Jeremayakovka

Passionate Arson In Alaska

With a recent attempt to burn down Gov. Sarah Palin's church (and whoever happened to be inside it at the time), this is a good time to revisit The Passion Of The Death Threats Against Jerry Falwell.

McCain Speaks With LGBT Media

Here's a lengthy, detailed interview of McCain by the Washington Blade.

Q: Why doesn't Obama sit down for a lengthy discussion with socially conservative, even "anti-gay," opinion journals?
A: Because McCain is the moderate in this election.

Wasillans Reportedly Gay-Tolerant

says The Advocate, quoting from several quarters, including native Wasillans:

I have never, ever had a problem being openly gay in that town, he says of Wasilla. I have brought two men up there to meet the family in the past five years, and no one's even batted an eye. He contrasts this with reactions he’s received in some of the country’s most celebrated gayborhoods.

Sandra Does Sarah

* Updated *

You can put lipstick, pearls, and even a cocktail dress on a self-pitying, rage-filled, liberal snob of a Jewish dyke, but it's still a self-pitying, rage-filled, liberal snob of a Jewish dyke.

Sandra Bernhard on Sarah Palin:

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Not included in the video: Bernhard's boast that Palin, in New York, would be gang-raped by blacks. The threat (or, more perversely, the taunt) of rape to keep disagreeable women in their place. Original.

Later Bernhard explains: [The gang rape comment] is part of a much larger, nuanced, and yes, provocative (that's what I do) piece from my show about racism, freedom, women's rights and the extreme views of Governor Sarah Palin, a woman who doesn't believe that other women should have the right to choose, Bernhard told the Daily News today.

Women deserve better, she continued. I certainly wish Governor Palin no harm. I'd just like her to explain to me how she can hold such outrageous views - and then go back to Alaska.

[Update: Women do deserve better - better than you, that is. S.E. Cupp replies in the Daily News.]

Palin's "extreme" and "outrageous" views are hers alone and she owns them. Her influence with them as vice-president would be slight, and even as president, while real, would be far from absolute. One aspect which Bernhard ignores, as do most pro-choice advocates, is that to people who are pro-life, any abortion is extreme.  (And to people of mixed opinion, either extreme is dispiriting to listen to for very long.) If Bernhard were serious about wanting an explanation from Palin, she would ask politely but firmly, then listen. She would not turn her comedienne's stage into a bully pulpit. Further, it's not as if explanations of pro-life positions aren't readily available. It's just that seeking them out would mean Bernhard would have to do some legwork to understand how somebody who disagrees with her thinks.

Bernhard's claim that she wishes Palin no harm is highly disingenuous. Of course she wants Palin "harmed": humiliated (which all threats of rape are - humiliations - in this case even more so because it's public) as a preliminary step to being politically diminished, neutralized, and - if possible - banished from the national stage. As for physical harm, what Bernhard means is, I wish that Palin comes to no physical harm as a direct result of my comedy routine. Shit, then I'd be in real trouble!

That trope of  criminally rebellious black men (or boys) being Bernhard's "brothers" - as rapists-on-call or as a tangental, amorphous punishing force or as some kind of Black Avenging Angels - is contemptible. It's worn-out "black Orpheus" or "white Negro" attitudes that poisoned the Western intellectual well the moment Sartre and Mailer poured them in over 50 years ago. In short, Sandra Bernhard needs to grow up. Finding her own power will have little to do with put-downs that trickle down from "Fight The Power." But if she insists on buying in to the myth of demonic, black moral and sexual potency (or supremacy), then emptor caveat: Give V.S. Naipaul's Guerillas a go before going any further, girl.

Oh, and Governor Palin went back to Alaska because that's where her home, her job, and her family are. Of course, I realize that what Bernhard means is Get the hell away from New York!

This is timely, Gentle Reader. At stake right now is that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, is insisting on representing America, alongside certain New York Jews and in solidarity with the State of Israel, to castigate the Islamic Republic of Iran for its nuclear, jihadist, and genocidal ambitions. So don't let any media hype surrounding Sandra Bernhard, nor any other snobby, liberal Jews in New York, divert you from what Governor Sarah Palin, one righteous gentile, is trying to do.
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The Womanization Of America, c. 1962

Late Night Thought #231 re Norman Mailer (updated):

Often tagged as "reactionaries" or accused of being unthinking apologists for the "radical Right," many so-called "neoconservatives" simply (but doggedly) preserve or re-examine or simply call attention to sometimes forgotten, often virile strains of 20th Century American liberalism.

One thing that often gets lost in today's culture war over persistent claims being made for gender and sexual identity(-ies) is the fact that men need to become men. In the 1950s Simone de Beauvoir dared proclaim that One is not born a woman, one becomes one. In 1962 Norman Mailer offered an indirect reply (or simply restated the case) in "The Womanization of America," a series of comments that appeared in Playboy magazine:

Masculinity is not something given to you, something you're born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men. The mass media, for instance .... give people an unreal view of life. They give people a notion that American life is easier than it really is, less complex, more rewarding. The result is that Americans, as they emerge from adolescence into young manhood, are very much like green soldiers being sent into difficult terrain ignorant of the conditions. A lot of virility immediately gets massacred.

Particularly famous for the punch and circumstance that couched his career, it's also been pointed out that there wasn't a whole lot in Norman's oeuvre that was astonishingly original -- the originality, on the whole, was to be found in his life. His writing style could be indebted quite nakedly to recent precedents, as it was to Dos Passos and Drieser in The Naked and the Dead. This was true later, during his high-Beat and Camelot phases, when he cribbed a bit clumsily from an American literary scene claiming to know God through sex, drugs, and jazz, and an absurd French one which proclaimed God dead, then  moralized on every subject under the sun. A lack of originality lingered even later, as when he undertook long projects to re-examine Marilyn Monroe or Henry Miller or Pablo Picasso or Jesus Christ. 

Still, as the above quote suggests, this buffalo in the china shop of post-World War II American letters (in fact, he middle-named one of his sons "Buffalo") could spill shelves and smash dishware as much as any bull.

Married to the Mob

Pat Buchanan's world is "Post-Christian America" and we're just living in it. He may be an incorrigible antisemite whose "America First" stances are too stark. He also firmly puts his foot down against gay marriage:

Homosexual marriage is not in the California constitution, else someone would have discovered it in 160 years. Where, then, did the state Supreme Court find this was a right?

Four of seven justices unearthed this right by consulting what Orwell called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then decided to overturn the expressed will of the voters, declare their opinion law and order the state of California to begin recognizing homosexual unions as marriages. And they did it because they know the Times types will hail them as the newest Earl Warrens.

Related: Gay Patriot asks whether he's a Nazi sympathizer?
Previous JMK post on Buchanan.

Lesbian Tammy Bruce Calls Today's Mainstream Media A "Gestapo"

From You I Get Opinions, From You I Get The Story

Through December 9 Gay Patriot is soliciting nominees for Grande Conservative Blogress Diva.

The Passion Of The Death Threats Against Jerry Falwell

** Welcome, Conservative Grapevine and Political Party Poop readers. **
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In the early 1980s homosexual savages* [scroll to the end], inspired by 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn bar, made death threats against this influential opponent of gay civil rights, over 100 pages of recently released FBI files suggest. From the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog:

[Jerry] Falwell's FBI file contains a 1983 letter sent to his television ministry that concluded with the words, "Hoping you will die soon." It was accompanied by a small plastic box containing a live scorpion. One threat involved calls to Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg in 1983, warning that a $10,000 reward had been offered for Falwell's "assassination" and that it was to be carried out by "gays in Cincinnati." One caller advised, "I know this is true, because my brother is one of them." Said another, "I intend to be the one to collect that money."

As disturbing as these threats (and one attempt, if you count the scorpion) is that WaPo phrases the item (and frames the issue) in banality bordering on the fickle and the reckless. Called simply, "Exclusive: Jerry Falwell's FBI File," the blogpost begins:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell , founder of the Moral Majority, stirred up passions with his attacks on abortion and homosexuality. Now, the FBI's confidential file on Falwell, who died in May at age 73, reveals that he also stirred up death threats....[emphases added]

Think about it. No matter how much authority the verb "to stir up" implies, only something pre-existing can be set in motion. Which is to say that neither Falwell nor the Devil made those ostensibly "passionate" homosexuals do it. (Granted, the Reverend might have disagreed with my take on the Devil's role in the matter.) People prone to passion will be found on each side of any debate, but making death threats catapults one beyond the pale of what is acceptable (indeed, of what is possible) as civil discourse. Because death threats destroy civil discourse. Like the bullying which taunts and torments another who is perceived to be "different," death threats against a public personality convey an aggressive contempt for the targeted individual. They also convey a cowardly disdain because they attempt -- always in futility, I should add -- to coerce through terror what one shrinks from achieving through debate.
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Unfortunately WaPo's "stirred up" phrasing suggests that deficient from Falwell's manner were reason, civility, and a certain love that dare not speak its name in the mainstream media, Christian love. Yet among the first news reports after his death was, from Falwell's most prominent public opponents, testimony to the contrary.

Pornographer Larry Flynt:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person ... Jerry Falwell and I became good friends.  He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Openly-gay activist Rev. Mel White cried at news of the death of this adversary whom he also considered "a friend": 

"It breaks my heart," he said. "I feel sorry for his family. He had a huge presence in this town [White lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the vicinity of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church] and the country."... He said while Falwell often condemned him from the pulpit, he would say hello every time he saw him around Lynchburg.... White said if anyone needs to learn anything from his and Falwell's relationship, it's that people should get their private and public lives in sync.

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Should WaPo's 400-word blogpost take pains to refer to Flynt's and White's statements? Probably not, Gentle Reader, but I feel I have to, even if it takes three times as long. Because the way WaPo reports those death threats accommodates their intellectual violence, which compromises the information conveyed. Why does the blogpost state in its short space twice that no assassination attempt had been made? If any had, then the attempt(s) would already be public knowledge, and even part of the public lore. Long ago they would have boosted Falwell's visibility; vividly they would have been evoked during our public remembrances. Obviously none had been attempted. So why does WaPo overstate the obvious? To understate what it intends to be less obvious: that gay radicals are a philosophically violent lot with latent and at times overt tendencies.

