Toxic masculinity

Elliott Harvey blinded in one eye by a homophobic attack (Source)

A man is blinded in one eye in an attack in a Melbourne night club.  Why?

Mr Harvey said he went to the Rubix on Phoenix Street on Friday, May 26, to watch a band. As he was going into the venue "some aggressive young guys" walked past him.

"I think they particularly disliked my hair cut, having my hair up in a fountain like this," he said, pointing to his ponytail.

"All the things they said to me were pretty trivial, just homophobic insults."

The three men, believed to be aged in their 20s, punched him to the ground, and then continued to punch his head and right eye.

"It was cowardly really ... I was on the ground when they punched my eye out," he said.

"I was just wondering where my eye had gone, I couldn't see out of my right eye, that's a pretty alien feeling."

Mr Harvey was taken to hospital in a taxi after the attack and has had several operations since. Nothing has restored his eyesight.

"I had a laceration to my right eye which has been sewn back up," he said.

"A couple of days later they reattached my retina to the back of my socket, which has restored very little sight. It's all just touch and go at the moment."

The injuries mean that Mr Harvey, an environmental conservationist, cannot work.

"It's drastically affected my life," he said.

"I can't work because I can't drive, but also depth perception has a lot to do with walking through undulating forests.

"I can't really go surfing because of the glare.

"A lot of the things that make me happy are pretty sad right now."

[Read the original report here]

 I was blinded in one eye by a homophobic attack at school.  And yes, it makes lots of things very difficult.

Mr Macho Men, so afraid of their own gay leanings that they have to beat up and blind another human being!   Mr Big-Deals, determined that everybody should be like them: homophobic, narrow, conformist.  Mr So-Braves, ganging up, and kicking and hitting (all three of them!) someone when he's down.  Sorry, guys, this is not how real men behave.

I keep on having ppl tell me how much more tolerant ppl are  today.  And yet there are still homophobic arseholes so filled with hatred for gay men that they attack someone, unprovoked, and blind them.  Scum.  I hope they get long prison sentences.

The man who walked through hell

Every gay man over a certain age has stories to tell of prejudice, disdain, contempt, unhappiness, loneliness, of being an outsider, of being shunned and excluded.  In my own life, the way I have been treated by straights, by the crackpot religious has scarred me, physically (I am blind in one eye as a result of bullying at school, and I was bullied because I was "effeminate"),  and mentally.  

But mankind is hateful to mankind.  This interesting article tells the story of a man who was imprisoned by the Japanese and forced to endure intolerable things, yet has somehow survived and is happy.  He does what I try to do, which is to focus of the good things.  Life brings good and bad, joys and woes.  This doesn't excuse the vile behaviour of the bigots and the narrow-minded religious fanatics.  But it's how we live that matters.  And to be happy we must count our blessings, not just all the bad things in our lives.

Lifestyle choice?

Religious freedom

Bad dreams

This morning (it's Saturday, so I have a lie-in, dozing, instead of getting up at 5.50 a.m. as I do on a weekday)  I had a recurring dream.  I was in some place I didn't know, but half recognised.  And everywhere I went, in despair, trying to find something--anything--familiar, I was threatened by men.  Not actually hit, but those sneering, disdainful, mocking looks and comments which we all know only too well.

Interesting that in your dreams what you deep down really think and fear is revealed.  And the the truth is, I shall never be comfortable with straights, or indeed with men.  Always trying to be "the good kid", trying too hard to be nice and complaisant, always I excite disdain instead of liking or understanding.

Bisexuality is not a choice

Is hatred of gays innate?

The ChrisTaliban believe that being gay is an abomination.  This isn't an intellectual position, though they try to produce a (feeble) justification for it.  It's felt viscerally, which is a lovely word and means "in your gut".   They have a gut feel that it is evil and wrong.  So why would they think this?  Is it something we're born with?

Think about incest for a moment.  There are powerful biological reasons why incest is a taboo.  In almost all societies, parent-child and sibling incest is taboo.  Inbreeding produces unhealthy offspring; unwell, mentally defective, stunted, short-lived.  It would make evolutionary sense if there were innate guards against incest.  And it seems there are.   So an incest taboo represents not just custom but a genetic (innate) predisposition, a perfect example of the interaction between genes and culture.

