MY LIFE

“Freedom is measured by the distance between church and state”

03 Jul

I didn’t realize I had such power!

Okay, I’m sure it was nothing related to my previous post about Sarah Palin, but I just now heard the news!

Palin is stepping down this month!    How cool is that?    And here’s the text of her resignation speech.

With any luck this means she will retreat back into private civilian life.   It is hard to think that the way to show leadership for the presidency is to just quit the governor’s job just 2.5 years into her first term!

Like everything (EVERY thing) else since she was introduced to us last summer, this is just another weird, bizarre, strange thing.  And I am confident there will be LOTS of speculation in the next couple of weeks as to WHY she is giving up (and let’s face it, that’s what it is).  But as someone just said on MSNBC, this is NOT the way to show you’re moving up to the Presidency.

It would be better for the country for her to just go back to Wasilla, hide in her safe little Pentecostal church away from the rest of the world, and stay out of politics.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed, eh?

03 Jul

It’s not just Palin, but all of her type

Fact: Sarah Palin needs to get out of the spotlight and give people adequate time to simply forget her!

As discussed in this clip with David Shuster and Richard Wolffe, besides being a Christian of the worst sort (hyper-funda-gelical), she has a very unstable relationship with truth and reality.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers had this today:

Part of Sarah Palin’s irresistible appeal to her fundamentalist base is her ability to look at the camera with utter conviction and declare black to be white.

The ability to lie well is a valuable part of the fundamentalist psychology. My son isn’t gay, he just hasn’t found the right woman! Those rocks aren’t 50 million years old, they just look like it as a test of our faith! My sexless marriage isn’t foundering, it is filled with God’s spirit! The minister isn’t molesting little Maria, they’re just very close! It isn’t torture, it is being tough on terrorists!

Fundamentalists can recognize a truly audacious and talented liar from miles away. Instead of running the other way, as you might expect, they gather around the powerful liar, for they know that their own lies will be respected and protected by a leader who understands the paramount importance of preserving their whole system of denial.

I realize some of my own relatives admire Palin, but I can’t help that.   The above paragraphs indicate why … and why they shouldn’t.  She is a dangerous and unqualified person to be anywhere near the White House in a position of authority.  But for people like her, who not only does not recognize the line between personal religion and public government, but apparently denies any such line exists, there is no way she can be allowed in authority.

But the problem that is very apparent with Palin is the same reason religious leaders are similarly dangerous — the biggest liars and phonies are the ones in the biggest venues and must adoring and gullible crowds, but they’re in the tiny little churches as well.   People flock to whomever will tell the most palatable lies they can get away with.     The worst sort are the ones who actively deny truth and reality even when it is given to them (like Ken Ham and the Creation Museum, or Ray Comfort, and others who deny science in favor of Biblical myths).

All of these people have a distant relationship with truth and reality.   So sad to see among most folks; absolutely unacceptable in someone aspiring to leadership.

(h/t Ed Brayton)

02 Jul

Mind your moral ground

This is making the rounds… too funny!

Amazing how people can get time-relevant videos made so quickly, huh?

02 Jul

It’s nice when things work out; sucks when it doesn’t

long, long ago, almost in another lifetime, I was married.   To a woman.   In a church.   In St. Peter and Paul Full Gospel Deliverance Church, to be exact.  It was a deliverance church.  And Full Gospel.  So they believed in divine healing and stuff like that.   There was a pair of crutches mounted on the wall above the platform and pulpit.   I guess someone got healed there and left the crutches behind.  Or maybe they just gave up and died.  I don’t know.

But anyway, that’s where I got married, over 35 years ago.   I was a Christian and a minister back then.   My best man and the groomsman were also Christians.   About 6-8 years ago, the groomsman looked me up on the web, and in the course of a few emails it was clear his only purpose was to “educate” me about what the Bible says about being gay.  I wished him well and sent him on his way politely — several times, in fact!  I let him know I was happy for him that he’d found his place and chose to stop learning and growing, but my life wasn’t about that any more and I was far more happy being ME, than being what some church decided I should be.   So I wished him well, and deleted the subsequent emails after reading his crap the first few emails.

Shortly after the groomsman contacted me I wondered about the best man.   Apparently the groomsman had also contacted him, because when I looked him up he didn’t want contact.   Understandably, since I was from that time in his life when “being Christian” was more important than being real.  I did, however, find out he had come out and was involved with another guy, so that put my mind at ease and I left it alone.

Another person from that Christian gang in Air Force days also contacted me, also still a Christian, also telling me I was doomed for hell and beyond if I didn’t “get right with the Lord.”   (Gee, good news travels fast, huh? it wasn’t but a few days after the groomsman contacted me that this other guy did.)    I just thought it was really odd they’d bother to contact me at all, since I hadn’t seen or heard from them since the day of the wedding.

Uh-huh… Whatever ….

So, now I’m on Facebook.  Mostly it’s pretty cool.

I happened to discover that the best man from my wedding is also on Facebook.  Way back in the day, since we were in the Air Force, it was just not allowed to be gay, and since we were Christians there’s no way we could have possibly been gay anyway, right?   But he knew I had ‘issues’ in that direction, and I knew he did as well.  Discussed briefly and set aside because … well, because we were Christians!  <*koff*>

Well, anyway, I am pleased to know that the Best Man from my wedding has also been out a good long time, and been in a long term relationship with someone very special.

So it’s nice that he’s been able to do that.    I don’t know if he’s still a Christian or not, and it doesn’t matter to me;  as long as he is true to himself and has worked out the details according to his own faith.  He seems happy.  (Which is cool, because the groomsman and the other dude seemed particularly angry in their tone — angry that I wasn’t who I had been back in the Air Force 30 years prior, perhaps?)

I thought of all this because several people on Facebook have just recently commented that they have been contacted with “friend me” requests from people they absolutely do not ever want in their lives in any way, shape, or form — like a crappy, abusive ex from more than a dozen years ago, for example; or some shyster who ripped them off long ago.   Very weird — it’s like people think on Facebook you’re supposed to contact Every Person You’ve Ever Known Because They Won’t Remember What A Shit You Were Before.

Heck, I haven’t even accepted friend requests from relatives of relatives.   I don’t know them, and wouldn’t even recognize my own relatives if we passed on the street.  And friends of friends of friends…. why does Facebook even suggested them as friends?     Whatever … if I don’t know them I usually don’t friend anyone just because of a tenuous or long-ago interaction.  Usually.    I don’t write nasty-grams or “fuck-off” messages, I simply ignore the requests.   No harm, no foul.

01 Jul

Things that make you go “hmmm…”

I was catching up in Facebook this morning and this ad caught my eye (for obvious reasons), but then the text beneath it gave me pause:

Now, don’t get me wrong, but if they are advertising TO WOMEN for a laser hair removal, it seems to me that they should show an image of a woman.  And if that is an image of a woman, they took off a whole lot more than just hair.

Just saying, y’know….

(for the record, men should not be shaving, waxing, plucking, or otherwise molesting a well-furred chest.  That’s just wrong.  Always.   Shoulders and backs…okay, you can do that part, but for goodness sake don’t manscape the chest.)

01 Jul

“Moral Opposition”?

This article, WFLA should have seen the red flags over antigay program shows that some people in the media still don’t get it.

On Saturday morning, thousands of people turned out to celebrate at St. Petersburg’s annual Gay Pride parade and festival, promoting acceptance and tolerance of the area’s gay, lesbian and transgendered residents.

