Friday, July 15, 2005
Shove gay rights superhero Mike Rogers in pink tights, a cape and give him a big "O" on his chest for outing, as he has done it once again. In a phone call recorded for his website
PageOneQ, Rogers has unmasked one of the most spetacular self-loathing disgraces in America.
Sit down, because this isn't fiction, although it certainly could be. According to Roger's investigation, Robert Traynham, Director of Communications for United States Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) has said he is an out gay man who completely supports the Senator.
However, at a
2003 forum he didn't appear to be out as he said onstage when asked about gays in the Republican Party, "I have a lot of friends who happen to be gay." He did not specify whether these friends were sleeping with him.
Incredibly, Traynham, who is black, also supports the GOP exploiting raw emotions surrounding the flying of the Red Neck flag in the South if it will bring votes.
"Those who are romantic about the Confederate flag, that's our base. We need their support; this upcoming election is going to be close," Traynham once said.
When Rogers asked how a gay man could speak for one of the nation's most notorious homophobes, Traynham protested that has "been with the Senator for eight years." Traynham went on to say "Senator Santorum is a man of principle, he is a man who sticks up for what he believes in, I strongly do support Senator Santorum." Unfortunately, Santorum stands for the
principle that abolishing sodomy laws will lead to "man on dog" sex. Why a gay man would support such a principle remains unclear.
What I find interesting is that just the other day Santorum was criticizing the city of Boston for supporting gay people and having a liberal climate that supposedly caused perversion. Yet, it turns out his office is the very example of Sodom he had condemned.
There is also word, from Rex Wockner's list, that the sell out is more than just Santorum's mouthpiece. He is also Deputy Chief of Staff to Santorum and, perhaps more importantly, Director of Communications for the Senate Republican Conference. This means Traynham has certainly helped in GOP message and delivery that has likely included homophobic talking points for GOP members of the Senate.
How very sick. How very sad. Would someone call the shrink for this poor fellow? He is obviously very conflicted and has more issues than a New York magazine stand. Let us hope that he finds some self respect in the near future and spends his remaining days working to undo the damage he has clearly done. But, his first step might be finding a conscience.
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Thursday, July 14, 2005
It increasingly appears like Sen. Rick Santorum, R-PA, is a sexually repressed lunatic who has fallen off the deep end. With not a hint of sarcasm or hyperbole, I must ask, based on his recent comments, if he is genuinely insane?
According to
The Boston Gobe, Senator Rick Santorum refused yesterday to back off on his earlier statements connecting Boston's ''liberalism" with the Roman Catholic Church pedophile scandal, saying that the city's ''sexual license" and ''sexual freedom" nurtured an environment where sexual abuse would occur.
''The basic liberal attitude in that area . . . has an impact on people's behavior," Santorum said in an interview yesterday at the Capitol.
''If you have a world view that I'm describing [about Boston] . . . that affirms alternative views of sexuality, that can lead to a lot of people taking it the wrong way," Santorum said.
Santorum, a leader among Christian conservatives, was responding to questions about remarks he made three years ago on a website called
Catholic Online. In those comments, Santorum said, ''It is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm" of the clergy sexual abuse scandal.
US Representative Barney Frank, a Newton Democrat, called Santorum ''a jerk" and pointed out that the senator tried to use the levers of the federal government to block the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, an act that Santorum likened to ''execution." An autopsy found that Schiavo's brain was half the normal size and that she could not see anything.
''This is one of those people who claims to have had eye contact with a blind woman," Frank said.
Frank is right on target with his shot at Santorum, a man who once said that legalizing sodomy between consenting adults would lead to "man on dog" sex. It seems to me, that Santorum may secretly want to enter all kinds of sexual arenas that the average person would never imagine. The only thing keeping him from hooking up with Fido, based on his bizarre logic, are laws that outlaw such behavior. Whatever his true passions, it is increasingly clear that Santorum is one sick dude. The citizens of Pennsylvania must be bowing their heads in shame knowing they elected such a weirdo to represent their state.
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A 21 year old Tampa man is
charged with murder after his 3-year old son was pummeled into unconsciousness and then died. The toddler's mother, Nysheerah Paris, testified that her husband thought the boy might be gay and would force him to box.
Nysheerah Paris told the court that Paris would make the boy fight with him, slapping the child in the head until he cried or wet himself. She said that on one occasion Paris slammed the child against a wall because he was vomiting.
This is clearly the result of James Dobson and Joseph Nicolosi's "ex-gay" therapy taken to the extreme. While these men and the groups they represent are in no way directly responsible, they have created a world where there is almost nothing worse than being gay - in some circles. Any remedy - no matter how bizarre - is fair game if it will supposedly help one become heterosexual. By the way, what they do doesn't work.