Sometimes this violence turns against their own. Many Americans, for example, know that two assassination attempts were made against President Gerald Ford. Not many know that one of them was thwarted by Oliver Sipple, a man who happened to be gay (and closeted). Gay radicals, including Harvey Milk, urged the compliant mainstream media to out him, which they did. That led directly to Sipple's estrangement from his family, and indirectly to his precipitous health decline and premature death. Even a framed letter from the White House didn't help him much (not in this life, anyway). The lesson to be learned here is not the insidiousness and ubiquity of "homophobia," but that any movement desperate for heroes is also a movement desperate for martyrs.

Sipple's heroic intervention on behalf of President Ford (indeed, on behalf of the country) had been back in 1975. Responding in 1983 to one of the assassination threats against Reverend Falwell, the FBI managed to locate an "informant" within Cincinnati's gay community. The facts he provided, quoted verbatim in the blogpost (grammatical errors included), read as sardonic mockery of the Bureau's interest and ability in obtaining any relevant information, whether about attested assassination threats or about the gay community generally. The quoted passage concludes, Source restated the general dislike for Falwell within the Cincinnati area, before the blogpost paraphrases another document, [T]he informant led the agents through the history of New York City's Stonewall riots -- a watershed in the early gay rights movement.... Even without access to any of the 100+ pages of Falwell's FBI file (a portion available here), an inquiring mind would figure that the ones WaPo references are not those most relevant to unearthing who, exactly, was behind these assassination threats. For example, spelled out in at least one other document (imaged above) is that one potential assassin had been a candidate for Congress in Santa Cruz, California in 1982. Surely that deserves further attention.

Instead of sifting through the most salient details of these assassination threats -- including, in fairness, asking whether any were made by heterosexuals (or even closeted gays) seeking to defame LGBTetc. people -- the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog cultivates in the reader's mind the image of a presumably "powerless" homosexual presumably "speaking truth to power." Whatever the ideological or agitational purposes that might serve, serving them up in a disorienting sentimentality ignores, if only temporarily, real evidence of crime and real clues as to the crime's origin and magnitude. The contemporary LGBTetc. movement would call this "queering" the profession of journalism. It's also what that movement would call "queering" the civic duty of cooperating with the FBI. The effect of all this "queering" is to make WaPo refrain, counter-intuitively and unprofessionally, from asking hard-hitting questions about a number of blood-thirsty, presumably merry gay homosexual pranksters -- and potentially murderous plotters.

WaPo, WaPo, why hast thou forsaken truth?
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[*]: Some readers have expressed apprehension at the phrase "homosexual savages."

It recalls a point Robert Bork makes early on in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline: Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. (Chapter 1, "The Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians.") Whether "families, schools, and churches" civilize our young regarding LGBTetc. issues, or rather how they do so, is obviously a crucial dispute in "the culture war." Certainly anyone with an appetite for violence needs to be civilized.

I also have in mind two French films of the 1990s, Les Nuits fauves (Savage Nights) and, to a lesser extent, Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds). The latter, a slow-paced, art house triumph, is the delicate coming-of-age tale of four adolescents, one of whom is just recognizing his homosexuality. Savage Nights on the other hand is about a young bisexual man, HIV-positive, hellbent on avoiding maturity and mortality. Its succes de scandale was enhanced when writer-star-director Cyril Collard died of AIDS just three days before the film took home four Cesar awards (the French Oscars).

One of Savage Nights's more irksome moments is when it snatches a line from the notoriously homoerotic writer Jean Genet. Collard acknowledges who wrote the line while ignoring where it originally appeared. It's from "Violence and Brutality" (included here), an essay which has nothing directly to do with the story of Savage Nights, and which is, in fact, an apology for terrorism: Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man....  

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A Cassandra in Europe

* Updated (11/26) *

Gay expat critic, poet, and journalist Bruce Bawer appears to have recently launched a blog, Memo From Europe. The initial posts display political and cultural commentary, plus the occasional undying reminiscence. Check it out. If you like it, let him know.

* Update * Bruce emails that Memo From Europe has been up and running for some time. Here are links to MFE's archives from earlier in 2007 and from 2006. We should all feel fortunate that Bruce has a presence on the Internet (where I learned about him). The unique, erudite, and timely perspective of a gay American in Norway would have made Henry James and Orianna Fallaci equally proud.

His most current title is the National Book Award-nominated While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying The West From Within. Other notable works include Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy (editor) and A Place At The Table. He's also written the best demystification of Edward Said I've yet come across.

Giving New Meaning To The Old Euphemism "Sexual Preference"

Psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who in the 1970s led the effort to depathologize homosexuality, defends research which vindicates "reparative therapy" according to this 2003 article: The current, politically correct view is that this therapy never works. I think it doesn't work a lot of the time but in some people it does, said Spitzer. I do believe that people who are bothered by their homosexuality have a right to have this therapy.

Entering the Ex-Gay/Ex-Ex-Gay Debate

* Update (10/18) * Psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who in the 1970s led the effort to depathologize homosexuality, defends research which vindicates "reparative therapy."

Last week I inserted myself into a comment thread at Ex-Gay Watch and in the process elicited several responses. Most responses were, uh, testy, and only a handful appreciative or constructive. The thread in question is a take-down of "reparative therapist" Richard Cohen, brought to you in part by The Daily Show. Cohen offers psychological counseling to men who are (or who think they are) homosexual and who want to be (or who think they want to be) heterosexual. The ex-gay "watchers" mock Cohen while I introduce coherent criticisms, trying to tease the same from the site's regular commenters.

Thanks, Jim Phelan, for your complementary remarks, and thanks, Asher, for linking to it. Your constructive feedback, Gentle Reader, is welcome.

Civility In The Face Of Criticism Is Cowardice

By yielding to a false form of 'civility,' we sometimes allow our critics to intimidate us. As I have said, active citizens are often subjected to truly vile attacks; they are branded as mean-spirited, racist, Uncle Tom, homophobic, sexist, etc. To this we often respond (if not succumb), so as not to be constantly fighting, by trying to be tolerant and nonjudgmental -- i.e., we censor ourselves. This is not civility. It is cowardice, or well-intentioned self-deception at best.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute,
quoted in "The Education of Clarence Thomas"
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Gay Marriage and The Constitution

Here's The Guy From Boston considering the question of gay marriage before the Constitution -- the U.S.S. Constitution, that is.

The reasoning could be tweaked just a little, but it sums up my feelings.

There Is "A Gay Agenda," Isn't There?

Alan Chambers of the "ex-gay" Christian ministry Exodus International asks "Is There a Gay Agenda?".  The 1987 gay strategy paper which Alan reprints, "The Overhauling of Straight America," plus a few introductory remarks, allow for comments to fly.

The first clue that there is "a gay agenda" is that the 1987 article claims that there is a "straight America" -- as if the United States is anything other than one nation ("under God," as some of us pledge our allegiance). Since a house divided against itself cannot stand, why don't we come together and read Alan's post.

Other salient (and contentious) clues:

* Straight viewers must be able to identify with gays as victims.

* The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.

* [W]e intend to make the antigays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.

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Not unlike yesterday's post -- in which I pointed out that ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer admitted factually (though not morally, not as a declaration of conscience) to his agency in propagating the HIV virus -- "The Overhauling of Straight America" provides a rare, candid glimpse into not just why but how our public discourse and common culture have been and continue to be overhauled before our very eyes.

Also: Alan Chambers interviewed on NPR (audio) this past June.
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Being Larry Kramer, Self-Confessed Left-Wing Mass Murderer Of Gay Men

In between bitter complaints and sweeping denunciations of Republican victories in the 2004 elections, this lifetime gay radical admitted his role in what Michael Savage recently termed "the homosexual dance of death":
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Larry Kramer and Vladimir Lenin:
Separated at birth? Perhaps. Joined in death? Definitely.

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I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of the plague years. I saw day after day a notation of another friend's death. I listed all the ones I'd slept with. There were a couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick? It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself. Have you ever wondered how many men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know.
-- gay novelist, activist, and ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer
speaking November 7, 2004 in Greenwich Village
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the worst of the plague years....
Which years? Early 80s? Late 80s? 90s? Which years were "worst"? What made them "worst"? When gay men were dying at the highest rates (by which time, refraining from promiscuity would have been advisable)? Were there "better" years? Or "less worse"? What made them so?

I listed all the ones I'd slept with. There were a couple hundred.
A couple hundred. And how many did they sleep with...?

Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick?
What he means is: Had they already been infected prior to his having sex with them? If so, then he would have an excuse to not feel as apprehensive, or (Heaven forbid!) as guilty for having less-than-loving encounters and/or ones that no doubt involved semen-t0-blood (or -mucous, or -saliva) transmission. Encounters that involved, with near-dead certainty, HIV-transmission.

It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself.
What took you so long, Larry? Has your "normal heart" undergone a change of heart? If so, How? What makes your declaration of such a change trustworthy? When was it ever possible? Elaborate, mein Freund. Bitte.

Have you ever wondered how many men you killed?
Me? No.

I know I murdered some of them. I just know.
You didn't say, "kill," as in, "infect unwittingly." You said "murder," which implies intention, knowledge, motive -- even hatred. Yet with malice aforeskin, even circumcision is no guarantee of circumspection. The whole thing reminds me of one of James Baldwin's more cutting observations,  A secret life is usually a secret only to the person who's living it.  Well, Larry, now you begin to know what some of us have always known.
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From the same speech:
I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do....
Oh really....
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Related: "The 20th Anniversary of an American Killing Fields"
(David Horowitz on the  "radical holocaust" of the AIDS epidemic):

You will read many stories about the heroic efforts of activists in the gay community, to lobby the government for more AIDS money, and to care for the sick and dying. None of these efforts should be confused with public health methods for combating epidemics, however. What you will not read is a single story about those methods, or how epidemics were combated – often successfully -- for a hundred years prior to 1981, before gay activists inserted themselves into the public health system. What you will not read is how the proven public health methods were opposed by AIDS activists, and how public health officials surrendered to the activists’ demands for veto-control over which methods were acceptable and which were not, or how they then colluded in subverting the system that had proved so successful in the past.

What you will not read is any evaluation of the AIDS campaigns – mainly "education" – that the activists demanded in place of the proven methods. Yet the harrowing figures released on this anniversary show these politically-correct, billion-dollar campaigns have failed miserably to contain the epidemic or to prevent it from spreading into other communities, particularly the African-American and Hispanic communities....

