Thanks to Obama, Jesse Jackson, et. al., seem to have evolved

Um, let’s not call Barack Obama “the first gay president,” but let’s credit him with being influential within the black community where equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals are concerned.

Newsweek’s May 21 cover pronouncement of Barack Obama being the nation’s “first gay president” is typically-for-Newsweek hyperbolic — Obama is no more the “first gay president” than Bill Clinton was the “first black president” – but Obama’s belated pronouncement of last week that he supports same-sex marriage (although he hasn’t changed his “states’ rights” “argument” and thus he has not argued that same-sex marriage should not be prohibited by any of the states) might have the benefit of easing some of the homophobia within the black community.

Seventy percent of the black voters who voted on California’s Proposition 8 in November 2008 voted “yes” and thus voted against same-sex marriage here in California – on the very same election day that brought us the nation’s first black president, mind you.

Seventy fucking percent. (Overall, 52 percent of the state’s voters passed Prop H8.)

The Washington Post at the time of Prop H8’s passage reported that “Similar [anti-same-sex-marriage] measures passed easily in Florida and Arizona. It was closer in California, but no ethnic group anywhere rejected the sanctioning of same-sex unions as emphatically as the state’s black voters, according to exit polls.”

This, I think, was for two primary reasons:

One, most black Americans have adopted the toxic, backasswards, ignorance-, hatred- and fear-based religion of those who once were their enslavers. They and their equally fucktarded and bigoted white counterparts call this patriarchal, misogynist and homophobic bullshit “Christianity,” but I’ve read the New Testament, and Christianity this ain’t.

It’s unfortunate that so many black churches are just like white churches. The only significant difference between the black Protestant churches and the white Protestant churches, it seems to me, is the race and the racial identity of the churchgoers. The ignorance, hatred, bigotry and the us-vs.-them, fear-based bullshit pretty much are the same.

Two, many if not most blacks refuse to share the victimization pie. These blacks don’t want to acknowledge that any other historically oppressed minority group also has been oppressed in the United States of America. Their victimization (real and/or fabricated) is their identity, after all.

Of course we cannot exactly compare gay rights and the historical oppression that non-heterosexuals and the non-gender-conforming have experienced to race-based rights and the historical oppression that blacks and other non-whites have experienced in the United States of America.

Slavery, and being discriminated against for your race, are a whole other ball of wax from being discriminated against for your sexual orientation and/or your gender expression. Obviously and of course.

However, it’s also true that gay males and lesbians and other non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming individuals are the only minorities who routinely are rejected even by their own families. Racial minorities, on the other hand, almost universally are accepted by the members of their own families. (There are exceptions, of course, such as in the cases of biracial children; a white supremacist white family probably would to some degree reject a biracial child born into the family, for example.)

But getting into arguments over which historically oppressed minority group has had it worse probably isn’t very constructive, and fuck it, I will say it: Those blacks who make stewing over the injustices that were done even primarily to their forebears their second or even their first job probably are quite stuck in their development, and since they have a difficult time living in the present, but remain stuck in the past — even others’ past — their chance of making significant progress in the present is slim. They are sad cases who not only are miserable themselves, but who do their best to make those around them miserable.

I mean, shit. I can’t marry my same-sex partner of five years here in the supposedly liberal and progressive state of California, and I can think of no other minority group that isn’t allowed to get married. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967, in Loving vs. Virginia, that no state can outlaw mixed-race heterosexual marriage, but here I am, decades later, and I don’t have marriage rights. Gay indeed apparently is the new black. (Maybe that is reason No. 3 for rampant black homophobia: Many if not most blacks want to ensure that there is at least one minority group that they still can shit and piss upon. In this dogpile that we call the U.S. of A. it’s still better to be next to the bottom than to be at the very bottom of the dogpile, isn’t it?) I could stew over this gross injustice a lot more than I do, but I would like my life to be about more than stewing over this injustice.

All of that said, same-sex marriage rights and other equal rights and human rights for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals are civil rights.

Civil rights is a large umbrella — an umbrella that doesn’t cover only blacks. Wikipedia notes in its entry “civil rights”:

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals’ freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one’s ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.

Civil rights include the ensuring of peoples’ physical integrity and safety; protection from discrimination on grounds such as physical or mental disability, gender, religion, race, national origin, age, status as a member of the uniformed services, sexual orientation or gender identity; and individual rights such as privacy, the freedoms of thought and conscience, speech and expression, religion, the press, and movement.

Fuck it, I’ll say it: If you maintain that civil rights cover only your group, you’re a selfish fucking hypocrite who demands that your group be treated with fairness and with justice, but you don’t give a flying fuck about other groups. Therefore, you don’t fucking deserve the same respect that you demand that others show you.

Therefore, I was incensed when Jesse Jackson announced some time ago that gay rights (or at least same-sex marriage rights) aren’t civil rights. As recently as two years ago, Jackson reportedly declared, “Many African-Americans believe gays are discriminated against, but they don’t believe marriage is a civil-rights issue. [Really? Loving vs. Virginia, which allowed mixed-race heterosexual marriage, was not over a civil-rights issue?] There are issues of acceptance [of gays], but there is no back of the bus; there are no lynchings.” Um, Matthew Shepard and countless other non-heterosexuals who have been killed for their sexual orientation and/or non-gender-conformation have not, in effect, been lynched? Jackson at that time added that being non-heterosexual “is not immutable” and “is not an externally observable characteristic unless you want to flaunt it.”

Actually, for most non-heterosexuals it is not a choice, any more than heterosexuals have a choice as to who they are and are not sexually attracted to, and of course, that word choice — “flaunt it” — reeks of homophobic bigotry (the only way for effeminate males and masculine females not to “flaunt it” is to [try to] pretend to be who and what they are not, which is soul-crushing), and of course the “immutability” “argument” is bullshit where civil rights are concerned. Civil rights protect one’s religious beliefs, for example, and certainly one’s religious beliefs are not immutable. (And why, oh, why, must so many “Christians” flaunt their mutable, bullshit, backasswards beliefs that they wish to inflict on all of us? And why do the “Christians” want to convert our defenseless children to their perversion?)

However, Jesse Jackson seems to have evolved on the issue of same-sex marriage since his earlier effective public proclamations that blacks have the monopoly on civil rights.

The Los Angeles Times on Thursday surreally reported (emphases are mine):

The Rev. Jesse Jackson on Thursday praised President Obama’s decision to support same-sex marriage, comparing the battle for such unions to the fight against slavery and anti-miscegenation laws intended to keep blacks and other ethnicities from mingling and marrying with whites.

“This is a bold step in the right direction for equal protection under the law for all citizens,” Jackson told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday morning. But, he said, he wished the president had gone further, pushing for federal protection for all citizens instead of leaving the controversial issue of gay marriage up to the states to decide. [!!!]

If other hard-won civil rights battles had been left up to the states, Jackson said, African Americans would have been on the losing end of those battles.

“If the states had to vote on slavery, we would have lost the vote,” Jackson said. “If we had to vote on the right [for blacks] to vote, we would have lost that vote.” …

Wow. Here is Jesse Jackson now more or less comparing the fight for same-sex marriage in all 50 states to the fight to eliminate slavery in all 50 states, a comparison that I recently made myself and was expecting to get shit for (but miraculously did not).

Of course, not being allowed to marry the one you wish to marry absolutely is not just like being involuntarily owned and involuntarily worked like livestock instead of being treated as a free human being, but the idea of allowing any of the states to put the treatment of and the equal human and civil rights of any minority group up for a fucking vote is anti-American. And I do believe that while of course we cannot directly compare the prohibition of same-sex marriage to slavery, we can more or less directly compare laws that banned mixed-race marriage to laws that ban same-sex marriage. Yes, marriage rights are civil rights.

I have been critical of Barack Obama for still not having gone far enough on same-sex marriage — and, by and large, most Americans, even non-heterosexual Americans, seem to be letting him off of the hook for his willingness to go only so far thus far – so it is gratifying to see Jesse Jackson’s proclamation that Obama hasn’t gone far enough on same-sex marriage.

The L.A. Times reports further of Jackson’s recent pronouncement (emphases mine):

His statement comes as a growing number of African-American leaders and civil-rights activists are stepping forward to voice their support for same-sex marriage. Their positions are significant because there is a stronghold of opposition to same-sex marriage within African American communities. This week alone, African-Americans voters were instrumental to passing North Carolina’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. [Deja vu all over again...]

