Happy Grillers in the Mist Day

Dequick Debunk

As if the self congratulatory screed that is the DL Fister Show needs yet one more example of how far removed from reality the author is, he has an entry relating his triumphant return from Washington, D.C. where he campaigned for the Federal Marriage Amendment. He's fairly brimming with excitement when he writes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, liberals are convinced that they have once again beat back the advancing hordes of 'conservative homophobes'. Whatever."







"Even though I'm ex-gay I still like a finger up my ass during sex."





Whatever indeed. The "pastor" is much more interested in the souvenirs that he brought back. Like a renewed sense of outrage over gay rights which he's afraid besmirches the reputation of other civil rights movements, "like a drag version of civil rights." Something he has in common with LaShawn the Barbarian who recently wrote in a comment on her blog, "As black person, it offends me when homosexuals try to use our fight to be treated as first class citizens to argue that perversion is also a civil right. It’s nauseating, actually."

Bad Reporter by Don Asmussen


The shiny bauble that DL holds so dear is a piece written for the Weakly Standard that he calls a "blistering deconstruct" of gay rights as civil rights. There's only one teensy small problem with it. A large part of the argument hinges on the canard that "the claim that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman constitutes discrimination is based on a false analogy with statutory prohibitions on interracial marriages in many states through much of the 20th century." As I showed a few months back, not only do gay marriage advocates draw this connection, but it is also recognized by those arguing for traditonal marriage. Here's a brief recap from the marriage case argued in New Jersey:

Justice Virginia Long: "Why is that an interest? The interest in maintaining marriage 'as it has been'?"

Patrick DeAlmeida: "Because it is such a fundamental institution in society that it is a reasonable thing that the legislature not change it radically. There are some things that make up our society that are so fundamental that a change in them is something that belongs to the elected representatives of the people."

Justice Barry T. Albin: "Didn't Virginia argue that in the Loving case? When they tried to support banning interracial marriage -- in fact criminalizing them?"

DeAlmeida: "They did."

DL may not have brought home an STD as a memento of his trip, but that certainly would have been preferable to what he did bring back. A "brilliant" paper by Dr. John Diggs called "The Health Risks of Gay Sex," in which the "doctor" draws inappropriate and inacurate conclusions. But don't take my word for it. The authors of the Vancouver study cited in Diggs's paper had a public rebuke for those who would misuse the information.

Over the past few months we have learnt of a number of reports regarding a paper we published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on the gay and bisexual life expectancy in Vancouver in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From these reports it appears that our research is being used by select groups in US and Finland to suggest that gay and bisexual men live an unhealthy lifestyle that is destructive to themselves and to others. These homophobic groups appear more interested in restricting the human rights of gay and bisexuals rather than promoting their health and well being.

[...]

It is essential to note that the life expectancy of any population is a descriptive and not a prescriptive measure. Death is a product of the way a person lives and what physical and environmental hazards he or she faces everyday. It cannot be attributed solely to their sexual orientation or any other ethnic or social factor.

[...]

In summary, the aim of our work was to assist health planners with the means of estimating the impact of HIV infection on groups, like gay and bisexual men, not necessarily captured by vital statistics data and not to hinder the rights of these groups worldwide. Overall, we do not condone the use of our research in a manner that restricts the political or human rights of gay and bisexual men or any other group.

For all their blathering about "truth" it really is the thing DL and his ilk are least interested in.

Update: LaShawn the Barbarian repeats the phony "interracial marriage is nothing like gay marriage" argument.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who recently sent fund raising party invitations shaped like a cowboy's crotch and that only opened after one undid the cowboy's belt, said that a vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment could happen as soon as June 5.

Click on the following links to send a message to your senators telling them that if they vote for the measure, they will be on the wrong side of history.

The ACLU.

The Human Rights Campaign.

This post will remain at top until June 10 or the vote is taken, whichever happens first.

How Pathetic is the Religious Right?

Protect Marriage Illinois has submitted some 345,000 petition signatures to the state legislature in order to get a referendum banning gay marriage on the November ballot. The referendum would not be legally binding for lawmakers, however it could be used as ammunition for more aggressive marriage amendment tactics.

One of the groups affiliated with PMI is the Illinois Fascist Institute. One Peter Labarbera is the executive director. (Which leads to a little side-thought I had. What if the Language Fartist were to marry him? "LaShawn Barber Labarbera." Perfect!)

Peter Labarbera is quite a character. He came to Chicago a couple of years ago to visit the International Mister Leather event in order to gather "evidence" (of what he never says). "As you can imagine, this idea didn’t go over too well with my wife," said Labarbera in a description of his little shopping spree.

I paid my two-dollar entrance fee and passed by a femmy “leather” guy who was happily greeting visitors with the line, “Welcome to the WalMart of porn!” At the vendors’ area, I found booth upon booth--there were over a hundred--selling whips, handcuffs, electric “torture” devices, leather “hoods,” etc., a veritable cornucopia for the deviant. The man was right: there was also tons of the most disgusting pornography imaginable for sale at reduced prices, right there are at the glitzy Hyatt Regency!

