Plans to picket Temirkanov US concert over Pussy Riot beating
mainA concert by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic with conductor Yuri Temirkanov, will be picketed in San Francisco on March 3 by members of Gays Without Borders.
The group’s organiser, Michael Petrelis, writes: ‘Conductor Temirkanov was one of the Putin 500 Trustees, a group of prominent Russians who endorsed Vladimir Putin’s 2012 reelection bid. On December 14, 2013, he was honored at a gala concert and 75th birthday party by Putin. … After months of escalating violence and stigmatization of LGBT people in Russia, and the beating of Pussy Riot performers during the Olympics, it is crucial that we use cultural visits to send a message of hope and tolerance.’
Russian policeman about to strike Pussy Riot musicians near Sochi. Credit: Morry Gash, Associated Press
I would SO be going there if I were in San Francisco, and I will certainly be attending protest gatherings if St Petersburg Philharmonic, Bolshoi Ballet or any other Russian enterprise tours these isles. I can only hope that public manifestations of disapproval like this harass all Russian exports be they the arts, or anything else. Russia has stripped its defenceless LGBT minority of citizenship, and cannot be allowed to get away with it. If we do not push, nothing will move. If we do nothing, nothing will change. “The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.”
“Russia has stripped its defenceless LGBT minority of citizenship”
This is a lie, plain and simple.
1. It is illegal in Russia to say you are gay openly, if a person under 18 years of age even MIGHT be present. A 14 year old girl Maria Novikova was recently charged with “homosexual propaganda to minors” after she came out as a lesbian to her classmates: http://www.channel4.com/news/sochi-gay-laws-14-year-old-fights
2. Even though the Age of Consent for same sex relationships is currently 16, the same as for heterosexuals, it is illegal to provide counselling to 16-17 year old LGBT on this matter.
3. It is illegal to protest against your mistreatment if you are disadvantaged by Russia’s recriminalisation of homosexuality, and you will be arrested and fined if you hold up a piece of paper in the street; Dimitry Isakov was reported to the authorities by his own parents: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/05/dmitry-isakov-charged-russia-anti-gay_n_3868060.html. Likewise for the Italian politician Vladimir Luxuria visiting Russia for the Sochi Olympics http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/feb/17/sochi-vladimir-luxuria-gay-rights-banner
4. It IS however, lawful for you to sack someone from their employment solely because they are gay or lesbian: Russian newscaster Anton Krasovksy was sacked on the spot after coming out as gay. This would not happen to a heterosexual: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2393001/Russian-television-presenter-Anton-Krasovsky-sacked-coming-live-television.html
5. It IS legal to evict us from our living accommodation because we are LGBT http://www.buzzfeed.com/davidtuller/far-from-russias-biggest-cities-being-gay-means-being-always
6. When gangs attack young gay men and post thousands of videos of the torture online that identify the crime in progress, and recruit hundreds of gangs in all major cities across Russia to do the same or worse, the police take no action. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/4od#3651833 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ_aSl3ktjg. The one and only person ever charged for violence against gays was given a suspended sentence, and was cheered out of the courtroom by his supporters.
7. It is legal to incite violence against LGBT people, and to call for all gays “to be burned alive in ovens”. Celebrity actor Ivan Okhlobystin was cheered by the audience when he called for this: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/16/russian-actor-ivan-okhlobystin-oven-homosexuals-burned-alive
8. It is legal to say our organs should be buried or burned as “unfit for the continuation of human life”, and if you are Dmitry Kiselyov and say this to a cheering Russian TV audience, you will be promoted to CEO of Vladimir Putin’s national news network http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1cLcyams1g http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/putin-appoints-homophobic-presenter-kiselyov-head-news-agency-homosexuals
9. It is legal to defame homosexuals as pedophiles, especially if you are President of Russia: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/19/22358854-russian-president-putin-links-gays-to-pedophiles?lite
10. A new law is waiting for re-introduction in the Duma after Sochi ends, by United Russia party member Andrei Zhuravlyov that will seize even the biological children from their lesbian or gay parent and place that child in the care of Russia’s notorious orphanage system: http://en.ria.ru/russia/20130905/183185396.html and http://atrl.net/forums/showthread.php?t=465238
11. At the next federal Russian elections, there will be a referendum sponsored by the Russian Orthodox Church, to make same sex relationships once again a criminal offence. Recent opinion polls show support for this is likely to exceed 80%, making it a certainty to be carried: http://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/russian-orthodox-church-spokesman-endorses-referendum-to-rec
Reading and viewing the above, do you still stand by your claim that Russian LGBT have full citizenship equal to that of heterosexuals?
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/how-russia-enforces-its-ban-gay-propaganda
Wish I were in SF so I could attend the concert.
It is a Western funded distraction from other more serious serious human rights violations. Enough, already.
Can you cite evidence of this?
I suppose that with an ever increasing number of dead people and an escalation of war in the Middle East and Africa, and raging conflicts in Ukraine, Venezuela and Thailand, or the yet unresolved Israeli-Palestinian question, etc. sometimes being displaced in the mainstream media by this one, while at the same time there seems to be little or no interest in examining more egregious denials of rights to LGBT in other countries- and even in parts of the U.S.- one could say it is a distraction. As for Western funding, can one honestly pretend that the NED and many Soros’ funded NGOs are not backing the movement against the Russian law with money- lots of it- and organizational tools, when it is common knowledge of it.
Good that you included your list above, though it would help to vet more closely the sources and the context of each of these, and also deal with the issue on a more global scale, instead of just demonizing Putin and Russia. That’s both disingenuous and silly.
Mea culpa for the poor grammar and run-on sentences, but you get the idea.
I am part of the LGBT activist movement, and am not aware of any funding that has come our way to “distract” the world from Ukraine, Thailand and Venezuela, which frankly, we’re seeing on the news every day. I hardly see LGBT mentioned at all, on the contrary the Sochi Olympics are in every news broadcast on every channel, and you can watch the games live on the BBC no problem. I just don’t see how we’ve hijacked world attention, if anything it’s the reverse. We’ve failed to persuade the IOC to relocate the Winter Olympics, we’ve failed to persuade a single Olympic sponsor to speak out against Russia’s crackdown against her LGBT minorities, we’ve failed to mount any effective boycott against the games or Russian products to date, we’ve failed to get athletes to speak out at the event. and we’ve failed to mount any effective demonstrations whatsoever anywhere in Russia, let alone Sochi because Russia has put a ring of iron around any sort of protest, even using whips against female protesters Pussy Riot. Moreover, not one of the political leaders who refused invitations to attend at Sochi gave Russia’s recriminalisation of homosexuality as the reason.
LGBT are a minuscule minority of but 5-10% of the population, and so we have no power at all without the protection and support of heterosexual allies – our families, friends, colleagues and politicians. Our allies put themselves in harm’s way time and again with nothing to gain personally and often a great deal to lose. They are therefore a precious resource and there’s only so much we can ask of them. We’re also often fighting “the enemy within”, but that’s another story.
Same sex relationships remain a criminal offence in 78 countries, including India which recently recriminalised homosexuality. All of these repressive regimes are obviously in our sights, but none of them are currently hosting the Olympics. We can therefore only pick battles that we have some chance of winning, and for which we can count on the support of our allies. Russia has been especially difficult, because on the face of it, they’re claiming the new law was passed “to protect children”. Everyone wants to protect children, so it was a clever way of fanning the fires of hostie public opinion ever further against LGBT minorities. It is analogous to the way Nazis represented Jews as
We share a great deal culturally with Russia, and so while this makes the recriminalisation of homosexuality all the more disappointing, there is at least a small chance we can reach the hearts and minds there over time. I estimate it will take at least 3 decades to reach the same level of tolerance we enjoy in the United Kingdom. In Africa, Malaysia, the Middle East (except Israel), I estimate at least half a century given the way they’re sentencing homosexuals to death or imprisonment in ever increasing numbers in these countries.