Hours later, WFLA-Ch. 8 aired an hourlong special paid for by the conservative American Family Association called Speechless: Silencing the Christians. The film urged viewers to fight a “radical homosexual activist agenda” aimed partially at persecuting churchgoers who find homosexuality morally wrong.

Two sides of an issue that got the airing they deserved? Or was one over the line?

Well of course one was over the line.  Duuhhh.    What WFLA did by airing AFA’s hateful program during Gay Pride was to encourage continued discrimination against gays.    It would have been like airing a KKK recruiting video during Black History Month.

“This show paints the entire gay community as being anti-Christian and that’s just not true,” said Brian Winfield, director of communications for Equality Florida. “On a day when tens of thousands of Tampa residents and their friends gathered together to celebrate diversity and pride, WFLA chose to profit from screening a show that was dehumanizing to gay people.”

* * *

“The striking thing about the gay and lesbian movement is that it’s a grass roots thing,” said Ray Arsenault, a professor of history at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg and a nationally recognized expert on civil rights. “There’s hasn’t been a signal from Washington, as with civil rights in the ’60s. There’s still a sense that it’s okay to express this antigay bigotry.”

This is why there needs to be a ’signal’ from Washington, making it very clear that the GLBT community deserves the same treatment as everyone else.

You can read the entire article for yourself.

I want to look at one of the comments posted beneath the article.  Thankfully most of them are sane, but carl from pinellas park writes:

With so many gays and lesbians on the television shows across the nation every day and with homosexuality being thrown in our faces on a daily bases,why not let the moral opposition have a say? You can always change the channel if you don’t like it.

“Why not let the moral opposition have a say?”    Uhh.. “moral opposition”?   How “moral” is it to actively seek to strip rights from others?   Or to set out a group of people for abuse?    There is no genuine moral opposition to what the GLBT community is asking for.  There is no moral opposition to homosexuality.  What ‘carl in pinellas park’ is talking about is the assumed privilege of telling other people how to live, and he does not have that right.   Nobody does.

And, as the news repeatedly makes very clear, those on the far-right who claim to have the moral high ground are standing on a quicksand of all sorts of scandals.   And nobody is saying the liberals and moderates don’t have similar problems and human frailties, but it’s the right wing conservatives who claim their morals are so much better and that this presumption of superiority gives them license to attack everyone else.    Bullshit.    Stop with the “morals” nonsense.

30 Jun

What a weird day

I am having some difficulty grasping why it took almost 2 hours just to dye 8 skeins of yarn.  In a normally good day, I can get a full steamer batch (of 8-10 skeins) in about an hour or less, normally, and usually I can get one steamer batch done in the time the previous batch is steaming (45 minutes).   And that’s including preparing several recipes, mixing new dyes, etc.   These 8 skeins were just 4 recipes (2 skeins apiece), and were the last of a larger order, most of which I’d already done earlier.

And these weren’t even the worst recipes — the ones that call for 7-9 different dyes to complete.   The heaviest of this batch only needed 6 bottles.  I don’t understand why it took so long to do it.

Beyond that I won’t give the details or set up any customer, but I am quite confident that today’s experience will change some of my policies, since I allowed myself to be nudged into fudging on my policies, leading to my losing money on this order.  Never again.

And another weirdness …  I shower and shave on a regular basis.  My routine is less regimented than when I worked in an office with office attire every day, but I have nonetheless kept myself clean and well-enough groomed for the last three years.   (OMG it’s been over 3 years since  I had a normal paycheck!)    But starting at early mid-day I noticed a seriously heavy sports-type odor.  It’s expected in it’s place, but not today.  The A/C was on, I hadn’t even turned on the steamer yet, and suddenly I noticed my own stink.

Now that’s bad!  I just can’t figure out why, since there was no major physical activity deserving such sweating, and not even engaged in an particularly stress-inducing sweat, either. (You know how sometimes you can work up a good worry and make yourself sweat in auto-response?  Not today; I was happily engaged in packing stuff, shipping stuff, and planning my dye schedule.)

Knowing that dietary changes can create different body chemistry, I checked my foods.   Nope, not a thing different there.  The ONLY significant change is that yesterday I started taking the Kroger brand equivalent of Centrum Silver™ vitamin/mineral tablets.   I cannot imagine that this would cause such a stink, but I  guarantee I’m showering before bed, because there’s no way I’d sleep with me like this.  I mean, if I crawl into bed with me like this, I would send me to the couch for the night!

On the other hand, after getting pissed at the dye job itself, I treated myself to suitable comfort-food:  a well-stuffed peanut butter and banana sandwich.  Yummmm…  :-)

Did you hear that the FDA might be banning Percocet and Vicodin?   YYYAAAYYYY!!!  It’s about friggin’ time!  The reason is that these narcotics are made with acetaminophen, the same ingredient in Tylenol, as well as many other OTC meds.   It has been shown that acetaminophen in larger doses can lead to liver damage. The are also trying to lower the standard dosage limits on OTC drugs as well.    One of the biggest problems with acetaminophen is that it also included in many, MANY combo preparations, like Ny-Quil and other cold remedies.   People take the cold remedy, and then top it off with tylenol tablets, not realizing they are overdosing on it.  They don’t read the damn labels!

Acetaminophen has NEVER worked for me.  It is not a true anti-inflammatory analgesic, but works on the brain not to register pain as much (they explained it on the evening news).  Ibuprofen works far better for me.   After my hernia surgery they gave me Percocet, which didn’t do anything but make me ill.   I looked it up and discovered it was made with acetaminophen and quit taking it.  When the surgery failed and they had to repeat it a month later, I told them don’t give me Percocet or anything with acetaminophen.  They gave me Vicodin.  WTF?  So I looked it up again, searching for the narcotic in Vicodin, and discovered there IS a version of that narcotic combined with ibuprofen — it’s called (ta-DA!!!)  Vicoprofen.   And it worked like a charm after the 2nd surgery.   I was on that for 2-3 days, then minimal regular ibuprofen for a couple weeks.  There is also a version of Percocet, with that narcotic and with ibuprofen instead of acetaminophen, but I don’t recall the name.

Anyway, it’s nearly bedtime, and I still need to shower.   See ya!

30 Jun

How can this be?

(oops…. this was supposed to go to the Knitterman blog!)

it’s already the end of June, and I’m overwhelmed with ’stuff’ still.   But never mind that.

Yesterday I changed the Dicey Knitting price and gave it a page of its own, as well as putting it in the side columns of the regular yarn pages.  I expect Mr. Brown(andHandsome) to bring me yet another shipment of cubes today to assemble more sets.  Yayy.

Also, in case you didn’t see it on the emailings yesterday, from now through July 5, all shipping has been reduced to $4.00 or less (inside U.S. — international shipping still applies, but email me to be sure you get the lowest rate, as PayPal only allows one international rate and your country might not be that expensive for me to ship to).

And, if you order FIVE or more socks or lace (either variety) between now and July 5, you’ll get a free Dicey Knitting set ($13.95 value).

Although it has only been a problem 2-3 times in the last couple years, I want to mention that you need to check and verify your PayPal shipping address.   The first time a package went to the wrong place, it was lost to the ethers and I had to replace it and reship to the right place.

And then last week someone just happened to mention on a group list she hadn’t received a special order for a group project — even though I’d sent all the packages to all the people for that project on the same day.   She wasn’t complaining, simply thought I was waiting for yarns to come in for shipping, so I wrote her and realized Paypal had given me the wrong address.  So I ordered another one of what she wanted.  It arrived yesterday and I shipped it out this morning … and the mail carrier left the original package, marked “Return to Sender”.   <*whew*> (how often does that happen?)

