrick Guerrero later recalled, “If you go down his list, (Romney’s support was) pretty much a check-off of the real hot-button concerns for gays and lesbians.” That included everything but marriage itself. “Just don’t use the M-word,” he reportedly said. He liked the idea of civil unions though, and he left the Log Cabiners with the impression that he supported them on other issues of gay equality.

That changed once Romney got into office and was confronted with the Massachussetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that opened the gates to same-sex marriage. He withdrew his reluctant support for a proposed constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage but allowed civil unions. Instead, he supported an alternate proposal that would have banned both marriage equality and civil unions altogether.

By 2005, when Romney looked out his window and decided that there was a larger world to conquer beyond the Charles River, he switched from a little bit rock and roll to a little bit country. That switch has proved somewhat acceptable to his new audience’s ears, despite its pained awkwardness. He may be singing “God, Family and Country,” but it comes off more like a John Tesh cover than the original. Most of his audience would clearly prefer the original, but over the past few months they’ve decided to settle for the cover and pretend that it’s just as good.

This latest flip-flop is a pretty good example of that. The right barely reacted to his Thursday statement that he was “fine” with gays adopting. I think it’s because they saw that as a flubbed throw-away line in a song whose chorus was about gay marriage. It was only those among us who were actually paying attention to the lyrics who thought we might have heard something new. We made a big deal over it, but his supporters appear to have largely not noticed. And as it turns out, his audience, who knew the song by heart, knew better after all.

Yeah, sometimes he flubs the lyrics. That mattered when there were others trying out for the same Republican Idol position. But now that the contest is over, they’re not paying such close attention to his lyrics now. As long as he’s singing to their tune, it’ll be good enough. But if he strays too far from the songbook, they will definitely let him know it.

Obama’s Big Gay Journey

Jim Burroway

May 14th, 2012

Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek cover story about President Barack Obama’s historic announcement last week that he supports the right of same-sex couples to marry is now online.

The cover and Sullivan’s op-ed bestows the title “The First Gay President” on Obama. This, of course, is in reference to the phrase coined by writer Toni Morrison who bestowed the title, “The First Black President” on President Bill Clinton during the impeachment proceedings in 1998. Despite Morrison being an African-American herself, I’ve always had qualms about the title. But now that Andrew Sullivan, gay himself, has bestowed the honor of “The First Gay President” on the real First Black President, I’m doubly pained. I’d rather wait until, you know, we actually get a real gay President. Someday.

But let’s not allow us to be distracted from the truly historic occasion. For the first time in American history, a sitting President supports the rights of gay Americans to marry the person they love. As Sullivan put it, “To have the president of the United States affirm my humanity—and the humanity of all gay Americans—was, unexpectedly, a watershed. He shifted the mainstream in one interview.” Sullivan then gets to the heart of why he thinks Obama deserves the title “The First Gay President” when he argues that Obama’s own personal odyssey is familiar to everyone in the LGBT community:

Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. The America he grew up in had no space for a boy like him: black yet enveloped by loving whiteness, estranged from a father he longed for (another common gay experience), hurtling between being a Barry and a Barack, needing an American racial identity as he grew older but chafing also against it and over-embracing it at times.

I have always sensed that he intuitively understands gays and our predicament—because it so mirrors his own. And he knows how the love and sacrifice of marriage can heal, integrate, and rebuild a soul. The point of the gay-rights movement, after all, is not about helping people be gay. It is about creating the space for people to be themselves. This has been Obama’s life’s work. And he just enlarged the space in this world for so many others, trapped in different cages of identity, yearning to be released and returned to the families they love and the dignity they deserve.

