Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, October 9

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Atlanta, GA and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Also This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Simeon Solomon: 1840. He was the last child to be born into a prominent Jewish family in London. When he was about ten years old, he began to learn to paint from his older brother, and a few years later he attended Carey’s Art Academy. Later, as a student at the  Royal Academy, he became a prominent member of the Pre-Raphaelite Circle, and he held several acclaimed exhibitions at the Royal Academy between 1858 and 1872. Many of his paintings were drawn from his Jewish background, consisting of scenes from the Hebrew bible and ordinary Jewish life, and he was hailed as the “darling of the Pre-Raphaelits.” His paintings also explored, at the very least, affections between men. In 1871 Simeon Solomon privately published his poem “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.” John Addington Symonds would note that the themes of same-sex love in the poem was “the key to the meaning of his drawings.”

The Sleepers, and the One that Watcheth (1870, click to enlarge)

Solomon’s career though was ruined in 1873 when he was arrested at a public toilet and fined £100 for attempted sodomy. He was arrested again the next year in Paris and was sentenced to three months in prison. He never recovered. From then on, he was hobbled by alcoholism and became destitute. He would pass his remaining years in and out of the workhouse where he continued to paint, but both the quality and quantity of his work was severely impaired by his drinking. He finally collapsed in central London and died of bronchitis and alcoholism in 1905. Poet and critic Arthur Symons, on learning of Solomon’s death, lamented, “There is nothing in this world so pitiful as a shipwreck of a genius.”

Nona Hendryx: 1944. The Trenton, New Jersey-born singer, producer, songwriter, author and actress was one third (with Patti LaBelle and Sarah Dash) of the trio Labelle, whose greatest hit was 1974’s “Lady Marmalade.” Beginning in 1977, Hendryx embarked on a solo career, but struggled to repeat the success of LaBelle. She wasn’t without work though, as she provided background vocals for the Talking Heads and became a part of New York’s underground rock, R&B and dance scene. As the eighties progressed, she collaborated with Keith Richards, Peter Gabriel and Prince for several of he solo release. In 2001, she came out as bisexual in an interview with The Advocate, and became a gay rights advocate. In 2008, she joined Cyndi Lauper for her True Colors tour.

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?

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, October 8

TODAY’S AGENDA (OURS):
First Openly Gay Ordination for the Presbyterian Church, USA: Madison, WI. Last May, the Presbyterian Church USA became the fourth mainline Protestant Church to allow the ordination of openly gay clergy. Today, that promise becomes a reality as Scott Anderson is ordained at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Madison, Wisconsin. The Princeton Theological Seminary graduate had served as Co-Moderator of More Light Presbyterians before moving to Madison to become the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches.

Anderson’s ordination will mark his return to a ministry he was forced to abandon twenty-one years ago. In 1990, while working as a parish minister in Sacramento, he was threatened with exposure by a couple who wanted him to help raise money for a cause they were advancing that he disagreed with. Rather than submit to the couple’s threats, he outed himself instead, and in keeping with the church’s rules he stepped down as minister and embarked on the long process of working to change the church’s stance toward ordination of openly gay people. Anderson will be supported by his partner of twenty-one years at today’s ordination. Anderson is being ordained by the John Knox Presbytery, which consists of 60 congregations in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Columbus, OH; Indianapolis, IN and Kent/Sussex, DE.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Orlando, FL; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Tucson, AZ.

Also This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK.

TODAY’S AGENDA (THEIRS):
Values Voter Summit: Washington, D.C. Whenever the Family “Research” Council and the American Family Association team up to put on their annual Values Voter Summit, you can pretty much guarantee that they will more than live up to their reputation for being on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-gay hate groups. Yesterday, we saw GOP presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum give his most bizarre qualification yet for the presidency, when he told the conference that voters should “look at who they lay down with at night and what they believe.” That will be hard to top, although Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver gave it his best shot by saying that gay equality will lead to the destruction of Western Civilization.

Today’s lineup will be about as crazy as yesterday’s. The AFA’s Bryan Fischer, whose sheer lunacy knows no bounds, will be a featured speaker, along with FRC’s Tom McClusky and Tony Perkins, National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown, American Values’ Gary Bauer, AFA’s Ed Vitagliano, Alliance Defense Fund’s Alan Sears, Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly, Glenn Beck and Bishop Harry Jackson, among many others. GOP Presidential candidates speaking today will be Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

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?

