April 14, 2009
I remarked (”remarked” being a subjective word; my verbosity IRL even surpasses my verbosity online) to my lovely wife this evening that I never imagined, at this stage in my life, I’d be trying to understand all the peculiar (and I do mean “peculiar”), under-the-radar quirks and rules and code words and the like of religions I neither believed in, nor cared much about. Oh, it’s very important to know a thing or two about religion in general (that Passover has nothing to do with Easter, for instance) just to keep from making a fool of yourself, and very helpful to have a good grasp on others’ belief systems, if for no other reason than to understand what you believe or not, and why (or why not), and to prevent you from getting suckered into snake handling.
But here I am, feeling, in the immortal words of Edina Monsoon, like I hit an oil patch at 35, and have been sliding toward the grave ever since — and, when I’d much rather be gardening, or engaging in hot monkey love, I’m learning about strange, usually bizarre, belief systems I’d rather have kept only at the furthestmost outer fringes of my peripheral vision.
“Know thine enemy” goes the oft-quoted and nearly always mis-cited saying. As I wrote some months ago to Mormons at large, I was quite content to leave you and your church be, and blithely ignore your missionaries on my doorstep. Now, I know more about Mormonism than I ever wanted to, because the Salt Lake PTB decided they weren’t content to leave me be, and barged into my home to rip up my marriage license. Thus, I need to know about Mormonism, so I know what I’m dealing with. And, besides, when you know all about a thing, it ceases to be scary. The Mormon church is no longer scary; the more I know, the more it’s like that fine piece of advice to folks who fear speaking in public: Picture your audience naked. (Granted, I now picture Mormons in their magic underwear — or, since that episode of “Big Love,” in their baker hats and green aprons — which is far less taxing on my imagination. News flash: Gay people do not want to see everyone naked. In fact, most of us want to see very few people naked.)
(Oh, while I’m thinking about it: Our friend and tireless freedom fighter Chino left a comment explaining some Mormon code that flew right past me; if you’d like to know about the “White Horse prophecy,” see his comment here.)
Anyway… I stumbled across a fairly new blog that offers a fascinating look into the mindset of the “Quiverfull” Christians — the sort of “biblical patriarchy” cult (spread through the usually disturbing homeschooling movement) I think Maggie Gallagher would belong to if she weren’t constantly compelled to run off at the mouth, unlike a submissive little wife shouldn’t. It’s called “No Longer Quivering,” written by one Vyckie Garrison, who, after quite the unstable childhood, dove headfirst into the wifely-submission role (she “adored” her role model, Michelle Duggar), popping out as many babies as possible for her ungrateful and domineering husband, even at risk to her own life, because, well, of course, God wants women to be miserable (and gender equality is the tool of Satan).
Vyckie — thank God — emerged from this destructive lifestyle after a year’s correspondence with her un-believing uncle (yes, Christians, g’head, blame the atheist; you will anyway), not unscathed, but definitely far more rational. She takes you through her ongoing journey in lengthy, well-thought-out posts, with, as a big bonus, comments from readers who are, overall, smart, articulate, and compassionate.
Rather than just hit the main link, you might want to start with this article about Vyckie first: “All God’s children” by Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
There are also some good related articles linked downpage, particularly “Submit, woman!,” which explores the line (is there one?) between “wifely submission” and domestic abuse. Within this second article is another link, this time to Joyce’s article, “Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence,” also a worthy read — especially if you want to know where Rick Warren is coming from.
If you read these pieces first (and they’re quite riveting and digestible, albeit infuriating to anyone with even a shred of self-worth), you’ll go into Garrison’s blog with a good overview of what Garrison herself endured — and more importantly, why.
Joyce writes: “The experience of Garrison’s friend Laura — a mother of 11 who collapsed under the demands of the lifestyle — also helps explain why many unhappy women are afraid to turn their backs on the movement, when they’ll be left with scant financial resources, years without work experience, and a dearth of references from a community that often shuns them.” Which has all the earmaks of any cult: Isolate the victim, destroy her independence, and hold the threat of ostracization over her head.