My list is not just a collection of links I plucked randomly via Google, it has been researched carefully, includes mostly major television channels like BBC and Channel 4 and other news sites, that are easy to verify. By all means post countervailing evidence if you have it.
typo (incomplete sentence) “It is analogous to the way Nazis represented Jews as ”
should have read:
“It is analogous to the way Nazis represented Jews as a danger to Aryan children.”
I am honestly for ‘live and let live’ but not for the inverted values that we are confronted with in Western countries. This has to do with laws pushed through by judges or other forms of fiat to dismantle the family unit that are not universally supported. Or if the consequences were understood better, more people would be against the dismantling of this pillar of society.
First on the list, is the status of children will be divorced from the natural biological roots for the first time in human history. Who decided this social experiment will be beneficial? The concept of mother and father will be extinguished, as has been replaced in several countries and states, “Parent A or B”. This is ridiculous and phony science as well since children are still conceived by one male and one female. Culturally, great literature, such as written by Shakespeare, Hugo, etc., about complex human relationships will be seen as quaint curiosities. This phenomenon was foretold by Huxley in “Brave New World” about 90 years ago, a society in which immediate gratification without consideration for the long term or future is the supreme guiding virtue.
If you care about the future, then you should care about the family, simple as that.
Slipping down the slope is the erosion of civil and religious liberties where businesses can be run into the ground if they don’t actively support a lifestyle they believe to be against their own principles.
The absolutist nature of the policies – support it or else – is silencing dissent and encourages self-censorship. Even reparative therapy for those who would like to leave the lifestyle that is NOT fixed and rigid, particularly for women, has been summarily forbidden.
You mentioned pederasty several times. I’m truly sorry and wish it were different, but the facts simply don’t bear out:
“The evidence indicates that homosexual men molest boys at rates grossly disproportionate to the rates at which heterosexual men molest girls. To demonstrate this it is necessary to connect several statistics related to the problem of child sex abuse: 1) men are almost always the perpetrator; 2) up to one-third or more of child sex abuse cases are committed against boys; 3) less than three percent of the population are homosexuals. Thus, a tiny percentage of the population (homosexual men), commit one-third or more of the cases of child sexual molestation.” http://www.frc.org/issueanalysis/homosexuality-and-child-sexual-abuse
The above is borne out in the Church abuse of which more than 95% were man on boy, but of course not admitted as homosexual aggression.
Why is NAMBLA trying to reduce the age of consent or abolish it altogether?
I would feel better personally if this movement didn’t seem so much as a Bolshevik takeover of society.
NAMBLA is no more representative of the LGBT movement than the Ku Klux Klan is of white America, or the BNP of Great Britain. Not only does adducing fringe extremists undermine your argument, it undermines your credibility as well.
1. What do you mean by ‘Live and let live’, if you don’t intend to abide by it?
2. You keep saying things that are not true. Adoption by same sex couples is by no means the “first time in human history” that children are raised by parents to whom they’re not biologically related. Children adopted by heterosexual couples are also “divorced from the natural biological roots”. Moreover, a large number of lesbian or gay parents ARE raising their own biological offspring by one or other parent, either after a failed attempt at heterosexual marriage following which they are granted custody, or through surrogacy. The minority status of LGBT demographic ensures that the “concept of mother and father” will NEVER “be extinguished”. Children raised by same sex couples have as every bit as much access to their biological parent(s) as do those adopted by heterosexual couples. What this is really about I suspect, is your unstated but pervasively evident squeamishness that gay people could be anything other than predators and a ‘threat to civilisation as we know it’. More than 25 years of research have documented that there is no relationship between parents’ sexual orientation and any measure of a child’s emotional, psychosocial, and behavioural adjustment.
We can turn to a host of experts and research findings on the topic including:
American Academy of Pediatrics
American Psychiatric Association
American Psychological Association
National Association of Social Workers
Starting with the American Academy of Pediatrics, which said the following about same-sex parenting:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/131/4/e1374.full
“There is ample evidence to show that children raised by same-gender parents fare as well as those raised by heterosexual parents. More than 25 years of research have documented that there is no relationship between parents’ sexual orientation and any measure of a child’s emotional, psychosocial, and behavioral adjustment. These data have demonstrated no risk to children as a result of growing up in a family with 1 or more gay parents. Conscientious and nurturing adults, whether they are men or women, heterosexual or homosexual, can be excellent parents. The rights, benefits, and protections of civil marriage can further strengthen these families.”
THEN the American Psychiatric Association:
“Numerous studies over the last three decades consistently demonstrate that children raised by gay or lesbian parents exhibit the same level of emotional, cognitive, social, and sexual functioning as children raised by heterosexual parents. This research indicates that optimal development for children is based not on the sexual orientation of the parents, but on stable attachments to committed and nurturing adults. The research also shows that children who have two parents, regardless of the parents’ sexual orientations, do better than children with only one parent.”
AND the American Psychological Association – which passed a lengthy resolution on this issue. A recent Australian study on same sex parenting can be viewed here: http://www.aifs.gov.au/cfca/pubs/papers/a145197/index.html
Same sex parenting is also supported by the following organisations: The United Nations, The American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Anthropological Association, World Health Organisation, American Academy of Pediatrics, Child Welfare League of America, National Association of Social Workers, North American Council on Adoptable Children, American Psychoanalytic Association, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Council on Child and Adolescent Health, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Mental Health America, California Psychological Association, American Counseling Association, American Sociological Association, American School Health Association, National Association of School Psychologists, not to mention countless universities, local governments, labor unions, and virtually every human rights organisation that exists.
3. You say, “If you care about the future, then you should care about the family” implying that homosexuals don’t care about family. Groups like your so-called ‘Family Research Council’ and others describing themselves as “For the Protection of Marriage” have cleverly woven the “Pro Family” and “Pro Marriage” mantra into their corporate name, so that if you disagree with them on same sex relationships, you become ipso facto “Anti Family” and “Anti Marriage”. Well let me disabuse you on both counts: I am very much FOR family and FOR marriage – and that includes both same sex and opposite sex marriage, as well as the institution of heterosexual marriage which gave me life. Being FOR one thing doesn’t mean you have to align against its counterpart.
4. I had to re-read my posts to verify your claim that I “mention pederasty several times” in this thread. I mention it once. We clearly have a different understanding of the word “several”. Your ‘facts’ are adduced from the self-styled Family Research Council, declared a hate group by (among others) the Southern Poverty Law Center and run by the discredited and delusional Dr Paul Cameron http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2005/winter/garbage-in-garbage-out Paul Cameron was expelled from the American Psychological Association (in 1983) for misinterpreting and misrepresenting the research of his peers, and has a string of professional misdemeanours too long to cite here. He has also been censured by the Nebraska Psychological Association (1984), the American Sociological Association (1986), Canadian Psychological Association (1996) and I counsel you to Google him before citing his FRC’s “findings” again. He is a nasty piece of work. You will find far more reliable information here:
University of California:
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html
American Psychological Association (over 173,000 members, the largest such professional body in the world):
http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/sexual-orientation.aspx
Conflating homosexuality with pedophilia is mendacious and malicious. If most gays were pedophiles then we would have zero rights and would be serving time in jail. The overwhelming majority of pedophile assaults are by men against girls, usually the father/stepfather or other relative or close friend of the family. Statistically speaking, children are safer with gays than they are with straights.
That said, just because most pedophiles are heterosexual, doesn’t mean all heterosexuals are pedophiles either. You mention the Roman Catholic Church which seems to have been a magnet for pedophiles for decades, if not centuries. That’s not an open, representative sample of the gay male population, and you know it isn’t. As above, citing the RCC as representative of gay men is as specious as saying the KKK represents mainstream white America.
Another problem that skews statistics is that most homosexuals are in the closet, so that instances of same sex child sexual assault are calculated as a percentage of ‘known’ homosexuals, which is far smaller than the real number against the total population, thus making the proportion higher than it would be if divided by the true, larger sample. Even so, the fact remains that same sex child sexual assaults are less than 1/11 and are absolutely dwarfed in number by the assaults on underage girls by heterosexually identifying males. Male pedophiles who assault boys are no more representative of the LGBT movement than they are of the Roman Catholic Church, both of whom are appalled by any kind of assault on children, sexual or otherwise.
