Larry's Phat Page: News

Wed.Jun.17.2009

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:45:00 -0400

An Open Letter to Barack Obama, President of the United States

Despite the promises you made last year during your campaign to end the legal fifth-class citizenship of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans, it has now come to light that your Justice Department has filed a legal brief that compares gay relationships to incest in a federal court case. Fifteen million Americans, myself included, are absolutely beside ourselves that you would so callously stab us in the back after we worked so hard last year to get your craven ass into office. I, for one, now regret my vote for you; at least I would have known where I stood with John McCain in the White House.

You and all the other spineless Democrat pieces of shit in Washington have until next November’s mid-term elections to fully open the military to service by GLBT Americans, add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and pass a law protecting us against the domestic terrorism that is hate crimes, or I will be personally seeing to it that my entire Democrat-leaning family stays home. This also applies to 2012, if you think you’re getting a second term.

Speaking of second terms, let’s review a little presidential history. The last time we elected a young, charismatic Democrat who made promises about civil rights during the campaign and then dilly-dallied on them once in office, who criticized those seeking their God-given rights as a distraction from “more important” problems in the world, he never made it to a second term. He was killed 34 months into his first term by an assassin who, by all contemporary accounts, was isolated and marginalized in his childhood just as many GLBT youth are by their own parents today. In case you don’t remember those two names, Barack, they were John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Face it, Barack, you’re already one of the most threatened presidents in recent memory. The rabid Reich-wing white supremacist movement wants you dead for no reason other than the color of your skin, and I sure as fuck hope you’re not under the illusion that they’re looking for any shot they can get. You would be a fool to be not taking the threat very seriously, in light of the Reich wing’s recent murders of Dr. George Tiller and the security guard at the Holocaust Museum. Given the threat you face, and the possibly quite prescient JFK parallel, why in fuck’s name are you putting political considerations above my civil rights?

Maybe it’s not political expediency; maybe you do just hate us as much as the Christofascists. If this is the case, I am so livid that I say the following: Fuck off, die, and join Jerry Falwell in the depths of Hell, you disgusting bigot.

You find that a little harsh, Barack? Well, after what your administration’s legal brief had to say about me and fifteen million other GLBT Americans, I’d say we’re about even.

Tue.Apr.21.2009

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:41:00 -0400

Another month has gone by without an update here. At least it’s spring here now, so I don’t have to bitch about how much winter fucking sucks around here any more — well, at least until December. That said, it has been a pretty shitty April here, but that’s relative; I’ll take a shitty April over a shitty January any day.

A couple hours ago, while making dinner, I had another one of those moments where the light bulb really comes on, so to speak. In past weeks, as the legislature in Vermont and the Iowa Supreme Court have come to see the unconstitutionality and un-American-ness of denying the civil and legal rights of marriage to same-sex couples, and taken action to rectify that injustice, so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” have greatly ramped up their efforts to slander and dehumanize God’s beloved gay and lesbian children. Central to these efforts has been the continued pushing of the lie that homosexuality is a “lifestyle” which is “chosen,” as seen in their use of talking points like “volitional homosexual conduct.”

I suppose the argument could be made that there are two different views about what exactly defines human sexuality and sexual orientation. I admit that the phrasing I am about to use is a bit crude, but it is extremely succinct and really drives the point home. The question we face here is, is sexual orientation defined by what you are, or who you do?

I offer the following challenge to my single straight male readership that will prove my point. (I would prefer that married men not take me up on this, as, contrary to what “Christians” would tell you, I actually do value marital vows.) I challenge you to dump your girlfriend for, let’s say, two months, and make an attempt at pursuing a same-sex romantic relationship. I further challenge you to have sex with a man at least once, and preferably on a regular basis, during this time period. Now think about it, at the end of those 60 days, what will you be: gay or straight?

If you actually are straight, you’re going to struggle to feel any real sexual attraction to men during those two months, if not find it completely impossible. Your attraction to women isn’t going to go anywhere, and will be just as strong and vibrant as it always was at the end of the 60 days. You might come to find out that many gay men can do a better job of physically pleasuring you, simply because they have the same “equipment” you do and know what works for them, but you’re not actually going to feel attracted to them. You know as well as I do, when you think about it, that this is true.