Ironically, Nicolosi, leader of The National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (
NARTH), takes patients as young as three, calling them "prehomosexual boys". Once in his clutches he work to butch them up.
Ex-gay therapy is unethical and in some cases a threat to the people it purports to help. It is a legal case waiting to happen. These quacks should be put out of business sooner than later. Not because they have a different, skewed point of view. But because they abuse patients and destroy lives, while lining their pockets by exploiting desperate and vulnerable people.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2005
In a wise and inspiring move that could further divide the global Anglican Church by angering the more backward elements, the leaders of the Church of England voted Monday to begin the legal moves toward ordaining women as bishops. (
New York Times)
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To the Editor:Results casting doubt on the reality of bisexuality reported are probably incorrect. In the 300 or more known vertebrate species with natural homosexuality, all combine heterosexual with homosexual relations.
Humans are not likely to differ from other species in this regard,i ncluding our closest nonhuman relative, the bonobo. Indeed, in all human cultures homosexual expression has been, and is, combined with heterosexual expression.
The data in the article show that 20 percent of the pool having same-sex relations do identify as bisexual.These people surely aren't all lying. Instead, psychologists should add a fourth possibility to their list: namely, that they are wrong.
Dr. Joan Roughgarden
San Francisco
The writer is a professor of biology at Stanford.
________________________________________________________________________
To the Editor:Some gay and bisexual advocates are condemning "Straight, Gay or Lying?" regarding a study suggesting that bisexuality may not exist among human males - something those of us familiar with the scientific literature have known since, basically, forever.
Compare this hysterical - and anti-science - reaction to the conservative Christians' anti-science reaction to studies showing that homosexuality is an inborn orientation like left-handedness. They're identical.
The right hates science because the data contradict (in the case of homosexuality) Leviticus; the left because the data contradict the liberal lie that we're environment-created, not hard-wired in any way.
These particular scientific facts are making these advocates scream like members of the extreme right, though it's they who always tells the right to let go of concepts that are contradicted by science.
Chandler Burr
New York
The writer is the author of "A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation."
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Certainly no one is suggesting the "B" come out of the GLBT movement, but a new study by a group of researchers in Chicago and Toronto questions how widespread bisexuality is in men and shows a need for more comprehensive studies to examine the topic.
The New York Times did a cover story in their Science section on the explosive study under the provocative headline, "Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited." Sadly, reporting on research that questioned assumptions on switch hitters earned the Times brickbats by leading GLBT advocacy groups.
TO READ MORE
CLICK HERE
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Monday, July 11, 2005
Community leaders and strongly spiritual residents in the very hostile Old Dominion are forming
People of Faith for Equality in Virginia. Organizers aim to be the antithesis of the vocal conservative Christian cult that has wrecked the state, offering a faith-based, yet gay-friendly perspective they say is absent in Virginia's gay rights discussions.
This sounds like a great idea and must be duplicated in all 50 states if we have even the slightest hope of winning the battle for equal rights. It is wonderful to see that people are taking a strong stand in Virginia to counter the poisonous conservative movement.
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Washington writer Terry Chasteen says that using the term "Same-Sex" marriage hurts the movement. He says that the term "same gender" makes better sense. Take a look at his
interesting commentary.
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It is illegal to knowingly reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent. It has now been discovered that
Karl Rove was one of the media leaks that outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, putting her life at risk and subverting American intelligence. He should immediately be investigated and if found guilty, tried and possibly jailed for treason.
It is crucial that Republicans speak up and condemn this outrageous, vindictive and probably illegal behavior. It is time that Republican leaders show that they care about America as much as they do about protecting the power of Team GOP.
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GUEST OP-ED BY MARC PAIGEAs a gay American, I no longer feel safe. The U.S. Senate has recently confirmed William Pryor to a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals with a Republican majority vote of 53 to 45. Pryor is so hostile to gay men and lesbians that he compares homosexuality to sex with animals or the dead, and believes states should be able to arrest two consenting gay adults for making love in their bedroom. When Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist seriously described Pryor as "a man with a commitment to treating all people fairly," I knew I was in big trouble.
The Republican Party is now in the hands of fundamentalist Christians who are determined to reverse the progress the gay community has made over the years, progress that has helped gay young people to come out at an earlier age, parents to embrace their gay children with love, and schools to create a safe learning environment for all students. Although in the past I was convinced that at the end of my life my nation would be far better to gay Americans than when my life began, now I am not so sure.
