Prometheus Unbound

Dan Savage is absolutely brilliant here. It’s straight people, not gay people, who have progressively redefined marriage, liberalizing it through history, and now gay people are saying: Hey! What straight people have turned marriage into, we want too. Clear and simple:

A man asks another man to marry him during a city council hearing!:

My response:

For gay equality in Maine, a good focusing question:

George Takei (Lt. Sulu of Star Trek fame) and his partner went on the Newlywed Game this week!

Come out, stay out, speak out.

You know that there’s an atheist community, and a gay community, and a lesbian community, and an Italian-American community. But did you also know that there is a Bigfoot community? Look and listen:

Spock and Captain Kirk? Really?

An amusing mash-up here.

Last week Keith Olbermann went after the anonymous atheist who donated $10,000 to the atheist bus ad campaign in New York, giving the anonymous donor the bronze for June 29th’s “Worst Persons in the World” segment:

Tonight’s worst persons in the world. The bronze: To the person who donated the scratch for ten thousand dollars worth of ads on the sides of buses in New York City, promoting atheism. They read, “You don’t have to believe in God to be a moral or ethical person.” The hope, from president Ken Bronstein of the group NYC Atheists, is to get people to stop hiding their non-belief — to stop hiding it. No complaint about the message — however, while Bronstein says, “We want to get atheists to come join us, to get out of the closet,” unfortunately the donor who made the ads possible is keeping his identity anonymous!

Notice that Olbermann did not attack atheism as such, but the idea that a person might hypocritically invite people into a movement for which he (or she) is obviously ashamed to have his (or her) name associated with. I think that is a fair critique. If you want others to get on the atheist bus, the least that you can do is not wear a paper bag over your head as you wave and shout atheist slogans from your atheist bus window. It’s hardly a profile in courage.

The same goes for those wealthy individuals who were outraged that their bigoted large-sum financial donations for Proposition 8 (the anti-gay rights bill in California) were made public. If you want to enter the political or religious arena of discourse, you should go in unmasked.

Pinch me.

We are living in the 21st century, right?

1. They’re everywhere. Andrew Sullivan and his husband find themselves walking in the background of a famous heterosexual couple’s photograph . . . more
2. Slate deconstructs the conservative Republican War on Empathy . . . more
3. Camille Paglia worries about the obsessive and inflamatory Obama rhetoric daily consuming conservative Shout Radio . . . more

This today in Time magazine:

[A] new Gallup poll finds that most conservatives — 58% — now support openly gay people serving in uniform (nationally, 69% support the change; when Clinton assumed office, a Gallup poll found 53% of those polled opposed lifting the ban). Perhaps even more surprising, 58% of self-described Republicans, and 60% of weekly churchgoers, also support gay men and women serving openly in uniform. “While the Administration to date has not taken action on the issue,” the polling firm reported last Friday, “the Gallup Poll data indicate that the public-opinion environment favors such a move.”

Barack Obama simply doesn’t pray or torture enough for the folks at FOX News. If Obama would just pray and torture more, we would have back the America we all know and love!

On FOX News today is a truly noxious discussion of “prayer” that seeks to make public displays of religiosity a test of a politician’s moral bearings. Not ending torture, mind you, but praying in public:

Not that I’m all that keen on quoting Jesus, but here’s something that he supposedly said when he was alive (from the sixth chapter of Matthew, verses 5-8):

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

I don’t like Jesus’s sexist designation of God as a “father,” nor his creepy blanket dismissiveness of Jews and pagans as the evil “others” who don’t do religious things “right,” but his point would seem to contra-indicate the practice of public prayer for those who call themselves “Christian.” Of course, under cover of defaming Obama, and not from any real concern for prayer or moral behavior (such as not torturing people), the FOX News crew is simply scoring points for their right-wing “team,” and framing it in faux pious terms. And it is truly nauseating to watch the Barbie-girl—who obviously spent more time on her hair and make-up this morning than on her knees—feign earnestly about Obama’s blasphemous and anti-American presidency.

When will Jesus come again and clear the FOX News temple with a whip?

Or would that be torture?

So according to Access Hollywood:

David Ogden Stiers, the actor who is best known for playing Major Charles Winchester on TV’s “M*A*S*H,” has come out.

“I am [gay],” the 66-year-old actor said in an interview with the blog Gossip-Boy.com. “Very proud to be so.”

And he says that he stayed closeted for a long time because he does voices for Disney—and Disney, of course, didn’t want to deal with the public relations fallout and fundamentalist sniping.

But he’s out now.

Should gay people do Disney voices—or is there something wrong with that?

Where is President Obama on this?

According to Rachel Maddow today, Lt. Dan Choi recently received a dismissal letter from the military for coming out as gay. Here’s a segment from Maddow’s show in which Choi publicly declared his sexual orientation:

Kicking people out of the military because they are gay is so 1990s. It’s now 2009, and this simply has to stop. President Obama can stop it. Let’s see if he does.