Acknowledging that gap, Jackson called on religious leaders nationwide to address the issue with their congregations.

Jackson said gays and lesbians are among the ranks of soldiers dying for their country, the teachers educating the nation’s children and even the pastors guiding parishioners through the Bible. It’s time to reward gays and lesbians with equal protection, he said.

He urged opponents to remember that same-sex marriage isn’t about taking rights away from anyone else, but rather extending those rights to all. He also recalled a painful time in America’s not-too-distant past when African American men in the South faced swift punishment or even death if they tried to date a white woman, even as white men boldly dated across racial lines.

With such history in the rear-view mirror, Jackson said, it’s time to stop dictating the actions of others.

“You may choose your mate, but you cannot deny someone else the right to choose their mate,” he said. “The law protects you from being abused. It doesn’t threaten your lifestyle for someone else to have the right to exhibit their lifestyle,” he later added. ["Exhibit" -- I hope that that's not just a euphemism for "flaunt"... And your sexual orientation, in the vast majority of cases, is not your "lifestyle." Your lifestyle, by definition, is your choice. Your sexual orientation, in the vast majority of cases, is not your choice.]

Other African-American leaders were also vocal this week in their support for gay marriage, joining Jackson in reframing the issue as one of civil rights.

“I salute President Obama’s statement today supporting same-sex marriage,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement that went on to add: “This is not about mine or anyone’s personal or religious views. It is about equal rights for all. We cannot be selective with civil rights. We must support civil rights for everybody or we don’t support them for anyone.”

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, seen as a rising [black] star in the Democratic Party, appeared on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC Wednesday to lend an impassioned voice in support of gay marriage rights. [I saw that interview, and I like fellow Gen X'er Cory Booker, and he is, I think, an example of the fact that one's age largely determines his or her stance on same-sex marriage. Younger Americans, as a whole, are more accepting of same-sex marriage than are older Americans, such as Jesse Jackson, regardless of their race.]

And, earlier in the day, the social media savvy leader tweeted: “Historic day for justice and equality. Our United States President Obama endorses marriage equality. I rejoice in this announcement.”

I suspect that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et. al., wouldn’t be as on board with same-sex marriage as they are now if our “first gay president” weren’t black and if our “first gay president” hadn’t first made his (limited) support of same-sex marriage public, but I’ll take their (belated) support anyway.

Truth be told, their support of my equal human and civil rights makes it much easier for me to give them my support of theirs wholeheartedly.

Barack Obama’s cold calculation on same-sex marriage

President Barack Obama made headlines today by having proclaimed in an interview with ABC News, “…[A]t a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go  ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

I can tell you what that “certain point” was: the point at which Obama finally calculated (correctly) that his stubborn refusal to publicly endorse same-sex marriage was causing him more political harm than political gain.

On Saturday, I presciently raked Obama over the coals for having yet to fulfill what I had considered to be at least a strongly implied 2008 campaign promise: his endorsement of same-sex marriage — of full marriage equality, regardless of gender or sexual orientation – in all 50 states.

Among other things, I wrote:

Instead of delivering upon his relentless, ubiquitous [2008] campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” [Obama] for the most part has maintained the status quo and has told us dreamers of full equality for all that our dream must be deferred.

No, it doesn’t have to be deferred. It’s that Barack Obama lacks the character, the courage and the moral conviction to deliver upon what he promised (explicitly and implicitly…) …

On Sunday I felt fairly psychic, for the big news of that day was that Vice President Joe Biden had come out in support of same-sex marriage. But, as I wrote on Sunday, Biden’s endorsement of same-sex marriage was not nearly enough.

To a commenter on Saturday’s piece, I responded:

Nationwide polls taken over the last year or so show that about 52 percent of Americans, when asked to give a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down to legalized same-sex marriage, give it their thumbs-up. (The spread is about 51 percent to 53 percent. See http://pollingreport.com/civil.htm.)

As Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in 2008, there probably is great overlap — at least 90-something percent, I venture — among those who voted for Obama in 2008 and those who support same-sex marriage.

So I don’t see what Obama gains politically, especially in terms of votes for re-election, by claiming that he’s still “evolving” on same-sex marriage. For any support from the homophobes that he might get (and most of them hate him because he’s black), Obama is losing the support of those like me who used to support him but who no longer do, in large part because he is still “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage.

Sacrificing your base in order to cater to the “swing voters” is, I think, a huge fucking mistake.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Mittens becomes the next president. And after Election Day we can say that it was completely avoidable, that Barack Obama fucked it up royally.

Again, while it’s hard to calculate and thus hard to prove, I do believe that any political gain that Obama might have garnered from refusing to “evolve” already and publicly endorse same-sex marriage was canceled out by the loss of support from his base. And it’s your base, not the fucking “swing voters,” who give you money, who enthusiastically give you their votes, who talk up your candidacy to their associates, and who even volunteer for your campaign.

And we gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals) long have been sick and fucking tired of the Democratic Party asking us for our money and our votes — the term “gAyTM” was coined for this phenomenon — while refusing to fight for our equal human and civil rights, instead perpetually telling us that it’s not the right time yet.

A recent nationwide Gallup poll (which was taken between May 3 and May 6 and was released after I wrote the paragraphs above) put support for same-sex marriage at 50 percent and opposition at 48 percent, with 2 percent “unsure.”

Now, it seems to me that if you’re vehemently against same-sex marriage you are vehemently against same-sex marriage, so I surmise that more than half of those who are “unsure” would support same-sex marriage if they had to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down, so, I surmise, we’re looking at at least 51-percent support.

A Pew Research Center nationwide poll taken last month showed that 47 percent favor same-sex marriage, 43 percent oppose it, and 11 percent are unsure (yes, that’s 101 percent — which Pew says is due to rounding). Let’s give the freedom-hating homophobes more than half of the unsures — 6 percent — and the lovers of liberty and justice for all only 5 percent of the unsures. That still is 52 percent for same-sex marriage. I stand by my earlier assertion that we’re at about 52 percent of Americans favoring same-sex marriage.

Indeed, an ABC News/Washington Post nationwide poll in March found that 52 percent of Americans favor same-sex marriage, while only 43 percent oppose it, with 5 percent unsure. Give the pro side only 2 percent of the unsures, and that’s 54 percent support.

Again, Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in 2008 — which very apparently is within a percentage point of the percentage of Americans who support same-sex marriage.

Obama had nothing to gain, but, I surmise, had a lot to lose by continuing to hold out on same-sex marriage.

If we cannot agree on that, well, then, at least we had better agree that we cannot call Obama’s new-found stance on same-sex marriage an epiphany or even a change of heart — not when he put himself on record as being a supporter of same-sex marriage way back in 1996, when he answered a question of a campaign questionnaire as follows: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

Politico.com reported back in January 2009, the month that Obama took over the Oval Office, that this response was typed out and that the document was signed by Obama, and Politico included this graphic with the January 2009 story:

Image from Politico.com

So: Of course it has been cold, political calculation on Obama’s part.

But at least this is one clear contrast between Obama and the multi-millionaire Mormon Mittens Romney, who today in response to Obama’s surprise pro-same-sex-marriage pronouncement affirmed his homophobic, “Christo”fascist, anti-liberty-and-justice-for-all stance on same-sex marriage.

(The patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, racist Mormon cult, which is led by a cabal of stupid old evil white men in Salt Lake City, did, after all, give millions of dollars in support of Proposition H8 here in California, as did Mitten’s fellow “Christo”fascist nutjob Prick Santorum’s Catholick cult, which is led by a cabal of stupid old evil white men in the Vatican.)

Mittens — who, if elected, might as well move the Oval Office to the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City — proclaimed today: “Well, when these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name. My view is [that]domestic partnership benefits, hospital visitation rights, and the like are appropriate but that the others are not.”

Whether or not it’s too late for Obama to recapture enough of the love that he has lost over the past few years in order to ensure his re-election remains to be seen. He has disappointed millions within his base, and he has only six months to try to woo them back.

He might find that mere words aren’t enough; after all, it was the words “hope” and “change” that took him all the way to the White House (on the wave that Howard Dean had created in his ill-fated 2004 quest for the White House), and it has been the fact that those words have remained, for the most part, just words that accounts for the gap of enthusiasm for Obama of today from a few years ago.