(Which always makes me think of Mormonism. I’m not just getting in a jab at the Mormons here, honest, but: Consider the vast “support” network the Mormons have set up solely for the care and feeding of one another — right down to silos full of food to be distributed in case of Armageddon — and then consider the fate of Mormons who are excommunicated or leave the church voluntarily; they are often completely cut off, and may as well be dead, even to their own families. And Mormons wonder why so many, especially Christians, consider their church a cult? Such Mafia-like intimidation tactics — once you’re in the family, you can never leave — under the mask of Us Against the World, is but one warning sign of a cult.)
While Garrison’s blog, which she writes in tandem with her friend Laura, who is undergoing a similar — and in some ways, much more difficult — journey (Laura’s ex-husband wrenched custody of all eleven of their children from her), is only a little more than a month old, there is much material to absorb, and there is a natural chronology to it. So I would suggest reading the introductory links under “What It’s All About” (in the righthand menu), and then navigating your way back to the women’s first posts (Laura: “Part 1 ~ In The Beginning”; Vyckie: “Part 1 ~ Married At 16″), and proceeding from there.
Even if you have no interest in “biblical patriarchy” to begin with, I assure you that you will after you’ve read a few posts (and the many comments). You may never come to truly understand this mindset (I doubt I ever will), much less relate to it (I know I never will), but you will come away with a few more pieces to the puzzle that stymies those of us who cannot imagine life without having, and fighting to maintain, our freedom, our dignity, and our very personhood.
And, while this may sound flip (as I’ve really been ragging on her this week) you will actually come to understand Maggie Gallagher… and Phyllis Schlafly, and all the others like them. There’s really no difference among them at all.
The only danger: You may come to pity them.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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Filed Under: Atheism/Agnosticism, Christianity, Heterosexuality, LDS/Mormons, Marriage, Mental Health, Parenting, Radical Religious Right
April 1, 2009
This is one of the best reads I’ve stumbled across in a long time. Excerpts don’t do it justice, but I’ll quote a bit anyway, just to whet your appetite:
…I have friends — mostly conservatives, including social conservatives — who have grown grimly anxious about the state of the world. … This gloom is particularly strong among those who fight on the opposite side of the culture wars; those who oppose embryonic stem cell research, gay marriage, and what might generally be called “sexual freedom” are a confounded lot these days. …
Despite temporary victories for social conservatives like the passage of Proposition 8 in California, the polling indicates a gradually growing consensus in favor of the freedom to marry, particularly among the youngest Americans. Legislative efforts to advance an anti-abortion cause continue to make tiny bits of progress, but much of their work has been undone both by the strongly pro-choice Obama Administration and by a series of disheartening defeats at the ballot box. Younger conservatives may still be anti-abortion, but despite the shrill cries of their elders, they are increasingly likely to see the “life” issue one among many; many young evangelicals are increasingly liberal in their views on fighting poverty and global warming, with many more inclined (rightly so, from a Scriptural perspective) to see the morality of the pocketbook as of more concern to Christ than the morality of the pelvis. …
Politics works in cycles; the GOP will come back eventually, and conservatives will come to power again. But culture doesn’t work in the same cyclical way. The genie of women’s liberation and cultural emancipation has been hard for the right to put back in the bottle, despite their most furious efforts for forty years. The Pill isn’t going away. Americans as a whole are not showing any signs of a renewed willingness to marry young and stay married to one spouse of the opposite sex for the rest of their lives. Oh, there are a few microtrends here and there that might gladden a reactionary heart — but for the most part, the narrative of American history holds true: rights once granted are hard to take away; freedoms once tasted are hard to give up. …
I think social cons know that even when they win an occasional battle, they’re losing the larger war. This has led some to take some whoppingly extreme positions. Maggie Gallagher, one of the noisiest (and, to be fair, most hard-working) advocates of the limited marriage franchise, has been putting up a series of posts on the National Review’s main blog. This one from Monday is a stunner: The Amazing Power of the Culture (Part 9). Gallagher, who seems the poster child for the increased franticness of the right, is well aware that it’s possible for conservatives to win elections and lose the culture war; she suggests, rightly, that that is what has been happening for generations (but of course, particularly since that great bugaboo of all reactionaries, the 1960s). And in the past few weeks, the previously even-tempered Gallagher has begun to pull off the proverbial gloves, and in doing so has revealed some of the ugly underpinnings of the social conservative Weltanschauung. An excerpt from her latest:
“Marriage is about the love of adults for each other; it’s about caretaking intimacy, passion, not necessarily about children.” When I hear people claiming they are marriage supporters and saying these things about marriage, I cringe. They do not know what they are talking about.