Yet, so-called “Christians” would go on non-stop about how you had “fallen victim to the ‘homosexual agenda’” or some such claptrap. In their view, you have essentially become gay for those two months, your actual feelings and attractions notwithstanding. They would no doubt parade you around as a so-called “ex-gay” at the end of those two months, and use you as a cudgel with which to bash gays. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that you never were gay during those 60 days. You know that straight is “what you are,” not just “who you do” before and after my 60-day challenge.

It becomes clear, with any sort of real analysis, that the “what you are” view of sexual orientation is based in truth, and the “who you do” view held by so-called “Christians” is based in bigotry and hatred. It is even more shocking, then, when these same so-called “Christians” attempt to deflect this perfectly valid calling-out of their bullshit by projecting their intolerance and hatred onto pro-gay groups!

As many of you may already know, the annual Day of Silence was held in thousands of schools all across America last week. So-called “Christians” came out with their same old tired and predictably false rhetoric about how the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is “indoctrinating children into a ‘homosexual lifestyle’” through the Day of Silence. One of the accusations made by “Christians” is that GLSEN is somehow seeking to convince young people that even one same-sex thought makes them totally, permanently, and irretrievably gay. Tell me, doesn’t that sound like a “who you do” view of human sexuality — the totally incorrect view that I have already proven is held not by gays, but instead by so-called “Christians”? Does that furthermore not sound like projection on the part of so-called “Christians”?

I suppose that when you think about it, all of the anti-gay bigotry exhibited by so-called “Christians” makes sense in light of their illogical “who you do” view of sexual orientation. I don’t think that anybody would argue that who you do is a choice — I mean, if I really wanted to, I could screw women left and right. Who I do doesn’t prove anything to anybody who operates under the rules of logic, but in the parallel universe of so-called “Christians,” it somehow “proves” that I’m “choosing” to be gay.

From there, it’s no huge leap to call the innate trait of homosexuality a mere “lifestyle,” and once convinced that it’s merely a “lifestyle choice” instead of the 24/7/365 state of being it actually is, it’s quite easy to believe that we should be denied more than 1,500 legal and civil rights in America — and quite frankly, any claim to equal humanity and dignity. Truly, this “who you do” view of human sexuality is at the root of all the evil perpetrated by so-called “Christians” upon gays.

In our dealings with people, we must always make it clear that being gay or lesbian is what you are, not merely something you do. We are gay and lesbian all the time, not just when we’re going to Pride, having a couple drinks at the bars, or having sex. Perhaps the so-called “Christians” can never be reached — they do, after all, have the tendency to stick their fingers in their ears when confronted with facts that shatter their pastors’ talking points — but if we work hard enough at propagating the truth that human sexuality is defined by what you are, we will eventually render the “Christian” “who you do” view the belief of a tiny minority.

All right, I’m off to bed. Three more nights of work lie ahead of me, before I go across the state to Grand Rapids this weekend for history’s first ever all-gay road enthusiast meet. Stay tuned to my Flickr site for some pictures from that.

Thu.Mar.19.2009

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:14:00 -0400

I return here tonight, some 61 days after my last update, simply because I don’t have the energy to do much else. Like I explained in my last update, I’ve been feeling very “meh” about keeping this blog up, but since I don’t feel like heading out to wash my rather filthy car tonight (I think I’ll save that for Saturday), here’s another entry.

I let the tenth anniversary of this section of my site pass by, on March 1, without an update or any fanfare. It’s pretty amazing how long I’ve been at this, more than a third of my life at this point; of course, I did disappear for over two years between November 2001 and late January 2004, and haven’t been heard from much in about the last year or so. I guess in a way, you can say that this section of my site has come full circle: the Michigan basketball team has gone from really sucky in my third post, to being in the NCAA Tournament field of 65 in this, my 494th post.

Despite having lost a great deal of the motivation for keeping this blog updated, I haven’t lost the propensity to take on controversial topics here. I intend to do that in two ways before I hit the sack tonight: first, I will expound upon a statement I made here on January 22, 2008 regarding an annoying behavioral tendency of so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’,” and second, I’ll say what I feel is being left unsaid about an alleged abduction and Amber Alert situation currently in the news here in metro Detroit.

