Surprise, fucking surprise

Family First is demanding that all Federal candidates declare whether they are now, or ever have been TEH GAY:

The Family First candidate in the far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt says voters have a right to know the sexual preference of all candidates contesting the federal election.

A report in today's Courier-Mail newspaper says Family First's Ben Jacobsen demanded that the Liberal candidate Charlie McKillop declare if she is gay.

Mr Jacobsen, who is against gay relationships, says he was not targeting Ms McKillop, but speaking generally about every candidate.

"Look I think this is a public office, this is a person that's going to represent Leichhardt in our House of Representatives," he said.

"I think the public have a right to know the values that you're going to pursue in Parliament." (ABC)

And everybody knows that gay values aren't Australian values, non? Everybody knows that as soon as you let one of those into Parliament, they'll immediately proceed to infect our beloved Christian democracy with TEH GAY. Santorum spreading everywhere. Before you know it, your 15-year old son is being sodomised with the rough end of a heroin-laced outcomes-based education, while being forced to watch lesbian witch porn on the Internet.

Fundies First: the gift that keeps on giving.

UPDATE: The backpedalling has begun already. Read more!

The Wonderful World of Magical Thinking XXX

The week in fundie:

1. There's been plenty of chatter on Oz blogs regarding the Family First "I can't believe it's not a Christian political party" Christian political party:

   About time there was some scrutiny of "Family" First (Mr Lefty)
   Family First home movies (Grods)
   Family First stifles free speech (Grods)
   Absolutely no connection between Family First and the church at all (Grods)
   “Right-Wing” Christian Australia’s War on Liberal Democracy (Thinker's Podium)
   

2. Southern Baptist seminary course teaches women students to "graciously submit to their husbands' leadership." Students learn "how to set tables, sew buttons and sustain lively dinnertime conversation." (via The Atheist Experience)
   
   More over the fold . . .
3. Pope Benedict on faith-based schools: "It is incumbent upon governments to afford parents the opportunity to send their children to religious schools by facilitating the establishment and financing of such institutions."(via Dogma Free America)
   
4. In case you missed it, Tuesday October 23 was the Earth's birthday. 6010 years young. "Why was she born so beautiful, why was she born at all? . . ." (via The Atheist Experience)
5. From a creationist lesson plan:

   Evaluation: Students will be monitored by teacher observation during the classroom discussion, group work and answering the appropriate questions. Reflection paragraphs will be collected. The teacher will try to determine the students’ new courage and ability to defend their belief in the Creator.

   How's that for academic freedom? (via Pharyngula)
6. According to Pravda, Melbourne University biologists have discovered that dolphins descended from the human inhabitants of Atlantis. (via Pharyngula)
7. Re-closeted gay fundie James Hartline's explanation for the recent fires in California:

   They shook their fists at God and said, “We don't care what the Bible says, We want the California school children indoctrinated into homosexuality!” And then Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the heinous SB777 which bans the use of “mom” and “dad” in the text books and promotes homosexuality to all school children in California.
   
   And then the wildfires of Southern California engulfed the land like a raging judgment against the radicalized anti-christian California rebels.

   
   (via Pharyngula)
8. "Security Moms": there is a new conservative group in the US (actually a front group for a conservative Washington think-tank) that agitprops in favour of the Bush Administration's national security and foreign policies. Family Security Matters has advocated that Bush make himself President-for-Life (in the tinpot dictator sense), and ranks universities and colleges (all of them) #2 in its list of the "Ten Most Dangerous Organizations in America" (behind Media Matters). (via Kazim's Korner)
9. Banning Harry Potter: it's not just for Protestant fundies anymore. (Boston Globe)
10. Evangelical Christian UK Army Chief of Staff declares that "Christian leaders and chaplains in the Army [are] needed to equip soldiers for" life after death. (via Dogma Free America)
    

Read more!

The Bill Muehlenberg Trophy: Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, has published a book in which he argues that

there are no homosexuals in the entire Arab world, except for a few who have been brainwashed into believing they have a homosexual identity by an aggressive Western homosexual missionizing movement he calls "Gay International." [. . .] According to the author, "It is the very discourse of the Gay International which produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist" (emphasis added).

The claim is advanced in the third chapter of Desiring Arabs, based upon an earlier paper of his (“Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World”).