A marriage culture means married men who fall passionately in love with their secretaries or their junior law partners saying, “My marriage comes before my happiness; my family comes first.” It means women watching Oprah and feeling underappreciated, like they are “settling” for less than they deserve, stepping back to say, “It’s not humiliating to accept less than I ‘deserve;’ it’s grown-up. It’s motherly. It’s what women have done for all of human history and it is good.”
And then stepping back and saying: “His mother can love him; if he were my son I would love him, there’s got to be a way for me to love him well and truly even though right this second I’m feeling humiliated and angry with how I’m being treated.” No marriage culture can survive unless adults are actively encouraged to surmount this kind of ordinary temptation…
Bold emphasis mine. Repost it widely, folks. Gallagher wants a world where wives baby husbands like mothers baby sons (she uses the mothering image too often for it to be careless). Her contempt for women and men is staggering; for Gallagher, a man is apparently an eternal child and every woman is called, perhaps like Mary, to be long-suffering, maternal, and self-abnegating. (Since when did the Jesus-Mary relationship become the model for good marriages? That’s a perverse twisting of Ephesians 5 indeed, more perverse than even Freud could imagine!) For Gallagher, humiliation and degradation are feelings to be suppressed, denied, and overcome, while happiness itself — especially for women — is a “dangerous temptation.”
Those who want to limit marriage to a man and a woman have rarely been so honest about the misogyny that undergirds their position. Here’s the shorthand: “marriage is about obligation and reproduction, not about desire. If gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, it will symbolize that marriage has become about love and feeling rather than solemn duty and reproduction. Heterosexual couples will look at gay couples and conclude that they are only expected to remain in a marriage as long as that marriage is fulfilling, because the non-reproductive nature of gay and lesbian relationships indicates that emotional fulfillment, sans reproductivity, is sufficient grounds to wed someone. And thus emboldened to choose happiness over duty, the divorce rate will spike, children will suffer, and the baby Jesus will cry.”
Good luck marketing this one, Maggie Gallagher. And you wonder why you’re losing the culture war? …
Despair is not a pleasant feeling. It leads some to revolution, some to misanthropy, some to apocalyptic millenarianism, some to Zoloft, and some to unhinged postings at the National Review. As the evidence begins to grow that the battle to drag America and the Western World back to Calvin’s Geneva or Savonarola’s Florence is really and truly irrevocably lost, some essentially decent but misguided folks are struggling with despair. Watch with glee or empathy, but watch — because as they try and hold off despair, their rhetoric grows more honest. And that candor will hasten, I suspect, the irrelevance of the cultural right, as it reveals once and for all the deep-seated misogyny concealed beneath the lofty language of the “culture of life.”
Oh, and by the way: I don’t know Hugo Schwyzer, but it’s easy to glean from just this piece alone that he’s straight, married, has a new baby, and is devoutly spiritual (if not downright religious). So, before you True Believers™ descend on the comments section, bear in mind that Mr. Schwyzer does not appear to be a ringleader in the Vast Homosexual Agenda to Destroy Civilization™.
Anyway, read the whole thing — you’ll be glad you did:
Despair on the right:
of depressed social conservatives,
a lost culture war, and the misogynistic underbelly
of the “marriage movement”
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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Filed Under: California, Choice, Christianity, Civil Rights, Heterosexuality, Homophobia, Marriage, National Organization for Marriage/Maggie Gallagher, Proposition 8, Radical Religious Right
October 8, 2008
I hestitate to say, “Now I’ve heard it all,” because the equality-haters never fail to amaze me with their convoluted justifications for turning gay and lesbian Americans into permanent untouchables, nor with the blatant lies they use to do it, nor with their deliberate ignorance, which is so breathtakingly astounding one can only wonder if these people were all homeschooled* by Paul Cameron.