1. Commentary claims journalist I.F. Stone was a spy for Stalin from 1936-1938 . . . more
2. The New York Times says big screen e-readers, such as the new larger version of the Kindle, might save the publishing industry, and transform the college textbook industry . . . more
3. In an interview with Christianity Today, Joe the Plumber talks some bigoted shit about gays, calling them queers, and saying that he, of course, would never let them around his children . . . more
4. Tattoo artist Scott Campbell turns stacks of dollar bills into art by laser cutting. The Virgin Mary dollar image is especially beguiling . . . more
5. In 1831, French poet Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine dreamed of blogging . . . more  

Andrew Sullivan has been talking about this. Iraqi Shiite’s have been targeting gays. And it’s almost too apalling to report, but this today in Gay City News:

As the murder campaign targeting Iraqi gays intensifies, a leading Arabic television network last week revealed the use of a horrifying new form of lethal torture against Iraqi gay men – anti-gay Shiite death squads are sealing their anuses with a powerful glue, then inducing diarrhea, which leads to a painful and agonizing death. The use of this stomach-turning new torture was first reported by the Al Arabiya network, which is headquartered in the United Arab Emirates and was alerted to the story by a leading Iraqi feminist and human rights activist.

Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), told Al Arabiya that the torture substance “is an Iranian-manufactured glue that, if applied to the skin, sticks to it and can only be removed by surgery. After they glue the anuses of homosexuals, they give them a drink that causes diarrhea. Since the anus is closed, the diarrhea causes death. Videos of this form of torture are being distributed on mobile telephones in Iraq.”

I am a strong supporter of gay marriage, but I think that the below story is an outrageous violation, by authorities in New Mexico, of conscientious religious objection.

According to the Associated Press this weekend:

A professional photographer who refused to take pictures of a gay couple’s commitment ceremony because of her religious beliefs violated New Mexico discrimination law, a human rights panel ruled. Vanessa Willock filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission in 2006, contending that Albuquerque photographer Elaine Huguenin told her she photographed only traditional marriages. Huguenin and her husband, Jon, own Elane Photography.

And the commision’s reasoning for its ruling? Again, according to AP:

The commission viewed Huguenin’s business as a public accommodation, similar to a restaurant or a store.

A lower court has sided with the commission, generating an appeals process. I hope, as a gay marriage supporter, that this commission’s infringement on the conscience of a photographer is quickly overturned. It is not good for the gay rights movement to be seen as forcing religious people to participate in gay gatherings or civil union ceremonies, and it is not good for civil liberties and the protection of conscience. The right to non-participation and conscientious objection must be vigilantly safeguarded in a free society. It is one thing to tell religious people that they must not interfere with the freedoms and equal treatment of gay people under the law, but it is another thing entirely to force religious people to associate themselves with activities or functions that they regard as morally objectionable. Hopefully the State would never step in and require religious photographers to participate in a pornography convention or an atheist convention against their will, and so the State should likewise not be forcing photographers to participate in gay gatherings against their will.

A methodical dismantling of anti-gay marriage claims and their disingenuous supports:

Yes, there are real monsters in the world.

This today in the Guardian:

A young couple who tried to elope in one of the most lawless and conservative parts of Afghanistan have been publicly executed by Taliban gunmen after their parents handed them over to be tried by insurgents.

Officials from the south-western province of Nimroz say Gul Pecha, in her late teens, and her boyfriend Abdul Aziz, 21, were shot by a firing squad outside a mosque in their home village of Lokhi on Monday.

The couple had fled to a nearby village and were planning to start a life together without the permission of their parents, according to the province’s police chief Abdul Jabar Pardeli.

But they were found by their parents and turned over to the Taliban, who held them for four days in Lokhi’s mosque before putting them on trial.

Can you imagine the icy chilliness of these religious fanatics, keeping two young people WHO LOVE EACH OTHER from marriage because they aren’t doing it according to tradition and THE BOOK (in this case, the Koran)!

Oh, wait. We have fundamentalists in our country who, with similar icy rectitude, don’t let people marry here because a holy book forbids it (the Bible).

The young people above were murdered for their love, but if there is a difference between their love, and its denial by fundamentalists, and an American gay couple’s love, and its denial by fundamentalists, it is only a matter of degree, and not of kind. And make no mistake, there are many Americans who would support the death penalty for homosexuality.

Back in Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s Orthodox Jewish days, she was very obnoxious toward gay people, making snarky statements about them. But since she stopped declaring herself a practicing Orthodox Jew, she seems to have mellowed considerably toward the gay community. Recently, on Larry King’s program, she stopped just short of endorsing gay marriage:

SCHLESSINGER: I still believe, as just every president has, and all the people who ran for office, that marriage is a sacrament between a man and a woman. So not calling it marriage works for me. But that two people would have that sort of commitment to me is very healthy and very positive thing in their lives and society as a whole.

KING: So, you favor marriage between a man and a woman, but you applaud the fact that even people of the same-sex can have that kind of commitment to each other.

SCHLESSINGER: That’s a beautiful thing and a healthy thing.

Groovy kudos to Dr. Laura for her support of gay relationships.