Maddow to GOP: Anti-gay bigotry is not a winning strategy

Aww. Rachel, you’re spoiling it for us. They keep using a failing strategy, and they keep losing as a result. Don’t tip them off!!

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Going to visit Pride today. I expect I’ll be tabling this afternoon for Minnesota Atheists, though I’m not yet a dues-paying member. Come out and say hello!

Maddow to GOP: Anti-gay bigotry is not a winning strategy
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Obama Boy: I sense this is going to backfire.

Remember the “I’ve got a crush on Obama” meme that happened in 2008? The one that arguably helped win a bit of the youth vote? There’s evidently a new variation on that meme for the 2012 election cycle: a guy who has a similar “crush” on Obama.

Considering the very legitimate grievances gays have with Obama’s wishy-washy and states-rights-y stance on gay marriage, regardless of the fact that it is an incremental improvement over previous slavering homophobes in office, I can see this being very ill received by the gay community. It also doesn’t help that the guy doing the singing is apparently straight, and thinks this comportment he’s acting (what with the butt-jiggling and all) is representative of the gay experience. I suppose it MIGHT be, for some individual gay person, but I’m betting someone’s going to take issue with this representation.

I don’t know. I’m seeing this from the hetero-privileged perspective, and I don’t think it’s in any way affiliated with the official campaign in the same sense that the Obama Girl video wasn’t, so I think it might win a few votes and might tweak the noses of the aforementioned slavering homophobe party, but I can see this backfiring otherwise and in a very big and real way by earning outrage and LOSING more votes than was gained. What do you folks think?

Obama Boy: I sense this is going to backfire.

Another self-Godwin: Baptist pastor for queer concentration camps!

My focus has been on gay rights lately primarily because the Western world’s focus has been on gays. While Obama’s stand was hardly a stand at all, triangulating and capitulatory to states rights (and thus individual states’ rights to violate human rights) as it was, I happen to think this shift in national focus is one of the good things about his announcement. Getting us talking about gay rights again is the surest way to make change, to get people to recognize gay rights as human rights, especially with waxing public support for gay marriage.

Except it also seems to be bringing all the asshats out of the woodwork with their religiously-motivated bigotry. And this guy, Pastor Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina, gets a gold star.

While one pastor calls gay rights akin to Hitler, another is perfectly willing to unabashedly suggest making gay concentration camps. How completely rational. Every value you exhort in this video, I’m aginn’ it, and you personally make me pukin’ sick. You and your three or four “amen” sycophants.

Hat tip to, well, everyone bringing this video up pretty well everywhere.

Another self-Godwin: Baptist pastor for queer concentration camps!

Harry Jackson: “Gays = Hitler.”

Ho hum, yet another religiously-inspired bigot who thinks being disallowed from their bigotry is something akin to a cultural Holocaust. These people aren’t getting any cleverer.

The icing on the cake, I think, is when he says that gays can’t reproduce, so they must “recruit”. Like being a minority and trying to get equality is a numbers game — that they’re fighting for rights to marry one another (and have all the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples), just so that they can more effectively form two-person recruitment cells or something. The very presence of a pair of gay men in your neighborhood will cause further gayness! Maybe they’ll go door-to-door asking “have you heard the good news about buttsex?” Or something.

I can’t even try to argue this seriously. There’s no “there” there.

Harry Jackson: “Gays = Hitler.”

Maddow on GOP homophobia flip-flopping: “absolute bull”

I can’t believe this nonsense about Thorne-Begland being blocked from becoming a judge by Republicans because he’s gay. Impeccable credentials, bipartisan support, and a waxing public support for gays, and yet these backward-looking Republicans are entrenching themselves in their homophobia.

Only now that they’ve realized their anti-gay opinions are anathema to public discourse, they’re lying about it!

I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise.

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Maddow on GOP homophobia flip-flopping: “absolute bull”

Mitt Romney to openly campaign on constitutional amendment against gay marriage

Okay, so if this is something you can do, if this sort of thing is actually politically viable, how’s about Obama openly campaign on a constitutional amendment mandating that gay marriages be legal nationwide?
Continue reading “Mitt Romney to openly campaign on constitutional amendment against gay marriage”

Mitt Romney to openly campaign on constitutional amendment against gay marriage

Why my initial thoughts on the Obama gay marriage announcement are wrong

Yesterday, Barack Obama declared that his position on gay marriage has evolved, and where once he thought civil unions were sufficient, he’s decided, rightly, that they are not, and has made possibly the clearest and most supportive statement on the matter that any president has ever made.

Critics have contended that civil unions are another way of saying “separate but equal”, only, you know, without the “equal” part. It is effectively a form of soft bigotry to say that one type of life partner contract is allowed to be called “marriage” while this other type is not, for reasons completely unfathomable to anyone but the theists who draw the line in the sand at their personal definition of marriage — a relationship sanctified by a member of their clergy and thus accepted in the eyes of God. There are, of course, legal ramifications as well, but people seem to care more about their precious words.

And while many individual members of many religious organizations would have no problem with declaring that their God has no problem with gays getting married, others obviously find it some sort abomination, owing to their particular readings of the religious traditions they hold dear. The parallels with the religiously-motivated opposition to interracial marriage are obvious and palpable. With good reason — the situations are practically identical.

Despite this good news, my initial reaction — and I suspect many of your initial reactions as well — were deeply cynical.
Continue reading “Why my initial thoughts on the Obama gay marriage announcement are wrong”

Why my initial thoughts on the Obama gay marriage announcement are wrong

Barber/Staver: Dan Savage poisoning kids against “believers in normal sexuality”

From the introduction saying Dan Savage talks dirty to children, through the claim that heteronormalcy is under attack and that gay people are effectively bullying people who “believe in normal sexuality” by trying to create legislation to get them to stop bullying gay people, this video pretty much shows exactly how little of the moral landscape these people understand.

We are near the tipping point, and people like Matt Barber and Mat Staver are the ones who will be seen, through history’s eye, as terrible bigots fighting for religiously-inspired bigotry. I have little doubt that, in the future, those passages that regard homosexuality as abomination will be thrown out exactly like those that condone slavery. These people fighting against gay marriage will be seen exactly like the anti-miscegenation activists, as anachronistic and small-minded, and poor readers of their own bible.

Hat tip Right Wing Watch.

Urgh. These asshats give me indigestion.

Barber/Staver: Dan Savage poisoning kids against “believers in normal sexuality”