Whenever possible I do try to make up for errant shippings and lost packages, but i really need to be sure people check the address that PayPal sends me, since they usually show it on the confirmation emails to me and the customer.

I have yarns in the soaker getting ready for a big dye session this afternoon and then… woo-hoooo!  nothing left to dye, and there’s a little yarn left. (OMG, how often does THAT happen?)  So I will “finally” be able to play again and work up some new colorways.   YAYYYYY!!!!!

So, into the day I go.

29 Jun

People are going to die.

I received a mass mailing notice from someone recently, announcing to the world that a relative had “gone to be with the Lord”.

As I wrote back to this person, I am genuinely sorry for the loss and I know the family will grieve their loved one’s passing.   Even when it is expected, or even when a person has been an absolute shit during life, the ending of a life always has some sort of impact on his or her loved ones.  Admittedly, some people have lived in such a way that their passing is welcome — people show up at the funeral just to view the body and make the person is actually, finally, gone and out of way.    But such was not the person mentioned in the email I got — she was a much loved mother and will definitely be missed in her family.

People die.  So do plants and animals.   Every living thing eventually dies.  Even the Giant Sequoias will eventually topple over.

Humans are greatly benefitted by having consciousness AND self-consciousness or self-awareness.  We have the power of thought and choice.  We have evolved to this condition over many hundreds of thousands of years (I believe the estimate to the first known homo sapiens sapiens is about 275,000 years ago — but my brain is fuzzy and I’m not going to look it up — it is roughly 65 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct).

I was talking with a friend yesterday and mentioned the email that this person’s relative had “gone to be with the Lord”, and my friend quipped, “Well, she’ll be looking a long time.”    (Gotta love a smart-ass — if you can’t be a smart-ass at least some of the time, we probably wouldn’t get along over the long haul.  I don’t deal well with overly sensitive folks.)    And I suggested that the dead woman and Billy Mays can hook up and swap housecleaning tips.

The reality, of course, is that this person has died, as did Billy Mays, and they are both dead.  Just dead.

They didn’t ‘go’ anywhere.  They expired.  Life has gone out of them.

I realize various religious systems invent doctrines and beliefs about what happens after death.   But none of these notions are based on facts or evidence.   We know that our consciousness depends on chemical activity and neurons in the brain, our nervous system, and so forth.   All consciousness is a purely physical thing.  Nowhere in science has anyone shown that consciousness continues after the body dies.   Even NDEs aren’t proof of life-after-death.

Nobody actually goes to be with the Lord, any more than they go confer with their Spirit Guides and lay out a plan for the next incarnation on earth, or receive their karmic sentence for the next trip around.

I find all the after-death notions to be rather fearful — fear of non-existence, and the desire to continue forever.   For millions of years of the Earth’s existence, I didn’t exist, and my life is none the worse today for not having been here a few thousand years ago.  And when my body dies, the Earth will be here until it is absorbed in the explosion of the Sun’s final burst as it dies out.

“he’s gone to be with the Lord”

“he’s in a better place now”

“he’s beyond pain and is happy now”

“there’s a reason God wanted him to come home now”

and so on and so forth.  Such comments are intended to express comforting thoughts to the grieving family, but I am not comforted by such things.  I find it rather demented and creepy.   I don’t argue with people in their grief when such things are uttered, I just nod or say “Yes, some people believe it that way.”  After all, when people are hurting it’s no time to ask them to think rationally or create further conflict.   I just let them have their beliefs, if that makes them feel better.

When you die, you are dead.   This life is the only one you get.  You might as well get over planning for the next life and start focusing on enjoying this life and making it a good one, both for yourself and as many others as you can.  Even if you can’t do a darn thing for anyone else in this life, you can at least try to avoid making other people’s lives harder.  If you can help, at least get out of the way and don’t hinder others.  Very simple.  The only reward you get is the legacy you leave behind here for others to remember in whatever way they will.

28 Jun

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but…

if I hear of one more person, near or far, close or distant, either falling ill, getting laid off/made redundant, being injured, or outright dying or passing or “going to be with the Lord” I will fairly well scream.  Enough is enough, awright?

No, really, I honestly DO understand that life is full of ups and downs, that people do fall ill or die, or fall victim to current economics.   But there’s been so MUCH of it lately.

One friend of mine has had an ongoing series of shit for the last six months — one health issue after another, between her husband, her mother, and herself.  I won’t list it all, but there’s no way one person should have to have that much in on calendar year.

And my sister’s mother in law died this morning.

And I learned this morning that my father-in-law just had a kidney removed after they found a cancer growing there.

I learned on Friday that my next door neighbor and co-tenant on the property (and my landlord’s nephew) is 6 months behind on the rent, which may be related to why the electric company put a hard lock on his power pole and removed the meter and the water company physically removed the pipe from the water meter into his place.  (And i thought I was struggling just to cover the rent and utilities!!!)

And on and on it goes.  Seems like nearly everyone I know is either having a crappy year, or having a really truly totally crappy year.

That’s sooo depressing.   There’s nothing I can actually DO about any of it, and I’m not even sure how long my own finances will carry me, or how long my health will hold up.

I know for a fact that most of you who come to read don’t actually leave a comment.   But if you have had some really GOOD news in the last month or two, please-oh-please hit the Talk To Me link just below.  I don’t care if it’s finding a job, graduating from school, planted a new garden, getting married (or divorced, if that’s a good thing for you), having a child … whatever.   Doesn’t matter if you’ve posted before or don’t know me from Adam.   But I would dearly love (”need”??) to hear some GOOD news for a change. So, if it’s significant and meaningful to you, feel free to comment with a bit of good news.  (i mean actual news, not “gospel-good news”.)

28 Jun

“Experts” who know so little!

Children of Gay Parents Speak Out! Interesting article, about children raised with gay parents.  As a gay father of four, this is interesting to me, even though I didn’t have a partner at the same time that my kids were with me, and my kids didn’t get to spend a lot of their growing up years with me, so I can’t say one way or another if my being gay had an impact on them.  They’re all straight, but they were mostly raised in a religious home with their mother and stepfather, with a heavy dose of religious anti-gay ’stuff’ present, so whatever negativity was dished out toward gays in general was implicitly intended against me in particular.

As the linked article shows, the scientists have uncovered no particular harm to children raised by same-sex couples as parents.

But it’s interesting… regarding growing up with two gay or lesbian parents

It damages the children, says Dale O’Leary, author of “One Man, One Woman: A Catholics Guide to Defending Marriage.” She says that all children have a natural desire for a parent of each gender.

But children of same-sex couples are forced to repress that desire because their parents won’t accept it, she says. Their parents won’t acknowledge their children’s needs because they don’t want to admit that they have caused their children to suffer.

“A baby is not a trophy — the child’s welfare has to be considered,” she says. “These children are more likely to experiment with same-sex relationships. They’re more likely to be confused and hurt.”

Okay, so children naturally want to have a mother and a father.  I get that, but I think that this is as much a social construct as a biological or psychological need.   More importantly, looking at our modern society, with about 50% of marriages ending in divorce, how many children actually live full time with both of their biological parents?

O’Leary says that children of same-sex parents are “forced to repress” what she says is a natural desire “because their parents won’t accept it”.    O’Leary actually believes parents won’t admit to harming their children.   Uhhh-what?   Does she not know that, at least for a large percentage of same-sex couples who go out of their way to have a child (vs. straight couples who have children without intending to do so).