TEH GAY AGENDA is a familiar Christian Right meme, and
the idea that gays and lesbians do not exist in the Middle East has most recently been put by one Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Massad simply presents the homophobic ravings of Christian and Muslim fundies and expresses them in the idiom of postcolonial studies. As former Guardian Middle East correspondent Brian Whitaker observes in a review of Desiring Arabs,

Massad talks of a “missionary” campaign orchestrated by what he calls the “Gay International”. Its inspiration, he says, came partly from “the white western women’s movement, which had sought to universalise its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women’s movements in the non-western world”, but he also links its origins to the Carter administration’s use of human rights to “campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World enemies”.

Like the major US- and European-based human rights organisations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and following the line taken up by white western women's organisations and publications, the Gay International was to reserve a special place for the Muslim countries in its discourse as well as its advocacy. The orientalist impulse … continues to guide all branches of the human rights community. (p 161)

Oddly, since this is central to his argument, Massad offers no evidence to substantiate his claim. There are plenty of reasons other than an “orientalist impulse” why gay rights activists might justifiably pay attention to Muslim countries (punishments for same-sex acts, for instance, tend to be heavier there, on paper if not always in practice, and the only countries in the world where the death penalty for sodomy still applies justify it on the basis of Islamic law) but that is not the same as reserving “a special place” for them in the discourse.

Then again, I suppose the demand that extraordinary claims of the kind Massad advances be supported by empirical evidence may be written off as another manifestation of Western imperialism. It gets worse:

State repression against gay people happens on a frequent basis across the Middle East. Massad, however, who claims to be a supporter of sexual freedom per se, is oddly impassive when confronted with the vast catalogue of anti-gay state violence in the Muslim world. Massad, unlike Ahmadinejad, does acknowledge that "gay-identified" people exist in the Middle East, but he views them with derision. Take, for instance, his description of the Queen Boat victims as "westernized, Egyptian, gay-identified men" who consort with European and American tourists. A simple "gay" would have sufficed. He smears efforts to free the men by writing of the "openly gay and anti-Palestinian Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank" and the "anti-Arab and anti-Egyptian [Congressman] Tom Lantos" who circulated a petition amongst their colleagues to cut off U.S. funding to Egypt unless the men were released. He then goes onto belittle not just gay activists (one of whom, a founder of the Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society, referred to the Queen Boat affair as "our own Stonewall," in reference to the 1969 Stonewall riot when a group of patrons at a New York City gay bar resisted arrest, a moment credited with sparking the American gay rights movement) but the persecuted men themselves. The Queen Boat cannot be Stonewall, Massad insists, because the "drag Queens at the Stonewall bar" embraced their homosexual identity, whereas the Egyptian men "not only" did "not seek publicity for their alleged homosexuality, they resisted the very publicity of the events by the media by covering their faces in order to hide from the cameras and from hysterical public scrutiny." Massad does not pause to consider that perhaps the reason why these men covered their faces was because of the brutal consequences they would endure if their identities became public, repercussions far worse than anything the rioters at Stonewall experienced. "These are hardly manifestations of gay pride or gay liberation," Massad sneers.

Joseph Massad: you are a disgrace to academia. Your brand of unscholarly and unsubstantiated rubbish feeds the hysterical paranoiac fantasies of the Horowitz crowd and their puppets in the Republican party--people who seek to restrict academic freedom and stifle the views of those with whom they disagree, and are just salivating for a cause celebre like yourself. Furthermore, it gives a free pass to the persecution of gays and lesbians in the Arab world, by coding any criticism of such persecution as "Western imperialism." Lift your game. Read more!

The Wonderful World of Magical Thinking XXVII

The week in fundie . . .

1. Texas law, with the Orwellian title "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act," allows evangelical students to proselytise to captive audiences at public school assemblies. (Alternet)
2. Fundies--of both the Protestant and Catholic varieties--call for the shutting down of a San Francisco gay and lesbian festival and for the boycott of sponsor Miller's. (As one liberal pastor observes, a conservative Christian boycott of alcohol--isn't that a little like Hindus boycotting beef?) (The Bay Area Reporter)
3. Archbishop declares he would refuse communion to Rudy Giuliani. (via Morons.org)
4. The Red Mass: where Catholic archbishops have the annual opportunity to instruct the members of the US Supreme Court on how to vote on constitutional matters. (via TheocracyWatch)
   
5. God-fearing evangelical Christians--default moral exemplars to us all--gay-bash an Indian man to death in Sacramento. Apparently "God has 'made an injection' of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities," according to the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento. "'In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin,'" he said. The murderers belong to a Latvian Pentecostal church linked to anti-gay activist Scott Lively, who in the 90s wrote a book comparing gay rights activists to Nazis. (Bartholomew's Notes on Religion)
6. William Dembski: evil atheist materialist scientists unfairly try to rationalise away the existence of angels (which Dembski insists are as real as rocks and plants and animals) with reason and science and whatnot. Evil atheist materialist scientists!
   