Or murder.  There is such a powerful taboo against murder that new soldiers have to specially trained to learn to kill.  And they don't like doing it:

"It is  a curious fact that the majority of soldiers, although well armed, never kill.  During World War II, only one out of every five US soldiers actually fired at the enemy.  The other four were plenty courageous, braving grave danger, landing on the beaches, rescuing comrades under fire, fetching ammunition for others [...]  yet they failed to fire their weapons.  One officer reported that 'squad leaders and platoon sergeants had to move up and down the firing line kicking men to get them to fire.  We felt we were doing good to get two or three men out of a squad to fire.'"  (Frans De Waal, The Age Of Empathy -- he gives several other examples)

Now, let's consider gayness.  At first sight, if you're not thinking carefully, it might seem that gayness would obviously be a genetic taboo.  After all, a gay man or woman is presumably less likely to produce offspring.  Evolution would bias survival against those with a putative "gay gene".   So if society has a taboo against gayness, this is, according the the ChrisTaliban, logical and obvious.  Only, it isn't.

Whatever one's culture is, one is inclined to believe that the way things are in your society, in your family is the way things ought to be, the right way, the proper way.  We in the West find it horrible if dogs or cats are maltreated ("It's just wrong!") but are quite happy to torture cows and sheepen and pigs so we can eat them ("Those animal rights people are extremists!") In India, however, killing cows is unthinkable.  Forbidden.  Cows are sacred.  Eating animal flesh revolts them.

The ancient Israelites were few, and monotheists, surrounded by many other different polytheist cultures.  They felt threatened.  So they wanted to encourage population growth.  Their priests told them to go forth and multiply.  And they told men not to have sex with other men (not women, interestingly, because women were assumed to have little choice in sex or marriage, and would therefore reproduce willy-nilly).  This proscription by the priests, written down as the Old Testament, was added to St Paul's distaste for the promiscuity he saw in the Hellenic world of Asia Minor and it became Christian dogma that being gay was wrong and evil, even though Jesus never mentions it.

So in cultures which have been influenced by a long Christian history or by recent Christian conversion, being gay, especially if you were male, became taboo.  When I was growing up it was quite clear to me that being gay was worse than being a rapist or a murderer.  Which is both absurd and clearly a taboo -- that fascinated horror when you do something "wrong".  These values were exported to Africa and South America and Asia, overriding the more tolerant indigenous values,  so that ironically today, as the West is just getting over its homosexuality taboo, Africa and Russia and Eastern Europe is on the whole getting more backward and narrow and less safe for gays.  Encouraged and prodded of course by Christian crackpots.

But before Christianity/Judaism/Islam, in Europe and in Africa, homosexuality was tolerated and accepted.  The Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Celts, the Teutons, Japan, China, India, Africa, Native Americans--all accepted one or more forms of gayness.  It's only where Christianity and Islam have spread their message that gayness has become taboo, evil and unacceptable.

Mankind didn't survive as individuals wandering the African savannah.  Everything about us indicates that we were members of groups of proto-humans dependent on each other for our survival.  Just as we are now, only now our connections and dependencies stretch around the globe.  Even today, a solitary hermit still depends to some extent on the products of civilisation (candles, oil lamps, salt, axes) and civilisation is nothing other than groups writ large.  Even our intelligence appears to have evolved because as members of a group we needed to satisfy both our personal needs and those of the group.  Empathy, sympathy, insight, self-sacrifice, love, companionship .... you name it, things we consider quintessentially human, these are essential to the survival of groups, but not of individuals. Without them humankind would not have reached where we are now.  Without them we would not survive at all.  Darwinian survival for us humans is not about individual survival but about the survival of the group.  This is an essential insight, vitiating much of economics and politics and received wisdom in our own culture. When I board the train, or walk down the street, ppl do not fall upon me and rob me.  Why not?  Think about it.  Don't take our broad human culture for granted.  We have innate rules on how to behave.  Because without them we would not be here.  We would be orangutans, who are solitary, unsocial, and relentlessly heterosexual.

The taboo against incest is a logical one because of the damage that inbreeding produces.   And incest doesn't just affect the individual, it affects the group.  It makes the tribe/the group/the band less fit, less likely to survive, because the group supports its weaker members. Our ancestral small bands of proto-humans would have had enough problems with inbreeding anyway.