This is the gay experience: the discovery in adulthood of a community not like your own home and the struggle to belong in both places, without displacement, without alienation. It is easier today than ever. But it is never truly without emotional scar tissue. Obama learned to be black the way gays learn to be gay. And in Obama’s marriage to a professional, determined, charismatic black woman, he created a kind of family he never had before, without ever leaving his real family behind. He did the hard work of integration and managed to create a space in America for people who did not have the space to be themselves before. And then as president, he constitutionally represented us all.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, May 14

Jim Burroway

May 14th, 2012

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Colorado’s Legislative Special Session on Civil Unions Begins: Denver, CO. When the Colorado House of Representatives’ Speaker, Frank McNulty (R, HD-43, Highlands Ranch), abruptly called a recess when it became evident that a majority of the House wanted to pass a bill granting civil unions to same-sex couples in Colorado, at least 30 other bills died in McNulty’s childish tantrum. Last Thursday, Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) called a special session of the state legislature, which is scheduled to resume its unfinished work today. McNulty, who called civil unions “gay marriage on the installment plan,” says the new session is a “full reset” which gives him the power to assign the bill to a different committee or to change members of committees, tactics which could be used to kill the bill.

Outserve Capital Summit: Washington, DC. OutServe, an association of more than 5,000 actively-serving LGBT military personnel worldwide, begins its two-day Capital Summit today at the Renaissance Washington at D.C.’s Dupont Circle. The first day is dedicated to workshops and presentations on making LGBT military families stronger. The second day is dedicated to congressional lobbying with coalition partners, including The Human Rights Campaign, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, and the Courage Campaign. You can find more information about the Capital Summit here.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Canada’s Parliament Votes to Decriminalize Homosexuality: 1969. In 1967, Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced a large omnibus bill, The Criminal Amendment Act of 1968, in to the 27th Canadian Parliament, which, if passed, would have had far-ranging effects on Canadian Law. The bill proposed, among other things, would allow provinces and the federal government to set up lotteries, expand laws on gun possession, impose penalties on drinking and driving, regulate misleading advertising, allow abortions and contraception, and decriminalize homosexuality. In 1968 when Prime Minister Lester Pearson announced he was stepping down as Prime Minister and head of the Liberal party, Trudeau sought the party’s leadership and won. After elections that summer, Trudeau became Prime Minister and John Turner became Trudeau’s Justice Minister. Turner re-introduced the massive omnibus bill into the 28th Parliament and described it as “the most important and all-embracing reform of the criminal and penal law ever attempted at one time in this country.”

The most controversial elements of the bill, the provisions legalizing abortion and homosexuality, drew the sharpest criticism from the opposition. The government fought back amendments from Conservative and Creditiste party members to leave the homosexuality sanctions intact. MP Marcel Lambert (PC-Edmonton West) asked, “If it is right to remove the legal sanction from acts of homosexuality between consenting adults … and from certain acts between husband and wife, why do we not remove a whole gamut of offenses, including attempted suicide and other acts involving an individual only and not other human?” MP Andrew Fortin (Creditiste-Lotbiniere) claimed that homosexuality “like tuberculosis,” could be brought under control with proper treatment. MP Rene Matte (Criditiste-Champlain) found the whole debate an abomination, saying it was “almost scandalous to see representatives of the people being obliged to discuss these questions.” England had decriminalized homosexuality two years earlier, but Matte countered, “we’re not obliged to follow the decadence of England.”

Justice Minister Turner countered that the removal of homosexuality from the criminal code would merely lift “the taint or stigma of the law,” and repeated the government’s position that “areas of private conscience, private behavior had better be left to private judgment.” He also added that a law that was not enforceable was not a good law. Trudeau also rose to defend the provisions, telling reports that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation, and what’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.” Finally the acrimonious debate ended, and the criminal code amendments dealing with abortions and homosexuality cleared the House of Commons late on Wednesday night, May 13, 1969, by a 149-55 vote.

You can see the CBC’s archival newsclips of Trudeau speaking to reporters about decriminalizing homosexuality and other provisions of the omnibus bill here.

“Shock Doc” Protested at APA: 1970. Protests and demonstrations over injustices were already de rigueur when the American Psychiatric Association held its annual meeting in San Francisco in 1970. Gay advocates had long observed that the APA’s labeling of homosexuality a mental disorder served as a handy excuse to enforce widespread discrimination and legal sanctions against LGBT people in all areas of life. What’s more, psychiatry’s attempts to cure homosexuality were often physically torturous, with electric shock aversion therapy a not uncommon method. One of the stars of aversion therapy, an Australian psychiatry by the name of Nathaniel McConaghy, was in San Francisco to read a paper before the august organization. Advocates were waiting. As McConaghy coolly described the methods he used — his patients’ penises were wired to measurement devices and they were shown porn; once twinge of arousal and they were delivered powerful electric shocks — gay advocates in the crowd began shouting “vicious!” and “torture!” and “where did you take your residency, Auschwitz?”