P.S. I note that Obama apparently hasn’t abandoned his “states’ rights” “argument.” In a fundraising e-mail that he sent out today titled “Marriage,” he wrote: “I respect the beliefs of others, and the right of religious institutions to act in accordance with their own doctrines. But I believe that in the eyes of the law, all Americans should be treated equally. And where states enact same-sex marriage, no federal act should invalidate them.”

That is not the same as saying that no state should be allowed to outlaw same-sex marriage, of course, even though he had just finished asserting, “But I believe that in the eyes of the law, all Americans should be treated equally.”

“All Americans” means all 50 states.

This very much reminds me of the days of slavery, when some states retained slavery and others rejected slavery.

Speaking of which, North Carolina was a slave state, of course, so it’s no fucking shock that the backasswards state’s voters decided to write discrimination into their state’s constitution yesterday by banning same-sex marriage.

None of the former slave states is exactly enlightened.

(To wit, the haters of North Carolina voted not only to ban same-sex marriage, but voted to ban even separate-and-unequal civil unions and domestic partnerships as well, to be extra hateful.)

The wingnuts’ very bad day

Updated below (Wednesday, February 8, 2012)

Wow.

So the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled that Proposition 8 — the anti-same-sex-marriage measure that passed by a small majority in California in November 2008 after a hateful, lie-filled campaign by the right (financed largely by the Mormon cult and the Catholick church) – violates the freedoms guaranteed to Californians by the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, a.k.a. the Equal Protection Clause.*

Sure, the case will go to the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, but even if the current right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court rules that banning same-sex marriage is not unconstitutional, the composition of the court will change over time, and one day same-sex marriage will be legal in all 50 states.

These things take time — it wasn’t until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Loving vs. Virginia, that no state may outlaw mixed-race marriage.

And it was in 2003 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence vs. Texas that, per Wikipedia, “private sexual conduct is protected by the liberty rights implicit in the due process clause of the United States Constitution.” Yet it was just in 1986 that the same court had upheld “sodomy” laws in Bowers vs. Hardwick. The court reverses itself all the time.

Also today, anti-choice wingnut Karen Handel resigned from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation after the foundation took well-deserved truckloads of shit for having decided to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood — a decision that Handel denies that as the Komen foundation’s vice president for public policy she influenced, but that insiders say of course she did.

Before she went to the Komen foundation, the Repugnican Tea Party’s Handel had run for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an anti-choice platform (never mind that the issue of a woman’s right to an abortion was settled waaay back in 1973 with Roe vs. Wade) and had received the endorsement of fellow wingnut and misogynist Sarah Palin.

Today is a great victory for women and for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals.

The treasonous, ignorant and hate-filled wingnuts among us hate the ideas of equality, of liberty, justice and freedom for all, but the ideals of equality, of liberty, justice and freedom for all — and not just for the oppressive wingnuts — march on nonetheless.

–

*The Fourteenth Amendment reads, in part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Updated (Wednesday, February 8, 2012):

Wow. Yesterday also was a bad day for the wingnuts because the utterly unelectable Prick Santorum came in at first place in all three Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary contests yesterday in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. Gilded Boy Mitt Romney came in at second place in Colorado and Missouri and third place in Minnesota.

A protracted Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary fight can only help Barack Obama. Indeed, the media have been reporting that Obama’s favorability ratings are up, and that the latest polls have him beating all of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential contenders in hypothetical matchups.

Again, yesterday was a pretty bad day to be a wingnut.

P.S. Prick Santorum’s attacks against Obama are pretty fucking hilarious, such as this one: “He [Obama] believes he’s the smartest guy in the country and he should tell people what to believe and how to live their lives.”

Yet it’s the Catholick Prick Santorum and his “Christo”fascistic cohorts who want to ban abortion – and perhaps even contraception – and decide who may and may not get married, and otherwise cram their backasswards, patriarchal, misognyist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-science worldview down our throats.

But nooooo, it’s Barack Obama who wants to “tell people what to believe and how to live their lives.”

The two Pricks vie to be the top fascist

Associated Press photo

“Christian” presidential aspirants Prick Perry and Prick Santorum falsely greet each other at an apparent all-white-male “prayer breakfast” in South Carolina today. With “Christians” like these, who needs demons?

Presidential wannabes Prick Perry and Prick Santorum, with the presidential primary election in South Carolina upon us on Saturday, apparently are vying to be the biggest “Christo”fascist in the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary race.

Thank Goddess that neither one of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever sitting in the Oval Office.

Texas Gov. Prick Perry, who wants to represent the third and maybe even the fourth term of George W. Bush, has proclaimed that to denounce the recently revealed incident of U.S. Marines having urinated on the bodies of their kill in Afghanistan is to have “disdain for the [U.S.] military.”

That exactly is what the criminal members of the unelected, treasonous, fascistic Bush regime did: They equated any criticism of their profoundly bungled military policy or of any of their military failures (such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) to wholesale attacks on our troops by America-hating traitors. And that is the same tack that Perry is trying to take now: Barack Hussein Obama, you see, according to Prick Perry, actually hates our troops. (Well, Obama does send them off to their pointless deaths as nonchalantly as George W. Bush did, but that’s another blog post.)

“Obviously, 18-, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often. And that’s what’s occurred here,” Perry dismissively said today of Goldenshowergate, adding, “What’s really disturbing to me is the kind of over-the-top rhetoric from this [the Obama] administration and their disdain for the military.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta should not have condemned the desecration of the dead, which the Geneva Conventions forbid, you see. The Associated Press reports that Perry today “said the Marines involved should be reprimanded but not prosecuted on criminal charges” — even though they violated the Geneva Conventions, for fuck’s sake.

Prick Perry’s knee-jerk right-wing, jingoistic “defense” of Goldenshowergate unintentionally raises more questions than it puts anything to rest.

Why do we have “kids” in the U.S. military when, as Perry correctly states, “kids make stupid mistakes all too often”?

Why do we entrust such highly sensitive matters to “kids”?

Is it because older and wiser individuals will know that they are being exploited? Is it that it easier to send kids — with their false sense of immortality and their naive trust of authority – to their pointless maimings and deaths in the bogus wars for the profiteering of the stupid old rich men who so casually send our kids off to be maimed and traumatized and to die for their personal fortunes?

I can assure Prick Perry that President Barack Obama hates our troops just as much as “President” George W. Bush did. If Obama did not, he would never put them in harm’s way only for the benefit of the war profiteers of the military-industrial complex and the corporateers, such as Big Oil.

Obama promised “hope” and “change,” but there still is plenty of death and destruction in the Middle East that benefits only the war profiteers and the corporateers. But apparently for Prick Perry, there isn’t enough death and destruction for the obscene profits of the 1 percent.

Not to be outdone in hateful jingoism by Prick Perry, former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Prick Santorum – the evil stooge for the pedophilic Catholick church led by Pope Palpatine who fancies himself a “Christian” and is who is so hated by his own state that he lost re-election by a record margin there in 2006 – has declared that no one should condemn the assassination of a 32-year-old Iranian nuclear scientist last week.

This is (was…) 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who, according to the Iranian government, was murdered in a car bombing in Tehran on Wednesday:

Associated Press image

Whoever killed Roshan is guilty of the murder of a young father. There is no getting around that, whether Roshan’s murderers turn out to be the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (as the Iranian government reportedly alleges); Israel’s equivalent of the CIA, Mossad; or even – who knows? — fellow Iranians who for whatever reason or reasons wanted Roshan dead. While I suspect the CIA or Mossad (or both), it’s not impossible, I suppose, that even the Iranian government killed Roshan.

But to hear “Christo”fascistic assbites like Prick Santorum make such pronouncements as “Our country condemned it [Roshan's murder]; my feeling is we should have kept our mouth shut,” is nauseating.

Of whose assassination would Jesus approve?

Further, both the United States and Israel apparently have nukes.* What if the Iranians assassinated an American or an Israeli nuclear scientist on American or Israeli soil? That would be an outrage that might even be cause for all-out war, no? Why, then, is it perfectly OK for the United States or Israel to assassinate others on foreign soil?

And why is it that the United States and Israel may have nukes, but that any other nation may not? Why do the United States and its partner in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Middle East, Israel, get to determine who may and may not possess nukes in the Middle East?

This blatant hypocrisy and double standard and self-righteousness is why the United States and Israel are so hated in the Middle East, and why we have seen perpetual warfare there (and blowback here at home, such as on September 11, 20o1).