Considering all the obstacles and built-in prejudices, I don’t know ANY gay or lesbian individuals or couples who would want a child just for the sake of having a child to show off as a ‘trophy’.   O’Leary’s position is an insult to all the gay and lesbian parents who have overcome all sorts of shit in order to be parents.

And, as the article shows, having same-sex parents is NOT the hardship she wants it to be.  Nearly EVERY child has aspects of their lives that could be the source of taunting and teasing, but having same-sex parents is not a greater target than, for example, having grossly overweight parents, or parents of different races, or some other out-of-the-ordinary fact.

She seems to think that having same-sex parents will encourage children to experiment more with same-sex relationships on their own.   Does this mean same-sex parents actually encourage their children to try something they wouldn’t ordinary do?   Or does it mean that seeing up-close that people can be different, it is okay to experiment in ways they might have wanted to but were afraid to because their parents were ‘normal’?   That is, does having non-conforming parents allow the child to be more him- or herself?  And we all know that “experimenting” does not mean commitment.   I suspect a large portion of hetero boys and girls experiment and play around with their friends.  In some places, “circle jerks” are somewhat a rite of passage for young boys, for example.

Kids are going to experiment, period.  Having same-sex parents, in my opinion, doesn’t send the message that a kid has to experiment in one direction or another.  But it does send the message that you can have a normal, healthy life and good relationships even if yours isn’t the majority choice.   So why not experiment?  There’s a big wide world of viable options, and I think having same-sex parents enables a child to see more options than would otherwise be visible.

Of course, O’Leary is an “expert”.  She wrote “One Man, One Woman: A Catholics Guide to Defending Marriage” — surely she wouldn’t have a bias… would she?  <*snark*>    Of course, she would.  But even worse than starting with a conclusion before viewing the evidence,

O’Leary says she doesn’t personally know any same-sex parents or their children.

WHAT?    Doesn’t know any of the people she pretends to be an expert on?    WTF?   She’s an “expert” without interviewing any of the people she condemns?

Actually this is a common problem, especially among these religious types.   They have no personal knowledge of the things they write so much about — GLBT issues, atheism, evolution, other religions, and on and on.  They are not experts.  They pontificate from behind the safety of their religion, without having a clue that the people they talk so much about are laughing their asses off at their idiocy.  You’ll see this in other areas as well -  public health “experts” deciding what this or that community “needs”, without entering the community, learning about the people and their own culture.   (In one well-known case, doctors delivering babies at the public hospital to minority race mothers in New Orleans were routinely sterilizing the women so they wouldn’t have more babies; and the women didn’t know about it until the damage was done; this was done as common practice of that era because the doctors and policy-makers decided for themselves these women didn’t need any more kids; it became one of the reasons women starting avoiding public health care there.  If women today were routinely sterilized while knocked out during childbirth, there would be heads rolling!)  Religious missionaries going to a foreign country without learning the people or cultures they are entering.   They “know” they are right, and they take that ignorant belief as license to disrupt and destroy the lives of others, all under the guise of “helping”.

It’s bullshit.  All of it.

Fortunately, the article offers a different perspective, from the words of children raised by same-sex parents.   They are none the worse for it, and many of them say it added to their strengths.

Idiots like O’Leary need to STFU and go observe and listen a while.  They just might learn something.

28 Jun

Has it really been 40 years?

(WARNING — a lot of personal sh*t here about family members; read at your own risk; parts of this have been written up before but it is part of the 40-years-ago story… and I’m still not writing all that could be written of that period.)

This weekend marks the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and the visible beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement.  There had been stirrings before then, of course, but there was something about the Stonewall Riots that marked the beginning of something that would not be dismissed or denied.   If you’ve read the histories of it you know that it wasn’t about rising up against straight people, but it was rising up against the blatant anti-gay behavior of the police, who would regularly target and raid the gay bars in Greenwich Village.   if you haven’t read the histories, you are missing an important part of American gay history.  Go look it up.  It didn’t hurt that the 60s were full of social unrest and demands for change anyway.   The Civil Rights Movement, Woodstock, and so many other things happened back then.

Anyone who cares to learn about it can do so.  I’m going to tell my own story.

In June of 1969 I had just finished the 9th grade at La Cumbre Junior High.  That summer we moved from 210 Balboa Drive right next door to 214 Balboa Drive.  And just a few months prior (March 11, 1969, to be precise) I had returned home to my dad’s house, after being 12.5 months in Denver with mother.

In early January of 1968, Mother had kicked Dad out of the house.  They’d had yet another drunken, knock-down drag-out physical fight, the police were called (again) and this time they actually took him away and put him in jail.  He ended up staying at his sister’s (Aunt Bettie) for a time, although briefly and then got an apartment of his own downtown.

Mother got busy looking up old boyfriends (oooo, what a shock!), got signed up for AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children — welfare/food stamps), and decided she wanted to try selling Holiday Magic cosmetics (an early MLM program).   There was a LOT happening in that brief couple of months.

She hooked up with an old boyfriend from school days, and he was into pendulums, Ouija, automatic writing and other psychic woo-woo stuff.   She had already been into New Thought for a while, anyway, so it wasn’t such a leap for her.   And one of my own friends and I had been reading the ghost stuff by writers like Hans Holzer and others, so it wasn’t such a leap for me, either.

Thanks to Mother’s dabbling on the Ouija board, she “learned” that one of our ancestors, Jesse James, had left $5 million worth of gold bullion in Denver, and it was up to her to go find it and claim it.

(Actually, as Mother told it, Jesse’s half-brother, Johnny James had married Kathryn Angel — Kathryn’s brother, George, had founded Angels Camp, CA, and through mother’s mother’s lineage there had been a string of Kathryns and Angels ever since then — including my mother, her mother, one of my sisters, one of my daughters, and then one of my granddaughters)

Anyway, Mother was all hot-to-trot to go find the gold and get rich, so it was fortuitous (for her) that the very first welfare check she got was at the end of February — a couple hundred dollars or so.  The day she got the check, she decided she would go to Denver, get the gold and be back by the weekend.   February 26 was a Monday.

She was all excited getting dressed and ready to go when I got home from school that Monday.  She was going to leave my older brother, me, and my two younger sisters alone — “You’ll be fine, I’ll be home in a couple of days.”    I told her I wanted to go too, and since it was my friend’s borrowed Ouija board that she was using, I really should get to go, since you can’t have just one person working a Ouija board.  She agreed to let me come along (”but you have to bring your school books and do your homework while we’re there.), and my 15 y.o. brother would stay home and mind the girls, who were then 3.5 y.o. and 11 months old.

So we flew that night, first to Los Angeles and then connecting to Denver.  Mother had brought her vodka in her purse, so along with the 2 drinks provided by the airline, she’d had plenty and was completely drunk by the time we got to Denver.  A cab took us to a motel in Lakewood, where we spent the rest of Monday night and then Tuesday night.   Then we went to a motel closer into town for Wednesday and Thursday night.  Except there was no money left on Friday.  Ooops!

The hotel manager called the police, who came banging on the door of the motel room Friday afternoon.  Mother was plenty drunk and was hiding in the bathroom, telling me I had to talk to the manager and police.  I was only 13 at the time.  My only experience with the police was when they had come so often to make Dad stop beating up on Mother, so I thought the police were good, but Mother was now acting like they were bad.  Hmmmm….

I finally let the manager and police in and they tried to talk her out of the bathroom while I just stood there wondering WTF was going on, and why my life had become so confused.  After an hour (?) or so, the police loaded up our suitcases and us into the back of a patrol car and took us to the police station downtown.  Since it was Friday evening and the county assistance offices had closed, the police gave us vouchers to let us stay at the Frontier Hotel near the police station for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.  The idea was that Mother would contact county assistance Monday morning and do something to get herself (and me) back on track.