From DC to Anbar, CPAC Honoree Honors Martyred Sheik

Matt Sanchez, whose media spotlight earlier this year provided a great opportunity for me to "come forward" about homosexuality in a new, critical, and appreciative way, has been reporting for several months now as an embed from Iraq, the Gulf, and Afghanistan. As more proof of the need for and rise of the New Media, Matt conducted what most unfortunately became the last interview Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi gave to the press. Sheik Sattar, who apparently craved to live in a civil Iraq and for Islam to be a civil religion, recently received media when al-Qaeda savages assassinated him. Hopefully there will be more from Matt on the martyred sheik.

Why Step Out Into The World When So Much Of The World Deserves To Be Stepped On?

From one of the most influential American novels ever written:

-- Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.
-- How? By being stupid?
-- I mean, for instance, didn't you enjoy meeting the young men?
-- What men? There wasn't a man there I couldn't squash ten of.

(Written during a time when "gay" meant happy, light, care-free, etc.)

Where Have You Gone, Anita Bryant?

* Updated *

A day without Anita Bryant is like a day without sunshine.

Anita Bryant is like Rodney Dangerfield -- she don't get no respect. Not in elite cultural circles, that is, and not even on the internet. Her myspace page seems to be the only unabashedly affectionate web page out there. If you read it you'll learn that she toured overseas with Bob Hope to perform for American troops, sung "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the Super Bowl, recorded several pop albums, and wrote several books. All this while being pretty, articulate, and charming -- not at all by being sleazy or profane or by parading some gyrating sexual suggestiveness.

Yet because Ms. Bryant uncompromisingly and successfully took a public stance, consistent with her Christian beliefs, against gay rights legislation she found herself the target of death threats, assault, career-ending boycotts, and wholesale vilification. [* Update * Note, e.g., the film short, "The Assassination of Anita Bryant," (1976) (whose director died of AIDS in 1992).] Like Ann Coulter, she said it as she saw it and did not back down -- the result was almost complete banishment from the entertainment industry and an almost insurmountable reputation as a purveyor of "hate."

Note the video, below (found at her myspace page). It's made entirely from footage taken this past July in Ms. Bryant's native state of Oklahoma, at a commemorative benefit for victims and survivors of the battleship named after it, the USS Oklahoma. (The Oklahoma was sunk by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941; 429 servicemen died; no memorial has yet been established for it, or them.) Note about 2 minutes into the clip the pledge Bryant steadfastly makes and the song she proudly performs. If you don't, Gentle Reader, no one else will. The scene is too old-fashioned -- too simple, too kind-hearted, too regional, and too patriotic -- to draw attention, even grudging attention, from the MSM or any major cultural institution.
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In the 60s Simon & Garfunkel rode the the folk-pop wave, packaging baby boomer "angst" by singing Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. After watching Anita Bryant sing for USS Oklahoma vets and survivors, you'll wonder Where have you gone, Anita Bryant....? But don't ask her; Ms. Bryant doesn't have to answer for anything.  She never left America. America -- or rather, left-wing America -- left her.

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Further: Buried on page 9 of Google hits for "Anita Bryant" is Anita Bryant Ministries International, located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Previous: "I Believe You, Anita!" "A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb"

Related: A "gay patriot" and an "ex-gay journalist" walk into a bar.....

I Believe You, Anita!

(No, not Anita Hill.)

Further reading:

"The Gaycott Turns Ugly"
(originally published November 21, 1977 in Time)

"Exorcising the Ghost of Anita"
(originally published September 18, 2002 in the Chicago Free Press)

Pim Pied

In a follow-up to the gay radical assault on Anita Bryant post of August 28, here's a video of a 21st Century twist on that tactic: a shit-filled cream pie hurled at gay, Dutch politician and patriot Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn, a firm opponent of Muslim immigration and the Islamicization of Europe, would eventually be assassinated by a fanatic leftist in 2002.
(H/T What Would Charles Martel Do?)

(If the video doesn't work properly, try this link on "The Myth of Liberal Tolerance." Am workin' on the vid....)

Overheard in a Public Restroom in Minnesota

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I da ho?... Naw. You da ho!!
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Very bad judgment on Senator Larry Craig's part, bad in so many ways. For one thing, boasting to the officer about being a Senator suggests he's used his prestige and privilege to skate through compromising situations in the past. The Romney campaign did the smart and right thing to distance itself from him.

But should he resign? Predictably, many conservative pundits think so: Hewitt, Malkin, Hawkins, Musclehead, Gay Patriot, and probably more. If GOP talent is waiting in the wings to be appointed or can run next year for the seat, then maybe. But if Craig can get his priorities straight, there are good reasons for him to fight to keep his office: on the one hand, Democratic pols like Gerry Studds, Ted and Patrick Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and dozens more; on the other, next year's razor-tight race for the Senate. Republicans sucking their teeth and shaking their heads doesn't have to be the end of the affair. Regardless of what play the Republican huddle comes up with, they still have to do an end-run around being hung out to dry for some MSM-labeled "conservative crisis."

McGreevey resigned, but his affair had compromised New Jersey and national security. Craig has corrupted many things, breaking (in affairs of the heart) laws more unwritten than written, but so far as we know, not national security. Still, if he has a closet-full of skeletons ready to be thrown open (insinuations of secretive gay relationships or trysts, including with pages, have dogged him for years), he should think long and hard about why and how to fight for his office.

I know! Maybe next year he'll run for re-election as an independent. It worked for Joe Lieberman....
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* Update * Chris Crain weighs in with circumspection (and also a legal opinion):

The gay and leftie blogosphere is, of course, gleeful, as is practically every gay person I've talked to in the early hours after the scandal broke....  I just don't understand why we don't see the contradictions in how we cheer on the politics of personal destruction, however self-inflicted.

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FTR, the arresting officer's report.

A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb

* Updated *

Well, at least it's a fruit pie.
-- Anita Bryant

This 1977 clip of two four gay activists hurling a cream pie in Anita Bryant's face is the earliest instance of which I am aware where a cream pie has been used (to attempt) to humiliate and silence a right-wing political personality and to quash free speech as we know it.

The "legend" lives on:

* Gay.com calls it "a historic document of political strategy." Riiight.
* "Fringe" theater show Pie Face melodramatizes it ad nauseam.
* "[I]n addition to pie parties throughout the gay neighborhoods of the city that evening, people took a moment of silence and bowed down and prayed to the new holy spot in the East, Des Moines, a new, gay Mecca."
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In the years leading up to the emergence, post-Stonewall, of radical gay activism, "anti-establishment" activists had innovated ways of using props for aggressive, agit-prop street theater. Father Philip Berrigan, apostle of the Catholic Left and convicted felon, protested American commitment to a free Vietnam by trespassing on private and government property and stealing and setting fire to draft records. Frequently he poured blood on his target of choice. (Left, Berrigan pours napalm on draft records, May 1968.) Whether it was human or animal blood, and how exactly the blood was obtained, I don't know.
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One of Abbie Hoffman's most noted stunts was to "nominate" a pig as for president outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. (Right, Abbie mugs your reality for the camera; below, the rather unimaginatively named "Pigasus.")

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In the Anita Bryant case, gay radicals perform street theater sleight of hand when they become ever more aggressive while at the same time seeming ever more harmless, even hilarious.  Their assault with a tasty weapon isn't just pushing on a door marked "open," it's ramming it -- left-wing radicals abusing Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech by breaching all decorum and even commiting a crime. (Unfortunately neither Ms. Bryant nor her fellow spokesman pressed charges.) But there's neither redemption nor pride in the hilarity, only contempt and humiliation. It's yet another way the radical left tries to have its cake (or pie) and eat it too (or have you eat it).
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Left-wing pie-assaults of more recent note:

Coulter Horowitz (text only)

The Coyote Call And The Howling Winds Wail

You say "potayto," I say "potahto."
They say "Brokeback," I say "The Cowboy Song."

If you don't know Thin Lizzy ... it's time you did.

Islamo Fascism Awareness Week - October 22-26

* Update (8/25) * Welcome, Tampa/St. Pete readers and listeners of the Schnitt Show (93.3FM WFLZ and NewsRadio 970 WFLA)!
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This just in from the David Horowitz Freedom Center:

Islamo Fascism Awareness Week: Is your alma mater on our list?

We are now planning what will be the largest campus demonstrations ever staged by conservative students for October 22-26. We are calling the event Islamo Fascism Awareness Week. We already have student coordinators on 150 campuses and we are hoping that the event will touch close to 200 universities and colleges across the country. We are offering these campuses a full menu of activities including panel discussions on the origins and implications of Islamo Fascism; keynote speakers such as former Sen. Rick Santorum, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Spencer, and Nonie Darwish ; and a showing of the uncut version of ABC's milestone docudrama "The Path to 9/11," and other documentaries about the threat of radical Islam, including Obsession and Suicide Killers.

In addition we are working with our student coordinators to organize protests at women's studies departments which have been shamefully silent about the violent oppression of women in the Muslim world, and to stage a memorial for the international victims of jihad. Among the campuses already committed to major activities during Islamo Fascism Awareness Week are Columbia, UC Berkeley, Penn State, Temple, Penn, Emory, UC Irvine and Ohio State. This week has the potential to be a major news event as well as a transforming political experience for our college students.

If you want further information or would like to see your alma mater or a school of special interest added to our list of targets, please email Jeffrey Wienir at jeffrey@horowitzfreedomcenter.org. This is our chance to bring the truth about the war on terrorism to campuses dominated by an unholy alliance between pro jihadists and the hardcore left.

* * *
Q: Is this crowd going to teach you anything useful about Islamo Fascism? 
A: Yes. But useful to whom?

The eyes have it. From right to left: the one-worlder bugging out on making the rounds in her global village;  a one-worlder, global villager in training; the shifty-eyed, terrorist mafioso (who would pass his poisoned blood off to 9/11 survivors); and, as history is proving, the narcissistic rapist who was along for the ride.

Can't you picture "ACT-UP Ramallah"? Say it! Millionaire terrorists get AIDS, too!

The 8-Ball Meme: Eight Previously Unknown Facts

Ok, Irina, you asked for it. Eight previously unknown facts about me:

1. While a child, our household had a leatherbound Holy Bible that had been printed in 1876.
2. Also while a child, I was photographed with Mayor Ed Koch in New York.
3. While a young adult I introduced myself to pan-Africanist socialist [euphemism for Black racist, antisemitic] Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) in Berkeley, California to ask him his opinion (his advice, almost) about politics.
4. More than a decade later, returning from my informal political exile, I watched the 2004 Superbowl with Wesley Clark during a break from his presidential campaign in Flagstaff, Arizona.
5. I've spent a day in jail for something I (used to) believe in.
6. I've been to Windows on the World restaurant atop the former World Trade Center (when it was still possible) and have climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty, up to and inside her crown (when it was still permitted).
7. While a teenager, when I went to get Allen Ginsberg's autograph after a public reading, the NAMBLA member lanced a sexually provocative comment at me in front of the tiny crowd that had gathered around him. During my adolescence I had the good fortune to know some consistently (in some ways outstandingly) "appropriate" gay men. (Allen Ginsberg wasn't one of them.)
8. Also while a teenager, I had the good fortune to be introduced to and spend quality time with William Bronk. During our conversations, he offered more than one memorable lesson about poetry, including: ..........................