When the moderator announced the next session, the gay advocates exploded and demanded to be heard. When the moderator refused, the meeting broke down into shouts and recriminations. One physician reportedly called for the police to shoot the protesters. Most psychiatrists left the room, but some stayed and the conversations that ensued over the next three years finally led to the APA’s delisting of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

In 1981, McConaghy was still unapologetic about his treatment of gay people. In an article he published in the journal Behavior Research and Therapy, he was still presenting the results of his electric shock experiments on gay men. He defended his work as ethical and voiced resentment over the interruption of his presentation eleven years earlier.

By the mid 1980′s he abandoned aversion therapy, but he kept trying to cure an illness that no longer existed. And yet somehow, his reputation remained intact. After he died in 2005, the Archives of Sexual Behavior published a memorial lauding him as a pioneer in behavioral therapy who “inspired many to pursue truth and beauty through his example.” The memorial was notable for three things: 1) it briefly mentioned his attempts to cure gay men and painted his response to the “near riot” of 1970 as heroic (“He remained a fearless champion of the application of scientific methods to the study of human sexuality.”), 2) the memorial neglected to mention his use of electric shock therapy, and 3) the memorial was unsigned.

First LGBT Civil Rights Bill Introduced in Congress: 1974. Bella Abzug, the Democratic Congresswoman in for Manhattan and part of the Bronx, was a civil rights attorney before she entered Congress. She was an outspoken supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment and opposed the Vietnam War. Her stands earned her a position on President Richard Nixon’s famed “Enemies List.” On this date in 1974, Rep. Abzug introduced the first federal gay rights bill, the Equality Act of 1974, with fellow New York City Rep. Ed Koch. The bill, which would have banned discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations, went nowhere then, and similar efforts to ban discrimination have come to naught in the 38 years since then.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Magnus Hirschfeld:1868. Known as “The Einstein of Sex,” German-born Magnus Hirschfeld was the most prominent advocate of gay emancipation in his day. In 1897, Hirschfeld co-founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), whose first project was to repeal Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality between men (women were unmentioned in Germany’s anti-gay code). He never succeeded in repealing the law, but the committee succeeded in gathering signatures of some 6,000 Germans calling for repeal. In 1919, he founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), and was widely recognized as a prolific writer and speaker on sexual minority issues. He also figured in film history, when he made a cameo appearance in the 1919 film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), the first film to portray a homosexual love story in a sympathetic light.

While Germany’s Wiemar Republic saw homosexuality becoming somewhat accepted in Berlin, extreme right-wing forces reacted with violence. In 1920, Hirschfeld was attacked and severely wounded in Munich after a conference, and in 1921 his skull was fractured in another attacked. From 1929, Nazis repeatedly disrupted his lectures. In 1930, Hirschfeld began a lecture tour of the United States, which was expanded to a world-wide tour. By the time he returned to Europe in 1932, conditions in Germany became so dangerous that he decided not to return. On May 6, 1933, the Nazis attacked and destroyed the Institute for Sexual Science, and on May 10, they burned its library and files, the largest of its kind in the world. Hirschfeld wandered Europe before settling in Nice, France in 1934. He died there in 1935, with his death coming also on this very same date in history.

Julian Eltinge: 1881. He was, perhaps, America’s first famous drag queen. One story has it that he first donned women’s clothing at the age of ten for an appearance in Boston. Another one suggests that his mother helped him to dress in drag at a very young age to perform in the saloons in Butte, Montana, and that his father nearly beat him to death when he found out. At any rate, he was performing onstage and touring Vaudeville after the turn of the century. Unlike most female impersonators at the time, he didn’t place farcical caricatures of women for laughs. He sought to create the full illusion of actually being a woman. He toured Vaudeville under the his last name “”Eltinge,” which gave no hint of his gender. After his act of singing and dancing, he stepped forward on stage, and in a dramatic gesture emulated later in the 1982 film Victor/Victoria, he reached up and removed his wig to the surprise of his often unsuspecting audience. He arrived on Broadway in 1907 at the Alhambra Theater, and through the next decade he was reputed to be the highest paid stage actor. He started appearing in films in 1914, and by 1920, had one of the most lavish mansions in Southern California, where he lived with his mother.