Religion as Child Abuse
Read more!

Degayifying the Moskva

Orthodox Christian Russians were working tirelessly last Sunday to cleanse the Moskva River's sparkling waters of TEH GAY, after a dirty gay cruise vessel full of dirty gays trailed megalitres of santorum in its wake the previous evening.

Participants hired a ship and decorated it with church banners, icons, Russian imperial flags and their motto, "We are Russian, God is with us."

"Our great Orthodox capital is in spiritual vacuum and experiences ideological aggression from the West. So our aim was to demonstrate that the Russian people's spiritual and moral ideals are alive and will be so forever," Yury Ageschev, coordinator of the Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods, told Interfax.

He said one of the action's aims was "to purge the Moskva River after a large group of gays, who hired a similar ship to have a party going the same route last night."

On a more serious note, this follows a plan by Christians to conduct anti-homosexual pogroms in a Moscow park popular as a meeting place for gays and lesbians.

YouTube: Christians and homophobia
Read more!

Bush nominates degayification advocate as US Surgeon-General

Australia doesn't really have an equivalent of the US Surgeon-General (technically, the closest equivalent is the Chief Medical Officer). He or she is the unofficial public face of health in the US, and is generally seen as a respected and authoritative advocate of public health education and healthy living. Naturally, the Christian Right would regard getting one of their own into this position as a major coup in its quest to Talibanise America.

As the disastrous experiment with abstinence-only sex education has demonstrated (an experiment destined to continue thanks to a decision by lily-livered Democrats to increase funding for such programmes), the fundagelicals don't do health science well. But what do they care?--they're more interested in saving souls than lives, and they're not about to let reality get in the way of their Bronze Age agenda.

Regarding the office of Surgeon-General, the faith-heads have had previous success: in 1994 they forced the resignation of Jocelyn Elders after she dared to suggest the promotion of so benign an activity as masturbation as an alternative to riskier sexual practices--despite the fact that masturbation carries no harmful side effects--expect possibly chafing. (Indeed, frequent ejaculation has been found to reduce the risk of prostate cancer in men, but I guess Jesus wants you to get prostate cancer.)

But the big pay-off for the Religious Right would be to manoeuvre a kool-aid-sipping fundagelical into the position of Surgeon-General itself. And now they have a sniff of victory, thanks to the Bush administration's nomination to the post of James Holsinger, a Paul Cameron-class homophobe:

James Holsinger, President George W. Bush's nominee for Surgeon General, has a dark view of homosexuals. In a 1991 paper, Holsinger describes homosexual sex in sickeningly lurid language. "Fist fornication," "sphincter injuries," "lacerations," "perforations" and "deaths seen in connection with anal eroticism," are some of the terms Holsinger concocted to describe acts with which he suggests at least medical familiarity (a case of participant observation, perhaps?). At the same paper, Holsinger puzzlingly issues no warnings about the dangers of heterosexual sex in his paper. To him, only "anal eroticism" is a health peril.

As the Alternet article points out, what is most worrying about this nomination is not so much Holsinger's bigotry as his support for "ex-gay therapy." In other words, the individual who the Bush administration believes is best qualified to give the American public advice on healthy living is someone who believes homosexuality is both a "lifestyle choice" and a "disease" that can be "cured." Moreover, the nomination is a tacit endorsement of a therapy discredited by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and other mainstream medical organizations. The American Psychiatric Association maintains that there is "no scientific evidence that reparative or conversion therapy is effective in changing a person's sexual orientation;" there is evidence, however, that ex-gay therapy can have harmful effects, including "depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior, since therapist alignment with societal prejudices against homosexuality may reinforce self-hatred already experienced by a patient."

Hopefully, US senators will give this snake-oil salesman the short shrift he deserves.
Read more!

The Wonderful World of Magical Thinking XVIII

The week in fundie:

1. Homophobic street preacher whines about hypocrisy because he has been refused permission to march in a gay pride parade. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Incidentally, the WorldNetDaily article detailing the poor oppressed anti-gay activist's plight refers to said gay pride parade as a "gay" pride parade. Why the scare quotes? Are the participants not gay? Are they only pretending to be gay? Why do wingnuts do this? Are they stupid or something?)
2. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox Jews are threatening violence against this year's gay pride parade, having acted upon similar threats in previous years. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
3. And if you happen to be gay--or even if you're accused of being gay--in post-Saddam Iraq, it significantly increases your chances of being shot, burned and/or beheaded by Shi'a fundamentalist death squads. (Via uruknet) (Warning: follow the links at your own risk--they contain images that are definitely NSFW.) Isn't faith a wonderful thing?
   