[...]

Perhaps I will send some of my evidence to the Tribune Company’s executive staff, so they can see what they promoted to the public.

And perhaps he did just that. Or — just perhaps — he held on to the "evidence" and, under his wife's disapproving eye, pretended to box it up and put it in the basement on a convincingly hard-to-access shelf but exactly where he knew he could pry the lid open just enough to extract some of his favorite evidence on those long weekends when the wife visits the inlaws...

But I digress. The Chicago Free Press reports that Fair Illinois, the group checking the signatures on the marriage petition "say their objective of keeping the referendum off the ballot is well within reach. As a rule, about 70 percent of the signatures filed on voter petitions are legitimate. The rest are invalid for various reasons—they are duplicates, for instance, or the signers aren’t registered to vote or list incorrect addresses." As it turns out, even this optimistic estimation leaves the petition 41,611 signatures short. But it gets better.

So far, volunteers are finding a rate of accuracy that is far below 70 percent. “If 40 percent of these names are valid, I’d be surprised,” said Rick Garcia, political director of Equality Illinois. His organization joined forces with Lambda Legal and the ACLU to create Fair Illinois.

[...]

“These petitions are so phony,” said Cathy Calderon, who ended a 20-month hiatus from volunteering in order to be part of the Fair Illinois effort. She held up an invalid petition that was circulated by a person who used two different names—one a man’s name, one a woman’s.

“The gall of these people,” Calderon said. “They think they’re going to put one over on us. It’s not going to happen.”

Which, I'd say, finds PMI at the end of their rope. Their members are proven liars who must cheat in order to force their views on all, the remnants of a disgraceful movement in its final gasp, their names forever on record as endorsing this failed rapture of bigotry, to the everlasting shame of their descendants.

Oh yeah — and I think Chimpy McSmirksalot chimed in today on the matter of gay marriage, too.

AFA's Overblown Rhetoric Hard to Swallow

AFA Action Alert:

Dear Fantod,

A liberal activist judge has struck down a constitutional amendment in Georgia which made homosexual marriage illegal! She felt that she knew better than the voters how they should vote and threw out their ballots.
The constitutional amendment, passed overwhelmingly by 76% of the voters in Georgia, is now null and void.

The homosexuals are determined to win this battle. They know they will never win if the people have an opportunity to vote. So they are turning to liberal activist judges to force their will on the people. They intend to force homosexual marriage down the throats of Americans. They feel our children must be indoctrinated beginning in kindergarten that homosexuality is normal behavior.

On June 6 the U.S. Senate will vote on the Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA) which defines marriage as being only between one man and one woman. Because of a power grab by activist judges like the one in Georgia, the MPA is the only way that the sacred institution of marriage will remain between one man and one woman.

While it may be hard, I guess Americans are just going to have to get used to the pistoning sensation of the turgid instrument of the law pumping and pumping hot infusions of justice into the belly of their most untenable biases. Who knows? Maybe in time they'll like it!

If Only There Was a Vaccine for Stupidity...

If you're a straight person who thinks that you couldn't possibly have a vested interest in gay marriage, think again. Dan Savage has been sounding the alarm about how the Christianists have a much bigger plan in mind.

From this week's Savage Love:

STRAIGHT RIGHTS UPDATE: I've been running around with my hair on fire trying to convince my straight readers that religious conservatives don't just hate homos. Their attacks on gay people, relationships, parents, and sex get all the press, but the American Taliban has an anti-straight-rights agenda too. As I wrote on March 23: "The GOP's message to straight Americans: If you have sex, we want it to fuck up your lives as much as possible. No birth control, no emergency contraception, no abortion services, no lifesaving vaccines. If you get pregnant, tough shit. You're going to have those babies, ladies, and you're going to make those child-support payments, gentlemen."

After raising the alarm for months back here in the sex ads, I was gratified to read Russell Shorto's brilliant cover story, The War on Contraception, in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. To readers who think I'm being hysterical: So you don't think the religious right would seriously go after birth control? Fine, don't believe me. But maybe you'll believe Shorto when he lays out the American Taliban's plan to deny access to birth control—any and all types, folks, not just emergency contraception.

"In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex," Shorto writes. "Contraception, by [their] logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality), and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage." Shorto quotes Judie Brown, president of the American Life League: "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion. The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set.... We oppose all forms of contraception." And there's this from R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: "I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill... Prior to it, every time a couple had sex, there was a good chance of pregnancy. Once that is removed, the entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there could be no question that the pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation."

I'll say it again, breeders: The American Taliban is not just opposed to straight premarital sex, with their abstinence education and hilariously ineffective virginity pledges, or gay sex, with their "ex-gay" campaigns and their anti-gay-marriage amendments. The American Taliban doesn't think married heterosexual couples should be able to use birth control. If you care about your own freedom—not just your right to have premarital sex, but your right to decide whether, when, and how many children you're going to have—you need to read "The War on Contraception." And don't comfort yourself with the notion that these are just some antisex religious wackos: The Bush administration not only listens to these wackos, it appoints them to important positions all over the federal government—and let's not even think about the members of the American Taliban that Bush has already appointed to lifetime positions in the federal judiciary.