There is a lot about Iran not to like, such as its oppression of women and non-heterosexuals and those who don’t submit to the nation’s theocratic rule, but this patriarchal (and misogynist and homophobic) theocratic rule is exactly what the war-mongering, patriarchal theofascists here at home — such as Prick Santorum and Prick Perry — would love to establish for themselves right here.

And not to let Mitt Romney off the hook; a Mormon president would be a huge mistake. Although Romney’s Mormonism instructs him to pretend to be more civil than are his political opponents and to be falsely nice while in actuality he supports a great deal of evil, if we are going to elect Mitt Romney as president we might as well just move the nation’s capital from D.C. to Salt Lake City and put the control of the nation entirely in the claws of the cabal of stupid old evil white men who rule the Mormon cult, who are no different in (malevolent) spirit from the patriarchal, totalitarian clerics who control Iran and other “Islamofascist” states.

It speaks volumes of the evil of the Repugnican Tea Party that its presidential aspirants claim to be such great “Christians” but are supportive or dismissive of such evils as assassination — murder – and desecration of the dead (although, as I have noted, it’s a much, much larger crime to murder someone in the first place than it is to then disrespectfully treat his or her corpse).

How about we assassinate Prick Perry and Prick Santorum and then piss on their corpses, since such acts, according to them, are perfectly acceptable?

You know, I don’t call myself a Christian – in large part because evil people like Prick Perry and Prick Santorum and Mitt Romney call themselves “Christians” – but it seems to me that Jesus Christ’s core teaching that anything that you would not want done to yourself you should not do to anyone else is pretty fucking sound.

If “Christians” actually followed Jesus’ teachings, then we wouldn’t witness things like bogus warfare and mass murder and war crimes and crimes against humanity and assassinations and torture and desecration of the dead.

I can guarantee you that if an actual Christian — someone who actually followed Jesus Christ’s teachings as contained in black and white in the New Testament – ever ran for president, I would vote for him or her enthusiastically, but no actual Christian will win the presidency in November 2012 because no actual Christian is running.

And nor could I see a majority of the people of the United States of America ever actually electing an actual Christian president, since the majority of Americans are not only comfortable with, but very apparently want, a certain amount of evil in their leaders. After all, the vast majority of people want their leaders to be just like themselves.

–

*Wikipedia notes that Israel refuses to confirm or deny whether or not it possesses a nuclear weapon. I assume that Israel does. Indeed, with the billions of our U.S. tax dollars that go to the parasitic, war-mongering Israel, I’d be surprised if Israel doesn’t have nukes.

Will the Orcs in the audience hurt the Repugnicans in November 2012?

 

Bloodthirsty Orcs in the audiences of the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debates scream out their demand for manflesh. Who, oh, who, will be their Saruman?

I tried to watch all of the last Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate (which was Thursday night in Orlando, Fla.) so that I could blog on it. I really did.

But after about 10 to 15 minutes of the usual free flow of Repugnican Tea Party lies from those who would be king – we should deregulate everything, we should privatize everything, we should not raise taxes for the rich and the super-rich by a single red fucking cent, guv’mint is evil, labor unions are evil, welfare benefits are evil, etc., etc. — I couldn’t take it anymore and I had to close the live-streaming window.

I can stand to be in hell, where demonic lies reign, for only so long.

What’s interesting about the three Repugnican Tea Party debates thus far is that the biggest news that has come out of them — aside from not-ready-for-prime-time Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s lackluster performance — is the spontaneous outburts of hatred by the debates’ far-right whackjob audience members.

At the first debate, the audience burst out in raucous applaud when it was mentioned that as Texas governor, Perry holds the record as the most-executing top state executive. (Really, the cold-blooded, bloodthirsty Perry seems to take the title of “executive” waaay too literally.)

I watched that audience-reaction debacle as it happened live, but I missed the next two.

Apparently at the second debate, the audience burst into applause over the idea of letting someone without health insurance die because he or she cannot afford to pay for his or her own medical care.

Woo hoo! Survival of the fittest! It’s what Jesus would do — let the weakest among us die!

And at the third debate (after had I stopped watching it live), the audience booed Stephen Hill, a U.S. Army soldier who is stationed in Vietraq, after he asked a question (via video) regarding the U.S. military’s recently repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy – and they booed him because he is gay.

(You can watch all three shameful clips here.)

So the Repugnican Tea Party’s base — aside from the minority of treasonous plutocrats and corporatocrats who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes but who want to continue to tank our nation’s economy at our expense for their selfish benefit, and who want to see the gaping chasm between the rich and the poor widen even farther – is comprised of bloodthirsty, cold-hearted, bigoted haters who nonetheless claim to be such great fucking “Christians.”

Will these shameful audience reactions hurt the Repugnican Tea Party brand in upcoming national elections? (After all, none of the fascists who are vying for the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination rebuked the audiences’ sickening displays during the debates.)

Salon.com editor and writer Steve Kornacki tackles this question, noting that as it is, only about a third of Americans view the Repugnican Tea Party favorably. This percentage seems about right to me (and is in line with recent polls).

In hypothetical November 2012 matchups against Barack Obama, even Michele “Like Deer in Headlights” Bachmann pulls in around 40 percent, which indicates to me that the far-right-wing nutjobs have as much as 40 percent of the electorate’s support (that is, the support of the staunch right-wing nutjobs, who are about a third of the electorate, plus those “swing voters” whom they are able to dupe). That’s a minority, but it’s a sizeable minority, and, given the “swing voters’” ability to vote for fascists like George W. Bush (and potentially for George W. Bush II, a.k.a. Rick Perry), Obama’s re-election certainly is not certain.

(Against Obama, by the way, as of late Perry has been pulling in around 41 to 45 percent, which to me suggests that right now he has the support of at least some of the “swing voters.” The question would be how many of those who for some God-damned reason are undecided right now he could pull in between now and Election Day in November 2012.)

Kornacki concludes of the shameful Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate audience reactions that we’ve been seeing lately:

…[T]hese debate outbursts end up generating considerable attention and helping to establish (or to reinforce) a sense among non-Republican voters that the GOP has gone off the deep end.

[But it] could be that this won’t end up mattering in the end. If the economy is rotten enough, swing voters might end up voting straight ticket Republican next year no matter how extreme the GOP seems to them.

But when members of a Republican crowd at a nationally televised Republican event start booing [active-duty] members of the military, it’s safe to say [that] the GOP is playing with fire.

Agreed.

The Repugnican Tea Party fascists in the audience at the third debate clearly had a dilemma: Members of the U.S. military, especially those on active duty in the post-9/11 crusade in the Middle East that is bleeding the American empire to death, are considered to be heroes, and the right wing’s post-9/11 hero worship generally applies to them, but at the same time, the right-wing fascists hate non-heterosexuals like the Nazis hated the Jews (and like the Nazis also hated non-heterosexuals…), so what to do?

Clearly, for those who booed, where it came to the gay soldier, the “gay” part canceled out the “soldier” part.

But for the majority of even the dimwitted “swing voters,” it seems to me, the “soldier” part trumps the “gay” part. Nor, I surmise, are even the “swing voters” on board with just allowing those without health insurance to die.

(I surmise that most of them support the death penalty, however. The more ignorant one is, the more fearful he or she is, and the biggest fear is probaby the fear of death, and the “thinking” apparently is that executing convicted murderers will protect the rest of us from death.

That said, I surmise also that the majority of the “swing voters” aren’t on board with executing those whose guilt is questionable [as was the case with
Troy Davis, whom the state of Georgia executed this past week], which the deep-red states [like Georgia] have no problem with, especially if the executed are black or otherwise non-white [as was Davis].)

So I hope that these Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate audience outbursts continue.

In a roundabout way, they’re good for the country.

Bill would make LGBT individuals visible in California public schools

The California state Legislature has passed a bill that requires the state’s public schools to teach about the contributions that non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming Americans have made to the nation – and the wingnuts, predictably, are agog.

Funny, though, how it’s perfectly OK for the Repugnican-Tea-Party-majority members of the Texas Board of Education to dictate that state’s public school curricula – among many other things, the Texas board last year voted to replace all references to “capitalism” with “free-enterprise system” (since capitalism, in which the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer, is growing more and more unpopular these days) and to rewrite history to reflect that the alcoholic, self-aggrandizing witch hunter Joseph McCarthy wasn’t such a bad guy after all — but it’s “socialist” “tyranny” or the like (indeed, the McCarthy-loving Ann Cunter would call it downright “demonic”) for the Democratic majority in the California Legislature to dictate California’s public school curricula.