This next example of sheer idiocy does not come from the official anti-marriage campaign — but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this doozy ends up in their next attack ad.
On a blog promoting the elimination of our legal rights in California is a long essay by one “John A. Evans,” who asks if support for Proposition is “intolerant.” It begins, surprisingly enough, with this admission:
Probably the most relevant definition of “intolerant” is “an unwillingness to grant equal freedom” to others. Certainly married heterosexuals are granted a host of legal rights and obligations that would be denied to others if those in same sex relationships cannot be “married.” There is also a degree of legitimacy and respect, associated in our culture with the institution of marriage, that might be denied to same sex couples if they are denied “marriage.” Denying rights and legitimacy to some, while granting it to others, certainly appears “intolerant.”
Nothing wrong there — but the writer’s apparent sanity is an illusion; he quickly dissolves into a comparison of “tolerating” homosexuals and “tolerating” smokers. (That probably caught Frank Schubert’s attention.)
And here, dear reader, is where the writer makes his “point”: that it is right to be intolerant of things that kill, and smoking and homosexuality both kill.
Oh, but Evans doesn’t stop there — he posits that homosexuality also causes sterility
As you read, try to keep your eyes from rolling right out of their sockets:
… Now we have become so intolerant of smoking that smoking is illegal in public buildings and those who sponsored smoking—the tobacco companies—have been required to pay billions of dollars in damages to those they lured into the habit. Why is such pronounced intolerance for smoking so acceptable?
The obvious answer is that smoking kills people—not immediately, and not everyone, but irrefutably. Health costs for everyone are increased by smokers. Even non-smokers are harmed by being in the presence of smokers. The first question in every medical check-up is “Do you smoke?” Some smokers excuse their smoking with the confession that it is a habit—a physical compulsion—that they are helpless to resist. It is part of their inherent nature, they claim, that cannot be denied. The fact that others have ceased smoking is irrelevant to those who remain smokers—they do not accept that it is possible for them to stop smoking. …
So the problem with smokers is their behavior, when they claim they were born smokers. Gee, what a clever way to equate an acquired addiction with an inherent trait.
Not.
Fail.
I’ll tell you what’s often inborn: stupid. But without access to the writer’s psych workup, it’s impossible to know whether he was born stupid, or chooses to be stupid.
Is this societal intolerance of smoking, now crystallized into law, intolerance of smokers? Generally speaking it is not. Most do not condemn smokers for smoking.
Oh, really now? Tell me more.
Most recognize they have challenges in their own lives that are as great for them as is smoking for smokers. Smokers are not denied the right to vote, or to eat where they want, or even to employment in almost any job because they smoke. …
Exsqueeze me? “Pointing to rising health costs and the oversized proportion of insurance claims attributed to smokers, some employers in California and around the country are refusing to hire applicants who smoke and, sometimes, firing employees who refuse to quit.”
But never mind all that — here’s the money quote:
How is this relevant to Proposition 8? Smoking may kill people eventually—usually decades after they become addicted and long after they have reached the age of reproduction. Smokers have had many children—many people alive in the world today are children of smokers. In contrast, homosexuality has an instant medical resul [sic] —it causes sterility. Which is more damaging to society—cancer and heart failure caused by smoking or sterility caused by homosexuality?
Paul Cameron, that is you, isn’t it?
And, gee, where have I heard something like that before? Not from Paul Cameron, I mean, but… Oh, yeah, I remember — it’s right out of the ol’ Reasons to Pull Out of Your Ass for Banning Interracial Marriage Handbook:
“It is stated as a well authenticated fact that if the [children] of a black man and white woman, and a white man and a black woman intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid the intermarriage of blacks and whites.”
— Supreme Court of Missouri, 1869
If a population of animals, let us say frogs, were faced with two diseases—one that caused cancer late in the life cycle of the frog and one that caused immediate sterility—which one would be the focus of major research grants searching for a cure? The frogs will suffer from the cancer, but they will become extinct from sterility.
