Entries associated with the tag "Gays":

It's not easy being a traditionalist conservative. First, you assert that your views about gays and women are timeless truths. Then, you change them.

According to the Pew Research Center's March 22 survey on trends in political values and core attitudes, 1987-2007, the average Republican is now more tolerant of gays and of women in what the pollsters call "non-traditional" roles than the average Democrat was in 1987. This trend is particularly amusing when it comes to religious edicts. "In 1987, 73% of white evangelical Protestants agreed that school boards should have the right to fire homosexual teachers. Today, just 42% do so. And in 1987, 60% of white evangelicals believed that AIDS might be a punishment for immoral sexual behavior; today just 38% believe this."

Of course, popular opinion isn't self-executing, especially when the true believers are better organized.

Full report (PDF). (Naturally, the MSM are more interested in short-term party identification, but there's plenty of wonky goodness to go around.)

Has anyone summarized the Christianists' fear of gayness better than Jack Balkin at Balkinization, following last week's proclamation that Ted Haggard has been "cured"?

"It is clearly very important to the ministers -- and to Haggard himself -- that he not have any speck of homosexual desire, for to have any such desire, no matter how small, would be polluting. It is, sad to say, all too similar to the Jim Crow theory that one drop of black blood made you black and therefore socially inferior to 'pure' whites...."

"Sexual orientation in human populations is not a matter of either opposite-sex or same-sex, or of healthy desires and polluted ones; rather it involves a continuum of possible orientations that are spread across a population distribution-- as are so many other human traits. What Haggard and his friends particularly want to deny is this fact, because it changes the meaning of normalcy and undermines their way of seeing the world." Their horror is the gayness inside.

(Hat tip to Chicago blogger Hunter at Random.)

Talk to Action, a group blog that keeps a mainstream eye on wacko Christians, has a link-filled post on the latest chilling development: "Seven Virginia Episcopal churches, including two of the largest and wealthiest in the American Episcopal Communion in the American Episcopal Communion, voted to break away and, as a New York Times story written prior to the vote put it, 'report to the powerful archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality who supports legislation in his country that would make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant.'"

Akinola heads the largest Anglican province in the world, and the legislation he supports echoes Nazi efforts in 1933. 

In the Washington Post story on the Episcopalian split, the self-described Christian conservatives try to excuse Akinola's homobigotry. In the AP story run by the Chicago Tribune one of them describes the change from being part of a denomination that ordains women and gays to one that seeks to imprison them:  "A burden is being lifted. There are new possibilities breaking through."

Anyone else remember the good old days when leftists imagined that the third world would enlighten Americans?  Or when Christians expected foreign missions to bear good fruit?

Check out all the worst political web sites, from "campaign dogs" to a screen of raw HTML, here.

Emergency Kindness provides emergency contraception for women in need, thus helping to prevent abortions.  (Hat tip to Feministing, which has some good commentary.)

Those of us who worship at the New Yorker shrine need to know that their reporters and editors can screw up their stories badly -- for example, implying there's some kind of "Democratic orthodoxy" on gay marriage.

BerkShares are a local currency in western Massachusetts (170,000 currently in circulation) -- one often-talked-about method of building up a local or regional economy. They're no wackier than frequent flyer miles or credit card cash-back programs, and they might do some good.

Geoffrey Stone at the University of Chicago Law School Faculty blog remembers back when the school's first Gay Law Students Association convened: "One of my faculty colleagues was outraged, comparing it to a Heroin-Users Law Students Association."

Not just another day at the office: scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder find that dinosaurs had stomach worms. "This research is exciting because it provides evidence for the movement of tiny, soft-bodied organisms inside the gut cavity of a dinosaur."

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise explains why Cheney admitted on a right-wing talk show that U.S. interrogators practice waterboarding:  "That's right folks, we're destroying our constitution for the sake of a marketing campaign."

I missed gay ex-fundie Mel White, author of Religion Gone Bad, when he was in town, but I did visit his Web site. There I found Walter Wink's fascinating article, "Homosexuality and the Bible."  Wink teaches at Auburn Theological Seminary, and he argues that while the Bible has nothing good to say about homosexuality, it puts forth so many long-gone sexual customs (polygamy, stoning of adulterers, categorical prohibition of divorce, and 13 more) that we don't need to sweat the specifics.

"There is no Biblical sex ethic," he writes. "Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand-year span of biblical history. . . . The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, culture, or period."

That sounds like a book I could live with. More than one version of Wink's article is on the internet, though, and while trying (and failing) to figure out which was the most recent, I ran across Wink's exchange with Robert A.J. Gagnon (PDF) of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in the Christian Century, and Gagnon's 53-page takedown (PDF) of Wink's argument in Horizons in Biblical Theology.

Gagnon is deeply conservative, but he's no ignorant literalist who regards the Bible as some kind of lawnmower instruction manual; he knows that its teachings change over time. The question is, do the fundamental teachings change? He reckons that the most fundamental of the sexual teachings cited by Wink is divorce. Wink writes that Jesus categorically forbade divorce, "yet we ordain divorcees. Why not homosexuals?"

But even today, as Gagnon observes, the cases aren't analogous. Mainline churches may not stigmatize divorcees as in the past, but they "do not regard divorce as an act to be celebrated and repeated. They regard divorce as a sin to be repented of and not repeated. If it is repeated, repentance rather than self-affirmation is again expected. Serial unrepentant divorce is viewed as a grave problem that has serious consequences at least for holding ordained office." In other words, "the appropriate parallel [to ordained divorcees] is the ordination of a homosexual person who may have engaged in same-sex intercourse in the past but who in a spirit of repentance does not intend to repeat such behavior in the future."