You cite the Southern Poverty Law Center as a reference? What a joke! Talk about disreputable! Not so amazing about Associations (with a capital A of course) funded by governments, who toe the political line even if decades earlier they were preaching the opposite. Manipulation of facts and phony science are not new. The Soviets had Lysenkism and the Nazi scientists were promulgating their false racial theories. You mentioned Nazi as few times. You are not aware that a homosexualist cult was at its center?
You want to make it seem that there is monolithic agreement that fairly contradicts commonsense but not everyone in your community would concur, particularly those who were raised by same sex parents and found it confusing as well as a deprivation.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065/
“The richest and most successful same-sex couple still cannot provide a child something that the poorest and most struggling spouses can provide: a mom and a dad. Having spent forty years immersed in the gay community, I have seen how that reality triggers anger and vicious recrimination from same-sex couples, who are often tempted to bad-mouth so-called “dysfunctional” or “trashy” straight couples in order to say, “We deserve to have kids more than they do!”
But I am here to say no, having a mom and a dad is a precious value in its own right and not something that can be overridden, even if a gay couple has lots of money, can send a kid to the best schools, and raises the kid to be an Eagle Scout.
It’s disturbingly classist and elitist for gay men to think they can love their children unreservedly after treating their surrogate mother like an incubator, or for lesbians to think they can love their children unconditionally after treating their sperm-donor father like a tube of toothpaste.”
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/03/9432/
“I wholeheartedly support civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, but I am opposed to same-sex marriage. Because activists have made marriage, rather than civil unions, their goal, I am viewed by many as a self-loathing, traitorous gay. So be it. I prefer to think of myself as a reasoning, intellectually honest human being.”
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/06/5640/#sthash.F6sNS79v.dpuf
“Despite the lack of empirical evidence for the claim that today there are large numbers of stable, two-parent gay households, for the last ten years, contemporary gay parenting research has nevertheless claimed that there are “no significant differences” (and some benefits) to being raised by same-sex parents.
Therefore, Regnerus analyzed the new NFSS data to verify this claim. In the end, he found the claim to be more plausible when comparing the grown children of parents who had a same-sex relationship to the grown children of divorced, adopted, single-parented, or step-parented arrangements. The claim is false if one compares the grown children of a parent who had a same-sex relationship to those from IBFs. (Intact Biological Families)
While the study has been criticized for “comparing apples to oranges,” Regnerus’s work studies the reality of the population of children who were raised by parents who had same-sex relationships. As the next sections show, there are clear and, in most cases, very unfortunate differences between the children of parents who had a same-sex relationship and those from biological families of still-married parents.”
Then there is personal experience and commonsense. With regard to the former and I have been around, I have not met ONE monogamous gay couple and was informed how some were initiated into this lifestyle. In a culture that worships youth, why should it be surprising that young flesh is the ideal and even sought out?
Commonsense has to do with the very nature of creation, the ying/yang of which marriage and human procreation are an intimate part of, participating in the mysteries of the Divine that any great religion issues from. This has infinitely more clout than the rationalizing of eminent professors who have to justify keeping their jobs and research funding for a twisted notion of social engineering. These are the same white coats who in the past supported lobotomies and electric shock therapy.
Commonsense is an innate, functional BS detector, unmoved by authorities preaching how good it tastes. There is one Authority, the Source of Life, who is not impressed either and who is not changing HIS rules.
The Regnerus study you cite has been debunked, and practically even disowned by its own author no less, on the basis that his sample was taken from children whose lives were already in turmoil after parental divorce, and some included one parent who had merely “dabbled”. Obviously a child who discovers his natural father is gay, and doesn’t love his mother, or vice versa, is going to be in great distress. You may as well include only children from broken homes to assess the validity of opposite sex adoptive households, something Regnerus conspicuously and I believe disingenuously failed to do. I say this after looking at the sources of his funding (including partly self), and the timing of his study, intended to influence the Supreme Court in its deliberations on DOMA and Prop 8:
“Regnerus was recruited and his work partially funded by the Witherspoon Institute, a religious-conservative research center. He also recieved $90,000 from the Bradley Foundation, which backs conservative causes. In addition, the University of Texas, where Regnerus works, hired an academic consultant named W. Bradford Wilcox who was a fellow at Witherspoon, and who had been in the institute’s employ when the idea for the study came about.” http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116741/regnerus-study-same-sex-marriage-michigan-must-defeat-bad-science
Many of these children were already going to be compromised by the pain of their parents’ breakup, or discovery of the homosexuality of their mother or father, even if they didn’t end up being raised by a same sex couple, and not all those in Regnerus’s sample were anyway. For a study to have validity, like those I adduced, it should be of children adopted by choice by same sex couples, or conceived by surrogacy, not those flung into turmoil by their parents’ divorce or disclosure of their homosexuality.
Details here:
http://www.unl.edu/rhames/Social/Controversial%20Gay-Parenting%20Study%20Is%20Severely%20Flawed,%20Journal%27s%20Audit%20Finds%20-%20Percolator%20-%20The%20Chronicle%20of%20Higher%20Education.pdf
The American Sociological Association, which has rejected the study’s findings said publicly: “If any conclusion can be reached from Regnerus’s study, it is that family stability is predictive of child well-being.”
Your consistent mantra is that homosexuality is a sort of ‘value’ that can be imparted to vulnerable youngsters by propaganda, and that over time, the homosexualists would convert the whole world to gayism. Such notions are disproved by the vast majority of evidence, and the personal experience of homosexuals like myself, and ignore the reality that Nature is always ensuring the human race reproduces. Homosexuals will always be in the small minority of 5-10%. Even if your fears were realised and the entire planet opted for homosexuality, conception could continue to take place. But this simply isn’t going to happen, and you know it isn’t.
I’d have more time for your flailing paranoia if you could point to ANY evidence that my consensual adult same sex relationship was actually damaging your opposite sex relationship, or that the world population was in catastrophic decline, and that homosexuality was the root cause. If my marriage can so easily damage your marriage, then your marriage was already in trouble to begin with. Likewise, the world population has practically trebled since my birth from 2.6 billion to 7 billion today, and will have trebled again to 20 billion by the time of my death, around 2050.
The conclusion to be drawn from your polemic can only be that homosexuality is quintessentially (and counter-intuitively) more attractive to humans than heterosexuality, such that over time, none but the godliest could resist its ineffable charms. Therefore, people have to be literally forced against their will into the arms of their hapless opposite sex spouses.
As for your ‘god’, he/she/it is very much a designer product, and that is why we have separation of Church and State.
He has none, he just wants to babble because he hates the idea that his precious cultural event is being boycotted and protested against, and he also can’t stand the truth in the links that you’ve posted.
You’re both wrong on anything that has to do with me. I couldn’t care less about the concert but I do object to their being hijacked by special interest groups. The same goes for disrupting Israeli musicians abroad. Obummer led America is not a haven of freedom either and is becoming less for conscientious people who would opt out of popular culture and political correctness. So in all fairness, if concerts should be picketed because of their country of origin, then no place is blameless.
I don’t really give a damn about population whether it is less or more. Quality counts more than quantity. This means providing the best environment for future generations. Sober values not fixated on sex or selfish gratification have shown to be the most enduring. So thumbs down on raunchy sex parades! (This kind of exhibitionism is immature anyways, shows adults to be “kids”, admittedly a salient feature of society these days, not role models to be emulated.)
I feel I have a loyalty and debt to the culture that has given the world so much. Western Civ, like it or not, is steeped in Judeo-Christian values, the great monuments of music and architecture hailing from it. Imagine Western music without Bach. He did not emerge from a void.
As for separation of Church and State, the last I heard was HRH Elizabeth is the Defender of the Faith. If there is no God, there is no need for marriage or morality, just hook up according to your urges and whims.
Because these days generations are not being educated in values or a proper appreciation of history, in other words, learning from its lessons, instead of having to repeat them, all I can say is the last one to exit this the dregs of this culture, please turn out the lights.