Mother had other plans.   No money, and her vodka (and Librium) had long since run out.   So she visited the hotel bar and met Orville.  Monday morning came and instead of visiting the county assistance office, we were moving into the transient hotel were Orville lived.  He had a little kitchenette one-room apartment (a shared bathroom was down the hall, a common feature in transient hotels back then), and we had a room closer to the manager’s apartment.   Actually I had that room and mother did her thing with Orville.

Fast forward about 2-3 months, toward summer.   There’d been over a dozen men, and as many places to live sleep (sometimes a night or two, sometimes up to a week), and I’d witnessed several ways to ‘pay’ for a place to sleep.  (Seriously, did she really think yelling, “roll over the other way and go back to sleep” was going to make me deaf?)  Then she met Ralph Raher, who lived at the Elms Hotel on Tremont Street, half a block from the Brown Palace.  By that time I’d already learned that grown men like young teen boys.  No, not Ralph — he was a drunken ass, but no threat to me since I was already larger than him; it was other people who saw me as unattended and vulnerable.  That was a lesson to be repeated several times during my time in Denver, and even after I went back to California.  Nobody actually completed their quest, but several tried.  The last was the school bus driver who invited me to his place after school, but by then I knew adults don’t get ‘friendly’ or  invite teenagers home except for one thing so I never showed up.

Actually, the first time someone tried something I’d been reading a book in the upstairs ‘lobby’ of one or another transient hotel.   A large (both tall and overweight) black guy noticed I like to read, and said he had  other books in his room and insisted I would like them and I should come check them out.   Turns out it was 3 or 4 comic books.   Within a few minutes he was on top of me telling me what he wanted to do, when Mother came calling for me down the hall.  He waited until she’d gone back the other way and let me go, but not until he kissed me.  ICK!   I told Mother what he had done or tried to do.   She got all upset, said I should have known better than to go with him (uhhh…and just how should I have known that?), and that she needed to run to the liquor store.   Hmph.   I barely escape getting raped, and she needs a drink?   So I learned not to trust strangers, for sure, and to not look for a parent to guide the process of growing up.

Anyway, one thing led to another and we stayed with Ralph in his room at the Elms, and somehow Mother convinced Homer Barth and Jane Conway (the owners) that she should be the manager at the Elms.   So we got the 3 room manager’s apartment.  AND we got the keys to the storeroom where they kept all the shit left behind by other transients.   THAT’s where I found the magazines — piles of gay porn magazines of the era, cheezy by today’s standards, but plenty graphic just the same.   And that’s when I knew that what I knew inside myself wasn’t unique.

As one writer said (so long ago I can’t remember where I read or heard it), that was when I found out I wasn’t the only one who didn’t fit, and I wasn’t sure if I was more excited to know that I wasn’t alone, or that there were so many of us there was actually a name for it! And we even had our own magazines!

I should mention, too, that because we were only going to be in Denver “a few days”, I had not enrolled in school.  I never finished the 8th grade at all.   I’d spent most of my time staying in the hotels during school hours, hanging out with aimless adults who didn’t work (or worked nights in “adult” jobs), and my afternoons and weekends wandering around the city.   But mostly hanging out in the hotels.  I met drag queens, prostitutes, drug addicts, hippies, and a whole bunch of other less-than-savory characters.  Actually, most were fairly decent people, and the ones in the hotels weren’t much danger to me — just down on their luck and living the hard life.  They didn’t know what to make of me any more than I of them, but we got along and I grew up very, very quickly.   And all the while I was going through puberty, figuring out I was gay, and wondering what to make of it all.

When summer was ending, it was obvious we weren’t going back to California, so I figured I should enroll myself in school.   I showed up for the registration day and lied my ass off.  I said we’d just moved to Denver unexpectedly and hadn’t thought to bring school records, but that I’d just finished 8th grade and was ready for 9th.  Amazingly they put me in 9th grade and promised to fetch my records.  By the time they had my records at Morey Junior High, it was clear I’d never finished 8th grade.

With Mother’s drinking, plus some time in the hospital [ed.: her in the hosp., not me], and other craziness I actually managed to get to school an average of maybe 2 days a week.  I honestly do not remember actually attending an entire week in a row.   Failing miserably, not fitting in, I might as well have just not bothered with school.  In the span of a few months, I’d gone from a kid in junior high into a junior adult trying to take care of a wet drunk, and covering up at the hotel so nobody would know I was doing the work and not her — taking in the rents, signing people in and out, doing all the linen changes each day, and generally being in charge of things, including being in charge of myself.

It wasn’t particularly ‘fun’, and definitely not the kind of life a kid should have.  Certainly not the kind of life any of my schoolmates in Santa Barbara were having.   Most of that year I was the most sober, and most sane adult — or trying to be a reasonable fascimile as best I could.  (in retrospect, it’s amazing I didn’t start drinking — I’d seen what it did to others, and I knew I had to keep my wits about me, so I just never got into that, and didn’t even have my first beer until my 30s, and still haven’t ever tried pot.)

For my “new school wardrobe” Homer and Jane fronted me $25.00.   I went to a seconds store (they were popular then, selling new goods that weren’t up to quality standards but serviceable; now they have the Dollar Stores), found a pair of pants, a shirt, and a pair of shoes.  Everything else I wore had been scrounged out from that storeroom of other people’s cast-offs and left-behinds.   In the entire time we were in Denver I never saw a washing machine.  All laundry was done by hand in the bathtub, which meant things were worn several times before washing.  I only had 2-3 underpants, so they were worn a LOT between washings.  (Gosh, any wonder I have 3-4 weeks worth of clean unders and socks now?)

Mother blew her shot at “managing” the hotel because of her drinking, and we were relegated back to one of the rooms upstairs, this time one of the 3 rooms that actually had an adjoining bath.

I’d turned 14 in November (my grandmother sent me a small check, and I bought myself a birthday present — a Spirograph — at Denver Dry Goods).  Mother and Ralph were too drunk to notice my birthday (or much of anything else), but I found them at their favorite bar and showed them what I’d gotten for myself.   They bought me a coke and sent me back to the hotel.  (I’d been in the bars so often, the bartenders knew me and didn’t throw me out, because they knew what I was dealing with.)   Christmas was another ‘non-event’ that year.   The Tuesday before Christmas there was a freezing storm.   Mother ‘needed’ some oleo from Safeway.  It was well below freezing outside, everything was iced over, and even the sidewalks were slick with ice.  I had a thin leather jacket but no hat or gloves, and the slip-on loafers I’d bought for school.  But Mother needed it, so it was up to me to go get it.   It took a couple hours to maneuver the 8 or 10 blocks to the Safeway store and pick up a lonely block of oleomargarine, and get back home.  It was night time, so the streets were bare.  I’d skitter from one storefront door way to the next, trying to avoid the winds and not slip on the ice.   What a cruel and inhumane thing to make me do.  My hands were nearly frozen, and Mother said to hold them under hot water to thaw them out.   I turn on the hot water and just as it turned scalding, I heard Ralph yell, “NO, use COLD water.”

Then one night it happened.   Ralph’s wife Terry showed up looking for money (I’d learned earlier they weren’t actually divorced) and beat the snot out of Mother, who didn’t fight back because she thought Ralph didnt’ want her to hurt his wife.  I couldn’t believe Mother did that, but she did.

A few days later, Ralph was gone.  I guess he went back to the suburbs to get sober and start over with his wife and son. Whatever.