Ouch! There's much more on both sides -- read the whole thing. It's not technical but you do have to pay attention. (Paul Whiting has blogged on this as well.)

Of course, if the Bible is anti-gay (taken as a whole and interpreted reasonably), then one of two conclusions follows: either it's bad to be gay, or the Bible is a great literary work lacking in moral authority.

Everyone's talking about death these days. I guess it's more fun than following the campaign ads. Depending on who you read, the fear of death may make you a bigot, or a Republican, or a Buddhist.

• Amanda Marcotte writes, "As Lorraine noted in her post on this the other day, one of the primary features of turning someone into an Other that you can feel superior towards is to symbolically cast them as embodied and then implicitly or even explicitly cast yourself as superior and transcendent of bodily concerns. How does this work? Well, . . . you have racists who think that white people are smarter than black people and concurrently that black people are better athletes, which is a way of saying that black people are embodied but white people are somehow transcendent. Fundie homophobes obsess over anal sex because to them, penetration is about humiliating and embodying the penetrated one, showing that she is just a fleshy thing that will die. That men can get penetrated means men are soft, fleshy beings that will die and this causes them to panic." More, including the application to torture and some good links.

• The omnipresent Cass Sunstein blogs about a 2004 study (abstract here) that found people were more likely to approve of Bush's policies and to vote for him after being reminded that they would die someday.  "Unless circumstances have relevantly changed since 2004, Bush -- and almost certainly Republican candidates more generally -- are likely to benefit from any reference to terrorism or the September 11 attacks. So Karl Rove knows exactly what he is doing." More. The generic name for this kind of research is "mortality salience."

• My one-time classmate and longtime friend, philosopher David Loy, has published in this area too, but he takes it in a different direction. "Consciousness of death is our primary repression [contra Freud].  The Buddhists claim that, since the self is insubstantial, the death-denial represents quite valid suspicion that 'I' do not really exist.  Fear of physical death is one manifestation of the deeper fear of the death of this 'I'." The cure is to recognize the truth. "When I am no longer striving to make myself real through things, I am actualized. When I stop trying to become something, I discover that I am everything." Bad news for fundamentalism, both political and religious. Much more.

Tom Roeser is old enough to have had Dennis Hastert in a summer-school politics class back when the current Speaker of the House was just a wrestling coach with a yen for politics. At his blog, Roeser traces Hastert's remarkably fortunate career, concluding with the envenomed truth of which only he is capable:   

"Denny Hastert is one who is wallowing alone without his old mentors to tell him what to do."

But Hastert's not the only one Roeser would throw under the bus. His fundamental conclusion from the scandal is that the Republican Party is--wait for it--excessively tolerant: 

"Sappy tolerance for homosexuality should be eradicated from the Republican party. Just as a congressional candidate has to account for excessive drinking, womanizing, gambling, business improprieties, and other vices, there should be no silent murmur that forbids the raising of the issue of homosexuality. For that matter, the Bush White House has a staffer who manages liaison with homosexuals. Why? The official Republican party has what it calls the 'Log Cabin Republicans'--a caucus of homosexuals. It is an open secret that GOP presidential candidates try to schmooze them."

Well. Unlike Bush and Cheney, he's no hypocrite. The moral for gays--even the conservative-minded--is bleak but obvious: Being attracted to the same sex isn't a choice. Voting Republican is.

  What is Wal-Mart, really?

• Wal-Mart is way liberal. Charles Fishman at Fastcompany.com: "In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers--100 million in all--one swirl bulb [compact fluorescent light, or CFL]. In the process, Wal-Mart wants to change energy consumption in the United States, and energy consciousness, too. . . . It's a bold goal, a remarkable declaration of Wal-Mart's intention to modernize and green up a whole line of business using market oomph. Teaming up with General Electric, which owns about 60 percent of the residential lightbulb market in the United States, Wal-Mart wants to single-handedly double U.S. sales for CFLs in a year, and it wants demand to surge forward after that."

• I said, Wal-Mart is way liberal. Mya Frazier in Advertising Age, August 24: "In an unprecedented push, Wal-Mart Stores has hired a gay-marketing shop, joined the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and begun discussions with activist groups about extending domestic-partnership benefits to its employees."

• Wal-Mart is way conservative. The company is well-known for its fanatical anti-union stance. Michael Barbaro and Stephanie Strom in the New York Times: "As Wal-Mart Stores struggles to rebut criticism from unions and Democratic leaders, the company has discovered a reliable ally: prominent conservative research groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute," to which it's given $2.5 million over six years.

• Wal-Mart is way powerful. Ezra Klein at Tapped: "Wal-Mart has the size, power, and will to dictate the behavior of their sellers [suppliers, such as GE], meaning their decisions can essentially set norms, prices, and wages throughout the entire economy. They may use that power [known as monopsony] for good, they may use it for bad. But they are using it." (More from Barry Lynn.) It is actually a form of central planning.

• Maybe Wal-Mart is the nation's Mayor Daley. People on both sides of the aisle may do what Chicago environmentalists did in March 2003, when Daley consulted no one and used his power to wipe Meigs Field off the map: swallow hard and say nothing about huge power being wielded arbitrarily, because the power was used to further their cause.