It’s only “brainwashing” when the Democrats do it, you see.

One Repugnican Tea Party California Assemblyman said of the pro-LGBT education legislation, “As a Christian, I am deeply offended” that the “homosexual agenda” would be taught in the state’s public schools.

As a non-Christian, I am offended that the so-called “Christians” — the “Christo”fascists — believe that it’s appropriate for our public schools to be conducted like “Christian” schools. What if the Muslims or the Jews wanted Islam or Judaism pushed in our public schools? How would the so-called “Christians” like that?

And the “homosexual agenda”? First of all, we don’t call ourselves “homosexuals” — only the homo-haters call us “homosexuals” — and secondly, our agenda is that of equal human and civil rights. (The “homosexual agenda” to the right-wing fascists, I do believe, is that we “homosexuals” have the goal of “making” everyone homosexual. [Of course, the actual heterosexual agenda is to "make" everyone heterosexual, but I digress...])

Gay Democratic California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco stated of the pro-LGBT education legislation, “I don’t want to be invisible in a textbook,” echoing the words of a (wise) Latina Texas Board of Education member who reportedly last year stormed out of a board meeting after the white-majority board refused to include more Latinos in the curricula, even though Texas is second only to California in the number of Latinos who live there: “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”  

The Democratic view of public education is that public education should reflect our nation’s diversity. Our children, after all, need to be taught how their world is, not how some wingnutty ideologues believe the world should be.

On that note, the Repugnican Tea Party view of public education is that public education should perpetuate, as long as is possible, the unjust, oppressive domination of the entire nation by the minority of those who are right wing, white, (presumably) heterosexual and gender-conforming, and “Christian.”

Determining what should and what should not be taught in our public schools inherently is a politically charged process, but if I had children, I sure the hell wouldn’t cripple them, possibly for life, by sending them to schools that don’t teach how the world is, but that teach how some ignorant and bigoted, white supremacist, patriarchal and misogynist, heterosexist “Christo”fascists — who, thankfully, are a dying breed — would like the world to be.

I hope that California’s Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, signs the bill to require that the contributions of us non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming Americans are taught in our public schools. It’s the right thing to do.

P.S. For more context, this is from The Associated Press:

California law already requires [public] schools to teach about women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor. The Legislature over the years also has prescribed specific lessons about the Irish potato famine and the Holocaust, among other topics.

SB48 [the LGBT education bill] would require, as soon as the 2013-2014 school year, the California Board of Education and local school districts to adopt textbooks and other teaching materials that cover the contributions and roles of sexual minorities.

The legislation leaves it to local school boards to decide how to implement the requirement. It does not specify a grade level for the instruction to begin.

So all that the LGBT education legislation does is add LGBT individuals to a curricula of diversity that already is mandated by state law.

I love living in California, where diversity is honored, not shit and pissed upon.

I ♥ NY!

Associated Press photos

New York City’s Empire State Building is lit up in rainbow colors today in honor of gay pride week. Because of the state legislation that was passed last night, same-sex marriages are expected to begin in New York state in a month, and same-sex couples who marry in the state do not have to be residents of the state.

There is so much to bitch about that it’s nice to see some good news for once.

Despite the fact that the “LGBT” “community” in general doesn’t have its shit together, that most of its “leaders” are self-interested sellouts who pathetically passively accept the national Democratic Party establishment’s pathetic mantra that we non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals  have to keep waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting* before our constitutional rights are upheld in all 50 states, the 19-million-plus-strong state of New York last night became the most populous state in the nation to have legalized same-sex marriage.

Six states — New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont — and the District of Columbia now have legalized same-sex marriage.

The addition of New York to that still-too-short list is a great gift this gay pride month.

It sucks to be a Californian and to not to be able to marry my same-sex partner of almost four years — talk of individual freedom and equality supposedly being so God-damned inherently American when so many so-called Americans want only some of us to have freedom and equality is utter bullshit to me — but same-sex marriage in either New York or in California is the death knell for the heterosexist fascists’ agenda of freedom and equality for only some.

And as the legal challenges to California’s anti-same-sex-marriage Proposition Hate are making their way up the federal courts — and thus far, Prop Hate is losing — it’s possible that what began as a loss for equality and freedom in California in November 2008 with Prop Hate could end up as a victory for equality and freedom not only in California but in the rest of the states as well.

Further, recent nationwide polls consistently show that around 53 percent of Americans believe that same-sex marriage should be legal in all 50 states.

Prop Hate, I surmise, ironically only harmed the haters’ “cause” because it exposed their ignorance, their fear, their bigotry, their hatred — in a word, their evil.

This, I believe, as well as other factors – such as that bitter old fucks take their ignorance and hatred with them to their graves and they are replaced by much more enlightened youths — account for the fact that finally, the equality-hating queer-haters are a minority in the United States of America.

That 53 percent majority was hard-won, and it took an awfully long time, to be sure, but it will hold. And it will only increase in the coming years. It’s already clear that the haters are on the wrong side of history, as evidenced by such facts as that same-sex marriage passed in New York last night with the “yea” votes of enough Repugnican state senators in the Repugican-dominated New York state Senate.

These are the Repugnicans who are wise enough to know that to continue to oppose equality and freedom for everyone is a battle that they cannot win, and they don’t want their names to go down in history as having been on the wrong, shameful side — as having been fucking assholes.

(“While I understand that my vote will disappoint many, I also know my vote is a vote of conscience,” one of the Repugnican New York state senators said in a statement before he voted “yes” on same-sex marriage last night. “I am doing the right thing in voting to support marriage equality.”

Said another Repugnican New York state senator, a lawyer, of his “yes” vote: “I cannot legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage. I cannot deny a person, a human being … the same rights [that] I have with my wife.”)

A few more notes on the historic achievement of same-sex marriage in New York:

The Associated Press quotes Ross Levi, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, as having said of the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York that there “certainly [will be] a ripple effect across the nation” from the “historic night.” I am with him thus far, but then he added that “democracy won.”

OK, fine, let’s celebrate the historical achievement, but let’s not tacitly or overtly agree that anyone’s equal human and civil rights, guaranteed to him or her by the U.S. Constitution, should be put up for a vote. Inalienable rights are just that — inalienable and not subject to the whims of the democratic process.

And I must note that history shall record that the Catholick Church – which, along with the Mormon Cult, backed Proposition Hate – fought the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York.**

Further, history shall record that same-sex marriage in the state of New York was won only after the theofascists were sufficiently satisfied that religious groups’ “right” to discriminate against non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals would be preserved.

Yes, today, “religious freedom” means things like the preservation of bigotry and discrimination and infant male genital mutilation (a.k.a. “circumcision”).

And the “argument” today is that if you don’t allow the theofascists to violate others’ rights (even the right of infants not to be mutilated), then you are violating the theofascists’ “religious freedom.”

(I suppose the fact that we don’t allow murderers and rapists the freedom to freely rape and murder is a violation of their “freedoms,” too. Interesting thing, freedom/“freedom” is.)

The Catholick Church, the Mormon Cult and other groups of “Christo”fascists and theofascists and ignorant haters deserve to see themselves driven to extinction for their refusal to leave the Dark Ages behind in this rapidly changing world.

I’m fine with these fascists believing whatever bullshit they want to believe, but when they believe that they have the “right” to impose their brand of theocracy on me, when they can’t keep their evil insanity to themselves, then it becomes my fucking problem.

It is because of them that I cannot legally marry my partner of almost four years. I take their assault on my freedoms and liberties — which I believe are worth dying for – quite seriously. They have declared war, and they deserve whatever blowback they sustain because of their declaration of war.

–

*It has occurred to me that the Democratic Party doesn’t want the advancement of rights and equality for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, because the promise of these rights and this equality in the future — always in the future – is great for fundraising.

Indeed, any actual progress in the United States at all can be made only by doing an end-run around the national Democratic Party establishment, such as how the people of Wisconsin took things into their own hands after Barack Obama and the other national Dems totally ignored the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ attack on labor unions/collective bargaining in that state, and how the states are achieving same-sex marriage state by state when it shouldn’t have to be achieved so fucking incrementally and without the support of the national Democratic Party establishment, which is less than worthless.

**The Associated Press notes:

The Catholic Bishops of New York said the [same-sex marriage] law alters “radically and forever humanity’s historic understanding of marriage.”