* * *

Eight other blogs "tagged" to answer this meme: West Bank Mama; Black Belt Mama; Cobb: Strictly Old School; Dancing in Tongues; Gay Patriot West; Right Truth; The Black Kettle; Bookworm Room. In addition to facts about yourself, you may also disclose "habits" (click to Irina's site for clarification).

Edwards Eye For the Straight Guy

* Updated *

The current issue of Barron's shows John Edwards combing his coif most admiringly while gazing into a handheld mirror.

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Note, Gentle Reader, that all the presidential candidates on the Barron's cover are looking at you -- except Edwards who is looking at himself. Everyone looks the part of a candidate -- except Edwards who, if anything, is looking at the part in his hair (let alone a part in the election). There's no crescent-and-star bling on Barack (Hussein) Obama, no dour 1984-imagery draped over Big Sister Hillary, no flip-flops making flippy floppy around "Mitt Happens" Romney. More than those flung at any other candidate, the Rightosphere's select epithets for this presidential pretender from North Carolina -- insinuations of "Breck girl" and even "silky pony" -- are gaining traction in the MSM. It's time for the Rightosphere to take a bow.

Also implied in this Barron's cover is the value that remains to be teased out of Ann Coulter's four-month old faggot "rehab" joke. In keeping with my commentary (from day one here and last week here), despite some ugly suggestiveness of the word "faggot," the joke's manifest value has very little to do with whether John Edwards has, ever has had, or ever will have sex with men. Nor should it -- unless, as we learned from Jim McGreevey (scroll down in link), it can compromise something as private as national security. The joke's value has nothing to do with liberals' haste to impute to Coulter status as the GOP's "bigoted id," as if she had a glaring intent to bully gays (scroll through here), nor with conservatives' haste to enumerate an almost sublime sense of their accepting nature -- while repudiating one of their own. As if the force of contemporary conservatism can (or ought) to be reckoned apart from Coulter's sophisticated satire....

Previous: "Boo Frickin' Hoo, Liz"

* * *

As the 2008 primary season gets into high gear (a 2007 fundraising season, mostly), let's recall the first close-up look most of us ever had of John Edwards, as reflected in the comments (and rebuttals) of Dick Cheney. From their 2004 vice-presidential debate:

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EDWARDS: There is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th -- period....

CHENEY: I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but there's clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror. And the point is that that's the place where you're most likely to see the terrorists come together with weapons of mass destruction, the deadly technologies that Saddam Hussein had developed and used over the years.

* * *

EDWARDS (at one point): The president and the vice president have not done the work to build the coalition that we need.

EDWARDS (at another): [If John Kerry and I are elected,] we will not outsource our responsibility to keep this country safe.

* * *

EDWARDS: We've taken 90 percent of the coalition casualties. American taxpayers have borne 90 percent of the costs of the effort in Iraq. And we see the result of there not being a coalition: The first Gulf war cost America $5 billion. We're at $200 billion and counting....

CHENEY: When you include the Iraqi security forces that have suffered casualties, as well as the allies, they've taken almost 50 percent of the casualties in operations in Iraq, which leaves the U.S. with 50 percent, not 90 percent. With respect to the cost, it wasn't $200 billion. You probably weren't there to vote for that. But $120 billion is, in fact, what has been allocated to Iraq. The rest of it's for Afghanistan and the global war on terror. The allies have stepped forward and agreed to reduce and forgive Iraqi debt to the tune of nearly $80 billion by one estimate. That, plus $14 billion they promised in terms of direct aid, puts the overall allied contribution financially at about $95 billion, not to the $120 billion we've got, but, you know, better than 40 percent.

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CHENEY: Senator, frankly, you have a record in the Senate that's not very distinguished. You've missed 33 out of 36 meetings in the Judiciary Committee, almost 70 percent of the meetings of the Intelligence Committee. You've missed a lot of key votes: on tax policy, on energy, on Medicare reform. Your hometown newspaper has taken to calling you "Senator Gone." You've got one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate. Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

* * *

MODERATOR: The next question goes to you, Mr. Vice President. I want to read something you said four years ago at this very setting: "Freedom means freedom for everybody." You said it again recently when you were asked about legalizing same-sex unions. And you used your family's experience as a context for your remarks. Can you describe then your administration's support for a constitutional ban on same-sex unions?

CHENEY: Gwen, you're right, four years ago in this debate, the subject came up. And I said then and I believe today that freedom does mean freedom for everybody. People ought to be free to choose any arrangement they want. It's really no one else's business. That's a separate question from the issue of whether or not government should sanction or approve or give some sort of authorization, if you will, to these relationships. Traditionally, that's been an issue for the states. States have regulated marriage, if you will. That would be my preference.

In effect, what's happened is that in recent months, especially in Massachusetts, but also in California, but in Massachusetts we had the Massachusetts Supreme Court direct the state of -- the legislature of Massachusetts to modify their constitution to allow gay marriage. And the fact is that the president felt that it was important to make it clear that that's the wrong way to go, as far as he's concerned. Now, he sets the policy for this administration, and I support the president.

MODERATOR: Senator Edwards, 90 seconds.

EDWARDS: Yes. Let me say first, on an issue that the vice president said in his last answer before we got to this question, talking about tax policy, the country needs to know that under what they have put in place and want to put in place, a millionaire sitting by their swimming pool, collecting their statements to see how much money they're making, make their money from dividends, pays a lower tax rate than the men and women who are receiving paychecks for serving on the ground in Iraq.

Now, they may think that's right. John Kerry and I do not. We don't just value wealth, which they do. We value work in this country. And it is a fundamental value difference between them and us. Now, as to this question, let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy.

And I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and so does John Kerry. I also believe that there should be partnership benefits for gay and lesbian couples in long-term, committed relationships. But we should not use the Constitution to divide this country. No state for the last 200 years has ever had to recognize another state's marriage. This is using the Constitution as a political tool, and it's wrong.

MODERATOR: New question, but same subject. As the vice president mentioned, John Kerry comes from the state of Massachusetts, which has taken as big a step as any state in the union to legalize gay marriage. Yet both you and Senator Kerry say you oppose it. Are you trying to have it both ways?

EDWARDS: No. I think we've both said the same thing all along. We both believe that -- and this goes onto the end of what I just talked about -- we both believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. But we also believe that gay and lesbians and gay and lesbian couples, those who have been in long-term relationships, deserve to be treated respectfully, they deserve to have benefits.

For example, a gay couple now has a very difficult time, one, visiting the other when they're in the hospital, or, for example, if, heaven forbid, one of them were to pass away, they have trouble even arranging the funeral. I mean, those are not the kind of things that John Kerry and I believe in. I suspect the vice president himself does not believe in that. But we don't -- we do believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

And I want to go back, if I can, to the question you just asked, which is this constitutional amendment. I want to make sure people understand that the president is proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that is completely unnecessary. Under the law of this country for the last 200 years, no state has been required to recognize another state's marriage.

Let me just be simple about this. My state of North Carolina would not be required to recognize a marriage from Massachusetts, which you just asked about. There is absolutely no purpose in the law and in reality for this amendment. It's nothing but a political tool. And it's being used in an effort to divide this country on an issue that we should not be dividing America on. We ought to be talking about issues like health care and jobs and what's happening in Iraq, not using an issue to divide this country in a way that's solely for political purposes. It's wrong.

MODERATOR: Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds.

CHENEY: Well, Gwen, let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much.

MODERATOR: That's it?

CHENEY: That's it.

* * *

MODERATOR: [The next question] goes to you, Senator Edwards, and you have two minutes. Ten men and women have been nominees of their parties since 1976 to be vice president. Out of those ten, you have the least governmental experience of any of them. What qualifies you to be a heartbeat away?

EDWARDS: The American people want in their president and in their vice president basically three things: They want to know that their president and their vice president will keep them safe. They want to know that they have good judgment. And they want to know that you'll tell them the truth. John Kerry and I will tell the American people the truth....

MODERATOR: Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds.

CHENEY: You want me to answer a question about his qualifications?

MODERATOR: That was the question.

CHENEY: I see. Well, I think the important thing in picking a vice president probably varies from president to president. Different presidents approach it in different ways. When George Bush asked me to sign on, it obviously wasn't because he was worried about carrying Wyoming. We got 70 percent of the vote in Wyoming, although those three electoral votes turned out to be pretty important last time around.

What he said he wanted me to do was to sign on because of my experience to be a member of the team, to help him govern, and that's exactly the way he's used me. And I think from the perspective of the nation, it's worked in our relationship, in this administration. I think it's worked in part because I made it clear that I don't have any further political aspirations myself. And I think that's been an advantage. I think it allows the president to know that my only agenda is his agenda. I'm not worried about what some precinct committeemen in Iowa were thinking of me with respect to the next round of caucuses of 2008.

* * *

MODERATOR: Mr. Vice President, picking up on that, you both just sang the praises of the tops of your ticket. Without mentioning them by name at all, explain to us why you are different from your opponent, starting with you, Mr. Vice President.

CHENEY: Why I am different from John Edwards. Well, in some respects, I think, probably there are more similarities than there are differences in our personal story.

I don't talk about myself very much, but I've heard Senator Edwards, and as I listen to him, I find some similarities. I come from relatively modest circumstances. My grandfather never even went to high school. I'm the first in my family to graduate from college. I carried a ticket in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for six years. I've been laid off, been hospitalized without health insurance. So I have some idea of the problems that people encounter. So I think the personal stories are, in some respects, surprisingly similar.

With respect to how we've spent our careers, I obviously made a choice for public service. And I've been at it for a good long time now, except for those periods when we lost elections. And that goes with the turf, as well, too.

I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it. I feel very strongly that the significance of 9/11 cannot be underestimated. It forces us to think in new ways about strategy, about national security, about how we structure our forces and about how we use U.S. military power.