You might surmise that gayness would have been bred out of us.  A Kinsey 6 bloke for example, would have no offspring, and so his genes would not be passed on (though it's true that in a tribe, his genes would still have been passed on by his fellows because the tribe would be somewhat related).  But if gayness is such a genetic disadvantage, why are there so many of us?

It's only an apparent mystery, one that exists because we insist on a dualism: ppl are either gay or straight.  Most gay-shaded people are bisexual.  In fact I suspect a substantial chunk of so-called heterosexuals are actually bisexual, at least potentially.  In the tribe, as a bisexual, your genes would still have been passed on to offspring.  But your love for your fellow tribesman would have helped hold the group together.  Actually, even if you were 100% gay and never had a child, you would still have helped your tribe be more fit, in a Darwinian sense, because you would have strengthened the ties within the tribe.  Of course, the ChrisTaliban and the MusTaliban don't believe in evolution, so this explanation will not satisfy them.  It is our intrinsic evil which makes us gay.

Everybody who has experienced it talks of the love that develops in war between members of the same corps, or about the love and comradeship which develops between the blokes in the same sports team.  Team sports contests are of course substitutes for tribal warfare.  Hunting dangerous animals would have required teamwork and sometimes, self-sacrifice.  Anything that strengthened links within the team/group would have been beneficial for the team/group and therefore for its members.  How else do you account for the one who gives up his life to save the many, and for how highly this behaviour is regarded by most cultures?

Far from being dysfunctional (as incest is) a measure of gayness added to our likelihood of survival.  Because our survival was about the survival of our group, even more than it was about our survival as an individual.    Except for the Abrahamic religions and the societies they have moulded,  hatred of gays is not "innate".  Even within them, the feeling "it's just wrong" has everything to do with culture and nothing with genetics.

Hatred of gays is not innate.  It's taught, and can be untaught.  As Nelson Mandela said, "people learn to hate, and if they learn to hate they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite".

How Many American Men are Gay?

An interesting stab at a number.

The author of the New York Times piece comes up with roughly 5% (Note that he assumes that there are gays and then there are straights and nothing in between): 

There are three sources that can give us estimates of the openly gay population broken down by state: the census, which asks about same-sex households; Gallup, which has fairly large-sample surveys for every state; and Facebook, which asks members what gender they are interested in. While these data sources all measure different degrees of openness, one result is strikingly similar: All three suggest that the openly gay population is dramatically higher in more tolerant states, defined using an estimate by Nate Silver of support for same-sex marriage. On Facebook, for example, about 1 percent of men in Mississippi who list a gender preference say that they are interested in men; in California, more than 3 percent do.

Are there really so many fewer gay men living in less tolerant states? There is no evidence that gay men would be less likely to be born in these states. Have many of them moved to more tolerant areas? Some have, but Facebook data show that mobility can explain only a small fraction of the difference in the totally out population. I searched gay and straight men by state of birth and state of current residence. (This information is available only for a subset of Facebook users.) Some gay men do move out of less tolerant states, but this effect is small. I estimate that the openly gay population would be about 0.1 percentage points higher in the least tolerant states if everyone stayed in place.

The percent of male high school students who identify themselves as gay on Facebook is also much lower in less tolerant areas. Because high school students are less mobile than adults, this suggests that a gay exodus from these areas is not a large factor.

We can approach the question of whether intolerant areas actually have fewer gay men another way, too, by estimating the percent of searches for pornography that are looking for depictions of gay men. These would include searches for such terms as “gay porn” or “Rocket Tube,” a popular gay pornographic site. I used anonymous, aggregate data from Google. The advantage of this data source, of course, is that most men are making these searches in private. (Women search, too, but in much smaller numbers.)

While tolerant states have a slightly higher percentage of these searches, roughly 5 percent of pornographic searches are looking for depictions of gay men in all states. This again suggests that there are just about as many gay men in less tolerant states as there are anywhere else.

Read more here.   

And this graphic is very telling.

I hate you! God hates you!

From Slap Upside the Head, which is temporarily quiescent.

The only disgusting thing about two men kissing ...

... is how some people react to it.

From Chris Crocker

The March of the Anti-Christ

The ChrisTaliban have been opposing human rights for centuries.  This photograph (from Blue Truck, Red State) of a protest in 1957 in Little Rock Arkansas, against integration has some choice posters:  Race Mixing is Communism, and Stop the Race Mixing March of the Anti-Christ.