“We always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love,” the bishops said Friday. “We worry that both marriage and the family will be undermined by this tragic presumption of government in passing this legislation that attempts to redefine these cornerstones of civilization.”

The AP also notes that the infamously homophobic “Democratic” New York state Sen. Ruben Diaz, “a Bronx minister,” said of his “no” vote: “God, not Albany, settled the issue of marriage a long time ago.”

Wow.

OK, the Catholick assholes (redundant…) don’t get their cake and eat it, too. They don’t get to oppose same-sex marriage but at the same time claim, “We always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love.” That’s like your rapist proclaiming his “love” for you while he’s fucking raping you. No. You can’t work to keep others down and claim that you are treating them with “respect, dignity and love.”

And the Catholick theofascists and theofascist Diaz — who is not a Democrat — sorely need to be educated about the separation of church and state.

They have the right to believe, stupidly, that there is a “God” (it’s their right to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, too) and that this “God” has an inviolable definition of marriage as being a union between a biological male and a biological female, one of the main purposes of which is to produce more offspring on an already overpopulated planet (after all, global warming is bullshit, right? And in any event, Judgment Day is just around the corner, so it doesn’t matter how much we trash the planet, does it?). They have the right to act out of this belief in their own lives.

They do not have the right to impose this stupid belief on those of us who disagree with them.

And same-sex marriage was legalized in the state of New York not by some abstract entity called “Albany,” to use Diaz’s propaganda, or “government,” to use the Catholick bishops’ propaganda.

No, the people of the state of New York elected their state representatives and their state senators in a system of representative democracy.

In this system of representative democracy, theocracy and theofascism lost and the people won.

The Catholick asshats, Diaz and the other “Christo”fascists and theofascists should get used to losing to democracy, because even though none of us non-heterosexuals and non-gender conformists should have to use the democratic process to win our inalienable rights, we are doing so. And we are winning.

Assorted shit (gay pride month edition!)

Homophobes take another blow

Reuters photo

Former federal Judge Vaughn Walker (pictured above in April), who last year correctly ruled that to prohibit same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, came out after he retired from the federal bench in February. Homophobes  shamelessly had challenged the ability of Walker, who had been appointed by the first President George Bush, to be able to rule fairly on same-sex marriage, but today another federal judge, who also was appointed by the first President Bush, affirmed that Walker did not inappropriately rule on the case.

If I could say two words to the “Christo”fascists who still oppose legally recognized same-sex marriage in all 50 states, it might be something like this: “Surrender, Dorothy!”

Same-sex marriage in all 50 states is going to be a reality within the next decade, most likely. So for the supposedly freedom-lovin’ wingnuts to keep expending their time, money and energy trying to stop the inevitable — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and justice for all — is a fucking waste. (If they were true Christians, they’d spend their time, money and energy helping people, as Jesus Christ instructed his followers to do, instead of trying to keep others down so that they can feel better about their miserable selves.)

Today the homophobes suffered a significant defeat when federal Judge James Ware rejected their “argument” that another federal judge, the now-retired Vaughn Walker, should have recused himself from ruling on Proposition Hate – the anti-same-sex-marriage proposition that passed narrowly in California in November 2008 – because he has been in a long-term same-sex relationship himself.

Walker – who, like Ware, was appointed by the first President George Bush – correctly ruled last year that Prop Hate violates the protections granted to all Californians by the U.S. Constitution.*

(When judges who were appointed by Repugnican presidents are ruling against the haters, the haters’ days are numbered, methinks.)

As The Associated Press notes, today’s ruling that Walker had no reason or obligation to recuse himself from ruling on the matter of same-sex marriage “does not settle the legal fight over Proposition 8. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering whether Walker properly concluded that denying gays and lesbians the right to marry violates their rights to due process and equal protection.”

But the ruling does make it much more difficult for the homophobes to try to pick and choose the judges who hear their bullshit homophobic arguments.

To the “Christo”fascists and other assorted wingnuts, only conservative, heterosexual, “Christian” white male judges should be able to rule on anyfuckingthing. Indeed, in Ware’s ruling he noted that female and non-white judges historically have been accused of not being able to rule impartially in certain cases — a right-wing “argument” that the law rejects.

“The sole fact that a federal judge shares the same circumstances or personal characteristics with other members of the general public, and that the judge could be affected by the outcome of a proceeding in the same way that other members of the general public would be affected, is not a basis for either recusal or disqualification,” Ware wrote in his ruling.

Indeed, one easily could counter-argue that a heterosexually married (or perhaps even a heterosexual but single) judge should recuse him- or herself from ruling on same-sex marriage, but how far would that argument get?

Ironically, in their homophobic attacks on Walker, the pro-Prop Hate crowd only further proved that non-heterosexuals in the U.S. routinely face bigotry, hatred and discrimination – which is going to speed up, not slow down, the eventuality of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

But this fact apparently escaped the homophobic abject fucktards, who are capable only of stupidity, fear and hatred, not of reason.

–

Black homophobes still suck ass

Associated Press photo

“Comedian” Tracy Morgan, pictured in March, has apologized for having said some hateful things that you really can’t apologize for, not credibly, anyway.

Way back in 2005 I posted a piece titled “Black Homophobes Suck.”

Among other things in that piece (which I think you should read if you have the time), I wrote about how a so-called leader in the black community actually wrote in a letter to me that being gay or lesbian might be a choice or it might be a “birth defect” and closed the letter with, “Take care of yourself health wise,” an apparent reference to her apparent belief that all gay men must have HIV or must be just about to contract HIV, since all that being a gay man means is taking cock up the ass as often as possible.

Alas, little has changed since 2005.

In the news recently has been black “comedian” Tracy Morgan’s anti-gay rant during a recent stand-up performance that you can’t just apologize for.

According to an audience member, among many other things, such as suggesting the President Barack Obama has been as pro-gay as he has been only because he is pussy-whipped, Morgan stated that being gay or lesbian is a choice and that “if his son [were] gay he better come home and talk to him like a man … or he would pull out a knife and stab that little [nigger] to death.”

Morgan also reportedly made the unfunny, already-made (by comedian Carlos Mencia, long, long ago) “joke” that if gay men can take a dick, they can take a joke – ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

The audience member further stated that

The sad thing is that none of this rant was a joke. [Morgan's] entire demeanor changed during that portion of the night. He was truly filled with some hate towards us. As far as I could see, 10 to 15 people walked out. I had to fight myself to stay seated, but I knew if I got up … he won.

I understand where this man, the audience member, is coming from: When someone tells an anti-gay joke/“joke,” you can tell what kind of space it’s coming from, whether it’s truly a joke or whether it’s coming from a space of bigotry and hatred and meanness.

The routine of Carlos Mencia that I saw on television years ago that I just made reference to did not strike me as coming from a space of actual hatred of gays, so it did not repulse me. Similarly, some years ago, the creators of “South Park” created an episode in which a classroom gerbil named Lemmiwinks must save his own life after having been inserted into a gay man’s rectum, for fuck’s sake.

On the face of it, that’s pretty fucking homophobic and stereotypical (I am one gay man who knows of no other gay man who ever inserted a small mammal into his rectum), but the way in which the episode was done does not give me the impression that the creators of “South Park” actually are homophobic. Therefore, I was able to laugh at the episode, even if at least on the face of it it’s pretty fucking homophobic. (Anyone who truly believes that gerbils are a routine part of the gay man’s sexual repertoire probably is beyond help anyway, so I can’t even really knock the “South Park” creators for having put out a negative and damaging view of gay men, even if they aren’t homophobic themselves.)

Anyway, Tracy Morgan sounds like he’s as out of control as is his character on the NBC show “30 Rock,” and after his homophobic rant, I don’t think that I can watch that show anymore (I’ve watched several of the early episodes via the Internet, mainly because I love Tina Fey and a co-worker recommended the series to me).

I hope that NBC dumps Tracy Morgan. After all, any star of any major network show who made blatantly racist (or, say, anti-Semitic) remarks in seriousness should expect to get fired, so why not Morgan?

Also in the news, it recently was reported that U.S. Rep. Allen West, a black Repugnican whose district is in Florida, recently fired an intern for having sent an unauthorized pro-gay Tweet in response to Tracy Morgan’s homophobic rant. (I read the Tweet, and it seems to me that it could have been meant sarcastically, which actually would make it an anti-gay message, but whatever…)

The reportage of the firing of West’s intern notes that West has called same-sex marriage “an oxymoron.”