OK, Einstein, first explain how homosexuality causes sterility, and tell us where you got this whopper.
Second, explain why animals — all of them — aren’t extinct. “No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins and aphis.”
Tell me why the bonobo (or dwarf chimpanzee), especially, still exists, when the entire species is bisexual, and 95% of the population is just as happy to establish a primary relationship with a MOTSS as with a MOTOS.
Tell me how the Amazon dolphin ever managed to survive, when its males are such big, gay perverts, they’ll happily penetrate each other through the blowhole, making the Amazon “the only example of nasal sex we have in nature.”
Oh, I know the old “reasoning”:
You: “Homosexuality is unnatural!”
Me: “Homosexuality is perfectly natural throughout the animal kingdom.”
You: (sputtering) “People are not animals!”
Finally, if this “homosexuality = sterility” idiocy were true, tell us why you might want to “cure” sterility in a group of people you’d rather see extinct in the first place.
Here’s a little tip, Skip: If you want to “cure” (i.e., eradicate) homosexuality, you can’t do it through these bullshit “ex-gay” programs you’re thinking of. They don’t work. If you want to “cure” homosexuality, you’ll have to kill all the heterosexuals, ’cause, Baby John, heterosexuality causes homosexuality.
With all the Radical Right’s yammering on about how only a penis and a vagina make a family, they just can’t handle the truth — the undeniable, unimpeachable truth — that 100% of all homosexuals are the result of heterosexual breeding.
Suck on that, Johnny.
Does the government have a legitimate role in opposing, or at least not encouraging, sterility? Admittedly many in America today support the nihilistic doctrine that humans are an ecological disaster and that the fewer humans there are, the better off the earth would be. That is the official policy of the Chinese government. But should that be the policy of our government? …
Is there an equivalent to Godwin’s Law for trying to equate the Demon Homosexual with the Yellow Menace? If not, there should be.
Or should our government support policies conducive to child bearing by Americans? Certainly that is the original basis for the legal privileges granted to “married” couples. It was intended to create a legally protected environment most conducive to the physical and emotional security of children where they would be most likely to receive the constant and sensitive nurture that is so essential to infants and children.
Never mind the reams of evidence that queerspawn grow up just as nice and normal as (and often more caring and compassionate than) the children of heterosexuals — the Radical Wrongys never listen to that in the first place.
Instead, Mister Wizard, tell me where your “best for the children” spiel leaves couples like my wife and me, who aren’t going to have children (and, yes, we could if we wanted to).
Every time the gay-bashers scramble for justification, it always comes down to “what’s best for the children.” And they always conveniently ignore childless-by-choice couples like Buffy and me — and like every heterosexual couple who choose not to have children.
Ya think marriage, or the lack of it, is going to change our minds? Or the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Childless-By-Choice next door?
“Golly, honey! I know we said we didn’t want kids, and nothing changed in the 15 years we lived together without benefit of marriage, but now that we are married, I suddenly have this overwhelming urge to whelp out more little brooders than the Duggars! Gosh, I never realized how conducive to childbearing man-woman marriage really is!”
Proposition 8, in effect, is a refutation of the California court’s approval for, and condoning of, a particular life style.
Don’t you love the way they get it exactly backwards? Proposition 8 is not a “refutation of the California court’s approval for, and condoning of, a particular lifestyle”; it is the “approval for, and condoning of, a particular—” chosen “—lifestyle” above all others: the Christian lifestyle.
Homosexuality is not a lifestyle, nor is it a choice. Religion, however, is very much a lifestyle, and very much a choice.
Of course, these same homophobes also insist that since gay people aren’t born gay, we have to “recruit” new members all the time to keep our membership up — when in reality that’s what religions, not gay people, do.
‘Phobes do have a bit of a problem with projection, don’t they?
Anyway…
Proposition 8 does not take away the right of anyone to live with anyone they please nor does it limit their ability to have whatever type of sexual relationships they choose. It does not restrict anyone’s right to a job…
John A. Evans, if you’re not deliberately ignorant, you are deliberately lying.