I started going back to school, trying to catch up and not having a clue.

And then it happened.   I came home from school and the place was silent, and it looked like stuff was missing.  Specifically, nearly all of Mother’s stuff was missing.   The bitch had moved out!    It was 3-4 days later, she came back to see how I was doing.  WTF?   I was FOURTEEN years old, abandoned by my mother in a city I didn’t know and no family close at home, how the fuck did she think I was doing???

(Mind you, this entire time, my dad had not made any attempt to contact me… at ALL!   After my grandmother told him what Mother had done, he moved back into the house the Friday after we left, totally pissed because he’d just signed a lease on his apartment, so my brother actually only missed that week of school.)

Turns out she’d met a guy (surprise!) in a bar (Surprise!) and moved in with him the same day.  She invited me to “come for dinner” and meet the guy.    It was just another one-room affair.   She was oh-so-cordial about it and said I was welcome to come and stay with them a while, or I could stay where I was.   WHAT?   How the hell did she think I was going to PAY for that?  But it was clear she (and he) didn’t want me or have room for me, so I said I’d stay where I was.  I went back to the Elms, told Homer and Jane that I’d found Mother, and that she didn’t want me.   Homer and Jane let me stay in that room by myself, while they called the county.

I guess I stayed there a week on my own, with Homer and Jane letting me eat with them or giving me money to go out and eat,  then a welfare person came and talked to me.  During that week, Homer and Jane had talked about sending me to Boys Town, as a ’safe’ place for kids in trouble.  They tried to talk with my Dad, but he wasn’t really interested in having me come back and seemed to like the BoysTown idea.  The county welfare people talked to Grandmother, and circumvented the Boys Town notion and arrangements were made for me to go back to my dad’s house.  He had to re-arrange the house and make room for me, so I spent about 5 days at Mrs. Payne’s house –  a lovely older black woman, a foster mother, where I’d spent time before during one of Mother’s hospital visits - she was nice and I asked if I could go back there, so they let me even though she’d been ill and wasn’t a foster mother any more.  Then on March 11, 1969, I was flying back to Santa Barbara.

Grandmother met me at the airport (Dad couldn’t be bothered, I guess).  She was horrified.   She gave me a hug, but in her eyes I could see she wanted to cry.  I’d grown several inches taller and 20-30 pounds lighter, partly because kids don’t eat until Mother had enough liquor at hand, and partly because I was smoking a pack or more a day, which helped ward off hunger (i smoked because everyone around me did and in order to pass as ‘grown-up’ in order to survive, I did what they did; it wasn’t until later that I learned smoking curbs appetite).  And because Grandmother worked in the school system with a long and unimpeachable history, she was able to talk them into letting me continue in the 9th grade - on the condition that if I fucked it up I’d have to do it over again. No, she didn’t use such language, but the message was clear — she’d put her reputation on the line for me, so I could stay with my peers.

I tried. For her, I really did try to fit back in and make it work at school.  And I managed to pass my classes the second semester of 9th grade.  But it was SOOOO hard.   I tried a few times to talk to her and tell her some of the things that had happened, but she didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to know the grown-up stuff I’d seen and heard and done, especially since it was her only daughter who had put me in those situations.  After all, this was still the 60s and nice people simply didn’t talk about that, especially not with young teenagers.

I’d learned in Denver how to ‘detach’ — just completely disconnect from the people and events around me and just be there observing, trying to not feel anything about stuff I couldn’t control.  Excellent survival technique in the moment, but it’s hard to shut it off when you spend such a long time in that mode.  I’ve been ‘detached’ most of my adult life.

But in June of 69, when news reports were coming out about Stonewall, I gobbled it up.  I needed to know what was happening with ‘my people’.   I couldn’t come out and say so back then, but I was more aware of that than I was about this-or-that new group on the radio, or school events, or whatever.   I spent my high school years pretending the year in Denver didn’t happen, but seriously you cannot unsee what you’ve seen.  And you can’t detach from one part of your life without detaching from all of it.  I couldn’t relate to what other kids were doing (gawd, it all seemed so frivolous to me), and they surely couldn’t relate to me.  Better to keep to myself and not let on that I wasn’t fitting in, than to try and be ‘found out’.

It would be another 14 years before I could actually come out.   After high school I immediately went in the Air Force (mostly just to get away from my Dad), then in the Air Force, I was ordained and got married, had four kids, and then realized it was all for nothing.

Gay Liberation started in 1969, but I didn’t get mine until 1983 a few months after my divorce.   I knew I was gay the whole time, but because it was a ’sin’ I never did anything about it, and tried to pretend that if I just behaved ‘right’ and did all the ‘right’ things and didn’t talk about “IT”, I’d be okay.   But I never was okay; there are still parts of me that I feel are missing, and ‘holes’ where other people have normal teenage histories.

Even though I will never be in a relationship personally (too many trust-and-abandonment issues that I don’t know how to change or fix at this point), I will continue to speak out, long and loud, in support of marriage equality for everyone else.   And I will always be grateful for what was started at Stonewall.   I wasn’t there, but it’s very much a part of our collective history.   So, its been 40 years since the riots in New York, and 40 years since my hell on earth in Denver.

It has been an interesting 40 years.

26 Jun

“The Evolution of God”… I might have to read this.

We already know that God was created in the image of man.  There is no dispute or debate about this.  Specifically, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is just a fiction of a violent and nomadic people, just one of a pantheon of tribal dieities, each one invented to control a superstition and ignorant population.

But the New York Times just posted a review of “The Evolution of God” by Robert Wright. As reviewer Paul Bloom makes clear, Wright is NOT exploring God, but the ideas about God as they have evolved over time — the way people believe their god to be, how they relate to the image they have constructed.

In his brilliant new book, “The Evolution of God,” Robert Wright tells the story of how God grew up. He starts with the deities of hunter-­gatherer tribes, moves to those of chiefdoms and nations, then on to the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism that followed, and then to the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wright’s tone is reasoned and careful, even hesitant, throughout, and it is nice to read about issues like the morality of Christ and the meaning of jihad without getting the feeling that you are being shouted at. His views, though, are provocative and controversial. There is something here to annoy almost everyone.

After all, if you aren’t annoying people now and again, you simply aren’t doing your job!

Bloom continues:

… don’t expect Pope Benedict XVI to be quoting from Wright’s book anytime soon. Wright makes it clear that he is tracking people’s conception of the divine, not the divine itself. He describes this as “a good news/bad news joke for traditionalist Christians, Muslims and Jews.” The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn’t really exist.

AMEN!    Err.. umm… Right on!

Since there is no real God, no Supreme Being, Wright seems to be exploring the history of religion through the ages — the .   As much as I dislike fundamentalism, the fundamentalists of today are somewhat nicer than many of their predecessors.  I will give them that.  At least the majority of them recognize we DO live in a pluralistic, multi-cultural and diverse society, so they’d better behave (at least when they are out in public and trying to function in society) just like the rest of us.   Our modern morality is not based on the dictates of this or that religion (regardless what the revisionist would like to pretend), but on a shared agreement (the “social contract”) by which WE determine the boundaries of right and wrong.

I would venture that the most addicted devout fundamentalist would read two or three pages into this book and toss it aside, refusing to acknowledge they just might not be right in all their views.   After all, they “know” all they need to know (which means they actually know very little and like it that way), so why would they be interested in learning where their concept of “God” came from and how nasty he used to be!  Truly, God (or rather, people’s idea of God) has mellowed over the centuries.