Mat Staver: Gays Threaten Survival of Western Civilization

Mat Staver, head of Liberty Counsel and dean of Liberty University’s law school, appeared on an American Family Association radio program this morning just before introducing GOP presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum at the Values Voter Summit. Staver told AFA Radio that “the sexual anarchy with the agenda of the homosexual movement” threatens the survival of Western Civilization:

Staver: We are facing the survival of western values, western civilization. And I think those survival, whether they win or lose, what will the future of America be will be determined in our lifetime…. One of the most significant threats to our freedom is in the area of sexual anarchy with the agenda of the homosexual movement, the so-called LGBT movement. It does several things, first of all it undermines family and the very first building block of our society, but secondly, it’s a zero sum game as well and it’s a direct assault on our religious freedom and freedom of speech.

Do you really want to know what threatens the survival of Western Civilization? Well, if one of the great pillars of Western Civilization is the rule of law, then Staver’s Liberty Counsel and law school pose a far greater threat to Western Civilization than treating all people equally. Members of Staver’s organizations have been implicated in facilitating the kidnapping of then- seven-year-old Isabella Miller-Jenkins, in defiance of a court order ordering Isabella’s mother, Lisa Miller, to turn custody of the child over to her other mother from a civil union, Janet Jenkins, after Miller refused to follow to previous court orders granting visitation rights. There is considerable evidence that Miller may be following the advice of legal counsel in defying the courts’ rulings. Teachers at Staver’s law school presented a case study that was remarkably similar to the Miller-Jenkins case, and taught students that, as future lawyers, they should encourage their clients to chose “God’s law” over “man’s law” and defy the legal system. Students who responded on an exam that the client should follow the court order were given bad grades, while students who responded that the client should be urged to break the law got A’s.

If there is a threat to Western Civilization, it’s posed by those who would impose legal anarchy to further their narrow religious agenda in open defiance of the law.

The Strangest Pitch for the Presidency So Far

GOP Presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum pitched the most oddest reason for voting for a candidate to the Values Voter Conference so far. Get ready for this one:

“When you look at someone to determine whether they’d be the right person for public office, look at who they lay down with at night and what they believe,” Santorum said.

Let’s see if any of the other GOP candidates can top that for wierdness.

By the way, was that a shot at Rick Perry?

Iowa Man Describes the Horrors of Home-Grown Ex-Gay Therapy

Samuel Brinton, a student at Kansas State University, describes growing up under his Southern Baptist missionary father, who beat him, burned him and shocked him with electricity to try to change him from being gay after Samuel came out at the age of twelve. The video is compelling.

We first heard from Samuel about a year ago when he first talked about his experiences for an “It Gets Better” video for the web site I’m From Driftwood.

Update (10/10): Wayen Besen at Truth Wins Out posted this comment yesterday on Towleroad:

Full Page Ad Reminds Voters Who’s Behind “Values Voter Summit”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has taken out a full page ad in the Washington Post reminding readers why the two organization’s sponsoring the event, the Family “Research” Council and the American Family Association, have been included in their very short list of anti-gay hate groups. The ad reads:

SPLC’s full page ad in the Washington Post (Click to view PDF: 132KB/1 page)

Just whose values are represented at the Values Voter Summit?Prominent public figures will attend the Values Voter Summit in DC this weekend.

But what values are they promoting?

The summit is hosted by the Family Research Council and co-sponsored by the American Family Association — organizations that have mounted a long-running campaign of falsehoods that demonize the LGBT community.

They portray gay people as child molesters, deviants, public health threats and more. Their outrageous claims have been thoroughly debunked by numerous scientific authorities and respected professional associations such as the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Their words have consequences: Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people are far more likely than any other group to be victimized by violent hate crimes. Many have been driven by relentless demonization to seek a “cure” for their sexual orientation through dangerous therapeutic practices. Many have been driven to suicide by relentless bullying in our schools.

Whose values are these?

Is bearing false witness a “family” value? Is bigotry?

The ad goes on to list several quotes from the FRC and AFA equating homosexuality with pedophilia, criminality, Nazi’s, and Adolf Hitler. The SPLC and Wayne Besen’s Truth Wins Out held a joint press conference this morning to release a report on the AFA and FRC’s “false propaganda that demonizes the LGBT community.” FRC’s Tony Perkins is furious, and equates the SPLC’s exercise of free speech:

Perkins said the SPLC news conference reflected an attempt to prevent free discussion of ideas and noted that he doesn’t show up at SPLC events to protest the civil rights organization’s beliefs.