4. Over in Pakistan, a Christian man has been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting Mohammed. (Via Richard Dawkins.net)
5. Confused by "NOMA?" US Republican Presidential candidate Sam Brownback unpacks it for you in an op-ed for the New York Times. The way to balance science and faith is to cherry-pick those elements of science which are consonant with your religious ideology (or could be interpreted to be so); if it doesn't agree with your religious presuppositions, you simply write it off as "atheistic theology posing as science." Simple, no? (Richard Dawkins.net) (More info. on the science-friendly Brownback campaign in this post)
6. New Zealand is set to get its own version of Ken Ham's Creation Museum. (Via Pharyngula)
7. Why some people resist science (Via Pharyngula)
   

Read more!

Hated to death: a gay lynching in Jamaica

Pam's House Blend reports on a gay-bashing in Jamaica, one of the most virulently homophobic societies on the planet.
A 2004 Human Rights Watch report concludes that the pervasiveness of homophobia in Jamaican society is such that it is jeopardising efforts to combat HIV/AIDS in that country, where HIV/AIDS is still seen as a "gay disease." It also contains the following description of what can happen to gays and lesbians who speak out:

On June 9, 2004, Brian Williamson, Jamaica’s leading gay rights activist, was murdered in his home, his body mutilated by multiple knife wounds. Within an hour after his body was discovered, a Human Rights Watch researcher witnessed a crowd gathered outside the crime scene. A smiling man called out, “Battyman [homosexual] he get killed!” Many others celebrated Williamson’s murder, laughing and calling out, “let’s get them one at a time,” “that’s what you get for sin,” “let’s kill all of them.” Some sang “boom bye bye,” a line from a popular Jamaican song about killing and burning gay men.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, Public Defender Earl Witter blamed the victim.

Public Defender Earl Witter resorted to the vernacular yesterday as he advised members of the gay community to "hold your corners", and avoid flaunting their sexual preferences in the face of those who are repulsed by their behaviour.

Condemning violence in all forms, particularly against homosexuals, the public defender, however, warned members of the gay community that if they continued to shove their tendencies on others who found it repugnant, it might incite violence.

"It may provoke a violent breach of the peace," Mr. Witter told The Gleaner yesterday evening.

Writing in the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead suggests that Jamaican homophobia is a legacy of "400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation." She also cites Jamaica's extreme poverty and dilapidated health, education and law enforcement systems: "for many the only support comes from churches, many of which dispense a fire-and-brimstone religion that is not merely homophobic, but designed to discourage independent thought." What is needed on the part of the West is not vilification, Aitkenhead concludes, but debt relief, fair trade and investment: "If that happened, homophobia would soon organically dissolve." Bullshit.

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars Read more!

Archie does fundies

Zaius Nation presents: "Archie and friends--with special guest star Test Tube Jesus."

Gold. Absolute gold.

(Via Light Remembered) Read more!

The Wonderful World of Magical Thinking XI

The week in fundie:

*Homophobic activist quack Paul Cameron again claims that homosexuals have a shorter life expectancy than heterosexuals. And then lies about it. (Via Ex-Gay Watch and Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

*Canadian wingnuts apologise to the world for legalised gay marriage. (Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

*It turns out that Perth Catholic Archbishop Barry Hickey has articulated his support for teaching ID in schools on a previous occasion. In October 2005 he declared: "Intelligent design is a far more elegant description of historical changes than an entirely evolutionary approach, and it therefore should not be ignored in the classroom. "Intelligent design, while it does not demand belief in a creator, sits very comfortably with Catholics who believe that whatever came first came from God who has a clear design for the universe and for each human being in it." (AD2000)

*Interesting article on B. A. Santamaria in The Australian.

Santamaria's attitude to so many of these issues was perhaps summed up in his statement in 1952 that one of the great evils of modern history was the birth of the "modern, liberal, democratic, secular state" in Europe in the years between 1750 and 1848. Think of the notions that are rejected in this statement: modern, liberal, democratic, secular.

Santamaria, who in his time was a hero of the Labor Right, is now a hero of the ultraconservative wing of the Liberal Party. (He also founded the aforementioned AD2000). UPDATE: See Bruce's post on Santamaria protege Tony Abbott and the abortion debate. Read more!