Bloom ends his review with this:

So I share Wright’s wonder at how nicely everything has turned out. But I don’t see how this constitutes an argument for a divine being. After all, even if we could somehow establish definitively that moral progress exists because the universe was jump-started by a God of Love, this just pushes the problem up one level. We are now stuck with the puzzle of why there exists such a caring God in the first place.

Also, it would be a terribly minimalist God. Wright himself describes it as “somewhere between illusion and imperfect conception.” It won’t answer your prayers, give you advice or smite your enemies. So even if it did exist, we would be left with another good news/bad news situation. The good news is that there would be a divine being. The bad news is that it’s not the one that anyone is looking for.

I think I will try to get “The Evolution of God”.   It sounds like an interesting read.   I just wish all the Christians I know would make the effort as well.

25 Jun

Cast out the demon of homosexuality?? WTF

This has been commented on elsewhere, but not all y’all read all the stuff I read:

It is rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.  The “ministers” are certainly not Christian, at least not in any decent sense of the word.

Homosexuality is not caused by demons.  It is not a choice.  It is not a sin.   Why do Christians continue to display their deliberate ignorance of these facts?

This is a prime example of why religion should not be given automatic tolerance in our society.   As the women interviewed toward the end of the clip said, these idiots actually believe they are “helping”.   But there is nothing there that needs “help”, and especially not the kind of “help” these people are dishing out.  There is no “cure” for homosexuality because no cure is needed.

The original, longer clip of the church activity was apparently taken down (but it is posted on lots of other people’s blogs!), but when the news person attempted to get a clarification from one of the “ministers”, the woman refused to speak.   WTF?

If your church is doing something, especially to minors (the boy in the video is reportedly just 16 years old), you need to be able to defend your activities.  You CANNOT hide behind “its our religion and none of your business.”    Just like priests and ministers having sex with children is everyone’s business, so too your rituals of “casting out demons” from children must be everyone’s business because of the long term psychological effects on that child.

The church, or “ministry” as it is called, must be able to provide rational, logical justification for holding a teenager on the floor and yelling at him for 20 minutes or more, trying to call out demons of homosexuality from him.  Can you imagine how frightening that would be, to be held down and told you have demons in you?  The behavior and actions of these religious idiots is absolutely in the realm of torture, and is completely inhumane.

The fact that they believe they are right does not, and should not, matter.  Further, their belief does not give them license to torture someone else.  Their beliefs are not sufficient reason for them to do what they did to another human being.  Personally, I think that it is just another form of terrorism and torture, and no different from the gay bashing that sends kids to the hospital or off to suicide.   It is because of religious idiots that bullies continue to abuse kids, and it is because of religious idiots that gay kids would rather kill themselves than to tell the religious folks to fuck off and leave them alone.

This one incident got captured on videos.   The sad fact is that this scene is repeatedly regularly in churches across the country, with  young gay and lesbian people being told to their face that the devil is working in them, or that they have a demon of homosexuality, and other such nonsense.   NOBODY in their right mind in the 21st Century actually believes in demons and spirit beings.  They do not exist.  They do not cause homosexuality any more than they cause epilepsy or blindness or other parts of human reality.

This incident is just another reason to illustrate why religion does not deserve tolerance.

24 Jun

Gov. Sanders, Republican. “Family Values”??

What the fuck?   (thanx for the tip, Sascha!)

No, seriously — What. The. Fuck???  Gov. Sanford goes public and admits to having an affair.

How can anybody take these right-wing “pro-family” idiots seriosly?   As a party, the leadership has lost all moral authority or moral high ground here.  They waste all this time and money and resources denying civil rights to same sex couples on the ground that marriage is “one man, one woman” and “marriage is sacred” and all this other bullshit.

Oh yeah, and y’member Sanford’s wife claiming she had no idea where he was and “wasn’t concerned”??  TWO WEEKS AGO she asked him to leave because she already knew. (Gosh, y’think she might have mentioned that during the entire weekend when everyone was looking for him??)

Now, you and I both know that Mark Sanford is like millions of other men (and women).   People DO have affairs, they hurt, and sometimes marriages break up, while other marriages are made stronger.   Life sucks, mostly because humans are involved, and humans are full of non-sequitors and incongruence.

It is no secret that humans will be human.  The problem with having an affair is NOT THAT a person is having sex with someone outside the marriage.   Sex isn’t the problem.  The problem is breaking the vow of fidelity.  If a couple says, “We are committed to each other first, and will be there for each other, to share our finances, our goals, and so forth, but sometimes we also like to have sex with other people, too,”  well, that’s their business and they can have their ‘open relationship’ on their own terms as long as they are both privy to the terms and in full consent.  It is NOBODY ELSE’s business to comment on that, or to pass judgment.

But if they make a commitment and then violate that commitment, the “sin” (I HATE that word) is not the act of having sex with someone else, but the act of breaking a promise.

That’s the personal level.

But here’s a state governor, a leader in the Republican Party, a potential candidate for the 2012 Presidential election.   And he’s a known anti-gay bigot, pretending to stand on “family values” to justify his anti-gay positions.   And, because his affair has been going on for at least a year, all that he’s said and done during this past year to hurt others in the name of “family values” merely underscores the utter hypocrisy.

Over and over again, these potential candidates for leadership in the party are falling to the side because of their hypocrisy. With all their pro-religion and anti-gay rhetoric, they are proving themselves to be incapable of holding themselves to the standards they, as a party, would impose on everyone else.

O’course, you know what this is, right?   God is pissed off at their blatant hypocrisy and hiding behind his name, so he’s plucking them off one by one.  Bwaaahahahahahahaha!

24 Jun

Well, that’s just weird!

The other day on Facebook I posted a link to this article about a young couple (she a Muslim, he a Hindu) whose village elders decided this was wrong, and insisted they should annul the marriage or face death.   So they killed themselves by poison rather than be dictated to by others.

This is the comment I posted with the link:

Why religion cannot be involved in the important matters of everyday life. This is sickening and disgusting. Religion (including yours) is poison to the soul. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8109805.stm Two young people legally married who chose suicide because of ignorant religious meddlers who wanted to kill them for marrying.

That is the sum total of my comment.     A person on my ‘friends’ list in Facebook commented back:

You know, when religious people tell me I’m going to hell for being gay, I remove them from my friends list. What should I do when gay people tell me I’m going to hell for being religious?

Tolerance works both ways.

By the time I saw it and responded back, he’d un-friended himself.   What a shame.  I never said he was going to hell for being religious, so I’m surprised he would interpret my comment that way. After all, people who aren’t religious don’t believe in hell anyway.    But funny he’d write “Tolerance works both ways” and then manifest his own intolerance of my intolerance of religion.   That’s funny.

But no matter — I still believe that religion is poison.  I have yet to find an example when religion (with all its fantasy and mythology and bullshit) has actually HELPED people because of its superstition.  Strip off the superstitious stuff and you have basic humanism in action.   Strip off the superstition and you have a clearer head to work with.

23 Jun

Ed McMahon… and other thoughts on dying.

In case you are among the half-dozen or so people living under a rock, Ed McMahon died just after midnight last night (early this morning).

He was 86 years old.   Mr. McMahon had been hospitalized since February, with a variety of illnesses, and finally succumbed to pneumonia. You can check the main news feeds for whatever you want to know about his, his life, his troubles, his successes, his character, his friends… whatever you want, it’s on the Internet already.