“Sober values not fixated on sex or selfish gratification have shown to be the most enduring.”
– I couldn’t agree more, but what evidence do you have that such values are the exclusive prerogative of heterosexual people? Think carefully before you answer, because I am ready with evidence.
“I have a loyalty and debt to the culture that has given the world so much. Western Civ, like it or not, is steeped in Judeo-Christian values,”
– Again, aside from the pervasive religious animus against homosexuals, what evidence do you have that I don’t feel exactly the same cultural debt that you do? Before answering, please bear in mind that many a church choir is conducted by a gay chorus master, and many a gay has sung in one. I speak from personal experience, having toured the world with the Auckland University Festival Choir in 1972, with performances in the White House, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Westminster Abbey, Kings College Cambridge and in churches in practically every town we visited in the USA, UK, Europe and New Zealand. Our (heterosexual) conductor, Professor Peter Godfrey (https://www.thearts.co.nz/artist_page.php&aid=8&type=bio) was choirmaster of the Anglican Cathedral of St Mary’s and Holy Trinity, Auckland, New Zealand where my grandparents were married.
There are many religions nowadays that accept LGBT with open arms, open hearts and open minds, offering full sacraments, including communion, ordination to the clergy and same sex marriage. Their god clearly disagrees with your god on at least that catechetical instruction. But then, so does the Catholic God disagree with the Anglican God on birth control, women’s ordination and divorce, all condemned by the RCC, yet not an issue with the C of E, founded by divorcee King Henry VIII no less I take your point about conflict of interest with the Queen being head of both the country and the Church of England, and there are many who favour disestablishment. In practice, royal interference is minimal anyway. Nevertheless, the Queen did sign into law the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, notwithstanding the dissent of her bishops in the House of Lords.
The following Christian religions welcome openly LGBT members to participate and receive sacraments:
Calvary Chapel, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Reformed Church in America, Oriental Orthodox, Community of Christ, Mennonite*, Moravian Church, National Baptist Convention*, New Apostolic, Unification Church, United Methodist Church*
The below also ordain, and bless same sex unions or marriage:
Anglican*, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)*, Church of Scotland*, Episcopal*, Community of Christ, Church of Denmark, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America*, German Lutheran & United Churches in Evangelical Church in Germany, Metropolitan Community Church, Church of Norway, Pentecostal*, Protestant Church in the Netherlands, Presbyterian Church (USA)*, Religious Society of Friends (Quaker), Old Catholic, Swedenborgian*, Church of Sweden, Swiss Reformed Churches in Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches*, United Church of Canada, United Church of Christ*, Unity School of Christianity, Waldensian*,
*varies
SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominational_positions_on_homosexuality
So fie on your idea that only heterosexuals can be religious people. I am not religious myself, but I know many gay people who are, counter-intuitive though that is both to you and me for entirely different, but correlative reasons.
“If there is no God, there is no need for marriage or morality,”
– This is patently false. There is a clear and demonstrable need both for marriage and morality, although we clearly part company on homosexuality which you regard is immoral, whereas I regard homophobia as immoral. Humanists and atheists alike get married all the time, and both subscribe to the mantra, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If any hijacking has been going on, it has been religion’s hijacking of this most fundamentally human of commonsense notions, that it’s not in anyone’s interest to kill, betray, maim, defame or rob anyone. There are clearly many different ideas about morality, homosexuality being but one of them, just as there are conflicting ideas on the value and meaning of marriage, but the emerging international consensus is that human rights belong to every individual, even you.
“Emerging international consensus” – that’s amusing. The Catholic Church has one billion people, count another for the Moslems. Then there are China, Russia, India and Africa, the latter bravely resisting the aggressive ideologies of the West even if they are attached to aid packages.
As for choir members, churches are anyway supposed to be a hospital for the sick, not a showcase for the virtuous. As for Christians and even Jews now who would like to rationalize their acceptance of “it doesn’t matter who you love (or lust after)”, the Bible is very clear about homosexuality. Whoever doesn’t like it can start another religion and it seems this is exactly what they are doing even if they say they are Christian or Jewish. You call it a “designer God” anyway, so why bother to sing in a choir?
As for all your exhaustive exegeses on the subject, they are really lost on me as I have personal experience that over the years has only corroborated the unfortunate association with that very sick person in my adolescence. To draw good out of evil in this case has made me resistant to BS no matter where it comes from. I could cite other stories but it would be too embarrassing and I don’t feel like remembering them either.
There is a difference between live and let live and a Bolshevik takeover of society that according to you has 100% agreement even in your community. Well, it doesn’t:
http://www.lanuovabq.it/it/articoli-io-omosessuale-dico-no-alle-nozze-gay-8449.htm#.Uv8KjjptQJg.facebook
The “rights of a child” have been superceded by the alleged “right to a child”:
“Lei denuncia il fatto che la lobby Lgbt reclamano un «diritto al bambino» piuttosto che un «diritto del bambino».Gli omosessuali sono persone responsabili, sono pienamente coscienti che il loro desiderio di avere un figlio non può avere la conseguenza di privare un figlio dell’affetto di una mamma. 25 anni fa, oggi ne ho 50, mi sono posto la questione di avere un figlio per trasmettergli un patrimonio, uno stato sociale, in breve: volevo un figlio per delle ragioni ingiuste.”
While you cite authorities and institutions, all I can say is “Tell it to the JUDGE”.
Amusing? Depends on your sense of humour:
Catholic:
http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=19267
Jewish:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/177877#.UxCofMdWL5c
Muslim:
http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2011/06/27/surprise-poll-shows-widespread-muslim-support
US:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-26/decade-sees-huge-rise-in-us-support-for-gay-marriage/5286330
UK:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/dec/26/voters-back-gay-marriage-poll
Northern Ireland:
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/majority-in-northern-ireland-support-samesex-marriages-survey-30035867.html
General:
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/4984
Your Italian link merely shows that not all homosexuals support same sex marriage. So what? Not all Catholics are opposed to artificial birth control You’ll never find complete unanimity in a democratic society, however it is obvious that without broad based public support for LGBT equality we could never have achieved the freedoms we now enjoy. This is in no small part thanks to our heterosexual allies – friends, families and politicians, who put themselves in harm’s way for us, with nothing to gain for themselves.
I’m sorry your personal experience with gay people has apparently been so unsatisfactory that you have such manifestly unbridled contempt for us. You’re clearly loaded for bear. I can only encourage you to examine the list below to see if you can find any good people among us:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gay,_lesbian_or_bisexual_people
The Bible is “very clear” about many things:
OLD TESTAMENT
DEUTERONOMY 7:3 No marriage shall be sanctioned of people of different races.
DEUTERONOMY
13:13-17 A town that allows the practice of more than one religion must be burned to the ground and its citizens slaughtered.
DEUTERONOMY 21:18-21 “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother… then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones.”
DEUTERONOMY 22:13-21 A woman not a virgin on her wedding night must be executed.
DEUTERONOMY 22:22 If a married person has sex with someone else’s husband or wife, both adulterers be stoned to death.
DEUTERONOMY 22:28-29 A virgin who is raped must marry her rapist.
DEUTERONOMY
25:11-12 If a man gets into a fight with another man and his wife seeks to rescue her husband by grabbing the enemy’s genitals, her hand shall be cut off and no pity shall be shown her.
EXODUS 4:11 “The LORD said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes him mute or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?”
EZEKIEL 18:5-6 No marriage shall be sanctioned in which the wedding ceremony shall occur during the women’s menstrual cycle.
KINGS 11:2 No marriage shall be sanctioned of people of different races.
LEVITICUS 11:6-8 Outlaws the playing of football (touching the skin of a dead pig).
LEVITICUS 11:9-12 Eating shellfish or pork strictly forbidden.
LEVITICUS 18:19 A married couple who have sexual intercourse during a woman’s period shall both be executed.
LEVITICUS 19:19 May not wear polyester cotton shirts (wearing garments of mixed fabrics forbidden)
LEVITICUS 20:9 “Anyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.”