Until recently, libraries sought out books with life-saving messages to gay adolescents that they were fine just the way they are, books that would have spared me years of self-hatred as a teenager. Today, Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma and Louisiana are leading efforts to ban children's books with positive gay themes from children's sections in libraries. An Alabama Republican has introduced a bill that would bar state spending on books and other materials by gay authors or about gay characters. And Texas Republican overnor Rick Perry suggests to gay and lesbian soldiers returning home from the Iraqi war that they leave Texas if they are not happy with the state’s proposed constitutional amendment banning marriages and civil unions for gay couples.
The fundamentalist Christians running today's Republican Party are the driving force to ban gay-affirming books from libraries, eliminate gay
characters from television, and prohibit positive messages about gay people in public schools. In essence, fundamentalist Christian Republicans from school committees to political chambers want gays eliminated from all spheres of public life, just as the Nazis campaigned and passed laws to exclude Jews from public life in Germany, prior to their "Final Solution" of Jewish annihilation.
At a recent exhibition in Ft. Lauderdale, entitled "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals: 1933-1945," most viewers commented on the similarities between Nazi repression of homosexuals and the rhetoric from the so-called religious right. One person desperately wrote, "Many of the words of the Nazis are the same we see today from George Bush and Karl Rove. Won’t someone do something so we don't have to repeat history?"
In the early 1930's, it was well known that Hitler's second in command, Ernst Roehm, was homosexual. Despite the fact that in 1933 Hitler closed all cabarets and bars catering to homosexuals, German gays thought things would never get too bad for them with Roehm in the power structure. Those illusions were eliminated on June 30,1934, when Hitler had Roehm killed, using his homosexuality as a major justification for his execution, and linking homosexuality to subversion and treason.
American gays and our straight loved ones take comfort that there are surely a few closeted gays within the power structure of today's Republican Party. And certainly gays exist in Republican Christian fundamentalist families. But right-wing Republicans have shown all too often that they are more than willing to sacrifice their gay relatives for ratings, politics, or their twisted version of what Jesus wants.
Conservative Republican radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham, despite having a gay brother, is often silent while guests and callers accuse homosexuals of trying to harm families; Vice-President Dick Cheney, while claiming to love his gay daughter, campaigns and raises funds for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO), one of today's most viciously anti-gay politicians; and Christian fundamentalist Alan Keyes, who often promotes "family values," throws his own teenage daughter out into the street after learning she is gay.
If the over 20 percent of gay men and women who supported the Republican ticket in 2004 think that they will be spared in this fundamentalist Christian war against gays, they are fooling themselves. Thousands of Berlin Jews voted for the Nazi Party in 1932, attracted by their campaign promises of law, order and "family values." None of them were spared the campaigns of hate, the racist laws, and ultimately, the gas chambers.
It is time for Americans of goodwill to come together and stop the Republican Party’s war against gays. We are all at risk in this war. Nazi persecution did not end with the Jews in Germany; fundamentalist Christian attacks will not end with homosexuals in the United States.
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I came across a fascinating item in this week's
New York Times Magazine. In an article about Syrian strong-man Bashiar al-Assad the founding of modern Syria was broached.
You could blame bad intelligence for it all [the founding of Syria]. In 1915, a member of the Damascus secret society opposed to the rule of the dying Ottoman Empire made his way to British intelligence headquarters in Cairo. As recounted in David Fromkin's, "A Peace to End All Peace," claims made by this young man persuaded the British officers that Arabs would rise in revolt against Turks in exchange for commitments about the post-war Middle East. Not much of a revolt materialized, but the commitments and the borders that they led the Western powers to demarcate helped create the crisis of legitimacy that Middle Eastern regimes are still facing.
Wow, this sounds exactly like the way Ahmad Chalabi duped the Neo-cons into believing Iraqis would throw roses when American troops arrived. And just like the Middle East in 1915, we are fighting for the legitimacy of the borders and governments we seek to create. History has, indeed, repeated itself.
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Christian creationists won too much of a victory for their own good in Tulsa, where the local zoo was ordered to balance its evolution science exhibit with a display extolling the Genesis account of God's creating the universe from nothing in six days. A determined creationist somehow talked three of the four zoo directors, including Mayor Bill LaFortune, into the addition by arguing that a statue of the elephant-headed god Ganesh at the elephant house amounted to an anti-Christian bias toward Hinduism.
After the inevitable backlash from bewildered taxpayers warning that Tulsa would be dismissed as a science backwater, the directors "clarified" their vote to say they intended no monopoly for the Adam and Eve tale but rather wanted "six or seven" creation myths afforded equal time. There was the rub: there are hundreds of creation tales properly honored by the world's multifarious cultures, starting with the American Indian tribes around Tulsa. -
New York Times -
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