“Southern Poverty Law Center is obviously desperate to try to shut down public debate,” he said.

The Daily Agenda for Friday, October 7

TODAY’S AGENDA (OURS):
Campus Pride College Fair and Prep Day: Boston, MA. Campus Pride’s College Fair is an opportunity for LGBT students and their families to discuss educational opportunities with participating LGBT-affirming colleges and universities. The fair features expert advice about LGBT-friendly colleges, scholarship resources and even effective tips for campus visits. The Northwest Region College Fair takes place today at Boston’s City Hall, from 1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. More information can be found here. Future College Fairs will take place in Los Angeles (Oct 15) and New York (Nov 4).

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Columbus, OH; Indianapolis, IN and Kent/Sussex, DE.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Orlando, FL; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Tucson, AZ.

Also This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK.

TODAY’S AGENDA (THEIRS):
Values Voter Summit: Washington, D.C. The Family “Research” Council, one of only a handful of organizations tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center for being an anti-gay hate group, kicks off its annual Values Voter Summit in the nation’s capital this morning with a breakfast talk by Mat Staver, Chairman of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty Unversity’s Law School. Members of Staver’s Liberty Counsel and law school staff have been implicated in the Isabella Miller-Jenkins kidnapping case, while teachers have instructed law students to ignore “man’s law” in favor of “God’s law.” And so as you might expect, the Summit just goes straight downhill from there. Other speakers include House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), and GOP Presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum. And all of that is before lunch, when voting begins for the Summit’s straw poll. Afternoon speakers include GOP presidential candidates Herman Cain, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, plus Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO). The evening plenary session features another GOP presidential candidate, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), as well as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. The craziness just goes on and on and on through Sunday morning.

Exodus International Florida Regional Conference. Leesburg, FL. Exodus International will conduct a two-day conference with the theme “Chosen for Freedom,” beginning today and continuing through Saturday. The conference’s featured speakers include Exodus International president Alan Chambers, former Exodus president Joe Dallas, and former Exodus vice president Randy Thomas. Also speaking is Dr. Julie Hamilton, a former president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and whose book, Handbook of Therapy for Unwanted Homosexual Attractions, includes a final chapter by discredited ex-gay activist George Rekers. As we reported in our original investigation of Rekers’s “treatment” of four-year-old Kirk Murphy, Rekers claimed that he had successfully turned the “effeminate pre-homosexual” boy into a straight man. He built his entire career on that supposedly groundbreaking success story. Except there were a couple of problems: Kirk grew up to be gay, and he ultimately committed suicide over the lifelong conflicts he struggled with as a result of that therapy. Yet in Hamilton’s book, Rekers boasted that Kirk “had a normal male identity,” six years after Kirk took his life. Hamilton’s book with Rekers’s boast is still on sale at NARTH’s web site, and I have no doubt that it will also be available at the conference, which takes place today and tomorrow at the First Baptist Church in Leesburg, FL.

Minnesota Anti-Marriage Strategy and Briefing Session: Bloomington, MN. The Minnesota Faith and Freedom Coalition, supporters of the latest proposed constitutional amendment to make same-sex marriage even more illegaler in the Gopher state, will hold a Strategy and Briefing Session at the Doubletree Inn in Bloomington, MN this morning from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Invited speakers include GOP presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and former Christian Coalition honcho Ralph Reed.

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?

Westboro Baptist Announces Protest of Steve Jobs’s Funeral

And they used an iPhone to do it.

[via Towleroad]

Steve Jobs Died

Steve Jobs died yesterday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. I learned the news on my iPhone. There is now an outpouring of online tributes for him from everyone, from the geekiest gadgethead to the President of the United States of America.

My first thought in discovering that he died was a surprisingly sharp pang of sadness. We all knew he was dying, but I was surprised to feel my stomach tighten when I read the news. My next thought was to wonder whether I would always remember where I was when I got the news, the way my parents did about Jack Kennedy. After that, my thoughts turned to embarrassment over placing Jobs’s death on such a high plane. After all, what was he to me? He was a multi-billionaire who got a lot of money from me for my iMac, my MacBook, my AirPort, my iPod, and, of course, I already mentioned my iPhone. (No iPad yet, but I hear the Sirens’ song.) He wasn’t much of a philanthropist and he had a reputation for being rather mercurial. And more personally, I had never met him. We never crossed paths, not even remotely. He was, literally, nothing to me.