Every major human rights reform of the last two centuries has been opposed by the Christian-Fascists: the abolition of slavery; the right of women to own property; the vote for women; divorce; birth control; abolition of segregation; Black rights; and now, gay rights.

I confidently predict that the churches will be as embarrassed by their unwholesome, rancid and irrational  hatred of gays in fifty years time as they are now about their former support for slavery, subjugation of women, etc.

Paul Ryan, gay hater

This is what The Christian Left think of him:

Special

One of the things about being eccentric (which is Greek and means simply, outside the centre) is that we know that all the stuff other ppl take for granted doesn't apply to us.

I'm right outside every "centre".  I'm in the blank space outside the Venn diagram.  I'm a gay man, or at least, mostly gay.  But I'm married, and happily, too.  I'm a vegetarian in a society which is 95% meat eaters.  I'm an intellectual, which sounds very grand and snobbish, but the way I think about the term is that it's the best there is for ppl who are interested in ideas.  Most ppl aren't.  I'm male, but unlike most males, I'm not obsessed with my small head -- I value friendship and love more highly than sex (how bizarre, you will exclaim).  Many readers think, from the emotional insights and feelings in my writing, that I am a woman.   I'm not,  but I know that my feelings are much more "feminine" than most blokes.

I don't belong anywhere.  And it's kinda lonely, to be honest.

OK, I will at once concede that every generalisation* I've made above is just that.    And generalisations inevitably mean that you don't notice when someone doesn't fit the convenient label you've invented or accepted.  Or had foisted upon you.  So much easier to sit back into the warm fug of preconceptions and generalisations and easy-to-digest familiar clichés.  So easy to hate.  And I have to fight that.  Because the labels are wrong.  And mislead.

Take my dear friend S.  He was married to a guy, who except for the love he felt for S, was straight.  Or A, who is in love with his best friend, who is also a straight bloke whose only male love and desire is A.  How to categorise this?  Because we want nice easy categories, we insist that they're really bisexual.  And I suppose if you stretch the meaning of the word enough it's true.  But if you stretch the meaning of all words enough they'll get like old undies:  always falling down on the job.

So I know, in my heart, that I shouldn't be angry at straights, or more particularly, straight men.  (Straight women have been amazingly supportive of me and my sexuality.)  Because, if I were 100% honest, I would accept that "straights" make up a huge group, full of individuals, just as "gays" are each unique, and "bi's" are all over the shop, with many, many bisexualities.

And yet.  And yet.

Straights -- straight men -- have all my life been cruel to me.  They have judged me and found me not good enough.  They have despised me.  They have bullied me.  They blinded me in one eye.  And they're still doing it, to other gay-shaded blokes.  Hardly a week goes by without some poor gay kid (or even just a straight but effeminate or nerdy kid) being bullied to death by his straight classmates for not being manly enough.

And I am angry with them for it.  Very angry.

And yet.  And yet.

My friend Damo is straight.  100 % straight.  A real pussy hound.  Yet he is entirely accepting of me and my gayness.  Completely, totally, utterly unjudgemental.   He's a lovely man.  And I value him even more for his eccentricity, his outside-the-centreness, his near-unique comfortableness with my sexuality.  Because all the other straight men I know are at the very least embarrassed by me and my sexuality.  And many are plainly hostile.  For them it defines me.  None of the other things about me matters.  Only my gayness is relevant.

But Damo doesn't give a flying foo-foo valve.

And that's special.



*All generalisations are false, including this one.

Salvos say Gays should be "put to death"

Read the PinkNews article here.

We've had other reports about the Salvos bigotry.  They won't ever receive another penny from me.

Christian Oppression

From Joe my God via Truth Wins Out.

Oscar Wilde's Tomb

After Oscar Wilde was released from Reading Gaol (he had been imprisoned for "gross indecency"), he went abroad to Paris, where he died. Unlike the English, the French  recognised his genius, and buried him in the cemetery Pierre Lachaise (in the north east of Paris), an honour they reserve only for those they most admire (Edith Piaf and Corot are just two of the other denizens of this huge necropolis.)

My daughter and I saw his tomb when we visited Paris (my favourite city) a few years ago.

You can see all the lipstick kisses on the sides of the tomb, made by the thousands of visitors who go there every year.

So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way, 
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.