You may recall that the aforementioned January 22, 2008 entry was essentially my response to a Kansas City-area woman named Brenda, who typed a bunch of Christofascist talking points and propaganda about homosexuality into my e-mail form and sent it my way. She came up with the idea that I needed to “truly meet a true christian person” [sic], and that the said “true christian person” needed to offer me “love and guidence” [sic] because I’m apparently “confused and scared.” You may also recall that I pointed out the following:

What this statement of “confusion,” and a later repeated use of it, represents is an attempt to belittle GLBT people as mental children, essentially. This is a manifestation of the “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” tendency to view everybody else as mental two-year-olds who they can scare like older siblings always try to do …

I promised to explain that further at a later date, but 14 months have since passed — until now. I can explain this behavioral tendency quite well, because as you probably know, I myself am an older sibling — some four years and eight months closer to gray hair and the nursing home than my sister — and I will admit that as a child, I was a textbook example of that kind of behavior.

The birth of a younger sibling is an event that can be quite traumatic for a previously only child, particularly if he/she is between roughly 3 and 7 (i.e., old enough to sense a change in his/her parents’ emotional attachment patterns, but still young enough where logic hasn’t developed enough to overcome the natural tendency toward self-centeredness). The parents quite naturally have to spend much of their time catering to the needs of the far more helpless newborn, and it can leave the older child bewildered, wondering what he/she could possibly have done to merit being forgotten by the very people he/she used to be able to depend on. (I know, I’m over-dramatizing it, but you know as well as I do that kids that age have a real flair for the dramatic.) The child often feels that there has been a massive power shift away from him/her, and toward his/her new sibling, because of all the attention the newborn requires.

One coping mechanism the older child tends to develop — and again, I was a textbook example here from maybe ages 5 to 9 — is to try to act as a sort of “third parent.” That is to say, by acting in a way that he/she believes will reinforce the parents’ discipline of the younger sibling, he/she thinks the parents will respond positively and that a power shift back toward him/her will result. Naturally, the parents and any outside observer see this as extremely pedantic, immature behavior, and it doesn’t lead to the kind of power shift the older sibling desires, to say the least.

Put so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” in the position of the older sibling, and any of their favorite attack targets — gays, sexually active single women, and non-religious people, to name just three of many — in the position of the younger sibling, and you kinda get the idea of where I’m going here. They think that by constantly quoting two hand-picked verses in Leviticus, they’re somehow currying favor with God (the parent in this analogy); but just as parents don’t care for the “help” offered by their older child, God doesn’t appreciate the pedantic, annoying six-year-old behavior of so-called “Christians” on their pet topics.

Just as the six-year-old tends to try to scare his younger sibling with threats along the lines of “just wait until Dad gets home!”, so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” seem to think they can scare us with threats and carefully selected Bible verses. The thing is, most of us aren’t the mental two-year-olds “Christians” would like to believe we are; we are able to think for ourselves, and we don’t appreciate fundamentalists’ constant efforts to belittle and dehumanize us. Ultimately, it is their behavior that destroys Christianity by turning everybody else off to it — not legalized abortion, or same-sex marriage, or any of the other canards they put out there.

Metro Detroit readers of this blog have probably been hearing all week about the Amber Alert issued for 15-year-old Justin Wainwright of Northville, MI, who was last seen Monday in Ohio and is believed to be in the company of 18-year-old Joshua Zohr. The media have reported the case as an abduction of Justin by Joshua, and have said that it is possible Justin is in “extreme danger,” but something doesn’t quite add up to me.

Typically, abductions fall into two categories: a non-custodial, though usually biological, parent essentially flipping the bird to family court and running off with a child, or a spurned lover, almost always male, kidnapping an almost always female partner as a form of abuse. It doesn’t exactly make sense that a 5’8”, 125-pound (173 cm, 57 kg) 18-year-old (Joshua’s reported height and weight) could drag a slightly larger 15-year-old, kicking and screaming, by force; usually, when teenage or older males are abducted, a group of abductors are working together, and the motive is usually ransom.