Some people say we should wait until we are attacked before we use force. I would argue we've already been attacked. We lost more people on 9/11 than we lost at Pearl Harbor. And I'm a very strong advocate of a very aggressive policy of going after the terrorists and those who support terror.

MODERATOR: Senator Edwards, you have 90 seconds.

EDWARDS: Mr. Vice President, we were attacked. But we weren't attacked by Saddam Hussein. And one thing that John Kerry and I would agree with you about is that it is....

MODERATOR: You just used John Kerry's name.

EDWARDS: Oh, I'm sorry. I broke the rule.

One thing that we agree about is the need to be offensive in going after terrorists. The reality is that the best defense is a good offense, which means leading -- America returning to its proud tradition of the last 75 years, of once again leading strong coalitions so we can get at these terrorist cells where they are, before they can do damage to us and to the American people. John Kerry made clear on Thursday night that -- I'm sorry, I broke the rules. We made clear -- we made clear on Thursday night that we will do that, and we will do it aggressively.

But there are things that need to be done to keep this country safe that have not yet been done. For example, three years after 9/11, we find out that the administration still does not have a unified terrorist watch list. It's amazing. Three years. What are we waiting for? You know, we still don't have one list that everyone can work off of to see if terrorists are entering this country. We're screening our passengers going onto airplanes, but we don't screen the cargo. There are so many things that could be done to keep this country safe. You have to be strong, and you have to be aggressive. But we also have to be smart. And there are things that have not been done that need to be done to keep the American people safe.

MODERATOR: Would you like to respond? Thirty seconds.

CHENEY: No.

* * *

MODERATOR: As previously agreed, we'll go to closing statements now, two minutes each. Coin toss, Senator Edwards, you begin.

EDWARDS: Thank you. Thank you, Gwen. Thank you, Mr. Vice President, for being here.

You know, when I was young and growing up, I remember coming down the steps into the kitchen, early in the morning, and I would see the glow of the television. And I'd see my father sitting at a table. He wasn't paying bills, and he wasn't doing paperwork from work. What he was doing was learning math on television. Now, he didn't have a college education, but he was doing what he could do to get a better job in the mill where he worked. I was proud of him. I'm still proud of him. And I was also hopeful, because I knew that I lived in a country where I could get a college education.

Here's the truth: I have grown up in the bright light of America. But that light is flickering today. Now, I know that the vice president and the president don't see it, but you do. You see it when your incomes are going down and the cost of everything -- college tuition, health care -- is going through the roof. You see it when you sit at your table each night and there's an empty chair because a loved one is serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. What they're going to give you is four more years of the same.

John Kerry and I believe that we can do better. We believe in a strong middle-class in this country. That's why we have a plan to create jobs, getting rid of tax cuts for companies outsourcing your jobs; give tax cuts to companies that'll keep jobs here in America. That's why we have a health care plan. That's why we have a plan to keep you safe and to fix this mess in Iraq. The truth is that every four years you get to decide. You have the ability to decide where America's going to go. John Kerry and I are asking you to give us the power to fight for you, to fight to keep that dream in America, that I saw as a young man, alive for every parent sitting at that kitchen table.

MODERATOR: Vice President Cheney?

CHENEY: Gwen, I want to thank you.

It's been a privilege to serve as your vice president these last four years and to work alongside President Bush to put our economy on an upward path. We've cut taxes, added 1.7 million new jobs in the last year, and we'll continue to provide opportunities for business and for workers. We won't be happy until every American who wants to work can find a job. We believe that all Americans ought to have access to available -- to medical care and that they ought to have access to the finest schools in the world. We'll do everything we can to preserve Social Security and to make certain that it's there for future generations.

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office. We saw on 9/11 that the next president -- next decision a president has to make can affect the lives of all of us. Now we find ourselves in the midst of a conflict unlike any we've ever known, faced with the possibility that terrorists could smuggle a deadly biological agent or a nuclear weapon into the middle of one of our own cities.

That threat -- and the presidential leadership needed to deal with it -- is placing a special responsibility on all of you who will decide on November 2nd who will be our commander in chief. The only viable option for winning the war on terrorism is the one the president has chosen, to use the power of the United States to aggressively go after the terrorists wherever we find them and also to hold to account states that sponsor terror. Now that we've captured or killed thousands of Al Qaida and taken down the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, it's important that we stand up democratically elected governments as the only guarantee that they'll never again revert to terrorism or the production of deadly weapons.

This is the task of our generation. And I know firsthand the strength the president brings to it. The overall outcome will depend upon the ability of the American people and the strong leadership of the president to meet all the challenges that we'll face in the days and years ahead. I'm confident we can do it.

A Sadistic Thought For This Weekend's Ex-Gay and Ex-Ex-Gay Conferences

As already referenced more than once, diametrically opposed conferences on homosexuality are being held this weekend in Irvine, CA. The larger, longer, and more longstanding one is for those seeking a heterosexual life animated through the Good News of Jesus Christ. The other, lesser one is for those who have tried that route and found it impossible. The one tries to save people from homosexuality; the other tries to save people from being saved from homosexuality.

While more sympathetic to the aims of the former conference, I am also not signing up for it. I can't shake the temperamental, freethinking and freewheeling skepticism which took me, first as a young adult, away from heterosexual norms, and then when more mature directly back to them. This has nothing to do with denigrating the core Christian essence of the evangelical conference, nor with denigrating religion generally. Nor, for that matter, with embracing a supposedly more "tolerant" interpretation of religion that accommodates (or even celebrates) homosexuality.

While coming forward about being, what other people call, "ex-gay" (a ridiculous label, if there ever were one) if I have any message to preach, any principle (let alone, light) to prize, any faith to profess, they're not so much those of Jesus Christ as those of the one French marquis who still boasts marquee-name recognition:

Let no one accuse me of being evil's apologist; let no one say that I seek to inspire wrongdoing or to blunt remorse in the hearts of wrongdoers: my sole purpose throughout these endeavors is to articulate thoughts which have gnawed at my conscience since I was first able to reason; that these thoughts might be in conflict with the thoughts of some other persons, or of most other persons, or of all other persons except me, is not, I believe, sufficient reason to suppress them. As to those susceptible souls who might be "corrupted" by exposure to my writings, I say, so much the worse for them. I address myself only to men who are capable of examining with an objective eye everything before them. Such men are incorruptible.
-- Donatien Francois Alphonse de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom

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If I were in Irvine today, I'd be shuttling between the two gatherings with a sign reading: XXX-Gay Curious?

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(Is any of this surprising? Seemingly unnecessarily? Even tortuously complicating? Ah, Gentle Reader! Expect nothing less from a blog that takes after Vladimir Mayakovsky and Franz Kafka.)

"My Name Is Sue, How Do You Do?"

The other day I posted about both Exodus International's Freedom International conference now underway in Irvine, CA and the Ex-Gay Survivors' Conference about to get underway, also in Irvine. One is a longstanding, evangelical Christian gathering that offers people who are, or who consider themselves, gay or lesbian, etc. a new (heterosexual) life through Jesus Christ. The other is a more recent and concerted effort to keep gays and lesbians, etc., or people who consider themselves gay or lesbian or etc., gay or lesbian. Or etc.

I wonder if there'll be any interaction between the two gatherings this weekend, and if there is, whether it will be, uh, fruitful. Maybe this Johnny Cash classic will break the ice.

Exodus International's 2007 Freedom Conference

* Updated *

Exodus International's 32nd annual Freedom Conference kicks off today and runs through July 1 in Irvine, CA. For those who don't know, Exodus International is dedicated to introducing its members to the teachings of Jesus Christ, to turning people of all ages away from a gay or lesbian lifestyle and toward forming committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationships, marriages, and families.

I'm happy to tip my readers to this year's Freedom Conference, not because I'll be attending (nor, for that matter, addressing it), but out of goodwill to its Executive Vice President, Randy Thomas, who has flown across the country to help lead it. Randy and I have had the opportunity to become acquainted this year. He's a good guy with a lot to say. I'm sure he'll be saying a lot in Irvine this week.

Since coming forward this spring with some critical comments about the gay community and my one-time place in it, I have found that with only one exception gay men -- those I knew long ago, relatively recently, and/or to whom I decided this year to introduce myself -- have shunned me. At first it was disheartening and disappointing. Now I see it as instructive: for one who's not "in the church" the gay community can be uncharitable, inhospitable, and un-gay (as in, not fun).

You shouldn't have to be a born-again Christian to be capable of recognizing the positive force of Christianity, and of religion generally. Just last week I went on the road to attend a very meaningful event at an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. So best wishes to all the attendees and presenters at Exodus International's 2007 Freedom Conference -- we're not on the same road but we're kind of headed in the same direction.

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* Update * (6/27) Little did I know that a "counter conference" will take place this weekend, also in Irvine, run by "ex-ex-gay" activists -- i.e., people who understood themselves as gay, lesbian, etc. who became "ex-gay" and later became "gay" or "lesbian" again (and have remained so). All this would be funny except that, as I know from experience, real lives are at stake. Here's an open letter addressed from its leading organizers to Exodus International. May more light than heat be generated this weekend.

P.S. If you're new to this site, and have strong opinions on gay and lesbian issues, please sample my "Gay/Lesbian" category before you go. Thanks.

Testimony From A Concentration of Camp Survivor

For Gay Pride Day:

In the French Quarter there are several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out onto the sidewalk. A roomful of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloquists' dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist. The dummy sits in a queer bar nursing his beer, and uncontrollably yapping out of a rigid doll face.

-- William S. Burroughs, Junky

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Check out what Gabe wrote in the Comments section. (Thanks, Gabe!)
MB gets personal. I reply.

Cuba Commentary (Passover Sermon)

* Updated *

Following is a comment that I just added to the mix at Matt's recent blogpost on Cuba. For a guy who doesn't speak Spanish well and who's never been to Cuba, I didn't know I could get so worked up on the subject. Must be my happy childhood memories of "Guantanamera"! Don't neglect to read Matt's original post and the other comments, too. (What follows is edited slightly from its original form.) 
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Communist Cuba has been a pet cause of liberals and leftists for almost 50 years. It has hosted the Venceremos Brigade from the 1960s to the present day, harbors extremist fugitives from American justice (Black Panther Party honchos Huey Newton and Assata Shakur), and indulges mainstream fugitives from post-Soviet truth (Oliver Stone, Charlize Theron).