The Wonderful World of Magical Thinking X

The week in fundie . . .















*Catholic political correctness. (ABC News Online; see also Pharyngula)

*The "Creation Science Museum" phenomenon sweeps across America. (HT: Justaguy)

*Poland's war on gays (and Jews)

*Court ruling: Procter and Gamble "does not worship Satan" (via Morons.org)

*South Carolina pushes to force women--even rape and incest victims--to view ultrasounds before seeking abortions. (via Morons.org)

*The Argument from Peanut Butter: defeating Darwinism once and for all. (via Dispatches from the Culture Wars) Read more!

The Bill Muehlenberg Trophy: The War on Gay Junglebunnies

This has to be seen to be believed. A man named Corey Andrew who had posted his resume to Careerbuilder.com (the equivalent of our Seek or CareerOne, I suppose) was emailed by Marcia Ramode, an army recruiter. Her initial email was cordial and professional enough. Andrew responded:

Awesome! Sounds great! The US military has so many vacant positions and opportunities. I had no idea. I'm seriously considering contacting you. One thing. I'm not up current poilitics but since it's 2007, I would imagine also that I am now able to serve in the US military as an openly gay man, right?

And with that last sentence, Marcia Ramode switched into Fred Phelps CAPS LOCK mode. After informing Andrew in a short reply that "IF YOU ARE GAY WE DON'T TAKE YOU YOU ARE CONSIDERED UNQUALIFIED," with every subsequent reply she managed to up the ante in homophobic ranting--which soon became racist ranting (though the racist jibes weren't all one way) once she learned that Andrew is an African-American:

YOU GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE AND PRACTICE YOUR GAY MORALS OVER THERE THAT'S WHERE YOU BELONG.

All in caps. All from her official army email address. The military is investigating.

Via Dispatches From the Culture Wars. More at Pam's House Blend. Read more!

Quote of the Day

Malott, in the comments:

I long for the good old days when people kept their proclivities to themselves. There was a better social climate for homosexuals because there was less homophobia - because homosexuality was a private matter.

Read more!

Fundagenics

"If we can't get them out, we'll breed them out."

Here's a novel idea that should cause Iain and his fellow homophobes to prick up their ears with enthusiasm. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is advocating pre-natal gene therapy in order to eradicate homosexuality. Via Pharyngula:

If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.

Well, I suppose its an improvement upon the method preferred by anti-gay campaigner Paul Cameron (speaking in 1985):

Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.

I guess GLBTIs ought to keep their fingers crossed that we get "medically lucky"--or it may very well be Zyklon-B for them. Read more!

Pandagon on Coulter

Amanda Marcotte reflects on the role Ann Coulter plays in red-blooded red-staters' fantasies as a fuckable WASP bitch.

While I abhor it when men who take cheap shots at her fuckability, one can safely state that Coulter does have this exaggerated femininity, and appears to cultivate it. But I wouldn’t characterize it as American so much as the exaggerated version of the stereotype of the bitchy WASP—not the girl you marry, of course, but the one you party with while listening to your yacht rock while your baby factory wife stays at home tending your heirs. Or, in the other fantasy of the yuppie good life, the fantasizing man is the confirmed bachelor banging the skinny, bitchy blondes in his abundant spare time. Think of Bill Maher’s own view of himself or maybe Chevy Chase’s character in Caddyshack.

Taken from that point of view, the conservative dude obsession with Coulter makes perfect sense. Most wingnuts aren’t going to be That Guy—leaving the wife home to tend the baby while you go out to fuck bitchy, skinny blondes tends to be out of the reach of your average wingnut. Anyway, even if you can get away, it’s unlikely that said bitchy, skinny blondes will give you the time of day. But then there’s Coulter on the TV and she wants you to know that she loves you and thinks you’re a hot manly man and totally like the Chevy Chase character and the only thing you have to do in order to get into her good graces is vote Republican and hate liberals, those fags. Framed that way, there’s no mystery to her appeal.

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post suggests that Coulter's recent shark-jumping (which has resulted in advertisers and newspapers dumping her left, right and centre--so to speak) has wrong-footed the Republicans, exposing their homophobia as the bigotry that dare not speak its name among "respectable" conservatives. ("No, Arthur, you have us all wrong. It's not bigotry: it's 'compassion.'") Read more!

