Whoever the hell Robert B. Ives is, he doesn’t speak for the United Methodist Church. And while the UMC’s current position is not what it should be (primarily due to a 2008 voting coalition of a minority of American Methodists joining with African and Asian Methodists), but no one is eradicating anyone’s very nature.

(By the way, finding someone who spouted what you want to believe about the UMC must not have been easy. However type in “United Methodist Church homosexuality” and their real position shows right up)

So here’s the deal:

You have now proven beyond doubt that you have nothing whatsoever to support your assertion that the UMC have “become a majority of true haters”. However, you also are showing that you just don’t care. You want to spout hate and don’t give a damn that I’ve asked you to stop doing so at BTB.

So, until you can apologize and recant your false accusations, I’ll be pulling your comments. It’s only fair.

Perhaps your pride or your hatred will make it impossible for you to back down. I hope not, as you do have valuable things to contribute. I guess we’ll see.

You have to stop!

At some point, your own personal bad experience does not excuse you from lying about people. Sorry, you just do not have the privilege of making sh!t up, or at least not at BTB.

I am quite familiar with the Methodist church in this respect. Their decision to join with one of the most hateful of all christian churches a few decades back has so poisoned them, what was once a decent group of people are become a majority of true haters.

True haters? You are trying to say that to someone who lives in California where the United Methodist Church officially denounced Prop 8, wrote an amicus brief in favor of marriage, and helped pay for a “no on 8″ ad?

Your smear on them is just a total pile of sh!t.

Prove it or take it back. Seriously. This isn’t “your opinion”, this is a defamation of a group of people who are not our enemies, many of whom are our allies, and who are become more supportive of our community every year.

And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of outrageous demands for things that – amazingly and worthy of credit – are already happening. You want a “true uprising”? Then pick up a f*cking newspaper and see what pastors are doing all over the country!

But this time you went to far. And now I’m saying to put up or shut up.

I’m not kidding about this: substantiate that the United Methodist church has become “a majority of true haters”. And you’d better be able to show just where the UMC is acting out that hate.

And if you can’t, then apologize and retract your spurious claim.

Because if you think that you can just post hate speech here at BTB, you are VERY mistaken. What happened to you doesn’t give you carte blanch to lie and demean and insult people who didn’t do a damn thing to you.

Either proof or apology will be the next comment that stays up here.

And that’s what is wrong with the whole ‘filters’ concept. I was tortured. By christians. Specifically by christians because I am gay.
Any rational response to that other than to undertake every possible (not ‘reasonable’, possible) means to prevent it ever happening again is incomprehensible.

I note yet another GLBT victim of burning has turned up within a short span of only a few weeks – she is the fourth, I believe.
Burning is the traditional christian approach to killing us.

Clearly, there are always member of evil regimes who understand that they have gone too far. Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg was one. Oh, his own desires were not nearly as pure as popular history makes him out to be.
And in American christianity, there are similiar voices to be found. People, whose essential humanity has not been utterly subsumed by the most hate driven force in American politics.

They are, sadly, not those who determine our laws (and will appoint our Supreme Court Justices after the Democrats lose in 2012, locking in our persecution and sub-human status for decades).
Nor are they the overwhelming majority of ‘good Christians’ who say and do nothing to rock the boat. I am quite familiar with the Methodist church in this respect. Their decision to join with one of the most hateful of all christian churches a few decades back has so poisoned them, what was once a decent group of people are become a majority of true haters.

It’s not good looking back at what might have been, I deal in the here and now of scars which still burn when I am tired, of now near daily reports of children driven to suicide and adults burned to death for their non-cis gendered reality.

You have shown me that not 100% of American christians are vile haters. This is take note of. Until there is a true uprising of these christians to denounce the deaths, the rapes, the brutal burnings, I just am not going to be able to grant you more than that.

You are mistaken. I think that you have been so badly hurt by people who identified themselves as “Christian” that you have developed a mental filter that prohibits you from seeing any decency from anyone also going by that label. This is not rare; people who have been mugged will often take on strong negative feelings and apply then to an entire race. And you were – spiritually speaking – mugged.

But your filter is blinding you.