Here’s an entirely plausible scenario that the Wainwrights and/or Zohrs perhaps don’t want to admit: their sons are lovers and have agreed to run away together. The Wainwrights are known, through local media reports, to be the owners of a Novi, MI “fun park” (therefore, probably well-off) and to have sent Justin to Father Gabriel Richard High School in Ann Arbor (therefore, likely Catholic); so it wouldn’t be a terribly huge stretch of logic to assume they hold extremely conservative, anti-gay views, and that Justin felt the need to get away from that.

I’m not saying that this is beyond a shadow of a doubt what has happened here, but that it is a plausible idea that ought not be summarily ignored. The two families are claiming to have been gag-ordered by the police, and the cops aren’t saying a whole hell of a lot either, so all we have to go on at this point is speculation. Let us all hope Justin and Joshua do return safely to Michigan, whatever their motive for taking off might have been.

Well, it’s time for me to hit the sack. One more day of work, pulling a 12,000-gallon (45,425 L) bomb strapped to my back, and then it’s my weekend.

Sat.Jan.17.2009

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:08:00 -0500

Well well, here I am to resurrect this “blog” section of the site from the dead after eight months. My last update, for those who have lost track, was made last May 26, and I have not been heard from here since. There are a few reasons for this, about which I will now go into further detail.

First and foremost, I have often times found myself lacking the time or energy after a long night of work to spend much of the night writing something. I have always had a bit of a tendency to go on at length in these entries, and the job I have been holding for a year and a half (as of next week) doesn’t really permit me to do that in the manner I used to like. I suppose I could spread out the composition of longer entries over multiple nights, but my tendency toward a short attention span would kill that plan in short order. Hence, I just haven’t bothered to write here in eight months.

Second, as those of you who have continued to follow this site have noticed, I have been active in other areas around here. My Flickr account was first opened last May 24, a week after I bought a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, and is up to nearly 400 pictures now, most of which have been shot since last May. I think buying that camera caused something of a shift in my creative focus, from the written form to the photographic art — I just haven’t felt any “mojo” to write much of anything, but have been busy behind the camera.

Third, I don’t know that I’ve had as much “red meat” in terms of topics to write about in the last eight months. Yes, there was the huge fight in California over the exceedingly unconstitutional Proposition 8, with upwards of $30 million of “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” and Mormon money which could have gone to poor or hungry or homeless people diverted to bashing gays, but I felt that the news coming out of that campaign could pretty well speak for itself. Also, I sort of have a feeling that I’ve already once said most everything there is to say about so-called “Christians” and their unceasing lies about GLBT folk, having covered their semi-solid male bovine excrement for years. I may yet come up with more inspiration to reveal their blatant falsehoods, but I think that well kinda ran dry for a while.

I tell you, I keep trying to tell myself ‘I like Michigan, I really do,’ but the weather this last week is starting to make me agree with asshole University of Illinois students and their “MUCK FICHIGAN” T-shirts seen anytime Big Blue faces the Illini in sports. As you can see, it’s barely in the single digits this morning, and this comes after I personally measured –13°F (–25°C) at sunrise yesterday morning. (Official weather stations nearby had it even lower, at –15°F or –26°C.) The temperatures came on the heels of a week which has seen over a foot (30 cm) of snow fall in several phases, the bulk of it last Saturday, and are being ushered out by a storm bringing us another 3” (8 cm) later today. I’m really hearing the Pacific Northwest calling my name louder than ever now — it’s getting likelier and likelier every Michigan winter that I’m going to pull the trigger on that someday. Now, UW football is another matter entirely …

Speaking of which, in closing, I’m just going to say that since I stopped giving a shit about the Detroit Lions years ago, I don’t care about 0-16. In fact, when a sports-fanatic co-worker recently asked me who I thought the Lions would hire as a coach, I told her, “who cares? They’ll still suck.”

Mon.May.26.2008

Mon, 26 May 2008 06:27:00 -0400

Finally, after a month of May that has been consistently ten degrees (or about 6°C) below normal, we are beginning to see warmer temperatures here in southeast Michigan. We’re not by any means done with the cold, as tomorrow night’s low (technically in the wee hours of Wednesday morning) is forecast to be below 40°F (4°C) with frost possible a bit north of here. That is definitely not normal late-May weather in these parts.