Scienciness, continued . . ./Know Your Politician

Via Living the Scientific Life (you can see it better there)

Also, given the Burke/Rudd/Campbell orgy of mudslinging this week, Beware of the God provides a valuable public service in the form of a post detailing some things you may not have known about certain leading Federal Government figures. Learn about Tony Abbott's beginnings as a pugilistic Young Liberal thug; Eric Abetz' shady dealings with the Exclusive Brethren; Guy Barnett's theocratic and homophobic activism; and Kevin Andrews' links with various anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-women's rights organisations.

OK, so maybe this information isn't exactly earth-shattering, but it's well worth bearing in mind in an election year. Read more!

Journalism teacher threatened with sack over student newspaper editorial about TEH ANAL SEX GAYS

If aspiring young reporters want to get a sense of what it must be like to be a journalist in a theocracy or a banana-republic, they should look no further than the case of a high school principal in Woodlan, Indiana, who is threatening to fire a journalism teacher over a student editorial in the school newspaper calling for GASP!! SHOCK!! HORROR!! tolerance towards gays and lesbians. The tinpot dictator principal is also demanding that all future stories be vetted by himself personally, and has issued a written warning to the teacher in charge "for exposing students to inappropriate material".

The full editorial is available via the previous link, but here's the gist of it:

The editorial in question was Chase’s first-person appeal for tolerance and equal protections for gays and lesbians. She said she was inspired by a friend who told her he was gay.

“Would it be so hard to just accept (gays and lesbians) as human beings who have feelings just like everyone else?” she wrote. “Being homosexual doesn’t make a person inhuman, it makes them just a little bit different than the rest of the world. And for living in a society that tells you to always be yourself, it’s a hard price to pay.”

A sobering reality-check, one would think, for all those doe-eyed and naive students who were under the impression that their country still values a free press.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

UPDATE: The war on TEH GAYS continues closer to home in small-town Tasmania, where a gay couple have become the subject of a hate-mail campaign because of their plans to open a residential development in the town of Penguin. Evidently the pamphlets were of the COVER YOUR ARSES AND LOCK UP YOUR 15-YEAR OLD SONS!!!!!!! kind that Western Australians endured a few years back prior to the Gallop Labor government's gay law reforms.

Rodney Croome, who played a leading role in the push to reform Tasmanian law regarding homosexuality in the late 1990s, takes the fact that the mayor of Penguin almost immediately condemned the hate mail campaign as a sign that things are improving:

Beyond a dramatic shift in laws and attitudes, Tasmania has witnessed a demographic transformation with hundreds of same-sex couples moving to the state's regional and rural areas from interstate and overseas. Many of these couples have started small tourism and food production businesses, established strong links to their adopted districts and profoundly impacted on local attitudes to same-sex relationships.

Sometimes there is a backlash to this impact. But just as often gay immigrants are embraced. Indeed the intensity of both responses often match. Of this, there is no better example than Penguin.

In short then, Penguin lies on the fault line in Tasmanian identity. Whenever the tectonic plates we call the old and new Tasmania shift Penguin quakes.

Read his full post here. Read more!

Snickers, the SuperBowl and TEH GAY

Since I'm banned from commenting further on this post at Joe the Troll's (which I pretty much consider a permanent ban--I don't have a lot of time for censorious bloggers), I'll share my thoughts here on his post concerning a Snickers commercial that was pulled from its scheduled broadcast during the SuperBowl.

Since the Ridley Scott-directed Apple Macintosh ad premiered during the 1984 SuperBowl, the NFL championship has been a showcase for creative and/or expensive advertising campaigns. This year's broadcast was to feature a Snickers ad, in which two mechanics, sharing a Snickers bar by consuming it from each end, accidentally "kiss" when their lips meet at the middle. They're both taken aback, and one of them cries: "Quick, let's do something manly!"--whereupon they proceed to rip out clumps of their own chest hair. Several versions of the ad were in fact produced with "alternate endings:" one in which another man enters the garage and enquires "Is there room for three on this Love Boat?;" a second in which the mechanics drink motor oil and anti-freeze; and a third in which one of the mechanics swings an over-sized wrench into the stomach of his colleague, who reciprocates by slamming his head with the car hood.

The four different versions were posted on the Snickers website, asking visitors to vote on their favourite, with the winning version to air during the Daytona 500 (how apt :) ). (The ads have since vanished from the site.) Snickers also featured the reactions of some of the players who squared off in the recent SuperBowl (these too have vanished--though you can still see some of them on YouTube here and here), ranging from amusement to obvious discomfort and disgust.