LEVITICUS 20:18 No marriage shall be sanctioned in which the wedding ceremony shall occur during the women’s menstrual cycle.
LEVITICUS 21:17-21 “Speak to Aaron, saying, ‘No man of your offspring throughout their generations who has a defect shall approach to offer the food of his God. | ‘For no one who has a defect shall approach: a blind man, or a lame man, or he who has a disfigured face, or any deformed limb, | or a
man who has a broken foot or broken hand, | or a unchback or a dwarf, or one who has a defect in his eye or eczema or scabs or crushed testicles. | ‘No man among the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a defect is to come near to offer the LORD’S offerings by fire; since he has a defect, he shall not come near to offer the food of his God.”
LEVITICUS 25:45 Says it’s OK for a foreigner in your country to sell you their child, and equally OK for you to buy them and treat them as chattel.
LEVITICUS 26:14-30 “Then if you walk contrary to me …you shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.”
NUMBERS 15:32,35 Anyone who picks up sticks on the Sabbath must be killed.
NUMBERS 25:6-8 No marriage shall be sanctioned of people of different races.
PROVERBS 19:2 “…and he that hasteth with his feet sinneth.” (running and therefore all athletic sports are a sin)
NEW TESTAMENT
COLOSSIANS 3:22 “Slaves, obey your human masters in everything; don’t work only while being watched, in order to please men, but work wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord.”
CORINTHIANS 6:14-17 No marriage shall be sanctioned between Christians & non-Christians.
CORINTHIANS 14:34 Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be submissive, as the law also says.
JOHN 1:9-11 No marriage shall be sanctioned between Christians & non-Christians.
MARK 10:1-12 Divorce is strictly forbidden in both Testaments, as is remarriage of anyone who has been divorced
MARK 12:18-27 If a man dies childless, his widow is ordered to have intercourse with each of his brothers in turn until she bears her deceased husband a male heir.”
MATTHEW 5:28 No marriage shall be sanctioned for any man who has had sexual thoughts of any woman other than his intended.
MATTHEW 5:32 No marriage will be sanctioned between people who have been divorced.
TIMOTHY 2:12 “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence”
TIMOTHY 5:5-15 No marriage shall be sanctioned involving a widow (unless it is to her brother-in-law). All women whose husbands have passed away shall refrain from intimacy & pleasure for the remainder of their lives.
Jesus said the Old Testament must be obeyed – every cruel word of it:
1) “For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:18-19 RSV) Clearly the Old Testament is to be abided by until the end of human existence itself. None other then Jesus said so.
2) All of the vicious Old Testament laws will be binding forever. “It is easier for Heaven and Earth to pass away than for the smallest part of the letter of the law to become invalid.” (Luke 16:17 NAB)
3) Jesus strongly approves of the law and the prophets. He hasn’t the slightest objection to the cruelties of the Old Testament. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” (Matthew 5:17 NAB)
4) “Know this first of all, that there is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation, for no prophecy ever came through human will; but rather human beings moved by the holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God.” (2 Peter 20-21 NAB)
What is the saying, “Even the devil can quote Scripture”? There is the spirit of the Law and the letter, also time bound rules. From the outset He made them male and female. The continuing who begat whom is not idle chatter but reinforces the importance of family ties. You left out a few quotes from Paul to the Corinthians…
Millions of people can be wrong as the Germans were before and during World War II. What is important what the Pope will not compromise on, not American Catholics who spend infinitely more time in front of the TV than going to Church or understanding their faith. Morality is not decided upon by consensus.
Whether someone is good or bad doesn’t depend on worldly achievements, so I really don’t give a hoot about that either. In fact, I don’t have contempt, that would take too much of my time and energy. I don’t care even to dispute your skewed figures like 1/11 of children are same sex pedophile victims which would entail knocking down YOUR supposition of gays being 5-10% of the population. One in ten? Give me a break!. You leave out plenty of the dark side like rampant AIDS’s, violence and incredible promiscuity. I am TIRED of hearing about LGBTXYZ every flaming day. As I wrote before, the ultimate Judge will decide.
So if I quote relevant scripture to you I am “the devil”? Yet when you call up your religious belief to judge me, that’s ok? When I adduce links they’re yawned off as “exhaustive exegeses”, whereas when you do, they’re the gospel truth? When the Bible allegedly refers to homosexuality it is the unchangeable, literal “Word of God”, yet every other commandment I listed is “spirit of the Law and the letter, also time bound rules”. This is blatant and convenient justification of your overwhelming animus against LGBT people, whom you conflate with your alcoholic pedophile piano teacher of yore.
Of course, if you’re not homosexual, it’s easy for you to obey the alleged biblical proscriptions, if you’re a male, it’s easy to accept the Bible’s misogynistic subjugation of females, if you’re a slave owner, it’s easy to accept the Bible’s exhortation for slaves to obey their masters, if you’re marrying someone in your own race, it’s easy to accept the Bible’s commandment not to marry a different race to you, and if you’re not a child, it’s apparently easy for you to accept the Bible’s commandment to kill children if they misbehave or back answer their parents.
Let me remind you of a central tenet of Christ’s teaching that is the same in all translations:
“Do not judge others, or you yourself will be judged. You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” MATTHEW 7:5
Religion IS a designer product. That’s why the religion megastore offers up such a splendid variety of choices, ranging from the vehemently anti-gay to the LGBT accepting, from the polygamous to the monogamous, from the misogynist to the egalitarian. You happened to find one that matches your own tastes and your personal animus against gay people, to a T.
As for my “5% of the population” that you scorn, this is sourced from exit polls of openly gay from the last three US Census, 2004, 2008 and 2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States. That’s a survey of people willing to tell a complete stranger that they’re gay. It’s not rocket science to realise that in South Carolina, and West Texas, people are going to be heavily closeted and lie that they’re heterosexual. If you took a poll of gay people in Iran, Nigeria or Uganda right now, how many gays do you think would answer honestly? Are there really zero per cent gays in these countries? I have added a meremodest 1% to the US 4% to allow for people in the closet and bisexuals. Some surveys in the UK report as high as 6%, and in some US suburbs like those in San Francisco it can be 20%, where the area is heavily populated by gays who enjoy public acceptance.
I can’t challenge your claim that every gay person you met so far has been a diseased, immoral, irreligious, opportunistic pedophile, because i am not you, and I don’t know what it is like to be you, or what all these gay people did to you that was so bad to make you end with an attitude up like this. To me your account seems highly doubtful, with the greatest of respect. First off if it were true, then LGBT rights would grind to an instantaneous halt. Second, you are commenting from the safety of your nom de plume ‘Cabbage Juice’. I am just as confident that your forename isn’t really ‘Cabbage’ as I am that your parents are not Mr and Mrs Juice. I, by contrast, am putting myself out there openly. This discourse is therefore not being conducted on a level playing field.
But neither are you me, nor do you know what is is like to be me. Unless you are gay, you cannot know whether it’s a decision or not. You have no practical experience of being gay. Therefore, you must accept the testimony of those of us who are gay, and what we feel. I was attracted to males well before I knew what sex was and I have never had romantic notions for females.
I would have more respect for you, if you simply admitted you don’t know what it’s like to be gay and cease judging us. Leave it to your God to fix me up if I need fixing. If you don’t think he’s up to the job, then you’re certainly not in charge of me. If there is a god, and that god is all powerful, knows everything and created everything, then he knew in advance he was going to create Gays. It is counter-intuitive to suppose he would make upwards of 350 million Gays (5% of 7 billion) alive in the world today, just so we could be converted into Straights. Therefore, God is OK with Gays.
Who are you to “believe” anything about the reality of my life? It isn’t your place, and you’re out of line. The problem with you “christians” is you think your right to free speech and to evangelise your religion supersedes anyone else’s right to exist free from prejudice and discrimination. You don’t know when to step off. I didn’t “choose” to be a homosexual. This is how I am, and I can’t change it. Your opinion about it and about me, is irrelevant.
cabbagejuice says:
What is the saying, “Even the devil can quote Scripture”?