I think what we feel about Jobs really does come down to what he sold us, a lot of very shiny, expensive, cool things that we convinced ourselves we couldn’t live without. But when you look at all the things he sold us, there is one thread that runs through all of them. He didn’t just sell us shiny crap. He sold us connections. When the first Mac came out you could just connect an AppleWriter printer to it and it worked! That feat was miraculous for those of us struggling with DOS drivers and BIOS settings. After his second coming to Apple from his wanderings in the wilderness, he brought us the iMac. You just pulled it out of the box, plugged it in and you were connected to the world. Then it was the iPod, and after I loaded about half of my music collection onto it, its shuffle feature presented me with connections between the Ramones, Cut Chemist, Duke Ellington, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Hank Williams that I never would have dreamed existed otherwise. What could those connections be, you ask? Some are obvious when you hear them, but others I can’t explain. Maybe the connections are me.

I think maybe that’s really what Steve Jobs brought to the world. Instead of making the computer the center of all of these connections, the center is me. His products made it easy for an introvert like me (yes, really!) to make the most important connections of all, the connections we make to each other. You didn’t have to use his products to make those connections. Email, instant messages, Facebook, and Twitter run on all kinds of devices. But as an engineer, I can tell you that the best technology is always the technology you stop noticing as you go about your daily life. Jobs’s devices did that. They made connecting so easy and and intuitive that the device itself seemed to disappear and you were simply dealing with the person you were connecting with. (Update: So easy that homophobes could use an iPhone to announce they were protesting Jobs’s funeral with no apparent awareness of the irony.)

Jobs brought the world to me, friends and family as well as people who would do me harm. The latter I can do without, but the former are invaluable. It is easier to keep up with everyone wherever I go. Jobs didn’t make those connections possible, but he certainly made them much easier and more ubiquitous, and in doing so he make it easier for us to do stay connected to each other. That, I think, is his greatest accomplishment. He really didn’t make the world better. He just made it easier for us to do it ourselves.

The Daily Agenda for Thursday, October 6

TODAY’S AGENDA:

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Columbus, OH; Indianapolis, IN and Kent/Sussex, DE.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Orlando, FL; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Tucson, AZ.

Also This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Miami Mayor: “Deviates Are Leaving The City”: 1954. Miami had been undergoing a major anti-gay campaign for several years, targeting bars and private parties catering to gay people. Miami’s mayor told The Miami News that those efforts were clearly paying off:

Miami is the cleanest town in the area so far as homosexuals go, it was claimed by Mayor Abe Aronovitz, who said, “but we are not solving it from a humanitarian standpoint because we are only clearing it up as far as Miami is concerned.”

“There is no solution from a humanitarian standpoint, however, because I have received complaints from both Broward County on the north and Monroe County on the south that the homosexuals are just drifting out of Miami.”

The City Commission later today is expected to pass on second reading an ordinance aimed at controlling homosexuals and also jeopardizing liquor licenses of establishments serving people known to have homosexual tendencies.

It was passed on the first reading two weeks ago.

And that is why there are no homosexuals in Miami.

Matthew Shepard Assaulted: 1998. At around 6:30 PM, Aaron Kreifels was riding his bicycle on Snowy Mountain View Road, just outside of Laramie, Wyoming, when he wiped out near the end of a rough buck-and-rail fence. In the fall, he severely damaged his front tire. Aaron got up to try to figure out how to get back into town when he was startled by what he thought was a scarecrow. He took a closer look and discovered that it wasn’t a scarecrow, but a 5-foot-2, 102 pound University of Wyoming student by the name of Matthew Shepard. Aaron was further surprised to see that the bloody figure was still alive, though barely. Matthew was comatose, breathing “as if his lungs are full of blood,” Aaron would later testify. It had been a very cold day that day with a 30-degree freezing wind the night before, and it was now evening again. Matthew had been there for more than 18 hours, laying on his back, head propped against the fence, his legs outstretched. His hands were tied behind him, and the rope was tied to a fence post just four inches off the ground. His shoes were missing.

Aaron, in a state of panic, ran to the nearby home of Charles Dolan. From there, they called 911, and then the both of them returned to Matthew to wait for the sheriff’s deputy to arrive. Deputy Reggie Fluty later testified that the only spots not covered in blood on Matt’s brutally disfigured face were tracks cleansed by his tears. She told the barely breathing victim, “Baby, I’m so sorry this happened.”