Gee, that’s nice. There was a time when pro-slavery white supremacists would have called the term “a free black man” an “oxymoron.” (Just as white supremacists might call being born black a “birth defect.”)

As long as your own freedoms and liberties and rights are secured, that’s all that fucking matters, right?

I wrote way back in 2005: “Black homophobes will attack injustice that affect them — racism — but fuck the rest of us minority groups. They don’t have a problem with oppression in general; they have a problem only with being oppressed themselves.”

Nothing has changed, has it?

Some have actually suggested that we non-heterosexuals visit with members of the black community to convince the homophobes within the black community that we are deserving of their approval or respect or the like.

I say: Fuck! That! Shit! We non-heterosexuals shouldn’t have to fucking grovel on our hands and knees for equal human and civil rights any more than blacks ever should have had to or should have to today.

We non-heterosexuals should boycott all black homophobes, just as we would boycott any other homophobe, regardless of his or her race. I, for one, won’t spend a penny on anything that has Tracy Morgan in it. (That won’t be hard to do, since Tina Fey, certainly not Morgan, is the creative genius behind “30 Rock,” and since Morgan isn’t, in my estimation, remarkably talented anyway.)

And I invite black homophobes to commit some introspection and to ask themselves why it’s so fucking important to them to be able to have one historically oppressed minority group that even they, also members of a historically oppressed minority group, can shit and piss upon – and whether or not this is moral.

–

Still not much to be proud of

It’s “gay pride” month, but the corporatization of the gay and lesbian “community” continues.

It’s interesting: While gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals) proclaim that they won’t take it from the heterosexists and the homophobes anymore, they’ll still gladly bend over for the corporations.

Memo to the gay and lesbian “community”: The corporations don’t love us.

In October 2009 I posted on my blog “An Open Letter to Joe Solmonese,” who is the president of the Human Rights Campaign, and I e-mailed a copy of the open letter to the HRC.

In the letter (which, I think, you should read, if you have a few minutes), among other things, I criticized the HRC for accepting corporate money from corporations that, while they might have pro-gay-and-lesbian-et.-al. policies (at least on paper), are harmful to human beings and to the planet.

In the fall 2009 issue of HRC’s membership magazine (titled Equality), I noted, I saw full-page ads for Chevron, Shell Oil, American Airlines and Citigroup — corporations that, respectively, are killing the planet with the continued production of fossil fuels, drastically underpay their employees (their pilots, in the case of American Airlines), and, as Wall Street weasels, are partially responsible for the Wall Street meltdown that has tanked our nation’s economy.

I seem to remember getting some e-mail reply from HRC — not from Joe, of course, but from some lackey – stating that HRC supports those corporations that at least pay lip service to being pro-gay-and-lesbian (my words, not hers), and that if I have a problem with this, then I can have my subscription to Equality canceled.

I didn’t ask to have my subscription canceled, thinking that it would just run itself out, but I’m still getting the magazine even though I stopped giving HRC money a long time ago, disgusted by its corporate ass-licking and its selling out of the gay and lesbian community to the fucking corporations.

Nothing has fucking changed, because in the current (spring 2011) issue of HRC’s Equality is a full-page ad for — wait for it — that paragon of corporate responsibility — keep waiting for it — drum roll, please! — British Petroleum!

Yes, my non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming brethren and sistren, BP loves us!

(Along with the full-page ad for British Petroleum in the current issue of Equality are full-page ads for Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Chase, Chevron and Deloitte, all banking fraudsters, planet destroyers and Wall Street weasels. And American Airlines has another full-page ad.)

Not just to pick on HRC.

Locally, Sacramento’s annual gay pride festival earlier this month for the first time ever got rained out, which, naturally, resulted in low attendance, and the organizers of the festival subsequently actually apparently unashamedly and unabashedly sent out a fundraising e-mail asking people to just fork over $40-something because the festival didn’t recoup its costs this year (and they calculated that the average person would have spent $40-something at the festival were it not for the rain).

Well, the festival was held two weeks earlier this year than it was last year, increasing the chances of rain, it seems to me, but that aside, the fundraising e-mail actually read: “Pride 2011 was always going to be different for many reasons. Our corporate sponsorship support was the highest ever, with over two dozen sponsors this year. We invested in more marketing and promotion to hit the far reaches of our area to bring as many LGBT people and our supporters to [Sacramento] on June 4th….”

The first thing that the e-mail lists is the “highest-ever” “corporate sponsorship.”

Why has the gay and lesbian “community” become so fucking dependent upon corporate sponsorship over the years?

Can we not do anything on our own without corporate handouts, for which there are always strings attached?

Is bigger always better? Do we have to do everything huge? Is a huge amount of money necessary for every endeavor? Can nothing be home-grown? (Ironically, it seems to me, if the organizers of the rained-out Sacramento gay pride festival hadn’t focused on making the event so huge, the rain-related losses wouldn’t have been as huge. The bigger things are, the harder they fall.)

Anyway, I replied to the shameless fundraising e-mail with this: “Maybe the Rain Goddess was pissed off over that record-level corporate sponsorship, the selling out of the LGBT community to profits-over-people corporations by the same people who claim to care about and to be helping the LGBT community. Just sayin.’”**

(Unsurprisingly, I haven’t received a response to my response, and no, I don’t claim that I always play along nicely with the other kiddies in the sandbox…)

This gay pride month, if it were up to me, the gay and lesbian “community” would ponder this question: How are we of the gay and lesbian (and bisexual and transgendered and…) “community” doing ourselves a favor by fighting for equal human and civil rights for all non-heterosexuals (and for all non-gender-conforming individuals) while further enslaving ourselves and others to our corporate overlords, who have only their profits, not our best interests, at heart?

But I’m not queen just yet…

–

*In his ruling, Walker concluded:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis [emphasis mine] in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Indeed, that you just don’t like a whole class of people is not sufficient cause to deny this class of people equal human and civil rights as guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution.

**Not even to pick only on the gay and lesbian “community” in Sacramento — other festivals in Sacramento have been ruined by a corporate omnipresence, such as a recent festival for Asians and Pacific islanders here in Sacramento that I recently attended at which McDonald’s and Wells Fargo had prominent presences. (Indeed, McDonald’s provided the only place to sit down to eat — provided that you were eating McDonald’s, of course, because I don’t know about you, when I think of Asian and Pacific islander food, I immediately think of McDonald’s.)

Bumbling Brewer belongs behind bars

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a geriatric Barbie, is shown before the start of her first and last disastrous gubernatorial debate Wednesday night in Phoenix. Brewer’s speaking skills aren’t her worst crime, however; she very apparently has corrupt ties to the private prison industry, and the “breathing-while-brown” bill that she signed apparently was meant to send more business the private prison industry’s way.

Dorothy must have thrown some water on the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, Repugnican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, because Brewer had a meltdown on live television.

I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed watching, over and over again, the clip of Brewer freezing on live TV as she delivered her opening statement in her debate Wednesday night with her Democratic challenger Terry Goddard (who now is Arizona’s attorney general) like a nervous elementary school child delivering a book report.

Brewer’s word choice in the debate was as sophisticated as an elementary school child’s, too. This is how she opened before having a painfully long Alzheimer’s moment of silence in which she appeared not to even be able to remember her own name: “I have, uh, [long pause] done so much, and I just cannot believe that we have changed everything since I have become your governor in the last 600 days. Arizona has been brought back from its abyss….”

Yikes.

“We have changed everything”? “Arizona has been brought back from its abyss”?

Really?

The rest of the nation is still reeling from the devastation wrought not only by Hurricane Katrina but also by Hurricane George and Hurricane Dick, but under the governance of the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, Arizona is a magical oasis that has been “brought back from its abyss”?

What about Brewer’s other talking point, which is that the “illegals” have put Arizona into an abyss? Is Arizona in an abyss or has Brewer rescued it from an abyss? Which is it?

Brewer clearly isn’t fit to be governor even of Alaska. Her performance at her first and apparently final debate isn’t her only meltdown caught on tape. Rachel Maddow’s reportage of Brewer’s debate meltdown shows that Brewer struggles to speak coherently in public and that when confronted with questions from reporters who don’t lick her lily-white ass, like good reporters should, Brewer bolts like Nevada’s Sharron “Second Amendment Remedies” Angle.