Eltinge countered rumors of his homosexuality offstage by presenting a unrelentingly masculine presence in public. He smoked cigars, was an amateur boxer, got into bar fights, and had long engagements with women. Funny though, he never married. “I am not gay,” he protested, “I just like pearls.” But by the 1930;s, his heyday was over. He gained weight and started drinking as his career took a nose-dive. He was reduced to performing in a Hollywood nightclub catering to a gay clientele, but local laws intended to contain the “homosexual menace” banned dressing in drag. Eltinge had to perform in a tuxedo alongside mannequins dressed in his outfits. He’d point to them while enacting his characters. He died in 1941, reportedly of a brain hemorrhage, although some suspect suicide. His will, dated October 13, 1938,  stated “I declare that I am a bachelor” and left everything to his mother.

You can see an early silent film from 1918 featuring Eltinge in drag here.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Maggie: Part 2 of ‘The Harms of Same-Sex Marriage’

Rob Tisinai

May 13th, 2012

Maggie Gallagher, founder of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), has answered the question:

In states where same-sex couples have been allowed to marry, what harm has been brought to individuals or society at large?

I already knocked apart a portion of her answer here. Now I’d like to deal with this bit:

I think we’re in the early stages of seeing my primary concern, which is a transformation of the public understanding of marriage and the separation of it from its roots in the natural family…Gay marriage is not just adding a couple of people onto an existing institution. It requires re-norming the whole institution and making it serve new purposes, instead of its classic purpose across time and culture and history, which is to bring together male and female so children have a mom and a dad.

In other words, same-sex marriage will obscure the purpose of marriage. She hits this theme a lot, and I’ve previously pointed out the problems that arise when you talk about the purpose of marriage. So now let me hit something else — let me point out that her answer suggests this isn’t about marriage at all. It’s about gays.

See, in 2009 over 110,000 women aged 55 and older got married. That accounted for 5.1% of all marriages that year. The birth rate of women in this group is so small that the Census Bureau and the CDC don’t even report it. For these women, “the” purpose of marriage is not procreation, not about bringing together moms and dads. And by the way, when women in this group do conceive, it’s generally through an egg donor, so even that is contrary to Maggie’s repugnant, repetitive rhetoric about marriage uniting children with “their own mother and father” (that is, repugnant to adoptive parents, at least, who apparently cannot count their children as “their own”).

Now, that 5.1% figure is a bit higher than the 4.1% of adults willing to tell the government they’re gay or bisexual (which itself is different from the fraction who actually are gay or bisexual, but we’re concerned here with people willing to go on the record, as marriage requires).

So this is what Maggie needs to resolve:  We’ve got two groups, both of whom wish to marry, neither of whom can conceive on their own. According to Maggie that’s a bad combination. Yet she’s willing to let them marry as long as they’re not same-sex couples. At this point it takes some real tap dancing to avoid the idea that it’s really just all about gays.

Still, I invite Maggie to explain.

A preemptory note: Our opponents have two common responses to this:

• It would be a terrible invasion of privacy to investigate the fertility of an opposite-sex couple before granting a marriage license! If you hear this, then ask: “So if we could somehow know their fertility, you’d be fine with denying them marriage?” You’ll likely get back something about not wanting to deal in hypotheticals (which are entirely within the realm of possibility!), and that means they’re not willing to follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion.

• We don’t define laws according to the exceptions. In other words, opposite-sex infertile couples are merely “exceptions” that the law can’t be bothered to address. To begin with, what a dismissive insult! Can you imagine telling a heartbroken couple who has struggled and failed to conceive: We would take away your marriage rights but we simply can’t be bothered. Further, it’s not true; the law carves out exceptions constantly — consider killing as murder vs. self-defense. But most of all, if we don’t base laws on exceptions, then why do our opponents spend millions trying to rob one small exception — one small group of couples — of their marriage rights simply because they cannot conceive on their own?