Matthew was rushed to Poudre Valley Hospital’s intensive care unit in critical condition. He suffered fractures from the back of his head to the front of his right ear from being pistol-whipped by a 357-Magnum more than twenty times. He had severe brain stem damage which affected his body’s ability to control heart rate, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions. There were lacerations around his head, face and neck. He had welts on his back and arm, and bruised knees and groin. He had also suffered from hypothermia. His injuries were too severe for doctors to operate. They did however insert a drain into Matthew’s skull to relieve the pressure on his brain.

By the end of the day, Matthew Shepard was laying quietly in a soft, warm bed with clean sheets after having spent eighteen hours in the freezing high plains of Wyoming tied to a fence post. He was breathing with the aid of a ventilator.

(You can read the entire series I wrote to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his brutal slaying here.)

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Bruno Balz: 1902. He wrote some of Germany’s most famous songs for film despite his career being hampered by official persecution for his homosexuality. When Balz was arrested by Nazi authorities for violating Germany’s Paragraph 175 outlawing male homosexuality, he was released after several months’ imprisonment on the condition that his name not be mentioned in public. When he was arrested again in 1941 and tortured in Gestapo headquarters, his songwriting partner, Michael Jary, appealed to authorities to release him, saying that he could write songs to lift German morale as part of the war effort. He wrote two of his greatest hits just days after his release. And while his songs would be criticized later for aiding  the war effort, gays in Germany were buoyed by what they saw as double meanings in some of his songs. One song in particular, his 1938 classic “Kann denn Liebe Sunde sein?” (“Can Love Be a Sin?”), became something of an anthem for Germany’s underground gay community:

Every little Philistine makes my life miserable, for he’s always
talking about morality. And whatever he may think and do, you can
see that he just doesn’t want anyone to be happy…. Whatever
the world thinks of me, I don’t care, I’ll only be true to love.

Can love be a sin?
Can’t anybody know when you kiss,
When you forget everything out of happiness?

Balz’s troubles continued even after the war and the fall of Nazism. After all Paragraph 175 remained the law of the land until 1994 after Germany’s reunification, which meant that the strictures on him remained in effect preventing him from receiving his due credit for his music. Balz died in 1988. There is now a Bruno Balz theater named for him in Berlin.

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?

Here’s the Science, Mr. Cain

Godfather Pizza magnate and GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain appeared on ABC’s The View this week, to talk about, well, I suppose a lot of things. But the thing that seems to have gotten the most attention is his views on gays.

Joy Behar: I want to ask you about your conservative position on gay marriage and civil unions…

Herman Cain: Are we changing subjects?

Behar: Yeah, I’m changing the topic a little bit because you’re a social conservative…

Cain: Yes.

Behar: …strictly, I think…

Cain: Yes.

Behar: You would like to roll back… bring back “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I think that you believe that being gay is a choice.

Cain: Yes.

[…]

Behar: It has been basically… I think that to think that gay is a choice, I don’t know how to respond to that. I mean I don’t think that anybody in this world wants to be gay considering all of the vilification that is brought upon someone who is gay. Why would you choose that?

Cain: Well, you show me the science that says that it’s not and I’ll be persuaded. Right now it’s my opinion against the opinions of others who feel differently. That’s just a difference of opinions.

[…]

Well, as we like to say in the comments sections at BTB, Mr. Cain is certainly entitled to his opinion. But since he asked for someone to show him the science, we are happy to oblige. And to start off, we can point him to research conducted by folks who are fellow conservatives like himself — the Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse ex-gay study. That’s the study that found that out of 98 gay and bisexual people who entered the study who really wanted to choose to be straight, only fourteen could do so after seven years. And even then, those few found that their choice was not “unequivocal and uncomplicated.” Which is why Jones and Yarhouse wrote that their study “is not an optimistic projection of likelihood of change for one considering that process.”

Remember, these are major advocates for choosing not to be gay writing this.

And so it’s not surprising that the American Psychological Association — you know, scientists — after reviewing hundreds of studies (PDF:  816KB/138 pages), found that “enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon,” and that “there was some evidence to indicate that individuals experienced harm” from such attempts. And it’s also why the rest of the medical and mental health professions agree that trying to force a choice where none exists is contrary to the best medical and psychological evidence.

Those are the facts, the science you asked for. But as always Mr. Cain, you are certainly entitled to your opinion.

When Is It Okay To Use Anti-Gay Epithets?

Well, for starters, I’d say when you’re this guy, given his audience. He’s absolutely right: context is everything.