Very true. And how do you know those devils aren’t your religious leaders?
There is the spirit of the Law and the letter, also time bound rules.
And who gets to decide which is which in which case? You? Or the leader figures you were brought up to trust and follow blindly?
Seems to me like your “faith” is just some kind of spiritual cold buffet for you and your fellow “believers”. You pick and choose, you take what you want, you leave what you don’t want. Doesn’t look to me like you take the word of your god all that seriously after all.
From the outset He made them male and female.
That’s not actually what it says in your holy book. It says that in the beginning, god only made a boy. And then the boy was lonely, so he made a girl, too.
That raises a lot of questions. Did the boy originally have boy parts even though he wouldn’t have needed them? Did he get retrofitted with boy parts when good made the compatible girl? Does god have boy parts? He must have them, if man was made after his image. But what for if he doesn’t have a goddess girlfriend? Or does he? What happened to Asherah? Did she leave him for another god? Is that why he is so angry?
The continuing who begat whom is not idle chatter but reinforces the importance of family ties.
I agree. But that’s not a problem because only a few percent (2?3?) of the population are still straight and still ready to make new babies.
Millions of people can be wrong as the Germans were before and during World War II.
That’s right, and since history has proven them and the teachings they followed wrong, nobody in their right mind uses the book which contains those teachings anymore as a guideline; just like centuries of violence, mayhem and pandering to the rich and powerful has completely discredited the whole “Christian” thing and nobody in their right mind should use that book as a guideline anymore either.
What is important what the Pope will not compromise on, not American Catholics who spend infinitely more time in front of the TV than going to Church or understanding their faith.
Where do you get your faith from? Not from TV? The way you don’t take the letters of the book seriously when confronted with them strongly suggests that.
Morality is not decided upon by consensus.
Advanced, civilized morality is. Morality is when people treat each other the way they would like to be treated themselves. That is the consensus. Just blindly following rules, especially following rules which treat other people, people who are different form us as inferior people is not morality. It is a primitive tribal mindset.
Whether someone is good or bad doesn’t depend on worldly achievements, so I really don’t give a hoot about that either.
Whether someone is good or bad depends on *all* his or her achievements. It is not up to you to decide which ones are worth more than others. As long as they are good deeds. You actually rather sound like a very un-Christian person to me.
You leave out plenty of the dark side like rampant AIDS’s, violence and incredible promiscuity.
That’s right, all gay people are violent, promiscuous and have AIDS. Straight people are not violent, get STDs, or have multiple partners.
But what business of yours is it how many partners any person has, straight or gay? I find your desire to regulate other people’s sexuality highly immoral.
I am TIRED of hearing about LGBTXYZ every flaming day.
Please don’t curse. I am told your god really doesn’t like that.
As I wrote before, the ultimate Judge will decide.
That’s right. Death will eventually get you, too. So don’t spend your life telling other people how to live theirs. Remember, you only have one. Yes, I know, your miracle man from Nazareth promised you would live on after death, but then he also promised his followers that he would return to them within their lifetime (he really did – just check his book, it’s in there, in multiple places), and he failed to keep his promise. So I wouldn’t place any bets on him.
There’s really too much to answer here and really I don’t care what people do with their plumbing. Defining a person by what they do sexually is a debasement of a human being. We are so much more than that but you wouldn’t know it from popular culture. Unless someone has an inkling of history they think that culture, conveniences and rights drop from the sky. They are unaware of the painfully long process of forging a concept of rights. The idea and practice of freedom for women and for commoners we can thank Judeo-Christian values that secured them over the centuries. Otherwise a woman would still only be a baby machine and anyone not of a royal lineage, expendable. This is fact, not fantasy.
So if you want to call it “designer god”, it still had its uses in lifting society up from the caves. But really if those who despise religion and scorn the Bible, WHY in tarnation do they want their unions “blessed” just like “anyone else”? The issue with regard to marriage is not a deprivation of rights since anyone having reached the age of 18 (in some places lower) can marry. The question is who you can marry, the restrictions having to do with the upbringing and protection of children.
What is happening now is an experiment in social engineering lavishly funded by left wing radicals that over 40 years has been worn down the defenses and sensibilities so much that the frogs who wouldn’t jump into boiling water find it over their necks.
In that same period the institution of marriage has been downgraded as a necessity so divorce and single mothers are pretty much the rule not the exception. So why when common law and civil unions are readily available and accepted, this sudden longing for marriage by same sex couples? It’s well under 4% according to the “Williams Institute at UCLA…2.2 percent of men identify as gay and 1.1. percent of women identify as lesbian…”
http://www.marriagedebate.com/pdf/iMapp.Brief.Demand.pdf
With so few actually beating down the doors of the church or justices of the peace, what is the real issue here? Plainly, it is a move to stretch the definition of marriage so it becomes meaningless. Severing the biological roots of children from the family unit is the nefarious intent here.
http://hira.hawaiideservesbetter.com/pdfs/In-Their-Own-Words.pdf
“..if we scramble our definition of marriage, it will soon embrace relationships that will involve more
than two persons. Prominent advocates hope to use gay marriage as a wedge to abolish governmental support for traditional marriage altogether…“Monogamy is not a word the gay community uses,” Troy Perry told The Dallas Morning News. “We talk about fidelity. That means you live in a loving, caring, honest relationship with your partner. Because we can’t marry, we have people with widely varying opinions as to what that means. Some would say that committed couples could have multiple sexual partners as long as there’s no deception.”… Researchers found that even among stable homosexual partnerships, men have an average of eight partners per year outside their “monogamous” relationship.”
So again, no one is bothering anyone in a common law relationship even in Russia. All this melodrama is about false victimhood and yes, as another poster mentioned, really there are much more important issues in the world. The buck stops where the very foundations of society, the institution of marriage is being ripped apart by the selfish, immature and narcissistic. Most people cannot think past their noses but if they were confronted with the real dire consequences of this social experiment, not its whitewashed presentation by the social media, they would run in horror.
Look, if we’re such a statistically insignificant minority, what in the hell are you scarifying everyone for?
@Derek I am willing to admit that an agenda of social engineering has hijacked a legitimate movement for equality under the law, also that those within and without may not be exactly aware of its ramifications. Totalitarian systems are infamous for trying to explode the family unit, which in its autonomy is a threat to absolute power. Marriage gets to be defined and enforced by the state rather than an outcome of natural processes. Already the freedoms of families to decide what values to teach their children have been upended. But it doesn’t end there, businesses are being run into the ground because they won’t violate their religious principles.
As much as it is distasteful for me to even remember that unfortunate encounter, you can check the police records of Upper Darby, PA for March 1966. If you can’t believe the extent of some people’s dysfunction, why don’t you tell the three victims of that Castro character that kidnapping, rape, and imprisonment didn’t happen? The irony of his getting called by the police back then, is now it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow because masturbation is being taught in some schools! And WHO do we have to thank for bringing us to such a state? It’s a society on the whole obsessed with sex.
And don’t think that person was the last, there was yet another who was probably much worse as he got to live 40 years more and spread his dirt around. While not indicted as the piano teacher on another recent thread, since he is regarded as a harmless eccentric. When a person is so hooked onto sex, it is the ONLY thing in his or her life. He ruined more piano students than can be counted. One girl was the recipient for his dumping of his problems and escapades that went for hours on the telephone. I even hope he is reading this here because I know what he did.
I mentioned civil unions or common law arrangements as being acceptable. Where is the hate and judgement in that? I don’t judge you or anyone because I can’t. You consider what you are doing is right. Fine, good for you!
I don’t understand why you think posting examples of repudiated fringe groups like NAMBLA, and extreme crimes like the Castro kidnapper help your anti-LGBT equality crusade in any way at all Nor does the Castro case typify what you consider the West’s “obsession with sex”. Castro’s crimes of kidnap and torture horrified the nation, and the world. He was arrested, arraigned at court and then quite fittingly departed this life by his own hand.
