Hypocrisy

A Mike Peters cartoon.

Too young to know your sexuality

Lifestyle choice?

Religious freedom

Straights

All my life I have been despised by straight men.  Not because I was a thief, or a liar, or a rapist.  Not because I was cruel or vicious or evil.  But because I didn't conform to their image of what a boy, or teen, or man should be.  For something I couldn't help, because I was born that way.  They were happy enough for me to pretend to be what I wasn't, to lie to myself and them.  They were happy enough for me to do without love, and without the affection and caring that they got from their partners, because their partners were women, and I (for a long time) wasn't even allowed to make love to a man because it was illegal, punished by a prison sentence.  Their contempt has scarred me and deformed me.

"There had never been a time when he hadn't thought of himself as one of this company the mischance of battle had brought together: one with a secret, as many others had of one sort or another; one with an oddity, but there were plenty of those.  Lovell, who had owned a freak-booth that toured the fairs; Jansen, who was three parts coloured; Willis; Charlot; Odell, who had started with the handicap of 'talking posh'.  Now in a cold solitude he imagined, everywhere in the shadows, men quietly watching, curious, or mocking, or repelled, according to their kind, but all thanking their Maker for the solidarity that didn't include him."  [The Charioteer, by Mary Renault]

But if I say I despise and dislike and mistrust straight men, the response I get is that that is "so unfair", that "not all straight men are like that", and so on.  Indeed.  Yet the anger and hurt and disdain inside me aren't salved by exhortations to be "forgiving"  and "understanding"  and "accepting".  Bitter experience has taught me again and again not to trust men, not to let them into my heart, even as friends, not to rely on them to accept me for what I am.  No one can say I am stupid, and one definition of stupidity is to go on doing the same thing again and again even though what you do doesn't work and merely gives you pain.

And behind this whole cultural hate-fest lies the Church, with its assiduous drip-feed of homo-hatred and lies: "abomination", "intrinsically disordered", "kill the gays".

I cannot forgive or forget.

Facebook Hypocrisy

Click on picture to see it full-sized.

Incensed

My colleague at work has a severely disabled daughter, who is in a wheelchair, has to have a hoist to lift her out of her chair into the shower or onto the toilet, can't get out of bed by herself, and so on and so on.

When she goes out in her motorised wheelchair, she is frequently stopped by so-called Christians who tell her that if her faith was only strong enough, she would get out of her chair and walk.

This incenses me.  It's not enough that she is disabled, will never walk or run or have a normal life, will spend her whole life being dependent on others.  It's also her own fault.

These loathsome people make other people's lives worse, not better.  There is no love there, just a self-righteous judgmental bossy-boots horribleness.  Repellent, sanctimonious, hypocritical cretinism.

Jesus wept.

Tony Abbott, gays on boats

Bible belt

Morals

An interesting and polemical post by Michael-in-Norfolk about the Republicans and their moral "crusades".  It's odd how many of these "Christians" worship wealth.

So let's get this straight ...

Christian Oppression

From Joe my God via Truth Wins Out.

Hypocrisy

Newt Gingrich in favour of traditional marriage?  The kind where you keep on doing it?

Wall-to-wall hypocrites.

[From this blog]

Confession

I know this will be controversial, and I'll get grumbling and snarling emails, but I don't like straight men--or, to be precise most of the straight men I've encountered (see Anel's comment below).  Oh, I know one or two straight men who are decent enough blokes.  But they just don't get it.  It's too hard for them to understand what we're like.  For them, their sexuality is innate, "normal".  There's never any doubt, any problem.  They're turned on by women and they never have to wrestle with being an outsider, with being different, with having feelings and desires which are not congruent with the "norms" of society.  They never had the agonising over their love for a male friend.  They never had to pretend to have a girlfriend, so that a judgmental society would not put them in a box and close the lid.  Yet they say things like "why do gay men make such a fuss about being gay?" and "I don't want to hear about your sex life" when they've just regaled you with their love for their girlfriend/wife.  I hate their assumption that you inevitably find them attractive.  I hate their blithe assumption that all is well with the world.  Their world.  The world where culture, politics, law, custom, popular fiction and films, TV, sports, shops, restaurants, public transport, schools, hospitals and universities embrace heterosexuality and "normality".  I'm so fucking sick of straight men.

And I have to confess also to sorrow and dismay when bisexual men embrace the macho crap of the hetero lifestyle and maintain they dislike the feminine in us, even while they're having it off with their blokes.

Yeah.  A dyspeptic post.  Yet, sometimes I get so furious with the follies and narrowness of mankind.  And every so often I feel a compelling need to shout or groan or weep from the rooftops.  Consider this a rant.  Normal programming will resume tomorrow

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.

What are little boys made of?

Read this remarkable piece of research by Jim Barroway of Box Turtle Bulletin.  It's long.  It will break your heart.  It will make you boil with rage.  But it deserves to be spread as widely as possible, and read by as many people as possible so that this kind of pseudo-scientific perversion can never happen again. 

Every time some ChrisTaliban tells you that they do what they do to us "with love", remember this.  This is the bitter fruit of centuries of gay hatred, made worse by so-called scientific "treatment" and "analysis" and perpetrated by hypocrites.

Gay IS a choice

Read this thoughtful blog piece then read the comments including the hypocritical piffle from "Jules".

Gay Marriage

See also:

Gay Marriage Anyway

and

The Rabid Religious Right's agenda

Vainglory

From the Book of Common Prayer (I was brought up an Anglican):

From all blindness of heart, from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.

How few of the noisy Christians live according to these precepts.  It's always the quiet ones. Truly, this is the Christian message, not that you'd think so if you listened to the hate-filled preachers and hypocrites who shout and rant from every possible soapbox.

Well, I hope that I may be delivered of these things too.  Blindness of heart.  Pride.  Vainglory.  Envy.  Hatred.  Uncharitableness.   Perhaps we humans aren't strong enough to do it by ourselves.  We need help.

(I was reading some old posts about sorrowful events and sad times, The Bloody-Mindedness of Life  and Bread of Heaven and they made me think of all this stuff again)