The New Left of the early 60s backed the revolution there from the get-go. Soft liberals -- as well as many Cuban Communists -- were taken in by Castro's pledge to institute democracy. Lee Oswald used the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" as a cover to pose as a wacky leftist in order to assassinate John Kennedy. (In the opinion of many Republicans Kennedy was the last remotely honorable Democratic president -- to whom Richard Nixon and the Republican Party prudently ceded the 1960 presidential election despite having sufficient reason to contest and/or remain bitter about the results.) Personally, I was raised on career Communist Kulturkampfer Pete Seeger's recordings of the Cuban nationalist tune "Guantanamera" -- a non-Communist, patriotic song long exploited in the service of la lucha. In fact I attended the same summer camp in the 1980s which Pete Seeger had attended in the 1930s -- something of which I used to be proud.

Communist Cuba has been an enemy of freedom as we know it on at least three continents: at the first opportunity it installed (presumably) nuclear missiles aimed at North America, and it exported war to Bolivia in the 1960s and to Angola in the 1970s.

When la dictadura falls, there will be a vacuum of political leadership that will need to be filled. Hopefully that need is being addressed already. Yet the "culture war" as it relates to Cuba is already being waged. That is a good thing.

When I think of the prison that is Cuba I think of the description in Armando Valladares's Against All Hope of political prisoners being drowned in a shit-saturated sewage ditch under a baking sun on that Caribbean gulag aka Isla de Pinos. By comparison Camp X-Ray is a Travelodge (with room service) and The Shawshank Redemption a children's bedtime story.

It's up to the American and Cuban (and Cuban-American) Right to set the tone for this culture war, because if we allow types like Reinaldo Arenas and Wim Wenders to control the debate, we'll betray the Cuban people yet again.

- Un hombre sincero

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Let's see, the subject of last year's Passover post was the Soviet Union. This year it's Cuba. Next year in Tehran!

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ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

* (Update 04/03) * My dear blogbuddy Fausta left a must-read comment about Reinaldo Arenas's work in the comments section. Please read it.

* Fausta, with whom I sometimes argue -- but always patiently, carefully, and constructively (and therefore, Gentle Reader, instructively) -- suggested in the comments that Arenas's life and work are a direct subversion of the Cuban regime. Indeed. When it comes to truth, Fausta and I are always on the same side of the debate. And we always root for each other, even when we're on opposing sides of the debate. It's just that here I'm keen to push the empirical and analytical envelopes in a certain way.

* My (first) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police, whom I expect to pound on my door because I mentioned Reinaldo Arenas as neither a hero nor a victim, although in many ways he was both (and both at the same time): My phrasing is deliberate, and I own it. I don't suggest banning from the cultural debate the import of Sr. Arenas's life and work and death (by suicide), nor diminishing their potential contributions to it. As if I'm capable (or desirous) of suppressing truth! All and everything I'm saying is that his life and work and death should not set the tone of the debate.

* My (second) preemptive statement to the PC Thought Police: Lest you accuse me of being barren of compassion for anyone who suffers and dies -- so wastingly and so wastefully -- from AIDS, or for anyone who lives on after loved ones have died from AIDS, you need to surrender the calculating portion of your intellect (if only for a moment) to my sonnet "When Late We Lie."

* My (third) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: Now -- does "silence = death"? Or is silence golden? (Hint: that's a trick question.)

* My (fourth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: I've always got one finger pointed in your general direction. You'll have to guess which one, though.

* My (fifth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: I'm happy to debate any issue with anyone, it's just that -- by way of some kind of neoconservative "affirmative action" -- defectors from the PC Thought Police are encouraged to apply. (Need more encouragement? Go read Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy.)

* My (sixth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: The blogosphere's on to your devilish masters!

* Found a suitable "Guantanamera" video!  After everything, este viejo's still got his moves. Just like the Cuban people. Take it away, papi!:

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James and Me

One can learn from one's errors. What one cannot survive is allowing other people to make your errors for you.
-- James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

One can learn from one's Eros. What one cannot survive is allowing other people to make your Eros for you.
-- Jeremayakovka
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James and I go way back, Gentle Reader. It's good to bring him into the present. Bringing him into the future will be even better.

Brokeback Mountain, Take 1

* Updated *

A reader asked my opinion of Brokeback Mountain which, as I noted in the previous post, is one of the most exhausting movies I've ever seen. ("Exhausting" I mean as a compliment.) Here's my first attempt at a critical and constructive (as opposed to deconstructive) take on it:

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The movie turns an average piece of short fiction into an above-average moviegoing experience. It is heartfelt, professional, cinematic art. I grant it that.

The story, imho, has some weak spots that are worth considering. First, since by the 1970s gay communities were springing up around the US, these two guys could have picked up and moved -- but ... this story was a tragedy ... whose "anchor" was ... that mountain. I mean, it wasn't called Jack and Ennis Ride Again, and that's for a strategic dramatic reason.

I found Ennis's "broken family" speech (shortly before he and Jack first make love) not quite convincing, neither as character motivation nor as dramatic preparation for what shortly afterwards was the story's biggest emotional "leap." A counterpoint, I suppose, is the fact of the long, gradual lead-up of the many scenes on the mountain, scenes which "prepare" us emotionally for that scene. Yet this counterpoint admits the story's artificing -- that a strategic, emotional, and ideological fictionalizing is at work. In any case, this (to me) less than convincing quality allows, I think, a case to be made that Ennis was emotionally entrapped into their affair. Were I to take this plot and run with it, I'd emphasize a motif of emotional and sexual entrapment -- not necessarily malicious, but objectively harmful -- and Ennis's pathetic participation in it. I'd emphasize in him a more, well, *manly* struggle to come to grips with the loving and honorable duties of being a husband and father. (The same goes for Jack, too.) I just was not satisfied with watching Ennis's long, slow slide into a haunted, proto-alcoholic solitude. The short story, btw, which I read before going to the theater, opens with a particularly stark image of this, one which the screenwriters chose to omit.

Unfortunately I can't think of a conservative critic of Brokeback who adequately engages it where its emotional rubber meets the aesthetic road. Mark Steyn, e.g., made a quip about the irony of them agreeing they're not queer and then going back to having more sex. How Steynian! But that's not the same as meeting the movie on its own (aesthetic) terms. [Update: Steyn confronts Brokeback to some extent here.]

Powered by a conscientious balance of restraint and candor, Brokeback Mountain is convincing emotionally -- intellectually, no; but emotionally, yes -- which is art's first (though not last) responsibility.

Pachelbel Cowboy

When was the last time you listened to this?

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Whenever I hear "Pachelbel's Canon" I'm reminded of Ordinary People whose opening sequence it dominates.
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(still from Ordinary People)

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Some movies have completely exhausted me -- Raging Bull, Brokeback Mountain, Midnight Cowboy, The Last Tango in Paris....

Others have reduced me helplessly to tears -- Crooklyn, Ordinary People, Blue Velvet , Glory....
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Chicks don't dig it when I tell them I admire Last Tango. (I do, Gentle Reader, I really do. I admire it and I say so.) They think, Oh! He's itching to rape me in the ass. Scenes of such criminal marital desperation made current by Last Exit to Brooklyn and Brokeback Mountain overinform the popular imagination. In Last Tango that rape scene -- the second in the movie, but the only one anyone remembers -- was part of a more artful progression. And chicks really don't dig it when I then inform them that a while back I dated men. They think, Shit, now I know he's primed to do it.

Chicks want someone to take them to chick flicks -- When Harry Met Sally, 13 Going on 30, and whatnot. Most women, just like most men, don't want -- refuse -- to see the whole picture.
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(still from Midnight Cowboy)

That's a big part of why for years I gave up completely on American women and was only able to hit it off with European-born ones.
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ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:
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* Who else can act so brutally and imply such vulnerability and need?
-- Roger Ebert on Brando in Last Tango (Show 'em how it's done, Marlon!)
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* We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written.... (audio)
-- Matthew Broderick as Col. Robert Gould Shaw in Glory
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* She was stroking the innocence out of him.
-- James Baldwin, Another Country
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* Salvation lies within.
-- The Shawshank Redemption

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Previous: "An Open Letter To Matt Sanchez", "De Profundis Clamavit", "Recent Poem - 'Miserere'"

An American Parable

Still very young and naturally pale, with supply curved shoulders and almost stout neck, with thick dark hair and deep dark brown eyes that shined without effort, she had boiled her life's story down to a few sentences for me -- a total stranger.

Her mother, a born-again Christian, had left the church when deciding to become a lesbian. That's how they landed in the Bay Area from Oklahoma. Now she (the daughter) and her boyfriend were expecting a child (which explained the shining eyes).

The least I could do was to ask her her name.

- Maranatha.
- Your name is what?
- Ma-ra-na-tha, she repeated placidly and more slowly.
- Is that ... Hindu?
- It's Aramaic. I nodded ignorantly. It means, she said, sliding a custodial palm round her belly, "The second coming of Christ."
- Well! ... You have a lot to look forward to.

Open Letter To Matt Sanchez

The following is a message of appreciation I recently sent to Matt Sanchez -- Marine reservist, Columbia University student, and recent CPAC honoree. In my opinion his conduct since last fall, when he first stepped into the public spotlight, is worthy of the admiration of all Americans. With Matt's permission I am openly posting my letter here.

* * *

Hello Matt,

The first time I heard about you was two weeks ago when you were presented with the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award at CPAC 2007. Congratulations on the honor and thank you for your commitment to our country. Then those tabloid stories broke. While I'm sure you are intent on putting them behind you, I would like you to know that they bring to mind issues that are important to me and, I expect, to the broader conservative movement.

You see, 15 or more years ago, when I was a very young adult, I too attempted to live "the gay lifestyle." This took place at UC Berkeley and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the gay agenda figures especially prominently. Unlike you my prime motivation was not immoral and illicit sex but immoral and illicit politics -- a clear commitment to a vague concept of Marxist-Leninist revolution. Yet like you I "wasn't very good at being gay" either. More accurately, because my heterosexual tendency was never seriously in doubt, I wasn't very good at being bisexual.

An individual's motivations for entering into the gay scene can be complex. One of mine, certainly, was to earn the approval of my political "comrades," almost all of whom were significantly older than me and gay or lesbian. By campaigning in the Castro for gay and lesbian candidates, by marching in the Gay Pride Parade, and, yes, by pursuing and being pursued by other men, I was offering a certain solidarity. Yet -- and this is the kernel of virtue I extracted from that experience -- claiming "bisexual" status affirmed my intention to exercise an empirical, discriminating intellect within what, I was (and remain) concerned, was significantly a conformist, mind-numbing, and hazardous social scene.

