I realized I am Gay at about the age of 12. I’m 63. So that means for the last 51 years I have awakened everyday to a world and a country that has blatantly discriminated against me because it believes it’s heterosexual! Because it believes heterosexuality to be superior! Every single day of my adult life I have had multiple experiences that have demeaned me, either psychologically or physically. I am forced to wear that abuse because it has penetrated right down to the molecular level of my being! Even as a conscious critical thinking human being, I am unable to escape the effect that prejudice and hatred has on personal self-esteem. When I understand that the core of the prejudice against me has grown out of religious inspired intolerance of “difference,” I realize, all too well what I am up against.
Now we must wait for the bigots to decide if they will appeal the decision of the 9th Circuit. We do not wait because they think they have legal standing! We wait because in their hateful hearts they know they can use the system to abuse us a little longer. We wait because they are allowed to falsely carry the banner of Christianity, because too many loving Christians remain silent, afraid to criticize “their own.”
Others will counsel me to be patient, but I have run out of patience! They should be the ones who have to wait. Marriages should be resumed today! But that’s not how it works. Because in this country that was founded by people who came across an ocean to escape religious persecution, religion is so intertwined throughout every aspect of our culture, it is like a snake choking off our freedom and our self-determination. We are expected to tiptoe around in the slimy notion that anyone who claims to believe in God can rise against anyone else they disagree with without consequence!
And there grows the silence of so many who refuse to call a bigot a bigot, to call hatred, hatred. And so we continue to suffer from the inaction of those who sit on the fence to protect their asses, just in case God really is as hateful and vengeful as many of those who claim to follow him!
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WorkingSlob
skypixie0
LuminousMuse
Patrick Frank
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Nah, God is just a pissed off old man who likes to mess with people, both sides of the fence!! He really likes to mess with those on the middle, so might as well jump on either side!! ~:D
Rated!
I love it when these people in the Religious Connection like to speak for me and say "it'll break up heterosexual marriages if gays and lesbians are allowed to marry!" Huh? It will? Oh noze!!! My marriage to my wife will be ruined if you are allow to marry and have the same rights!!! OH NOZE AGAIN!! ~flees into the thorn bushes~
(Just kidding...my marriage was ruined when I said I do!! ;D)
Good for you; call it what it is.
r./
rated with love
And just wait 'til you see my piece tomorrow morning abt US Church complicity in the Ugandan so-called 'Kill the Gays' bill now in its parliament.
RATED.
For the great majority of us, sex is private, but connections are public. I am openly heterosexual every day of my life, just by saying "my husband went to the store to get milk and bread," or "my in-laws went on a cruise."
There's no reason on Earth why homosexual people shouldn't be able to be so public with their connections to the ones they love.
People can be so blinded by religion they can't even conceive of a different point of view. To them, it's not hate if God tells them it's the right thing to do. And I know from experience there is no changing the minds or hearts of many of them.
I honestly don't understand why anybody would think that allowing gay marriage would harm anyone. But then, I've always believed "live and let live" - as long as what you're doing doesn't hurt anyone, it's nobody's business but your own. *shrug*
Anyway, meantime, I thought California had this big money crunch...but they can spend money on stupid court cases. As others have said, how can it affect straight marriages if gay people marry? The U.S. is so reactionary in so many ways. We have same-sex marriage here in Canada and so far the straight people have been totally unaffected... (sarcasm).
Incidentally, for those disillusioned by Obama, he does appoint good Supreme Court justices. If only for this reason, people should get out and vote for him.
The guy who approved the ad added insult to injury by saying the ad was a "compliment" to Asians because it had a Chinese woman speaking English in it.
Straight face. Totally serious.
THAT is the climate in which we live today.
Nothing surprises me anymore. But a lot saddens me, still.
The whole Prop 8 issue is one of those things. We're trying soooo hard to march backwards to the pre-Civil Rights era that it scares me.