I could tell you of many many stories. Like the women in a UCC church in the conservative mid-valley who got together to be the local opposition to Prop 8. They didn’t actually know any gay people, but they thought it was what Jesus would have done. Or the Methodist Church in Hollywood who heard in the 80s that other churches were rejecting gay people so they put a 20 foot high AIDS ribbon on their church tower where everyone driving up highland can see it.

Rather than try to convince you, let me suggest a test. Use google to research news articles about towns in the US who h are proposing gays right ordinances. Read the local news story for who spoke to the city council.

I’m sure that you will read of someone there screaming about the Bible and Sodom. But I also bet that you will read of a local pastor there speaking in favor. Grab a piece of paper and keep track for a little bit and then get back to me. Okay?

I’ll let you be the one to convince yourself that there are more good loving decent Christians than you suspect at the moment.

Fair?

I deeply want them to win.

Timothy, you make lovely arguments. If I didn’t understand the true meaning of the term, I would call you a christian apologist.
Here’s the problem with your defense. Evil happens because good people do nothing. It is irrelevant how many of these ‘good Christians’ are nominally not out screaming for our blood – what they are not doing, at all, is taking their brothers and sisters ‘in Christ’ to task for their attacks upon us.
When you have been tortured by christians for being gay, you set the bar quite a bit higher than simply folding your hands in your lap and saying ‘well, really, they’re not our sort of Christians’. Which is exactly the level of support we are getting from these people.

That’s the problem you face with me and, from what I can see, throughout the GLBT blog-o-sphere. A very large number of us who survived the Aids epidemic, who know people who were beaten, thrown out of their homes, tortured, raped burned by those gentle people of god© are fed up and we are not going to put up with it anymore.

During those horrible years we lived in the US and those christians were torturing me, I learned what being a christian really means. Let them stand up for us, actually make a noise and work for us when it costs them money and power, then I will reconsider.

Enough Already makes one very good point about Maine: the reason we lost was a failure of GOTV. A few months ago, I spent some time reviewing the figures, county-by-county, city-by-city. When you sift through the data, the truth fairly leaps out at you. Although it did a lot of things well and although it developed a great image in the press, No on 1 failed miserably when it came to GOTV. It didn’t just fail in rural areas or in very conservative areas. It fell short everywhere. And in an off-off-year, that was decisive. You could spend a thousand hours debating over the effectiveness of this or that TV ad. But if the GOTV effort in an off-off-year election is defective, then you are toast.

I understand the person who ran GOTV for No on 1 has moved out of state. Hopefully, the campaign organizers in 2012 will see to it that every key management position is filled with the very best and most talented people.

We won’t have to wait too long to see if they learned from past mistakes. I see that it is being reported today that the proponents now have 100,000 signatures in hand – way more than they need to put this on the ballot and gratifyingly the same number of signatures that the anti-gay side collected in 2009. So there is no doubt that we are going to have a Round 2 in Maine in 2012.

So – let’s focus on getting those Republicans (those who are left, anyway) who aren’t totally off their rockers to help us, sure. Primarily, though, we have to get the Democratic party off this ‘pander to them until they vote, then throw them off the bus’ mentality. That’s the major problem we face.

I think that this is true, in general, in many of our battles (though, of course, it may not hold true in some specific circumstances.)

We’ve tried the meek and mild and ‘don’t fight back because that gives their arguments validity’ approach now for a string of continuous losses. It doesn’t work against an enemy with endlessly deep pockets, no desire to play fair and committed to our total destruction. Yes, I mean the christians.

Aaaaaannnd, here’s where hatred ruled the day.

Since we are talking about New Hampshire, I’m calling you on this. I’m sick of the slurs and mindless “all in one box” anti-Christian bigotry.

So tell me:

1. Are the Christians who belong to the United Church of Christ “an enemy with endlessly deep pockets, no desire to play fair and committed to our total destruction”?

Yes or No?

2. Are the Christians who belong to the United Methodist Church “an enemy with endlessly deep pockets, no desire to play fair and committed to our total destruction”?

Yes or No?

3. Are the Christians who belong to the American Baptist Church “an enemy with endlessly deep pockets, no desire to play fair and committed to our total destruction”?