And after her debacle of a debate performance, Brewer has refused to participate in any more debates from now until election day. (Her Democratic opponent has proposed that they have six debates.)

Yeah, that’s the fearless leadership that’s going to bring Arizona out of “its abyss” (or already has brought Arizona out of “its abyss” – I’m so confused…). What Arizona really needs now is an easily addled old woman who believes (as Sharron Angle believes) that the media’s job is to give her free positive publicity.

Years ago, as a reporter for the student newspaper at the University of Arizona in Tucson, I interviewed at some length Brewer’s Democratic opponent, Terry Goddard, who at that time had just been the mayor of Phoenix and was running for the governorship against Repugnican Richie-Rich frat boy Fife Symington III, who went on to beat Goddard but who later was forced to resign the governorship in disgrace after he was convicted of bank fraud in 1997.

I remember virtually nothing of my interview with Goddard (it was, after all, 20 years ago, and I don’t have a copy of the article that I wrote from that interview), but I remember being impressed with how intelligent and well-spoken — and thus virtually gubernatorially unelectable in Arizona — Goddard is.  

Seriously, though: intelligent, competent, honest politicians like Goddard don’t do very well in Arizona. Arizonans prefer crooked dumbfucks like racist Mormon motherfucker Repugnican dipshit Evan Mecham, the state’s first governor to be impeached and removed from office (under a cloud of financial fraud); the felonious Fife Symington III; and Jan Alzheimer — er, Jan Brewer, whose centerpiece for her campaign for the governorship (to which she ascended after Arizona’s elected Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, was tapped to become President Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security) has been to assert that all of the state’s problems are caused by undocumented immigrants (mostly from Mexico) — even though a new study from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that illegal immigration to the United States between 2007 and 2009 was about two-thirds less than it was between 2000 and 2005. So illegal immigration is declining, not increasing.

There’s also the interesting angle that Brewer’s campaign manager, Chuck Coughlin, also does the public relations for the Tennessee-based private prisons corporation Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) – which apparently has stood to profit from SB 1070, which the Phoenix New Times appropriately called the “breathing-while-brown” law that the racist, white supremacist Brewer enthusiastically signed into law – and that a federal judge then appropriately struck down as unconstitutional.*

“What’s the big deal with the CCA contributions [to Brewer's political interests]?” the New Times asks and then answers: “CCA operates six prisons in Arizona, three of which house detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

So apparently CCA helps Jan Brewer and Jan Brewer helps CCA by assuring that CCA has plenty of brown-skinned bodies to be incarcerated in its private prison facilities.

(Rachel Maddow also has been reporting on Brewer’s apparently corrupt ties to CCA; she did an excellent report on the matter here.)

Jan Brewer belongs not in the governor’s chair, but belongs behind bars for corruption, even though she only dutifully corruptly follows in the corrupt footsteps of her corrupt Repugnican (redundant…) predecessors Evan Mecham and Fife Symington III.

Even if she weren’t corrupt and racist and white supremacist, Brewer’s refusal to participate in any more debates demonstrates that she is utterly unfit to continue to govern Arizona, which she has made into a national pariah enough already.

P.S. I just saw this at the Arizona Republic’s website:

As for that opening statement, Brewer said in an interview [yesterday] that her mind went blank. “If someone had asked me my name, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them,” she said.

Shit, I was just joking (for the most part) when I referred to Brewer’s “painfully long Alzheimer’s moment of silence in which she appeared not to even be able to remember her own name.”

Apparently, according to Jan “What’s My Name?” Brewer herself, it was no joke.

If Arizonans actually elect this Alzheimer’s special, they’re even dumber that we of the rest of the nation already think they are.

–

*In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times reports:

The U.S. Department of Justice [yesterday] sued a controversial and popular Arizona sheriff, alleging that his department was refusing to cooperate with an investigation into whether it discriminated against Latinos while trying to catch illegal immigrants.

The Justice Department said that Maricopa County [which encompasses Phoenix and is not on the border with Mexico] Sheriff Joe Arpaio was the first local law enforcement official in 30 years to refuse to provide documents in a federal civil rights inquiry. The federal government could withhold $113 million in funding from Maricopa County if Arpaio can’t produce records demonstrating that he avoids racial discrimination.

“The actions of the sheriff’s office are unprecedented. It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division…

Arpaio claims that the Obama administration is playing politics, of course, but the L.A. Times also notes that

In the summer of 2008, under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department launched a preliminary investigation into the allegations of racial profiling [by Arpaio's office]. In March 2009, after President Obama had assumed office, the department expanded the inquiry into a full-fledged probe.

What the white supremacists who run Arizona (Brewer, Arpaio, et. al.) – and their white supremacist supporters — apparently don’t get is that each state has to follow federal law, including the federal civil rights laws, and so that Arizona doesn’t get to be the South Africa of the Southwest.

Arpaio, I have to say, is a major racist, fascistic asshole who deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of white supremacist history along with Jan Brewer.

I hate Muslims, but I don’t know any

Wrapping themselves in the American flag and in the Shroud of Turin, day by day the members of the radical right, most of them members of the Repugnican Tea Party, drag us closer and closer to “Christo”fascism.

Americans — thanks mostly to the tireless propaganda of “Christo”fascists and members of the Israel-first lobby (a.k.a. Zionists) – don’t like Muslims.

Forty-six percent of Americans believe that Muslims are more likely to encourage violence against non-believers than members of other religions are.

Forty-six percent of Americans believe that American Muslims aren’t patriotic or they’re not sure whether or not they’re patriotic.

Fuck freedom of religion — more than 60 percent of Americans believe that American Muslims should not be allowed to establish a Muslim center near the former site of the World Trade Center.

And more than 60 percent of Americans say that they don’t even know any Muslims. But that sure the fuck doesn’t stop them from having a negative opinion of Muslims.

It has been a long-standing American principle that there should be no religious test to hold public office, yet the White House apparently felt enough political pressure to announce today that President Barack Obama is a Christian who prays every day.

It’s a sad, sad day when the president of the United States of America has to assure the lynch mob for Jesus that he’s one of them.

But hey, how do we know that Obama is a Christian?

Maybe we should put him in a big vat of water. Only if he sinks will we know that he’s a Christian and not, say, a Muslim witch!

It’s true that the balls-less Obama administration is always caving in to the radical right, but it’s also a sign of how far the United States of America has fallen that Obama’s handlers should have felt the political pressure to announce that he indeed is a Christian. Who prays every day.

As I just wrote, it doesn’t matter whether he’s a Christian or not.

Speaking of public pronouncements of one’s Christianity, Jesus Christ Himself said (Matthew 6:5-6:6):

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward already.

“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

To me, there is no other way to interpret this instruction other than that Jesus Christ Himself asserted that spirituality is a private, individual thing — not something to be paraded publicly so that others will think that one is such an upright, pious person.

But Jesus’ actual teachings never stop those who claim to be His followers.

You know, I would love a Christian. I just don’t know any Christians, if we define a Christian as one who actually follows Jesus’ teachings.

Here we have the members of the Repugnican Tea Party and other assorted wingnuts claiming to be Christian when they in fact are anti-Christian, and they are beating up on Muslims for political gain (even though most of them don’t even know a single Muslim). Yeah, that’s exactly what Jesus stood for.

Even Disneyland is in on the Muslim-bashing, not allowing a Muslim employee to wear her hijab (head scarf) while in view of customers.

DisneyCorp told the woman she could wear only a hijab designed by Disney, but has yet to produce this special hijab. (Presumably, it’s not just a hijab with mouse ears attached to it…) 

Horrors should good little lily-white American “Christian” spawn learn tolerance of appreciation for other cultures! We can’t have that!

(I, for one, won’t set foot in the “magic kingdom” until and unless it embraces diversity. Fuck DisneyCorp.)

As it sank into fascism, Germany persecuted Jews.

As the United States of America sinks into fascism, it persecutes Muslims. And “anchor babies.” And non-heterosexuals. And…

God bless America.

It sure fucking needs it.

P.S. Interestingly, respondents to the nationwide poll taken this week by TIME magazine that I referenced above also were asked, “What if the following religious groups proposed building a community center and place of worship two blocks from your home — would you favor or oppose it?”

Seventy-eight percent said they’d be OK with a Catholic establishment, 73 percent said they’d be OK with a Jewish establishment, 65 percent said they’d be OK with a Mormon establishment, and only 55 percent said they’d be OK with a Muslim establishment.