Brotha...the daily slights you mentioned...I hear and feel ya'. But most of all, I love ya'.
Preach on.
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____♫♥ Happiness ♥♫
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or that restoring the right of religiously minded schoolkids to have a moments silence for the lords prayer won't cause a similar eruption of hatred among the rabid atheists?
everybody trying to maximize their own little piece of hell is the problem.
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Lezlie
That is exactly why I want every couple on my block to have the ability to get married if/when they are willing and able to make that committment. IMHO Marriage makes us all stronger. I thought that was a personal choice until all this "Prop Hate" meshegas came up.
On a lighter note, I haven't been invited or hired to play at a single wedding since the "Stay" was put in place. Things have been very tough in CA the last few years, and, Dammit, we need a reason for a good party.
But you touch on a point few have made. We all know religion of the worst kind is at the bottom of this. Indeed, this is not abut marriage at all but an end-run around Jefferson’s “wall of separation.’ It’s really all about foisting religious beliefs into the law and public policy. The pretext of marriage fool no one. How to you take down a wall? Remove just one stone then all the rest will follow. So, you are right again. If they win on this issue that will give them fuel to further impose one brand of religiosity on law and public policy. Others will be next. But they will not prevail. They will not win. It’s too late. They lost this war a long time ago. This is just all part of the long and arduous cleaning up process.
B ut it moves far too slow. Unfortunately, while our propagandists have done a good job of changing hearts and minds (just look at the shift in public opinion) they have not done a very good job at educating the community in terms of our rudimentary bedrock legal principals. This really is first year law school stuff and a legal no-brainier. Unfortunately (though I do admire him) President Obama’s politicking has only contributed to ignorance where, as a so-called “civil rights lawyer,” he has a duty to educate and not pander. Years hence this never refuted Op. Ed. from San Francisco gay paper lays out the legal dynamic beautifully. See “Untangling Barack Obama's audacious mumbo jumbo” at http://ebar.com/common/inc/article_print.php?sec=guest_op&article=73
Indeed, I suspect a SCOTUS hearing is being deliberately and cynically delayed until Obama gets a second term and can make at least one more appointment to the court to shift the balance. But, as I and others have pointed out, that is really not necessary and, SCOUTS being bound by stare decisis, we’d likely win if we went to court tomorrow.
Patience? Humbug! Larry Kramer agrees with you that this has dragged out far too long. The LGBT leadership has just been too chicken-shit. “Where is the outrage?! So what! If you loose you just go back. What the fuck are you afraid of?” He was referring to the fact that the time between Hawaii and now is far greater than the time between Bowers v. Hardwick to Lawrence v. Texas.
Of course, the AIDS pandemic, having taken-out or worn-out all the REAL shit-kicking activists, we are left with a rather gutless younger generation whose idea of ‘activism’ is to break a finger-nail or scuff a Gucci shoe clawing for a place in line for a photo op at white house cocktail party. As they toast to Stonewall the sad fact is that those drag queens had fare more cajones than the vast majority of today’s so-called gay activists.
Like you, I ran out or patience a long time ago. Activism in the LGBT community is virtually nil. Still, I do salute our propagandists and our magnificent lawyers but we expect too much of them when we eschew personal responsibility and retreat to complacency. We leave them to fight alone and our part is more than a beer-bust jock-strap legal fund-raiser action for tickets to Disneyland. We have no leadership. Harvey Milk should be less revered and more emulated. I suspect he’d feel disgraced to witnesses the accolades in his name as the ‘activists’ toast his name only to retreat into complacency and not carry on his legacy.
The miserably failed Equality California was and remains incompetent, shallow, vapid and ineffective. And they squandered many millions of dollars on the most stupid rubbish imaginable. It is now deservedly irrelevant. It actually did more harm than good. Instead of taking the fight to the parts of California where dialogue was needed they pranced about the Castro preaching to the choir and their pathetic activism could not even muster sufficient signatures to put a repeal of Prop 8 on the ballot. Millions and millions of dollars!. An accounting? Fuggetaboutit. This is not activism but a public relations clearing house for careerists too gutless to stick their necks out.