Why are you holding this internationally despised wretch up as evidence of anything other than that visceral repugnance of such horrendous depravity is alive and well? Do you likewise hold Adolf Hitler up as an example of German statesmanship?
Quite honestly, the one with the obsession here seems to be you.
A concert by the New York Philharmonic with soprano René Fleming, will be picketed in Paris on March 3 by members of Amnesty International.
The group’s organiser, Michaela Alterna, writes: ‘Soprano Fleming was one of the Obama supporters, a group of prominent American musicians, who supported Obama’s presidential campaign and performed at his inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2009. … After years of human rights violations by the Obama administration, the continuation of torture and unlawful renditions, the operation of unlawful concentration camps like Guantanamo Bay, constant breach of international law by illegal warfare with drones, endless killings of civilians in foreign countries under the disguise of a “war on terrorism”, and last but not least an Orwellian world wide surveillance regime of megalomaniac proportions, it is crucial that we use cultural visits to send a message of hope and tolerance.’
Hmm, interesting. Any other interest groups up for bandwaggoning this gig?
I’ll believe that Obama’s a war criminal when I also start to believe that the Tooth Fairy will give me millions of dollars for one of my teeth.
Please read this website’s articles about him, and then get back to me: http://www.thepeoplesview.net/p/search.html
@alter ego There was never any concert in Paris scheduled for Ms. Fleming and the NY Philharmonic. Odd. What were these individuals planning on picketing and what happened?
That guy beating Pussy Riot ladies is NOT policeman. He is dressed like policeman (like cossack, to be more precise), but he does not have any of the police rights.
@Evgeny I was wondering about all the latest Pussy Riot theatrics and if you say this wasn’t a policeman, then maybe he was part of the act? This wouldn’t be the first time by groups craving attention concocting a false scenario of victim-hood. There is however the duck side of sexual politics, or caricature. As with censors who used to monitor public morality by viewing sex films, you could just imagine if they would avert their eyes in disgust or secretly enjoy the show.
Similarly, there is MUCH hypocrisy in countries particularly in countries like Iran or Afghanistan (re: the film the Kite chaser) where the biggest offenders are the ones doing the stoning. This has to do not only with homosexuals but any woman or girl suspected of adultery that could just be alleged speaking to a man not from the family.
As for people who say ugly things, well there is plenty of baiting, abuse and obscenities going around, period. I just wish there were some kind of return to civility as an ideal, not always practiced but at least existing as a standard.
It looks a lot like a publicity stunt.
@Derek’s biblical quotes, above: Can’t beat the good ol’ days, eh?
@Derek re. list: I loved the entry for Michael Alig: Party Promoter, Murderer.
How sad is to see people divided over differences. We are different but are also fully equal. I got a few gay friends and love them to bits. However,in my personal view,they,like ALL of us are in deep need. We`ve all been hurt and broken,we`ve all had gaps that our parents could never fill. Being gay isn`t much of an issue,unless you`re a homophobic,but i wouldn`t celebrate it either-why would you celebrate brokenness? I didn`t feel like celebrating my lust and porn addiction that nearly destroyed me,even thought you might call me `straight`. We `straights` are ANYTHING BUT! We are all so fucked up and that`s why I hate religion and especially blind and spiritually bound church folks,who point fingers only because they aren`t this way. So what-there isn`t a difference folks-we`re all in a dire need of healing. To the religious folk,I say-wake up and instead of judging,see why we all are in the mess we are in-starting with YOU!!! To the gay people I say-get right with your Dads guys and gals,even if they are dead,write them a letter if you have to,get it all out! Don`t look for a lost identity and a Dad`s affirmation in sex,it takes of you more than it gives you,trust me,I`ve been there! A boy never had his Dad or a girl hates the Dad she had,but where do the need for affirmation go? It expresses itself through sexuality,and that`s exactly what happened to me. Gay or `straight`-sexual brokenness is what it is and I wont judge it (otherwise I have to judge myself!)or celebrate it. There is a way where we can all be healed-religious nutters,gay people,straight people,blacks,whites…we all are deeply fucked up…we need a love that satisfies….we need a good,strong and loving father. And I have found my Dad in God and Im sorry to say,I didn`t find Him in church-most often He isn`t there. He is love,not a religious showman or a violent maniac. He wants to be with the hurting,not where people pretend they are ok,neither where they say they love Him but really,deep down,they just use Him as a club to beat others in order to feed their own dirty,insecure,sinful nature. He longs to be with us but will we let him in? He want to heal us and hug us,and hold us-He made us-INDIVIDUALLY! Each one of us is so loved in a very personal way so how dare we judge others? We desperately need God and fuck the church-Jesus came for us,the sinners. We must be crazy not to receive His grace and love. I`m sorry if I`ve offended anyone but that`s my experience and i hate religion cause it destroys lives. God is love
When you define being gay as “brokenness”, you identify with the “love the sinner, hate the sin” brigade. This doesn’t wash I’m afraid. We don’t think of ourselves as “broken”. That’s not a start in life I would inflict on any LGBT child, as the Catholic Church does with its catechism of ‘Original Sin’.
In setting up your argument, you lay your ground speciously, in a quixotic amalgam of Mark Anthony’s “Honourable Men” and Uriah Heep’s “much too ‘umble”, by depicting yourself as “broken” too, so as to appear to be not really judging gays at all. In your world, for me to be “fixed”, the logical opposite of “broken”, I would therefore have to transmogrify into a heterosexual. Since this is impossible, and for me not in any way desirable, since I like myself the way I am, I could never be anything except “broken” in your eyes. I don’t like to keep the company of people who feel sad every time they think about me.
I’m not “in deep need”, and I don’t subscribe to your theology. Moreover, not all religion “destroys lives”, because religion isn’t a homogeneous entity. For example, I can name you dozens of religions like the Quakers that aren’t hostile to LGBT. On the contrary, they offer full sacraments, including communion, ordination to the clergy and same sex marriage. As I’ve argued elsewhere in this forum, the religion megastore spruiks a vast array of designer products ranging from Catholicism to Presbyterianism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, each subordinate to a god with rules widely divergent from his/her rivals.
As has also been argued, the Judaeo Christian tradition has given rise to some of the most enduringly magnificent works of architecture, music, sculpture and art on the planet, and through its charities and positive influences on personal behaviour has transformed lives of many people. Regrettably, some of those “fixed” in this way by religion go on to become the most heinous of judgmental bigots, proselytising like ex-smokers.
Where I part company from religion is in its propensity to bring about wars, stand in the way of science, and disenfranchise minorities like homosexuals. Religion has traditionally been the scourge of the homosexual, but it has also been the scourge of women and racial minorities. Yet I’d still be very reluctant to outlaw it, as was attempted unsuccessfully by the Soviet Union, without having something of equivalent or superior power and value to put in its place.
https://www.facebook.com/358168880614/photos/a.10152177373200615.917239.358168880614/10153898135025615
Speech video here: http://bcove.me/7y2nek99
@George I can cite quite a few gay acquaintances who complained about their absent and/or abusive fathers and/or brothers. One gay woman on a list I belong to said she was molested by a female as a child. OK, there may be those to whom nature breathed into them a desire for the same sex at the age of 14. However, for most sexuality is a process from childhood that entails societal and familial modelling and imprinting.
For those whom this is normal and natural, “live and let live” but for those whose sexuality has been misdirected, could be promiscuity in men or women, there should be the option to change if unwanted.
There is very much a political element that didn’t exist before saying that sexual orientation is “born that way” and resist anything that might contradict it. So for those who are honestly troubled by their sexuality are barred from seeking help. This is ridiculous and unfair.
Also, the fact that we all have to accept a complete alphabet soup of alleged gender differences is disingenuous to say the least. With regard to the “T”, how can “nature” breathe in the notion that their body is wrong for them, if we exclude the idea of pathology, meaning the cognitive dissonance is supposed to be normal and NATURAL? (I won’t go into what nature allegedly has to say about going either way.) There is so much politically correct BS going around sanctioned by the “men in white coats” who have a habit of defying commonsense to the extent of what was dogma 50-60 years ago is summarily discarded and the opposite now sits in its place.