So be ready for those responses. You’re likely to hear them, and they’re easy to deal with.

Here’s another way of seeing how ridicu-ludicrous Maggie’s statement is. She warns us away from making marriage “serve new purposes.” Presumably she means something other than just uniting two people of the same sex — something more than “just adding a couple of people onto an existing institution.” No, Maggie’s new purposes consist of that which goes beyond marriage’s “classic purpose…which is to bring together male and female so children have a mom and a dad.”

Do you believe that? If so, then imagine this conversation between Maggie and a new NOM intern:

Intern: Hey Maggie, get this: in 2009, more than 30,000 women aged 65 and older got married.

Maggie: No, that can’t be. That’s ridiculous. I should fire you.

Intern: Fire — wait — what?

Maggie: You’re trying to fool me into believing that 30,000 elderly women thought they could procreate!

Intern: But I didn’t — wait — what?

Maggie: Because that’s the only reason they would marry.

Intern: The only — wait — what?

Maggie: Why else would they marry?

Intern: Um…because that’s what people in love do? When they want to build a life together? As one?

Maggie: Nonsense. That would be an entirely new purpose for marriage!

Intern: It would?

Maggie: It’s so obvious, only a fool would need that explained.

Intern: Can you explain it?

Maggie: Oh…

Intern: Oh?

Maggie: Oh…you are so fired!

Personally, I don’t believe this conversation would ever happen. I don’t think Maggie, confronted with a 65-year-old bride, would find herself baffled. She wouldn’t investigate whether this woman thinks she can conceive. And Maggie’s head wouldn’t explode at the prospect of a new purpose for marriage. I bet Maggie would congratulate this woman on having another go at happiness.

As long as she’s marrying a man.

Maggie also offered this as a harm of same-sex marriage:

You see the idea and the ideal that children need a mother and father beginning to be redefined as the equivalent of a racist or mean or hateful idea. That’s on top of the problem of the silencing or the — which I’ve already talked about — the way religious institutions and religious people who in good conscience can’t treat same-sex unions as marriages begin to be treated as pariahs.

As you recall, I’ve written already how Maggie herself shares responsibility for this quandary. At that time, I promised to write more on it, but others anticipated me by pointing out the circular nature of her argument: Legalizing same-sex marriage is bad because it makes people who are opposed to same-sex marriage officially bad. So let me take a moment and extend that a bit.

First, Maggie is wrong in her circular argument. Legalizing same-sex marriage doesn’t mean the government is calling opponents bigots; after all, the government hires Jewish military chaplains, but that doesn’t mean it’s designating as “bigots” anyone who thinks Christ is the only path to salvation. As I’ve written before, compare these two statements:

The government is not taking a position on whether your religion’s view of salvation is correct when it gives equal support to multiple views.

The government is not taking a position on whether your religion’s view of marriage is correct when it gives equal support to multiple views.

If the statement on the left is correct, then so is the one on the right. Government neutrality is not an accusation of “bigotry.”

But there’s another response to Maggie’s argument. Suppose you spin it around like a hula hoop and turn it against her. During NOM’s ill-fated bus tour across the country, Brian Brown staked NOM’s worth on the character of its supporters. These are the same supporters who have a hard time commenting on NOM’s blog without speaking of abomination and perverts. So if we hijack NOM’s reasoning, we can say that same-sex marriage must be legalized; anything else would reinforce the idea of gays as abominable perverts who shall surely be put to death.

But of course that’s ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as Maggie’s notion that we must ban same-sex marriage to keep people from saying mean things about its opponents.

Send Mom some hyacynths

Timothy Kincaid

May 13th, 2012

On May 9, 1914 President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day. JC Leyendecker painted the above Bellhop with Hyacinths for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post and established the tradition of sending flowers on Mother’s Day.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, May 13

Jim Burroway

May 13th, 2012

TODAY’S AGENDA:
What, You Can’t Pick Up A Phone? Today is Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bergen, Norway; Brussels, Belgium; Chisinau, Moldova; Maspalomas, Gran Canaria; New Hope, PA and Uppsala, Sweden.