This is some serious shit, breeders. You're being attacked. It's time to fight back.

If you're still not convinced that the Christianist kooks are out to control every aspect of your intimate lives at any cost, our good friend eyedoc over at Raging Coconuts has a not-to-be-missed post about why Tony Perkins won't allow his daughter to get a potentially lifesaving cancer vaccine and why he'd be perfectly happy to keep you from it as well.

Good Quetion

The list.

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?

2. When did you decide you were heterosexual?

3. Could it be that your heterosexuality is just a phase?

4. To whom have you disclosed your heterosexuality? How did they react?

5. If you have never slept with someone of your same gender, how do you know you wouldn't prefer it?

6. Is it possible that you just haven't found the right same-gender partner yet?

7. Why do you flaunt your lifestyle with wedding rings, photos at work and talk of your heterosexual escapades?

8. Your heterosexuality doesn't offend me as long as you don't try to come on to me, but why do so many heterosexuals try to seduce others to their orientation?

9. Considering the battering, abuse and divorce rate associated with heterosexual coupling, why would you want to enter into that type of relationship?

10. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?
_______________________________________________________

Updated 05/20/06

Monitoring some of the neocon "outrage" over this incident has shown up their own hypocrisy. The more offended they pretend to be, the more they demonstrate how pointless these same questions really are. When demanded of homosexuals. A slight nuance I'm sure never crossed their pea brains. Let's sit back and watch some of the fireworks.

First up from Rightwinged, a post titled "More Gay Indoctrination In Schools, Awaiting Discipline For Teachers" the author almost shows signs of understanding the purpose of the exercise. In response to this quote from a newspaper article...

Freshman Jaime Reuter said the survey caused such a stir that, even though her class didn't take the survey, her social studies teacher made it part of a class discussion a couple of days later.

Reuter said she would have been offended if asked to take the survey. "I shouldn't have to answer that because it's private information," she said.

... the Rightwingeder writes, "Right on, who's business is it, and what purpose does this serve?" But then immediately following this insight (and totally ignoring it), opines, "The people didn't want to collect information. They are there to push their agendas. Liberals know when to strike impressionable youths, which is why the liberal virus is so prevalent in schools. This should make everyone sick."

Oh Mr./Mrs./Ms. Rightwinged. You were so close.

As a parting shot, the author makes a vague promise/threat "to tear apart each of these questions..." Well, I'm sure there a lot of gays who would appreciate your hard work on their behalf. So, by all means, have at it!

Next from McBride's Media Matters comes a pearl in response to question #5, "If you have never slept with someone of your same gender, how do you know you wouldn't prefer it?" McBride of Frankenstein writes, "This goes farther than just a survey question. It seems to almost advocate for the students to try out homosexuality because - who knows? - they just might not know what they're missing."

What do you know! Imagine how a gay person feels when that question is asked of him/her. McBride?

"Totally outrageous."

You got it and you don't even know you got it.

Matt Margolis of GOP Bloggers apparently feels put upon and unfairly singled out for his heterosexuality and that a survey "that implies that there is something wrong with heterosexuality clearly has an agenda that rightfully so has gotten parents upset. It takes an attitude that heterosexuality is abormal, and yet, teachers seemed to condone it." I presume that last "it" refers to the attitude that heterosexuality is abnormal, not heterosexuality itself.

If so, mission accomplished.

(Except that Matt obviously can't see the irony in his own outrage of course.)

Here's another one that appears to get it. adamelijah of Where I Stand starts out with solid reasoning (even though he's trying to be ironic) with, "Now, this [survey] is the type of thing that liberals will be okay with. After all, the schools are teaching tolerance and that type of virtue is so important, we can spend taxpayer dollars to teach it," but then lapses into typical neocon stoopid with the conclusion, "despite whatever concerns parents have about their kids be propogandized in government funded schools."

Ah yes. Teaching kids to be decent to one another is propaganda. *sigh*

And finally, with Liberty Bell Blues we get a twofer. Dumbbell starts off with the McBride interpretation "that the designers of the survey want to encourage experimentation with homosexuality," and then turns the "choice" argument neatly on it's head (not realizing it of course) with, "But wait -- I thought that people didn't choose it! The prevailing conventional wisdom is that being gay is not a matter of choice."

Thank you dumbbell. Thank you for pointing out the emptiness of the "choice" argument through your mock surprise to this fake question. It shall be a much valued contribution to the gay rights movement. Thank you.

Internet Blackout

Apparently, when our downstairs neighbor moved out last week, RCN inadvertantly disconnected our cable and internet service.

Just now back online.

Pastor Stupid Strikes Again



"Kincaid never ceases to amaze me. Wait, let me change that. He does amaze me."

DL Fister never ceases to amaze me. Wait, let me change that. He does not amaze me. His intellectual prowess can be measured in inverse proportion to his ever-inflating ego, providing some of the most predictable and yet tantalizing low-hanging fruit on the internet.