Yes or No?

4. Are the Christians who belong to the Episcopal Church “an enemy with endlessly deep pockets, no desire to play fair and committed to our total destruction”?

Yes or No?

Because right there you have the largest four protestant churches in New Hampshire, which make up about 2/3 of NH Protestants. And their priests don’t rape children and go free every day.

And now,

5. Are those Christians who belong to the Roman Catholic Church and who disagree with the church on gay issues – roughly 50% of Catholics – “an enemy with endlessly deep pockets, no desire to play fair and committed to our total destruction”?

Yes or No?

Because if you answer yes to any of the above, I have to say that you have a completely distorted and perverse definition of “an enemy with endlessly deep pockets, no desire to play fair and committed to our total destruction”.

At the same time, our biggest problem is that our demand for full human status and the restitution of our civil rights is seen as just another liberal cause by far too many of those people whose support we need. Since the Clinton era, there has been a sharp drift in the Democratic party away from unelectable politics to compromising every principle once held dear to just keep power (hence the curse of the blue-dogs in congress).
Comments such as last years top-placed DNC adviser saying we simply aren’t a large enough voter group to be worth pursing our civil rights are not a-typical, they are the opinion of those whose support we need but don’t have.
So – let’s focus on getting those Republicans (those who are left, anyway) who aren’t totally off their rockers to help us, sure. Primarily, though, we have to get the Democratic party off this ‘pander to them until they vote, then throw them off the bus’ mentality. That’s the major problem we face.

We’ve tried the meek and mild and ‘don’t fight back because that gives their arguments validity’ approach now for a string of continuous losses. It doesn’t work against an enemy with endlessly deep pockets, no desire to play fair and committed to our total destruction. Yes, I mean the christians. It is time to hit them and hit them hard where they are vulnerable. This means:
Getting campaign donation and initiative support laws enforced. Sicking agent provocateurs onto their most homophobic christian preachers and leaders. Publishing the pictures.
Exposing the lies behind their ads. Telling people the truth about the number of children their priests rape every day and how they go free.

At the same time, we must recognize the simple truth – their voters always vote. Our voters have to be motivated strongly to vote. This is where we still could have won in Maine – had we got enough more of the students out of bed and into the voting booths. The fact that even this is fought tooth and nail in the GLBT world shows just how badly we need to set aside our disagreements and too fight.

Sorry, Timothy. I think it is great you know some nice christians. I don’t. All I know are the ones who tortured me as a child and who now are doing everything in their power to turn the US into a country with laws similar to Germany in the 1930s.

Thanks for your insights and for your contribution to the discussion. For the record, I am not a Republican. I consider myself a non-ideological Dem. Although I am no fan of the GOP, it is pretty clear to me that the only way we can win and have our victories last over time is to develop some level of support w/in the GOP. We don’t have to get a majority or even anything close to a majority of the GOP. We just need about 10-15% to win in blue and purple state legislatures. NH, VT, NY are all good examples of how just a GOP crossover of that small magnitude made the difference b/t defeat and victory.

NOM understands this too and that is why they are on a jihad to punish the 4 GOP senators in NY who voted with us. Even if they could defeat all 4, it wouldn’t imperil gay marriage in NY. But they see it as a good investment to go after these 4 Republicans anyway, because defeating them may
terrorize GOP legislators in every other state who might be thinking of crossing over.

Leaving aside the legislatures and looking at popular opinion, the GOP is ripe for a shift. While Dems and Independents have shifted very substantially on gay marriage, the GOP clings to a 75-25 opposition. This is true even in blue states like Maine and CA, and it is the main reason we couldn’t cross the 50 percent threshold to score a win. 75/25 represents a very modest increase in GOP support for gay marriage, something like 10 percent or less, over the past decade.

75% opposition is sustainable when Dems and Independents also have majorities in opposition, as was the case up until fairly recently. But with Dems and Independents now showing solid majority support for gay marriage, and with support growing daily as new Millennial voters replace the Silent Generation and older Baby Boomers, a 75% level of opposition can’t stand. It wants to move. It just needs a push from us. Get that GOP opposition down from 75% to 60-65% and it’s game over.