As long as I can remember, Ed McMahon was an “older man”, even though he was only about 6 months older than my dad.  My dad died October 28, 1987,  2 or 3 months after being hospitalized in a coma from his second major stroke.   His first was in May 1980, which put him in a wheelchair and a foster home for the last 7 years of his life.  While in a coma after the second stroke in August of 87, he developed several decubitus ulcers (bedsores) and they had to amputate his right leg, first below the knee, and then a few weeks later above the knee.  Quite literally, he died in bits and pieces.

He was wicked mean to me nearly all my life, but more so after Denver, and after his stroke he was demonstrably mean to both me and my kids in front of other family members, so his passing was no great loss to me.

But the idea of spending months in a hospital before dying, whether it is Ed McMahon or my dad, is just abhorrent to me.  I would MUCH RATHER just have a major heart attack or stroke or whatever, and be done with it.  I have no intention of lying in a hospital bed for weeks or months on end.  That’s just ridiculous.

I’ve met and heard of lots of people who have had extreme strokes, who went on to live relatively full and functional lives.  it made me sad (for him) that my dad gave up, but he had pretty much given up long before the first stroke, so it wasn’t a surprise when he decided to quit taking his medicine and just let himself die.  He’d been warned to stay on his meds or he’d have another stroke, and promptly hid his prescription refill and told his caregivers he couldn’t find it.  Two days after his medicine ran out, he stroked out and went into a coma.  They found his prescription in his shirt pocket.   I call that a suicide-by-inaction, although I suppose there are other terms for it.

Whatever.   Ed McMahon’s death, and the closeness of age to my own dad, put me in a mind to look at such thing.

I think the only thing worse than being in a hospital would be in a semi-invalid state and having to live with one of my kids or in a nursing home.   It would be horrible to have to eat other people’s cooking, or live under someone else’s care.  I can almost guarantee that I would be a BITCH to live with — not that I intend to be deliberately mean or unkind (caregivers should be sainted for their efforts), but my independence would make such a condition completely unbearable and would turn me into a bear if I couldn’t make my own decisions.

22 Jun

Soooo… what’s next?

This has been an amazing few months, with so much going on in the world, especially with the situation in Iran right now.

Then there’s the irresponsible behavior of churches and religious groups working so hard to deny civil rights and equality to an identified large group of American citizens, for no rational reason.  (Don’t they have better things to do, like feeding the hungry, ending domestic violence, prosecuting the child-abusers in their own midst?).

And President Obama trying to all the right things for all the right reasons, being attacked by the Republicans who never learned the wisdom of “Don’t take a dog’s bone unless you have a steak to offer in its place” — they complain about Obama, yet they have nothing to offer that is better than the failed ideas that Bush tried to advance.   Bush failed the country, and Obama is trying to fix things.   Why are the Republicans fighting him?

I can’t believe 2009 is nearly half over already.  Just a couple more months and I’ll have been here three years.  That’s good, but it’s also a bit depressing that things aren’t any better than they are — sales slumps, not enough money to pay bills and eat regularly at the same time, wishing I lived in a neighborhood where I could access people I can relate to and get a bus to places where I want or need to go.  Knitting is great, and I enjoy what I do (most of the time), but all work and no play makes Ray a really grouchy bitch.   :-D

This living out in the boonies, and in a crappy neighborhood, is seriously depressing in unhealthy ways.  I’ve always been a bit of a hermit, but I’ve always lived where I could get out and about where I wanted and know I could meet people and have some fun. There’s just nothing to do here.  Grrrrr. But for now, this is all I can afford in rent.

<*sigh*>

22 Jun

Moving toward Marriage Equality in New York

Last Thursday, New York’s Gov. Paterson introduced a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York.  Bravo, that’s a good start.

Paterson made some good and valid points, as did City Council Speaker Christine Quinn:

Quinn, who is openly lesbian, dared anyone to “tell me I deserve less” than the right to marry her partner.

“Look me in the eye and tell me that Kim and I aren’t a family, that we don’t struggle every day, that we don’t pay taxes, that we don’t work every day in this city,” she said. “No one can look me or her in the eye and tell us that, because it is not true.”

But of course some people don’t get it.

At the same time Paterson was announcing his proposal, Sen. Ruben Diaz, also a Democrat but an opponent of same-sex marriage, met with religious leaders to discuss how to block the bill.

Diaz, an evangelical pastor from the Bronx, said his meeting was to inform Hispanics, Catholics, evangelicals and others opposed to same-sex marriage of their options to prevent the bill’s passage.

Diaz said it was disrespectful of Paterson to introduce the legislation in the same week that Catholics celebrated the installation of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who has voiced opposition to same-sex marriage.

“I think it’s a laugh in the face of the new archbishop,” Diaz said Thursday before the start of his meeting in the Bronx. “The Jews just finished their holy week. The Catholics just received the new archbishop. The evangelical Christians just celebrated Good Friday and resurrection. He comes out to do this at this time? It’s a challenge the governor is sending to every religious person in New York, and the time for us has come for us to accept the challenge.”

This Diaz person is a minister!   Of course there is nothing wrong with a minister who wants to be in politics, but as a senator he is supposed to represent ALL the people of the state, not just people who share his religious views.  His religion has NO PLACE in the State House and he is failing his constituents by imposing his religious views into his political office.

Diaz said it was disrespectful of Paterson to introduce the legislation...  what?  How was it disrespectful?  Religious groups have events and activities ALL YEAR LONG!   Why should state business be held at bay in respect of this or that religion?  Religious activities have no relevance to conducting the business of the state.  It is not disrespectful at all.  If anything it says, loud and clear, that religion is irrelevant to what is good for the state.

And more importantly, why should the citizens of the state be denied their civil rights in deference to the beliefs and doctrines of a religion those people might not even belong to?  Permitting same-sex marriage has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on other people’s religion.    Why do religious idiots consistently fail to recognize that there really are other people in this world who are not obligated to follow their religion? Religious doctrine cannot properly be codified into civil law for everyone else.

It’s a challenge the governor is sending to every religious person in New York — hello?  Does he not realize that not every religious person is a filthy disgusting bigot like himself?   There are plenty of devout religious people who support marriage equality for all, who are not narrow-minded and actively trying to deny civil rights to others.   With luck, all the more-sensible religious people will accept the ‘challenge’ and stand up with Gov. Paterson to do what is right for the good of all the people, and not just some of them, while treating the rest like second-class citizens.

it would also be good for Sen. Diaz’s constituents to look long and hard at his record and take steps to vote such an ignorant ass out of office.    After all, if he would deny the GLBT community on religious reasons, he could just as easily use his religious to abuse some other group of citizens.

SENATOR DIAZ … fuck you!   You’re a bigoted arrogant ass.  Keep your ugly religious nonsense out of the state house, and quit pretending you speak for all people of all religions.

21 Jun

Fathers Day 2009 - is your dad great?

Okay, so a few days ago, I saw this notification on Facebook:

well, I am not a great father.   My father was not a geat father, and I have no clue how to be a great father.  Or even a noticeably ‘good’ father.    I would hope that my attempts to be not as bad a father as mine was counts for something, but realistically I’ve never been all that good at it.  It’s not for lack of desire, but lack of information as to what constitutes a “good” father.  On the other hand, I would like to think that if I started having kids now, I would do a better job of it than I did in my 20s — more patient and more listening, less rigid, and even less like my father than I tried to be in my 20s.   Basically he was an ass toward me and I knew early on I didn’t want to be like that.

The fact that my kids are within an hour’s visit or less (5-10 minutes away in some cases) yet I rarely see them or talk to them, while I know they are regularly on the phone or visiting with their mother tells me I’m definitely not the favored parent.    Whatever.   I don’t like it.   I understand it, and accept that that’s the way it is, but I still don’t like it.

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