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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 11th, 2013
Yesterday someone messaged me a most perfect description of our opponents.
He and I had been tangling with NOM’s Jennifer Roback Morse on an anti-gay website, pointing out the error of using a tragic case of child abuse as an argument against same-sex marriage. Morse, on her Facebook page, claimed we were defending the abusers — “a couple of pro-gay guys circling the wagons around these creeps,” is how she put it.
It’s enough to make you wonder where she learned to read. I alerted my compatriot and he wrote back this description of Morse and her allies on that site:
Mostly they just talk to each other and, essentially, engage in a conspiracy to take each other seriously.
Read that again, just for the pleasure of it:
…engage in a conspiracy to take each other seriously.
I say that’s a perfect phrase.
It’s fluid, looks good on the page, trips off the tongue, and rewards you with deeper insight the longer you contemplate it. I’m holding on to it, and whenever I encounter a cluster of people swapping statements with no apparent connection to reality, instead of feeling baffled I’ll think: Yes! — they’re engaged in a conspiracy to take each other seriously.
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bill johnson
July 11th, 2013
That’s great and really it’s the best way to describe people who engage in such extreme levels of intellectual dishonesty on such a constant basis. I would also point out that given Jennifer Roback Morse’s education level she can’t claim ignorance either, this is deliberate misrepresentation of what is being said and she knows it.
Ryan
July 11th, 2013
Kudos to you for being able to laugh off such a disgusting character assassination.
Stephen
July 12th, 2013
This is making me think of the now defunct familyscholars.org where David Blankenhorn, Elizabeth Marquart, et al, would endlessly praise one another for their superior understanding of whatever tripe it was they were sounding off about while at the same time deleting and banning some very astute and interesting commenters for lack of ‘civility’. They banned straight grandmother, for God’s sake!
One saw over time the conversation dwindle to the same four or five voices till eventually it died of its own inertia. After the last round of banning at nomblog no one posts there, either. I imagine Tommy Peters, hunched over his Dell, pouncing on whatever slips through to delete it with the fervor of a true believer defending the ramparts of heaven.
jay
July 12th, 2013
Love Stephen’s reminiscence about familyscholars.org. Reminded me of loons like Alana S. and others who posted the most outrageous things, but when they were challenged Elizabeth Marquardt accused the protestors of being mean. There was a wonderful account of familyscholars and getreligion.org by someone at glbtq.com. Here is a link:
http://www.glbtq.com/sfeatures/confessionsofablogaddict.html
It was written before Blankenhorn flipped, but it gives a good sense of what it was like back then. Their impoverishment of ideas finally caught up with them.
Jim Hlavac
July 14th, 2013
What a great phrase — and indeed, they are in a conspiracy of the serious — to stop the militant radical homosexual – they’ve created the poor fellow, assigned him every possible worst thing imaginable, set him up a lobby and an agenda, and now they aim to stop him. The problem is, of course, is that he doesn’t exist. And then we get the um, “fun” of listening to this and trying to argue with it.
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