Because…

In our era of identity politics in which positions are often based less on principle than on who else believes it, I find myself marveling at the contortions that folks go through to justify their views. Small government libertarians who find justification for federal intervention into state marriage policy, civil rights activists who argue for excluding rights based on attributes, advocates for religious freedom who propose imposing their moral code on others, champions of tolerance who berate those who dare be of a differing political identity, foes of racism, sexism, and heterosexism who hold conferences with strict race-, sex-, and orientation-based criteria for participation, and defenders of diversity who only know people identical to themselves in all possible relevant ways.

But perhaps the most ironic (and entrenched) identity-based paradox is that of conservative traditionalists who oppose gay marriage. Of all possible expectations that a society can place on its gay citizens (other than the flippant “don’t be gay”), nothing is more traditional or conservative than marriage. Marriage is conformist, often religious, steeped in expectation, bound by socially enforced rules, and – as conservatives are quick to remind us – the bedrock of society, the most basic form of social unit, and an inculcator of values, traditions, and notions about family. Marriage is the smallest of small government. It is the place where a balanced budget is unquestioned, where “spend less” is a shared goal, where “family values” is literal and the only “special rights” are the ones you choose. In a logical world, conservatives would not only support gay marriage, they’d insist on it.

Absent the peculiarities of Social War alliances and doctrinal demands, the natural response of the conservative would be, “Stop all this running around and grow up already. Find someone decent, settle down, get married, and start contributing to society for once, you hippie!” Okay, maybe not the hippie reference, but you know what I mean.

As does the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, David Cameron.

“I once stood before a Conservative conference and said it shouldn’t matter whether commitment was between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, or a man and another man,” he said.

“You applauded me for that. Five years on, we’re consulting on legalising gay marriage. And to anyone who has reservations, I say: Yes, it’s about equality, but it’s also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other.

“So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.”

Boehner Triples Outlay For Defending DOMA

Despite an era of massive cost cutting in Congress, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has tripled the original $500,000  cost cap for the legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act to $1.5 million:

According to recently approved contract modification dated Sept. 30, House General Counsel Kerry Kircher has agreed to pay Bancroft LLC private attorney Paul Clement a sum not to exceed $750,000 to defend DOMA, but this cap may be raised to $1.5 million under written notice.

“It is further understood and agreed that, effective October 1, 2011, the aforementioned $750,000.00 cap may be raised from time to time up to, but not exceeding, $1.5 million, upon written notice of the General Counsel to the Contractor specifying that the General Counsel is legally liable under this Agreement for a specific amount,” the contract modification states.

Democrats on the Committee of Administration have blasted the increase, and charged that the contracting process lacked “any semblance of transparency.”

Tenn High School Principal Allegedly Threatens Student Over Pro-Gay Tee-shirt

A seventeen-year-old senior at Sequoyah High School in Madisonville, Tennessee, was reportedly shoved, bumped in the chest and verbally harassed by the school’s principal for wearing a tee-shirt supporting students’ efforts to launch a gay-straight alliance. In response, the ACLU of Tennessee is calling on the school district to protect the students’ rights to free speech in the classroom.

According to a press release from the ACLU of Tennessee:

[Chris] Sigler wore a homemade T-shirt to school last Tuesday that said “GSA: We’ve Got Your Back.” A teacher ordered Sigler to cover up the shirt in the future. Sigler, knowing he had a right to wear the shirt, wore it again Friday, and resisted an order to remove the shirt. Sigler says that [Principal Maurice] Moser then ordered all students out of the classroom, except for Sigler’s sister Jessica, who refused to leave. According to both students, Moser then grabbed Sigler’s arm, shoved him, and chest-bumped him repeatedly while asking “Who’s the big man now?” Sigler’s mother reported that when she arrived at the school, she saw her son seated in a desk with Moser leaning over him and shouting in Sigler’s face. The Siglers filed a report about the incident that afternoon with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department.

Students at  Sequoyah have been trying to start a GSA during the school year, but have been blocked and threatened with suspension by the school’s principal.

The ACLU says that if the school doesn’t receive an satisfactory answer by October 11, they will explore legal options, including filing a complaint in federal court. Assistant Director of Schools Tim Blankenship responded:

“The Monroe County School System is aware of the alleged accusations. We have received written statements from all eyewitnesses. Our documentation clearly indicated that there are always two sides to every story. We’ll gladly provide more information as it becomes available.”