Box Turtle Bulletin

Wicked hot headline

I don’t have children and I don’t pretend to be up on the latest in teen-speak. But I think this headline may not be expressing what Robert Knight intends

dude, that’s totally wicked

(or something like that)

Paul Cameron Denies Being Gay

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?

Get back, Mr. Demon!

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.

Today in Science: Five Urinals Are Better Than Seven

Someone finally determines the most efficient number of urinals based the International Choice of Urinal Protocol. Complete with graphs and formulas.

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, May 16

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.”

Tamara de Lempicka (top) and "Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti)," 1925 (bottom)

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.

Top: Liberace's signed photo to his mother. He was always Walter to her. Bottom: Liberace's transparent closet.

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?

Gay Son Speaks Of Father’s Failed Leadership In Killing Colorado Civil Unions

When the Colorado House’s State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee voted on a 5-4 party line vote to kill a civil unions bill, Rep. Don Coram (R-58) acknowledged that his vote to defeat the bill was also a bill against his own gay son. Today, Coram’s son, Dee Coram, has come forward to speak out against his father’s vote:

“He was given an opportunity here to actually be a leader and I guess he didn’t take that leadership role. It’s disappointing to see something like this that he said should have gone to a house floor for a vote. Essentially, he prevented that from happening,” Dee Coram said.

White House Objects to Congress’ Anti-Gay Appropriations Amendments

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

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:

Obama Discusses Marriage on “The View”

Chafee’s executive order recognizes marriage

Governor Lincoln Chafee (I, nee R), has signed an executive order authorizing state agencies in Rhode Island to recognize same-sex marriages conducted in other states. Rhode Island currently recognizes civil unions for its own residents.

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, May 15

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 on June 3, although that letter is now lost. But Withers followed with another  letter the following September, which will give us some indication of what that response was.

(Note: This post has been corrected to correctly identify the September letter.)

[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.

Phyllis Lyon and and Del Marton

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.

Jasper Johns’s “Map,” 1961 (Click to enlarge.)

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.

Jasper Johns receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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

Photo by Daniel Gonzales. Click to enlarge.

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.

Reps. Don Coram and Lois Court. Photo by Daniel Gonzales

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?

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

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

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.