“While states as diverse as Iowa and California already protect LGBT Americans from employment discrimination, 31 states still do not,” which means that “in most of the nation, it is still perfectly legal for an employer or landlord to say ‘lesbians need not apply,’ or for the manager of a movie theater to say, ‘We don’t sell tickets to gays like you.’”
…or to receive any particular level of benefits from that job, such as health care.
I can’t imagine the arrogance it must take to state such garbage as if it were fact. Try selling this bunk to people like Robert Ryan and Ralph Martinelli or Nickie Brazier and Heather Aurand, to name just two couples who have discovered the hard way that inferior, second-class civil unions and domestic partnerships do not afford the same benefits — especially healthcare — as marriage:
“The New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission … concluded that civil unions create a little-understood, separate category of citizens that is often more vulnerable to federal discrimination. …
“First, many employers are not recognizing civil union partners for spousal health benefits because they are governed by a federal law, not the state one that requires them to.
“The federal Employment Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, uses words like ’spouses,’ ‘husbands and wives,’ and ‘married couples’ in its benefits guidelines for self-insured employers.
“While such companies may also cover civil union partners, the law — coupled with the federal DOMA — gives them a loophole to avoid it without obviously discriminating.
“Companies in New Jersey and Vermont are doing this, while in Massachusetts, with marriage equality, employers don’t question their obligation to the couples. …”
To boot, since the federal government refuses to recognize same-sex marriages, or domestic partnerships, or civil unions, couples legally joined in their own states are learning that when one spouse can add the other to his/her employer’s health insurance plan, the value of the dependent spouse’s coverage is taxed as income by the IRS:
“As a growing number of employers offer domestic partner benefits, gays and lesbians are discovering a hitch — domestic partner benefits, unlike health benefits provided to married heterosexual couples, are taxed as income. As a result, gay and lesbian employees take home relatively less income than their married heterosexual co-workers who perform exactly the same job.
“For example, a gay or lesbian employee earning $40,000 a year and receiving domestic partner health insurance benefits toward which the employer contributes $250 a month would owe income and payroll taxes on a total of $43,000 in income at the end of the year.
“A married heterosexual employee earning the same salary and receiving the same health benefits for his or her spouse would owe income and payroll taxes on only $40,000.”
“As a result, married workers who get family health insurance benefits get a double benefit — they get health insurance coverage for their spouses and children and are not taxed on the value of that coverage.
“In sharp contrast, workers who have an unmarried domestic partner are doubly burdened: Their employers typically do not provide coverage for domestic partners; and even when partners are covered, the partner’s coverage is taxed as income to the employee.
“Employers who cover domestic partners are also penalized under current law, since employer payroll tax responsibilities increase along with employees’ income and Social Security taxes.
“As a result, the taxation of domestic partner health care benefits sets up a two-tiered tax policy that costs many American families and their employers millions of dollars each year. This report estimates the financial impact of this extra tax on employees and employers.”
Now, Johnny, you tell me: How are we treated “equally” again? And what entitles you and yours to such special rights?
Proposition 8 does not deny anyone life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Gosh, why does that sound so famil—? Oh, yeah! I remember now — that’s from the Handbook of Justifying Racism, Or: We Don’t Hate Colored People, But We Don’t Want Them Using Our Water Fountains or Touching Our Lily-White Daughters:
“[Negroes’] rights, social, civil, political and religious, will be jealously guarded; but they must not marry or be given in marriage with the sons and daughters of our people.”
— Lonas v. Tennessee, 1871
“All this is not to say that any race, creed, or caste should be denied any inalienable rights. But it is to say that Deity in his infinite wisdom, to carry out his inscrutable purposes, has a caste system of his own, a system of segregation of races and peoples.”
— Bruce R. McConkie
Mormon Doctrine: A Compendium of the Gospel, 1958
“Now we are generous with the Negro. We are willing that the Negro have the highest education. I would be willing to let every Negro drive a Cadillac if they could afford it. I would be willing that they have all the advantages they can get out of life in the world. But let them enjoy these things among themselves.”