Please don't be fooled because I might appear now, at age 37, to neatly summarize those ages, both formative and deformative, of 20, 21, and 22. That time in the gay scene was a time of trial and error, of heartache and heartbreak, of knowledge and even some wisdom. In hindsight, I could have parted ways from it at any number of moments; for example, when I fell deeply in love with a woman (which provoked mockery and resentment from my "comrades"). Since, however, I had entered into it as part of a broad political commitment -- a revolutionary commitment, a will to power -- it was only later, when resolving to disavow those politics, that I reckoned that my "lifestyle choice" had been part of a much graver error. When the vanity of revolutionary expectations vanished, so too did the vanity of bisexual pretensions.

Compared to such a colorful past, my recent interest in the conservative movement is rather plain. With the West embroiled in an all-too-real war of survival against a foreign (and increasingly domestic) enemy -- imperial Islam -- we have yet to find the national resolve that will guarantee that we prevail. Hence my interest in our nation's ongoing civil dispute, sometimes referred to as "the culture war." Having thought about it, core conservative values are, to me, our society's enduring, renewing, and winning values: those of initiative and responsibility, of law and life, of conviction and compassion. As I would point out to gay and lesbian Americans who are convinced that they have no choice but to be gay or lesbian, core conservative values offer an excellent choice as to how to be American.

Let me finish, Matt, by wishing you that the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award remain your defining moment of March 2007. I regret not making it to CPAC this year, but assure you that I was, and remain, there in spirit.

Sincerely,

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* * *

* Update * Welcome, Conservative Grapevine readers! And thank you to John Hawkins of Right Wing News (and of the Duncan Hunter for President campaign) for linking here. It's an honor to be listed alongside such proven talents as Michael Medved, Amanda Carpenter, and Rush Limbaugh. Don't be shy about visiting my entire "Gay/Lesbian" category, which includes takes on  Anita Bryant , Ann Coulter, and Larry Kramer.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 5) - "Ann of Arc"

I was going to have a few comments on Ann Coulter, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you compare an American conservative to anything French.

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Ann Coulter these days reminds me of Joan of Arc, to wit:
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Ann of Arc

In a land overrun by foreign enemies ... divided within ...
she's the bravest warrior to appear in generations ...
inspiring thousands to battle ...
and victory.

Then she's betrayed by her own people ...
put on trial for heresy ...
convicted ... condemned ...
and publicly executed on a pile of faggots.

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* * *

And now, a public service announcement and station identification politics....

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It's a subject "polite" people don't talk about, but every 11 seconds in America a woman thinks Well-behaved women rarely make history. A woman can think about making history anywhere, anytime: at home, work or school ... in a back alley or bedroom ... behind closed doors or in the great outdoors.

Often a woman thinks about making history in the presence of a man she knows intimately. It can be her husband, boyfriend or even another family member. Only a fraction of the times after a woman thinks about making history does she ever tell anyone about it. A woman who thinks about making history might spend the rest of her life burdened or even consumed by intense feelings of shame, inadequacy, and rage. And studies show that thinking about making history damages not just the woman who thinks, but all her relationships. Everyone is affected when a woman thinks about making history.

But there's hope. Thanks to the courageous efforts of many women (and men), today all across America women are no longer just thinking about making history. Women are talking about and women are making history. Now. More than ever.

The next time a woman thinks about making history in America -- the next time a woman makes history in America -- what are you going to do about it?

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* * *

I have pre-dated this post for March 8 in honor of International Women's Day Ann Coulter.

Fox News Channel recently rolled out the 1/2 Hour News Hour featuring her as vice president. So far, so good. I dare Fox and the Rightosphere to take it to the next level by declaring

March 2: "International Ann Coulter Day"

Lenny Bruce was reincarnated as a shicksa Republican goddess and career conservatives can't deal with it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, George Will.

Ann, you are right, it was an excellent joke. Thanks for beginning "the conversation"!

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Rehab "a total indulgence," says American Idol judge.

From George Bernard Shaw's introduction to his play Saint Joan (which I read in high school and out of which copied the following into my diary): The test of sanity lies not in the normality of the methods, but in the reasonableness of the discovery.

Edwards "kind of cute." -- Barack Obama

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Oh, and I was going to have a few comments about the other Democratic presidential candidate, Ms. Rodham Clinton, but it turns out that under a Hillary Administration you could be audited by the IRS if you use the word "dyke."
-- JMK

Is Gavin Gay? No, But He's Not Happy, Either

* Updated *
* SF Party Party wants to know: "Is Gavin Newsom Faking Rehab?"
* Was she worth $10,000?

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Gavin Newsom's recent sins (or "peccadillos" as his p.r. team might try to spin them) are fueling speculation among my online buddies that a revelation is in the works that San Francisco's mayor is gay. In case you don't know, Gentle Reader, an affair with a campaign aide (his campaign manager's wife, actually) was recently made public; plus, the San Francisco Chronicle just indulged his declaration of seeking "help" for "alcoholism" with wall-to-wall, frontpage headlines. If that's news that's fit to print, then why is he fit for public office? Obviously, the Bay Area Democratic political machine has an interest in protecting and packaging its rising star. While recently we've seen the pathetic ways in which New Jersey's Jim McGreevey and Florida's Mark Foley have been forced to come clean about their sexual preferences and transgressions, so far Newsom has fessed up to wrongdoing (the affair) only in order to prop himself up (the alcohol counseling). No, Newsom's too young, too well-connected, and too ambitious to throw in the political towel. He's in it to win it, even if for the moment he's backpedaling.

I don't suspect that San Francisco's political native son has "gone native" so much as his political persona in "Baghdad by the Bay" is heterosexually challenged. I'd respect him if, instead of getting divorced and now going for alcohol counseling, he had gone to marriage counseling and popped into SF's neighborhood bars for some old-fashioned palm-pressing politicking. A pol who's going to earn workingmen's respect needs to break bread with the guys who break a sweat for a living. Bartender! Gimme a reality sandwich, hold the bullshit. And whatever my friend here's drinking... two of 'em! Can you picture this Marina Triangle entrepreneur (3 bars on 4 streetcorners) ever saying that? Having lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto, having lived all over that town (as the Talking Heads song goes), IMHO -- never. The problem's less Newsom and moreso the SF electorate. After all, he was elected in a razor-tight runoff against a Green Party candidate! That's a hell of a lot of moonbattery to appeal and make concessions to. My, my, the political center in SF is a long way from Kansas, isn't it Toto?

So my money's not on him being gay, but on his heterosexuality being compromised by having come of age politically in the Bay Area. He's a protege of Pelosi and the Clintons, not Dan Rostenkowski and Lyndon Johnson: BIG difference. He's extremely ambitious and a savvy pol, but by laying the groundwork for his career in SF Newsom's building on loose soil. I suspect he senses that, but it hasn't fully hit him yet: hence he plays "loose" with not just any woman but with his campaign manager's wife! I suspect he's uncertain of exactly how to package himself to try to leap to higher office -- he needs to refine Clintonesque suavity to take his pro-gay marriage, anti-welfare record to new heights. He's got more star potential than most California Dems, like the terminated Angelides (who looks like a muppet who fell asleep in a tanning salon), the nigger-quippin' Bustamente, and the disgraced Kevin Shelley, but right now the biggest star in California politics is The Governator. Arnold, not Gavin, leads the way in governing from the center, which any statewide pol must do in order to get ahead. Start with the matrimonial department, where Arnold is miles ahead of Gavin -- by being not just married but married to a Kennedy (and one of the few good-looking ones, to boot). Top that, Gavin! But guess what? The shinehead from the Marina can't top the Mr. Olympia from Austria -- and he never will. Besides, California's leading Democratic pols are all powerful women: two long-term senators and the House Speaker. These women are from the Bay Area. When my male friends are feeling down, boxed in, depressed, etc., I tell them: Go bag a deer! (Perform some daring exploit, go conquer something, whatever that might be). Newsom's so boxed in, his idea of bagging a deer is bedding a married woman. That it was his campaign manager's wife speaks not to a lack of political ambition, but to focus. He lacks focus. (Also tact: she in effect said to her husband Your services are no longer needed before Newsom did.)

When Congressman Lyndon Johnson was gearing up to run for the Senate, he sat his closest people down and said to them, I'm going to be president someday. He wanted to know who was with him for the long haul. Dipping his wick the way he did shows that Newsom's nowhere near ready to line up his ducks like that. In the meantime, who's he going to turn to for inspiration? Jerry Brown? I almost feel sorry for Gavin Newsom.

Nihil Nisi Boner - Gerry Studds Dead at 69

I've got his pecker in my pocket.
-Lyndon Johnson
(quoted in Joseph Heller's novel Good as Gold)

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How ironic. Former Congressman Gerry Studds (D-MA), whose name was dragged back into the limelight during the Mark Foley revelations, died over the weekend at age 69. Tarred by the 1983 revelation of an overseas liaison he'd arranged with one of his teenaged, male pages, Studds later avoided being feathered by said revelation when he defiantly turned his back on his colleagues' otherwise overwhelming 420-3 vote to censure him.

Those who simply refuse to tolerate unprofessional and cross-generational sexual misconduct, as JMK does, admit no quarter to either Studds or Foley. Yet partisan rant jockeys have been trading barbs for weeks now over which Congressman was the more (or the less) honorable. There's Foley who admitted merely ethical wrongdoing yet promptly removed himself from office, and in the thick of an unbelievably close mid-term election, no less. Then there's Studds who -- in a slightly earlier era as the first openly gay congressman -- absolutely refused to step down. In fact, he retained his Congressional seat for several more terms.

Looking ahead, no national consensus on "Foleygate" is on the horizon as each side of the blogosphere boasts it occupies the moral high ground. Liberals point fingers anticipating a Republican "gay purge." Conservatives, on the other hand, quietly boast that Foley -- who resigned to the tune of un-Studdsmanly mea culpas, including "alcoholism" and "childhood sexual abuse" -- in fact did the right thing by relinquishing the very power that gave him access to those budding adolescents. Willingly relinquishing such power is something which no gay Democrat, it seems, could be capable of.

Looking back, in the following YouTube video clip from 1994 Studds admits a tactical error concerning his page liaison, but still plants his rainbow flag firmly within the context of a broader gay civil rights struggle. Worth noting is that Studds -- as liberal gay activists are wont to do -- carpetbags the racial civil rights struggle in an attempt to couch the public's understanding of gay aspirations in terms of the highest morality.