Other Events This Weekend: Boston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Boston, MA; Beach Bear Weekend, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Big Horn Rodeo, Las Vegas, NV Paradise Festival, Oahu, HI.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Cambio de Sexo” Premieres: 1977. Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 brought a new permissiveness in Spanish film-making, and Catalonia-born director Vicente Aranda probed the limits in what was acceptable in a still-conservative society. Cambio de Sexo (“Change of Sex”), which debuted on May 13, 1977 to critical acclaim, starred Victoria Abril as José Maria, a shy, introverted teenager living in the outskirts of Barcelona. Bullied and harassed by his schoolmates, José is expelled from his school. His father tries everything to “cure” him of his effeminate mannerisms, including, in a pivotal scene, taking him to a strip club in Barcelona. But unbeknownst to his father, one of the acts in the strip club is a pre-operative transgender. The father, clueless to the situation and determined to see his son lose his virginity, insists that José goes home with the stripper. Let’s just say the entire experience is revelatory as José understands that he was actually meant to be a girl. But the movie is more than just a story of the teen’s metamorphosis into a young woman. The transgender theme served as a reflection of the larger social changes which were just beginning to overtake Spain.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Bea Arthur: 1922. After serving thirty months in the Marine Corps as one of the first members of the Women’s Reserve. Her enlistment officer wrote that she was “officious — but probably a good worker — if she had her own way!” That description would be a good description of the characters she would portray on television. After working on and off Broadway, she landed the breakout part as Maude Findlay on Norman Lear’s groundbreaking sit-com All in the Family. The Maude character was Edith Bunker’s cousin who was the polar opposite of bigoted Archie Bunker. That 1971 episode led to her own spin-off in 1972, Maude. As the theme-song said, she was “uncompromisin’, enterprisin’, anything but tranquilizing.” The series tackled women’s liberation, menopause, drug and alcohol addiction, and spousal abuse. In one memorable two-part episode which aired two months before Roe v Wade, Maude decided to terminate a late-life pregnancy with an abortion. Maude ended in 1978. After a few other roles in television and the movies, she landed the role of Dorothy Zbornak in the hit series Golden Girls. Between Maude and Golden Girls, Arthur became an LGBT icon. The Advocate in 1999 asked her why she thought that was. “You play strong, honest people,” she said, “and gays buy it because it’s real and it’s slightly anti-establishment.” She was certainly real. Also she was on Broadway in Mame. You can’t forget that.

Armistead Maupin: 1944. He was born in Washington, D.C. but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. He began working as a newspaper reported in Charleston, S.C. before he moved to San Francisco in 1971 to work for the Associated Press, In 1976, he released the first installment of his Tails of the City serials. first in a now-defunct Marin County newspaper and later in the San Francisco Chronicle. Those columns were re-worked into a series of books in 1978. In 2007, Maupin married his husband Christopher Turner in Vancouver. During a trip to Australia in 2011, Maupin and his husband were denied the use of a restroom at a saloon in Alice Springs where they were having lunch. The bartender told them to go across the street because their rest room was reserved for “real men.” “So we did what real men do and crossed the street to the visitor’s center where we filed a complaint,” Maupin wrote. “Impressively we received an e-mail apology from the bartender that afternoon. Fair dinkum, mate. Next time don’t [expletive] with the poofters.”

Alan Ball: 1957. Screenwriter, director, actor and producer Alan Ball was born in Atlanta George and graduated from Florida State University with a degree in theater arts. He has written two films, American Beauty (for which he won an Oscar for best original screenplay) and Towelhead. He is more familiar to television audiences for his role as creator, writer and producer of the HBO drama series Six Feet Under (for which he won an Emmy in 2002) and True Blood, a series that has been seen as a paper-thin allegory for the LGBT community. Ball has called the comparison “kind of lazy”, adding “I just hope people can remember that, because it’s a show about vampires, it’s not meant to be taken that seriously. It’s supposed to be fun.”

Ball not only has to contend with critics, but last year he and his partner, actor Peter Macdissi, got tangled in a legal tussle with their neighbor, Quentin Tarantino, who filed a lawsuit claiming that the pair’s collection of exotic birds constantly emit “blood-curdling” and “pterodactyl-like screams” each day which have disrupted Tarantino’s work as a writer.

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