(Excerpt from The Ballad of Reading Gaol)

Majorca Flats -- 194

“No,” said Luigi. “Not even here just off Smith Street. There are still a lot of blokes who feel threatened by guys like him. Or like me.”

“Partly it's self confidence,” replied Keith. “If ya look strong and full a' shit, those drongoes will leave ya alone. If ya look timid an' fearful, they'll go for ya. Arseholes. I had to learn to fight those fucktards when I was on the streets. But I got beaten up a few times. They think it proves they're real men when they beat up a homo.”

“Yeah. I've got beaten up a few times too,” Luigi said. “That's why I don't like straights.”

“Lou, those blaokes who beat us up, they're fuckin' gay. Ya knaow that, roight? They hate themselves. They hate bein' gay. So they take it out on us. If they beat us up they feel better, they feel stright again. It's complete bullshit, we all knaow that, but they jus' daon't … they feel rotten inside.”

“They act straight.”

“Yeah. But beatin' up homos is a dead give-away.”

“Yeah. True.”

[The owners of the Lambs Go Bar have moved on to The Rainbow Hotel at the other end of Brusnwick Street, which is just as nice, and where I saw the scene about the band member I wrote into Fathers]

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Episodes 1 to 180 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter)

Majorca Flats -- 193

Tradies in Hard Yakka pants

One day, walking home to Majorca Flats, Jason deliberated very carefully whether he was falling in love. He didn't think so. Yes, he was very partial to Keith, but he liked Luigi too, and what's more, he found Luigi intensely arousing and desirable. When he pulled his wire in the shower every morning, he imagined himself with both the others, with himself in the middle of a threesome and Luigi doing him while he did Keith. Or of Luigi in the middle with himself on one side and Keith on the other.

Truth to tell though, he was beginning to feel a strong need for sex again when they set off together from Keith's flat to The Lambs Go Bar. He was filled with the prickly excitement of a second date.

The Lambs Go Bar was a small Victorian pub, much smaller than The Lord Grey, but very charming, full of what looked like the original stained glass and oak settles.

Keith had been correct: the clientele were very different to The Lord Grey's. There were mixed couples as well as groups of women on their own. But there were also a few gay couples, too. He admired one man wearing baggy diaphanous harem pants with a fluorescent green thong underneath, sandals with turned up tips like something from 19^th century Istanbul, and a skin-tight T-shirt. You could see that his nipple rings and a stud in his belly button through the thin cotton. He was with a man still in his tradie gear, dusty blundstone boots, torn Hard Yakka pants and a T-shirt which had clearly seen better days. His shoulders were like cannon-balls, and he had a bit of a tummy. Jason didn't know which he found sexier.

Keith noticed where he was looking. “Yeah. Interesting couple, huh? But I bet the blaoke in the gauzy pants doesn't go out loik that unless he's with Mr Hunk next to him.”

First Majorca Flats post       Previous MF post (#192)       Next MF post(#194)

Episodes 1 to 180 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter)

Cultural Conservatism

As I write this, it's a mere 8C (that's 46F for Americans).  Tomorrow is the 4th of July in Oz (and a few hours later in the US, thanks to the International Date Line).  Bastille day, France's big national holiday is on 14th July.  While it might be high summer in North America or France, here it is mid winter.

It made me think about cultural conservatism.  By this I don't mean conservatism as a political ethos, I mean that cultures change slowly, sometimes very slowly.  So, just as we are in mid-winter here and wearing sweaters and long-johns, so Christmas in the southern hemisphere takes place in midsummer.  Yet Ozzies continue to produce, buy and send Christmas cards with pictures of robins, snow, Father Christmases in thick fur-lined cloaks.  Even the Christmas tree, a symbol in the northern hemisphere of rejuvenation, of the spring to come, holds pride of place in our living rooms, decked with gold and silver baubles and lights to illumine the gloom of a northern hemisphere midwinter when in fact outside it's 40C (104F) and the light is glaring white and all you want to do is swim or lie in a shaded room with the blinds drawn.

Yet White Ozzies have been here over 200 years.  We still carry on the cultural traditions of our long distant ancestral lands, despite the seasons being arse-about-face.  Cultures are conservative.  They change glacially.