JMK does not conform to the Leftocratic party line that acknowledges gay lives and societal contributions as being on par with securing equality of opportunity based on race. JMK regards these struggles as separate and unequal. Concerning Gerry Studds, Mark Foley, or any other gay politician, I prefer to see demonstrations of greater dignity and lesser defiance. As things stand, however, I don't count on that becoming the norm anytime soon.

Fathers, Be Good To Everyone, Not Just Your Daughters

The rapidly unfolding House scandal in which (former) Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) repeatedly engaged underage, teenaged Congressional pages in seductive and pornographic communications, including "Internet sex" and who knows what else, has caused unknown harm to many individuals.  It threatens a sitting Speakership and potentially the GOP's 12-year majority, and will forever spoil many reputations, most notably Foley's. (His lawyer, btw, categorically denies any sexual contact with minors.)

Deservedly so. Foley's and the Republicans' reputations are taking a beating. So, too, are the Florida delegation's and that of the entire Congress. Depending on how the media and blogs pursue the story and on how authorities succeed (or fail) to prosecute criminal activity, their and our reputations are on the line, too.

* * *

"The personal is political," in which a personal anecdote or sentiment (rightly or wrongly) justifies a public stance, belongs to no party or ideology. While sparks fly in all directions -- The GOP says they're for 'family values'?! [spit]... Aha! The Democrats' 'October Surprise' ... "The MSM misreported this!" -- and while the Democrats (Barney) frank(ly) lack the moral authority to condemn Foley and the GOP leadership -- at least two conservative commentators are contributing to this story in a timely and meaningful way. Michelle Malkin and Debbie Schlussel have recently come forward with stories of their own Washington internships.

From Ms. Schlussel's "Mark Foley moment":

I know this first-hand. When I was in high school and college, I worked as an intern on Capitol Hill for three Republican Congressman--Mark Siljander of Michigan, Phil Crane of Illinois, and Donald E. "Buz" Lukens of Ohio. During my junior year of college, just after I worked for Lukens, he was caught in a sex scandal, broken by tabloid show "A Current Affair" (then hosted by Bill O'Reilly). Lukens was blackmailed on tape (all set up and arranged by the FOX show) by a teen-age prostitute and her mother, who was apparently her pimp and "marketed" her as "of legal age." Lukens was apparently one of their "customers."

It gave new meaning to the Christmas cards he sent me that said "Debbie, We hardly knew ye." It was the other way around, apparently. I hardly knew him. Still, I felt bad for him--it was a sleazy situation created in part by a sleazy, sick pimp mother (to whom nothing happened) and a sleazy TV show whose host now claims he's a "culture warrior." Buz Lukens was always nice to me (no, not in that way) and all of those who worked for him. And I saw him lose everything. He lost his Congressional seat, the scant money he had, was forced to take AIDS tests, and had to attend sex offender education. He lost everything.

From Ms. Malkin's "Reflections of a former intern":

The most important lesson I learned, however, came before my internship even began. Several weeks preceding my arrival in Washington, I got a call from an East Coast congressman. My college had sent out notices requesting help for interns in need of temporary housing. The congressman offered me a room in his Capitol Hill residence --- for free. He was married and had a family, but lived alone in D.C. while Congress was in session. How generous, I thought. And how exciting....

A few days after the congressman had extended his offer, I still had not made up my mind. Then I received a call in my dorm room that sealed my fate. It was the congressman's wife. In a brief and bizarre conversation, she started pouring her heart about the difficulties she was having with her husband. She asked me not to come. She cautioned me that it wouldn't turn out the way I thought it would.

Yikes. I was just looking for a place to stay -- not a real-life role in the D.C. version of "Days of Our Lives." Freaked out, I immediately turned down the invitation.

Update 10/4: "It's the predation, stupid"

Mercifully, we're not hearing from the teenaged pages whose trust has been molested by the dishonorable Congressman from Florida. I would like to state for the record, however, that Ms. Schlussel's and Ms. Malkin's remarks bring to mind the teenager I once was....

* * *

When I was 17 and applying to colleges, a professional newspaper writer helped me write an essay that was objectively persuasive and personally meaningful. A heartstring-plucking, 700-word coming-of-age story, it helped me win acceptance to a top-tier, private New England university. Sticking by me from start to finish, he and I together identified les mots justes and purged all others. I couldn't have done it without him.

Then he tried to force me to have sex with him.

Nothing happened in any graphic (or "Prince of Tides") sense. My objections, which eventually showed him I'd fight if necessary, collapsed his resolve. He quickly teared up when he realized what he was doing, and abjectly apologized.

Call it what you want -- "a moment of truth" ... "the drama of the unlived life" ... or whatever -- the trust had vanished. I felt like the garbage in a little office wastebasket -- after you crush it down with your foot to make room for more garbage. I walked out of his apartment and never looked back.

How little it takes for a pivotal role model to turn into a cringing weakling, leaving only confusion, anger, contempt, and sadness -- and the sting of a psychological slap that never quite goes away.

Lesbollah

For several years, the misfit outfits "Queers for Palestine" and "Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism" (QUIT) have militated for the destruction of Israel under the banner of agitating for Palestinian rights. They have done so since the 2000 resumption of the Arab war-by-Palestinian-proxy against the Jews (also known as "the al-Aqsa Intifada"), and maybe since before that. If you live in the real world you probably have never heard of "Queers for Palestine" and "QUIT," but the sad fact is that they are a freak-show fixture of the lib/rad "scene" in and around the San Francisco intergalactic zip code and beyond.

"Queers for Palestine" and "QUIT" consistently:

* oppose Israeli anti-terrorist operations in the Palestinian territories;
* endorse divestment from the region's most thriving economy (and most thriving democracy); and, most notoriously . . .
* endorse (click for image) the Arab demographic atom bomb aimed at the heart of Israeli civil society, the so-called "right of return"

Someone should spell out for these people that the very territories they purport to support are among the most dangerous places on Earth for any gay or lesbian person. But it's difficult to believe they're anything but a pathologically self-hating, morally fractured sect when their latest fundraiser is held at a bar called "DeBasement" and when their current organizing effort is to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference for gays and lesbians because it's being held in . . . Jerusalem!

With the outbreak this month of the Israel-Hezbollah War (or, War of Tammuz; or, as JMK called it from the start, "a defensive counter-attack in the longer war against jihad"), a brand new jihadist rallying cry is being raised in the battle to shape public opinion over it. This cry has begun circulating on the Left faster than a fast-tracked fatwa: "We are all Hizbullah."

Well, JMK has learned through its intelligence channels that the "We are all Hizbullah" meme is spreading like wildfire through the "hearts and minds" of some of the western Left. Its success stems from exploiting an already-existing split among the the "queer" pro-Palestine crowd.  The exact repercussions remain to be seen, but we can state with some certainty that a militant feminist faction has burst forth from "Queers for Palestine" and "QUIT" and is seizing this historical moment to assert itself with unprecedented and shocking force.

The faction is "Lesbians in Solidarity with Hezbollah," more commonly known by its quasi-acronym, Lesbollah.

Unfortunately, little is known about the exact numbers and locations of Lesbollah's sleeper cells, except that they are believed to have formed in large cities in the United States, Western Europe and Israel (including on large college campuses), but nowhere near southern Lebanon.  Lesbollah may, or may not, be affiliated with "Terrorist Dykes," which formed autonomously in Greenwich Village, New York in 2003, but which appears to have links to a militant feminist socialist group in Michigan, a known hotspot of Hezbollah organizing in the United States. Most of JMK's intelligence on Lesbollah, however, comes from the interception of propaganda communiques (stapled prominently on many college campuses' announcement kiosks), which lead with one of the following phrases:

Lesbollah: Wymyn killin' wymyn 4 Allah
Lesbollah: Puttin' the "she" back in "shiite"
Lesbollah: "I am jihad. Hear me roar."
Lesbollah: Sporting the longest shoulder-fired rockets and the shortest fingernails in "the resistance"

If you, Gentle Reader, come across any further Lesbollah communiques -- including print, video, or other media formats -- JMK urges you to email them to us or list them in the Comments section without delay so that other concerned readers may learn more about this stealthy, determined, and implacable enemy of Western civilization.

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Breaking Update (7/25): Thanks to inside sources -- including at least one member of Congress and a writer for the recently-cancelled TV series West Fling -- JMK has reason to believe that one or both of the women featured in the following photograph may have sensitive information about Lesbollah activities:

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What I want answered, JMK, is what the American people -- and what I think all decent Israeli, Palestinian, and Lebanese people -- want answered.  And that is: What, if any, knowledge is Mrs. Clinton or Mrs. Arafat privy to that will lead to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of Lesbollah operatives, whether in the United States or in the Middle East? In other words, what are either of these women hiding that is endangering American, Israeli, Palestinian, or Lebanese lives?

-- Sen. Hattrick Layshe, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (speaking off the record)

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Further Update (7/27): More (and related) stuff you can't make up: Hillary Clinton is busted! That is, a bust of her is to be enshrined in the Museum of Sex(?). Talk about Expose the Left .  And how better to do so than with an edition of Vent at Hot Air.

Super Duper Further Update (3/30/2007): Arab Lesbians gather publicly in Israel.

Remember May 6th, not May 5th

In a tragic but simple twist of fate today, May 6th, is and should forever be a day of remembrance in our brave, new, neoconservative 21st Century.

On this day in 2002 Dutch politician and prime ministerial candidate Pim Fortuyn was gunned down for having the civic courage to insist that for its survival the Netherlands must curtail immigration, specifically Muslim immigration. Fortuyn called Muslim immigration  a "Trojan horse of intolerance the Dutch are inviting into their society in the name of multiculturalism." But this didn't jibe with a vegan "animal rights" sympathizer who -- though he recoiled at the thought of running a worm down a fishing hook -- had no qualms about unloading six bullets into a human being and one of his fellow citizens, and turning a public sidewalk into a killing floor (scroll down w/in link).

I admit, I didn't follow this story closely back in 2002, but Infidel Bloggers Alliance ran a post on it today, and it made me think. For more to think about, see all the valuable links at Limits to Growth.

Let May 6th be a fitting and somber riposte to the Fifth-O of May-O reconquista movement.

 .... Proud ...  American?

Pim Fortuyn, Dutch patriot

Saturday afternoon new blog surfing Update (5/13): For further reading, see Center for Sanity's "Is Brown the New Black?"  This is guy is smart.