We should be out in the streets in force all across America, picketing and shaming the churches, and resorting to all the ‘unproductive’ in-your-face activism that actually changed the face of the AIDS pandemic. Unfortunately this LGBT generation lacks cajones, is devoid of leadership, and just doesn’t get it.
Many in the community still snark at Kramer. Fine, he invited it; but at the very least they should have the decency to preface their criticisms with thanks and a salute for the many thousands of lives he saved by NOT being nice.
As the Bay Area’s beloved Jessica Mitford once said, "You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty." Kramer, shamed, mocked, and humiliated them. No one escaped his pen warmed up in hell. His enemies trembled. His contribution is immeasurable. His work, his voice, should ring like Colson’s soliloquy in Ragtime. No one else made the world hear like Kramer did.
The problem is that most in the community today (who have no desire to marry) don’t really realize the magnitude of the threat if marriage is used to pull the keystone from Jefferson’s proverbial wall. Indeed you are right, “You are next.” They just don’t get the insidious nature of it all. I submit that Sam Harris is correct: when religious moderates on the left ‘tolerate’ intolerance and fail to speak up they are part of the problem and are complicit. It’s not just capitulation but collaboration.
Yet when President Obama wants to require religious institutions to provide full health care for women (“You are next” indeed!) they cry “freedom of religion” and Sentorum calls Obama a Jacobean Robespierre? What balderdash! Ah yes, the familiar cry of ignmorants, “C'est la faute a Voltaire! Cest la faute a Rousseau!" Blame it all on the Enlightenment. Ah yes, the freedom to impose a woman’s death sentence? One more example of Hitchens’ famous indictment. What poisonous rubbish. The fact that a politician can even think he can get away with that claptrap is a perfect example of Hitchens’ wonderful essay “Goodbye to all that: Why Americans are not taught history.” You see, the Rev. Wright was right and not such a crackpot after all. The government knows that if it wants to retain control, “You gotta keep the people ignorant.”
Frankly I love it when they overstep their bounds and I hope they keep on overreaching into the lives of others for only then will we see blowback. America has had enough of this phoney religiosity. How absolutely and bitterly ironic that America, the “most religious nation in the world” is hocked to the gills by a nation that forbids religion. Lenin’s proverbial rope by which the capitalists will infamously hang themselves will be labeled ‘Made in China.”
To the bigots who still persecute their children I think of the lines from Kramer’s screenplay of “Women in Love” where the father, ossified by orthodoxy, tells his daughter, “You can’t do this! I won’t permit it.” To which she nonchalantly replies, “Sure I can. Because someday I’ll be alive and you will be dead.”
My parents, however, cautioned me against laughing. Many jokes on one side of my family were directed at the immigrant group on the other side. Also, I played sports with blacks and Hispanics. Additionally, my mother told me at age 11 that she did not like the use of the word "gay" that I seemed to have picked up at school. People very close to me, she told me, would also be very disappointed.
Spirit, you are right: it is a daily assault. I think it was in graduate school many years ago that I finally decided that jokes at the expense of any oppressed group were no longer funny. I am only sorry it took me so long, and I am twice as sorry that I am virtually powerless to bring about the same change of heart in others.
The third paragraph of your post truly hit home with me. Relatives on both sides of my family have come out in recent years, and it took a lot of courage for them to do so. Isn't it funny that I never had to have courage to love women and bring them to meet the family? Isn't it unfair that I never had to fight for my right to get married?
My dear aunties in Connecticut were finally married a few years ago after more than 20 years together. I am so thankful for the perspective that they have shared with me, and I lament with them and you the fact that some bonds are favored over others. We may as a society arrive one day at a just way of formally recognizing the love between people, but that day cannot come soon enough for me.