So the fact that being gay has gone from a crime, a social disgrace and a psychologist-defined "disease" to be accepted and normal in just 40 years is very striking.  Of course there are places where being gay is still a crime, where the ChrisTaliban continue to perversely justify death and beatings up and imprisonment for gays as "Christian" and "loving" and other places where the MusTaliban do the same.  Yet in many many places young men don't even regard the once pejorative term "gay" (as in "that's so gay", for example) as an insult.  "I'm straight-ish," they say.  "I'm bi-curious".  "I kiss my male friends, big deal." Step by inexorable step gay rights are becoming the norm.  

[chart from Box Turtle Bulletin]

Cultures change slowly.  Yet something once as reviled and despised as gayness moves from the extreme edge into the broad centre of acceptance.  As the chart above shows, in America, step by step, gays have been freed.  Of course, the US is behind the curve on this.  Europe, at least the western half, is far ahead.  On the other hand, Africa and the middle East are far behind.  But just as the logic of freedom for whites inevitably in the end meant, logically, that those same rights would have to be--and were--given to blacks, so it is that the inexorable logic of human rights means that we homos will be given the right to marry and to parent.   Young people in the advanced world are already there.  The victory for gay marriage and gay rights in New York State in the last week lights the road forward.

The battle is far from won.  But we can see the victory podium shining plain.  On this dismal midwinter's day, I'm cheered by it.

We shall overcome.     

NOM = OAGR

NOM, if you didn't know, stands for National Organization for Marriage.

Now in fact, as it happens, NOM has bugger all to do with marriage, at least the heterosexual kind.  It's not campaigning against heterosexual divorce.  It didn't condemn the sperminator for serial infidelities with his wife's maid in their own house.  It's silent on heterosexual adultery.  It offers no tips to heterosexual married couples about how to sustain a difficult marriage.

Nope.  It's opposed to gay marriage and civil unions, even though its stated mission is "to protect marriage and the faith communities that sustain it."  Like other ChrisTaliban bodies such as Focus on the Family, it believes that allowing two men to get married somehow destroys heterosexual marriage.  Bizarre.  It also works to oppose and prevent gay and lesbian couples adopting, though quite what this has to do with marriage is not at all clear.

When I attempted to discuss this with them on their blog, they at first responded indignantly and then refused to post my response.  It was clear that they were not prepared to be rational, not prepared to discuss what they believed without parroting dogma and slogans. When I pointed out that Jesus doesn't mention homosexuality -- not once! -- they argued that St Paul spoke with His voice, so He did, really.  There ya go.  When I mentioned love one another as I have loved you, they said their opposition to us was "tough love".  Now you understand. How stupid of you to have thought they hated us!

They repeatedly mentioned that they were in favour of "traditional marriage", whatever that is.  Come to think of it, we're in favour of traditional marriage too.  You know, dressing up, a ceremony, the until-death-do-us part stuff, to cherish and love and honour.  With this body I thee worship.  Penguin suits, and confetti and joint mortgages.  The right to be with our spouse in hospital.  To be recognised by society and the law as a couple.  That's precisely why we want gay marriage.  We're sick of the nontraditional marriage which has been foisted upon us.  We're strongly in favour of traditional marriage.

They decline to disclose their donors despite court orders, leading some to conclude that so-called NOM is a front for a handful of mega-rich Catholics.  Their Wikipedia entry is instructive. Very, very instructive.  Read it.  The Southern Poverty Law Centre has declared it a hate group, right down there with the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazis and other low-life mouth breathers.

Before the Russian revolution, the majority faction in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party accepted the term Menshevik, though it means minority, allowing their opponents to use the term Bolshevik which means majority.  Over time, this came to be the truth.  Words mean something.  Would Russian history have been any different if the more liberal and open "Mensheviks" had taken power in 1917 instead of the "Bolsheviks" who, under their new name of "Communist"  went on to impose a vile and lethal tyranny on Russia and its satellites?  Who knows?  But certainly accepting such a dismissive label didn't help.

So let's not call this bigoted and vile organisation the National Organization for Marriage.  That's bullshit.  Let's instead call it the Organisation Against Gay Rights, or OAGR, with Maggie Gallagher (its head and spokesman) the chief ogress.  This is an altogether more satisfactory image.  If you must refer to NOM or DOMA (the so-called  "Defense of Marriage Act") or "Focus on the Family" (pull the other one, it's got knobs on), always preface your reference with "so-called" or perhaps even "soi-disant" which is French, is pronounced swa-dizahn (more or less), and is much ruder.  Give them no quarter when you talk about them.  They give us none.