The Snickers campaign was immediately condemned by several gay rights organisations, including GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign, for sending "a dangerous message to the public condoning violence against gay Americans." Another group expressing outrage at the ads is the Matthew Shepard Foundation, named after a Wyoming student victim of a brutal gay bashing which saw him robbed, beaten, tied to a fence and left to die. The Foundation's executive director Judy Shepard (Matthew's mother) declared: "This campaign encourages the same type of hate that led to the death of my son Matthew. It essentially gives 'permission' to our society to verbally or physically harass individuals who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual." According to Masterfoods (the Mars subsidiary that made the decision to pull the ad), market research had revealed that the ad's target audience was not responding well either--though they did not specify whether this was because the audience shared the position of GLAAD, et al., or because it disapproved of the suggestive depiction of male homoeroticism on a TV commercial.

What do I think of the Snickers campaign? Well, I agree with Joe that the reactions of GLAAD et. al and of those members of the public surveyed by Masterfoods were a tad over-the-top. I think the ad is laughing at the insecurities of the mechanics more than it is inciting violence and harrassment against GLBTIs--if they were truly comfortable with their sexual identity, they wouldn't need to "prove" themselves via cartoonish and excessive displays of manliness. I don't see it as an anti-gay ad necessarily, although I can see where those who do have objections to it are coming from, and I guess this is where Joe and I part ways.

Joe's position, essentially, is that organisations such as GLAAD undermine the whole enterprise of gay and lesbian equality by giving attention to what he sees is a trivial issue such as an ad for Snickers at the Superbowl:

Is not wanting to be gay when you’re not gay suddenly an act of prejudicial hatred? Is it “anti-gay” of me, as a straight man, to not want to kiss another man? And exactly how does this commercial foster violence against gays? The only “violence” in the commercial was self-inflicted.

This passage highlights a couple of problems I have with Joe's position. First, leaving aside the question of how it is possible to "be gay when you're not gay," it isn't simply the fact that the men depicted in the ad might not want to kiss other men; rather it is the fact that they react so violently (whether towards themselves or towards each other), and that they see male intimacy as something so beyond the pale of "normal" masculinity that they must engage in cartoonishly hypermasculine behaviour in order to reassure each other of their "manliness," that GLAAD & co. object to. Second, in remarking that "the only violence in the commercial was self-inflicted," Joe demonstrates an unwillingness to read the ad on anything more than a superficial, literal level. (Not that I think the ad actually promotes violence, but that's beside the point here.) Either the ad wears it's anti-gay sentiments on its sleeve--flashing GOD HATES FAGS!! across the screen in neon--or no such anti-gay messages exist. That's a false dichotomy.

Other differences with Joe stem from his view that organisations such as GLAAD have to choose their battles, and in this case, "picking the wrong battles can be a great loss to your cause." That may be so, but why would combating what they perceive to be negative representations of homosexuality--or even incitements to homophobia-- in the mass-media be the wrong battle for gay rights organisations to fight? This whole line of argument reminds me of the famous "NABA defence:" for every wrong for which someone is seeking redress, there is always a more egregious wrong transpiring somewhere else which that person could be paying more attention to instead of focusing on the present wrong. The assumption is that the gay rights movement is only capable of fighting one battle at a time, which is patently ridiculous.

Finally, Joe declares that he fully opposes "ANY organization in their quest to take away anyone’s right of free speech to assuage their tender feelings," and emphasises that "The US Constitution does not guarantee the right to go through life unoffended to ANYONE." Again, I think he's talking nonsense. The only entity that could conceivably take away the right to free speech is the government, and nobody's right to free speech is diminished just because some groups and individuals complain about an ad. Masterfoods made a corporate decision in pulling the Snickers ads--there were no lawyers or police involved--and were probably influenced by more than one demographic (i.e. concerned Christian consumers as well as concerned homosexual consumers of their product--as the reactions of the NFL players suggest). And while it is certainly the case that nobody has the right not to be offended, this does not mean that nobody has the right to be offended and to say so when they are (a point which Joe later conceded). This simply isn't a freedom of speech issue.

I'll leave the last word to Nicklas Johnson from Morons.org:

Picture this: you're watching the Superbowl and an ad comes on. Two redneck men are going through a buffet line. One of them loads up his plate with fried chicken. The other looks at him, then the plate, and they both jump back. The other exclaims, "quick, do something white!" and they don KKK outfits and set a cross on fire. Horrific and racist, right? Even if the guys were meant to be dumb?

Read more!