In my last update, I said that I was going to write an update about how progressives need to start doing a much better job of taking their message to the grass-roots level. This post has been inspired by a billboard that I pass semi-regularly while working; it is located along eastbound Interstate 94 near milepost 154 here in Michigan, just barely west of the Jackson/Washtenaw county line, between the towns of Grass Lake and Chelsea. A Jackson-based anti-reproductive-freedom outfit rented the sign a couple months ago, and has posted the following unsubstantiated lie: “What if you’re wrong? 90% of women who had abortions say they were wrong!”

Beyond pointing out that this 90% claim is based on a pseudo-scientific, non-representative sample — that is, maybe 90% of post-abortive women into whom the Christofascists manage to get their claws will say under torture that they were wrong — I’m really not even going to address the claim. Instead, I intend to hold it up as a perfect example of how conservatives and Christofascists do a far better job of getting their Satan-filled message out to their grass roots. If progressives ever hope to actually influence the direction of this country, beyond maybe winning an election or two when people get tired of the Rethuglicans, this is a lesson that must be learned quickly and well.

Take a drive anywhere on the Interstates in rural, conservative America, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Interstate 70 in Missouri sticks out in my mind as a great example: every third billboard is some kind of Christofascist anti-choice propaganda, especially in the more rural parts of the route. Turn on your radio while you take the said rural drive, and particularly east of the Rockies, I would challenge you to find a station that isn’t one of (a) country music, (b) conservative political talk, or (c) Christofascist propaganda — believe me, it’s not easy to do. If you’re lucky, you might even see conservative and/or Christofascist operatives committing crimes against property, such as they did in Indianapolis a year ago to billboards rented by a gay-affirming church.

What do progressives, liberals, and Democrats do? They give speeches and press conferences, and then they figure that the media will take care of getting their message out for them. This worked in days past, perhaps, but one must bear in mind the three-decade Rethuglican campaign to push the myth of a so-called “liberal media” in revenge for the resignation of Richard Nixon. That, combined with a virtual media ownership monopoly by large multi-national corporations, has given the media a solidly conservative, pro-Christofascist, pro-Rethuglican bent — yet the Democrats continue in this utterly self-defeating strategy.

This must change. We must start getting our message out to the grass roots of America, in ways that are just as ruthless and shocking as those used by the Reich wing. In order to promote reproductive freedom, I would recommend billboards that show a silhouette of a woman with a coat hanger in one hand and a pool of blood between her legs. Hell, for that matter, use a real image of that — it’s not as if Christofascists have any compunctions about using real images of fetuses. It would also work wonders to deface and/or vandalize Christofascist billboards; for example, “LIES LIES LIES” on that billboard on I-94 would get the message across nicely.

On that note, I would recommend that we focus our efforts on billboards that are high off the ground and difficult for those not in the sign industry to reach. That way, we do two things: (1) we prevent vandalism of billboards containing our message, and (2) we force Christofascists and conservatives to rent the boards that are lower to the ground, where we can much more easily correct their untruths.

Mind you, I don’t intend that this be a one-medium PR campaign confined to billboards on freeways. We can make far more effective use of print and broadcast media, such as newspapers and television, than we are doing right now. In fact, on the topic of gay equality in America, I have sort of half-formulated scripts for a series of TV ads that can be run by our advocacy organizations, and I have the crazy idea to spend $6 million to run the first of the series at halftime of the Super Bowl — which is exactly when those who most need to see that message will be exposed to it. That would also be perfect timing in the year, because the Daytona 500 is two weeks later — believe you me, the NASCAR crowd really needs to hear the message that we’re here, we’re an integral, necessary part of society, and we’re tired of third-class citizenship. I might begin to detail those scripts this morning if I had more than 25 minutes left before heading to bed, but that will have to wait for another time.

I also promised I would say more about the recent California Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in the Golden State. Again, time is short right now, but I did want to mention one thing that struck me about the dissenting opinions. Running all through the dissents was a visible undercurrent of Christofascist talking points: things like “millenia-old tradition,” “re-defining marriage,” “activist judges,” and so forth. What the three dissenting judges are implicitly admitting is that the only case against marriage equality is an explicitly Christofascist one — in other words, a constitutionally invalid one, given the First Amendment’s prohibition of laws respecting an establishment of religion.

OK, I have to be off to bed. Enjoy all your Memorial Day barbecues today, while I get to work hauling fuel around.