— Elder Mark E. Peterson
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
August 27, 1954
But tolerance for individuals who choose same sex relationships does not require tolerance (or worse, encouragement)…
Gosh, that sounds awfully familiar too!
“We must not … feel so sorry for Negroes that we will open our arms and embrace them…”
— Elder Mark E. Peterson
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
August 27, 1954
It is legitimate—intolerant or not—to fund school programs warning of the evils of smoking and encouraging students not to begin smoking. It is also legitimate to encourage child bearing and rearing and to create a privileged legal environment—called “marriage”—for those who undertake that most essential responsibility. Granting the same legal protections to sterile relationships is bad policy.
“Sterile relationships.” The only thing “sterile” is this guy’s synapses.
Well, at least he agrees that he has access to a “privileged legal environment” denied us. Disgustingly, his whole point is that it’s perfectly acceptable to discriminate against people he doesn’t think are as good as he is.
To ask the obvious, who is going to pay the taxes necessary to fund the social security benefits of same sex couples?
To ask the obvious, who is paying the taxes necessary to send your children to public school — and to private religious schools, thanks to “faith-based funding”? Last time I checked, I didn’t get a tax break just because I don’t have kids — I’m paying for your rugrats’ education, Johnny B. Dumb, and don’t you forget it.
And I’m paying for your mother’s Social Security check every month — when, frankly, I’d rather use the money to buy a time machine so I could duct-tape her knees together in time to stop her from giving birth to such a delusional homophobe of son.
Everyone knows the answer—the children of heterosexuals, because only heterosexuals have children.
That’s going to come as quite a surprise to Mary Cheney, and Melissa Etheridge, and Clay Aiken, and…
John-Boy, you are without a doubt the most delusional case I’ve encountered this week. And that’s saying a lot.
If citizens choose not to have enough children, or are discouraged by culture, economic pressures, etc. from having then, then the economic vacuum of unfilled jobs will be filled by immigrants.
OMG, look at this! He’s rolling all his phobias into one! Now gays are to blame for the so-called “illegal immigrant” problem!
Nature hates a vacuum of population as much as it hates any other type of vacuum.
The only vacuum is the one between your ears, Johnny.
Same sex marriage is sterile.
Then why am I still getting my period at 47 years old?
Sterility has worse than cancer.
John A. Evans has worse stupid than Forrest Gump.
It is legitimate not to condone behavior that has such dire consequences for individuals, families, society and the entire human race.
Like denying civil rights to a class of people for no other reason than that you hate them and fear them?
It is acceptable and legitimate for individuals and government to refuse to grant the same rights and status to sterility in our culture that is granted to heterosexual relationships that can and do produce children.
You know what’s scary, folks? For every John A. Evans who spews such garbage, there are countless more who swallow it like it was ice cream.
What’s worse is that you can never tell whether asses like John A. Evans really believe their own lies, or are just clever con artists who know how to manipulate the truly stupid among us.
* Actually, I’m not kidding about the homeschooling thing. “Paula,” the blogger responsible to blame for propagating Evans’ lunacy, is indeed a homeschooler. What’s more, she follows the Charlotte Mason method, which eschews “dry, factual textbooks” in favor of “living books,” which are “usually written by one person who has a passion for the subject and writes in conversational or narrative style.”
In other words, who needs pesky facts when you can get yore larnin’ from a single “authority” who, gosh darnit, prolly talks all real folksy an’ everything, like that Sarah Palin gal?
Gee, I’ve got a “passion” for both psychology and genetics, and I always write in a conversational style — I guess that makes me qualified to write a “living book” on curing religious insanity through fetal brain surgery.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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Filed Under: "Ex-Gays", California, Family Research Council, Hate Speech, Heterosexuality, Homophobia, Marriage, Parenting, Proposition 8, Race/Ethnic Issues, Radical Religious Right, Random Bigotry, Random Stupidity
“The number one reason given by gay couples, for their marriage, was ‘love and commitment.’ That does not shock me. I am shocked that others seem surprised.”