The Howard Government's War on Homosexuality

You just can't win with the theocrats. You can water down civil union legislation as much as you like. You can bend over backwards to placate fundy sensibilities--despite this supposedly being a secular liberal democracy. The Federal Government will still knock it on its head, arguing that any legislation proposing the faintest trace of formal recognition of gay partnerships "undermines the institution of marriage." As if happily-married heterosexuals will abandon their marriages in droves and embrace buggery before the ink on the Bill is even dry.

Oh, well. The medievalists have to get kicked out eventually.

(For a decisive smackdown of the notion that allowing gays to be married "undermines marriage", see this post by The Language Guy) Read more!

Seeking a coherent argument against gay and lesbian equality II

Some conservatives are so dogmatically opposed to GBLT equality that they end up missing the point of their own arguments. A commenter at Smogblot links approvingly to an article by Thomas Brewton in The Conservative Voice, in which the author critiques the following line in a New York Times editorial:

"The New Jersey Supreme Court brought the United States a little closer to the ideal of equality yesterday when it ruled that the state’s Constitution requires that committed same-sex couples be accorded the same rights as married heterosexual couples."

For Brewton:

The Times editorial implicitly presumes that the "ideal of equality" means entitlement to actual equality in all respects. Same-sex marriage is just the latest in a long list of socialist intellectuals' demands that judicial pronouncement, if not statute law, mandate equality of condition, rather than equality of opportunity.

The editorial presumes no such thing, but we'll get to that in a minute. Let's have a closer look at the distinction Brewton draws between "equality of condition" and "equality of opportunity." On the one hand, the distinction is valid: the government can provide universal health care, but it can't prevent you from getting sick; and the government can provide free or affordable education, but it can't guarantee that you will one day become a billionaire or win the Booker Prize. On the other hand, the distinction between "equality of condition" and "equality of opportunity is pure conservative cant, since many of those measures undertaken by governments and other entities--such as safety nets, public education, universal health care, affirmative action, progressive taxation, etc.--that Brewton would decry as "mandating equality of condition," are actually intended to maximise equality of opportunity.

Brewton, however, is talking specifically about same-sex marriage; and he argues that those who advocate it (we'll pass over the "socialist intellectual" ad hom. in silence) are trying to get the law to "mandate equality of condition"--by which I suppose means "equality of condition between same-sex and heterosexual marriages." In other words, advocates of same-sex marriage are--as he sees it--trying to get the law to make it so that same-sex and heterosexual marriages are the same thing. And on the face of it, this is ridiculous. Of course same-sex and hetero marriages are not the same thing--the one involves a same-sex couple, the other involves a coupe made up of different sexes--and no same-sex marriage advocate is suggesting otherwise. To be fair to Brewton, however, I imagine he would maintain that the differences between same-sex and heterosexual marriages go much further than that--so much so that they warrant a continuing legal ban on same-sex marriages.

Do they? Brewton never makes the case that they do (and it must be stated that on the conservative side of this debate the case is rarely ever made: it is only asserted). Instead, he draws a second distinction, and this is where he runs into trouble:

Our nation was founded on a completely different understanding of equality. [. . .] English political traditions brought to North America in the early 17th century remained the founding traditions of the United States in the 18th century, when the Constitution was written. In that framework, equality meant only that everyone was entitled to equal treatment under the law, that the ruler, as well as the ruled, was subject to a higher law of God-given morality.

Leaving aside the theocratic nonsense about "God-given morality," it is precisely upon the notion that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law that the argument in favour of legalising same-sex marriage is based. It is precisely according to the notion that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law that sodomy laws have been repealed. It is precisely this notion of equality that the New York Times editorial is idealising when it celebrates the decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court to award same-sex and heterosexual couples the same rights. What else could it be? The New Jersey Supreme Court decision won't guarantee that people will always treat non-heterosexuals fairly and justly, but it does ensure that the law will.

Hence, if the notion of equality as equal treatment under the law is the only notion of equality Brewton believes judges and legislators in a liberal democracy should be upholding, then he really has no case against the New Jersey decision. In the interests of logical consistency, he should back it. That he does not back it--nor any other measures aimed at ending discrimination against non-heterosexuals--and instead dishonestly portrays supporters of such measures as "socialist intellectuals mandating equality of condition," suggests that he only supports the concept of equality under the law to the extent that some people are more equal than others.

To demonstrate the force of this last point, have another look at Brewton's piece, and decide for yourself whether his argument would shift all that much if you were to replace "same sex marriage" with "interracial marriage," or "women's suffrage," or "desegregation," or "the abolition of slavery." Read more!