What was done to Alan Turing in the early 50’s was grotesque and criminal, the same with their electric shock “therapies” (that my paternal grandmother underwent), lobotomies back then, and now pass out psychotropic drugs like candy so much that kids are going around in a medically induced haze.
I would rather trust a religious interpretation that has bestowed dignity to individuals (no one said “persecute homosexuals or racial minorities” in the Bible). And as for war and religion, does violence fulfill or violate a belief system? That is the question that should be asked when that point is brought up.
And also, BTW, I am VERY happy about how Christianity has RAISED the status of women in monogamous relationships rather than multiple wives (that also BTW are only possible even in Islam only to those who can afford it).
Gay people become aware of our innate difference very early in life, just as straight people are comfortable with how “normal” they feel, and this substantially predates puberty. Most heterosexual fathers will sense such an emerging difference, and become hostile to their gay son, even before either realises what is going on. The so-called “distant father syndrome” is therefore being misrepresented as the CAUSE of the son’s homosexuality, whereas it is really the RESULT of it, because he is repelled by effeminacy in a male. This explains why a “distant father” won’t have all gay sons, since the disaffection doesn’t beget homosexuality in the first place. “Straight acting” gay males are less likely to suffer the distant father treatment, but are no less homosexual than those who are rejected. I for example enjoy an excellent relationship with my father, closer even than to my mother in many ways.
Likewise, there is no logic to the notion that child abuse turns kids gay. A male child abused by a male pedophile will be substantially damaged, but that lies in the violation of the expectation of appropriate adult behaviour, not in conflict in his orientation, other than a premature awakening of sexuality and horror at the discovery if it turns out he is homosexual, with all the rejection that connotes. A gay child will almost certainly be more vulnerable and easier prey, and if of teenage years may even enjoy the experience sexually while being appalled by it emotionally. Comparably, a female raped by a man doesn’t become more amorous towards men. If anything a woman who has been raped will have trouble trusting and being intimate with men, even with her own husband.
I’m truly amazed that all the gay and lesbian people you claim to have met are either alleged victims of molestation, or are pedophilic alcoholics. This is substantially counterbalanced by the fact that not one of those in my purview resemble such pervasive dysfunction. That’s not to say their childhoods were all plain sailing, not by any means.
One in four gay youths in the USA are rendered homeless on the same day they come out to their religious parents. It’s impossible to see this as a positive for kids, some aged as young as 11, since it forces them into prostitution and substance abuse. It’s also impossible to see this as good parenting. A child who discloses to his family that he is gay isn’t doing so because he is a really sinful heterosexual who contrarily wants to walk on the wild side and eschew the delights of the female body. He simply isn’t remotely interested, and nor was I at any age. Bashing gay kids doesn’t make them more and more heterosexual with every blow, it simply extinguishes their humanity. Maybe that’s what happened to some of your dysfunctional homosexual acquaintances, but do you honestly believe that if the majority of homosexuals are such wretched human beings as you insist on portraying us, any government would give a hoot about equal rights? Take another look at this list and see if you can justify your animus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gay,_lesbian_or_bisexual_people
Finally your preoccupation with “natural” and “normal” is wearing thin. The computer is not “natural”, and left handedness is not “normal”. Homosexuality occurs in nature, so it is natural. That doesn’t make it good or bad, it merely exists. It cannot, and should not be ‘treated’ because the outcomes are well documented as horrendous. Most discomfiture that homosexuals to whom you refer who want to “become heterosexual”, feel is because they see prejudice, violence, disenfranchisement, loss of career and loss of respect as inevitable outcomes. If any treatment is called for it is in trying to help gay people see themselves as less unworthy than the image in which a prejudiced society portrays them.
My own experience has by contrast, been substantially positive throughout my life. I was never rejected by my family, nor my friends, nor my colleagues. I am however all too well aware that not all gay people have enjoyed my own relatively peaceful life path, and some are in high danger in places like Russia, Africa, the Middle East. Even here in the tolerant UK – gay people are still having their teeth bashed in:
http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/uk-bi-teen-18-has-teeth-smashed-brutal-anti-gay-attack280214
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/03/05/uk-shocking-image-teeth-left-smashed-homophobic-teen-attack
The premise concerning abuse and trauma is that repeating the process hopefully will finally “get it right this time”. Read Robin Norwood’s books about the uncanny manner that dysfunctional people pop up in a person’s life who act similar to those adults who abused them. The problem is that repeating the dysfunction serves to compound it, making the grooves deeper and harder to escape. The very obsession with sex is a cue to its pathology, crowding out just about everything else in the world except one’s own narcissistic preoccupation with oneself and scratching that particular itch.
But really what kind of people are SO fixated on their own sexuality so that not only one day passes without referring to it, but probably on an hourly basis? In our culture, one would never guess that sex has a reproductive purpose, duh!!!
You have some incredible neat theories that paint everything in such an idyllic light except for the persecution of the heteros. You still didn’t respond to the high domestic violence of same sex couples in Massachusetts so much that they have a public vigil for the “victims”.
About rejecting fathers because their sons show signs of gayness, I can tell you right away that M’s father did not reject him, his family was accepting of his boyfriends. However, M did admit that while growing up his father was too busy womanizing to spend time with him. And so on…
I really dislike narcissists of any sexual orientation. There are such burning problems all over the world – over 1 million people, families from Syria being uprooted and decimated, living in tents, children being deprived of food and a normal life while there are the spoiled brats who have what to eat but can’t stop talking about themselves and their precious, boring sexuality.
.
“their precious, boring sexuality” gets gays literally stoned to death and burned alive (Google for an abundance of live burnings and stonings of gays, videoed shamelessly on cellphones by salivating crowds), bashed to death (Matthew Shepard and thousands of others), ostracised by their peers, kicked out of living accommodation, fired from their jobs, imprisoned or executed by their government in 78 countries of the world, excommunicated from their church, stripped of their parenthood and of their citizenship (e.g. Russia). The fact that ubiquitous persecution like this bores you, while your proselytize your sanctimonious disdain, tells us all we need to know about the kind of values your religion is inculcating in you.
Regarding your comment about same sex partner violent abuse, you’ll find this is dwarfed by opposite sex partner abuse, and that more young (straight) women are now responsible than young men:
http://www.domesticviolenceresearch.org/pages/12_page_findings.htm
If you persist in citing fringe pedophile, alcoholic, abusive elements of LGBT as representative of our norms, then I might as well respond by citing Fred and Rose West as everyday examples of heterosexual parents.
Sex does have a reproductive purpose, yes. During your life, how may times has this purpose been served for you? A clue lies in how many children you have. If you made two children, then your sexual apparatus has served its reproductive purpose exactly TWICE. The rest of the time its preoccupation is with urination, and “heaven forbid”, mutual pleasure with your spouse.
Sex for procreation is an animal function, whereas sex for love is what makes us human, along with compassion and mutual respect, two qualities you might well consider adopting for yourself towards others different from you. The love expressed between two human beings is a beautiful thing. In humans of any gender, sex takes us into a new array of purposes. Human sex involves emotional bonding and the dreams and promises of lovers. Beyond the physical, human sex also involves the psychological and the spiritual, toward higher things. And since the spiritual dimension of human sexual sharing is the highest and most significant, it is what determines the unique nature of human sexuality, so that is what must be preserved. Not mere rutting procreation, but genuine care and loving are non-negotiables of human sex.
I would really like to distance myself from accusations of judging or having an animus. Concerning the latter, if I have a strong dislike, it is for BS parading as fact.
First of all, in as much as movements like to have mythologies to justify themselves, the Matthew Shepard case raises more questions than answers. In fact, it seems more like an “inside job”.
http://www.advocate.com/print-issue/current-issue/2013/09/13/have-we-got-matthew-shepard-all-wrong?page=full
The author of the Book of Matt “…Jimenez does not entirely resolve the true nature of McKinney’s relationship to Shepard, partly because of his unreliable chief witness. McKinney presents himself as a “straight hustler” turning tricks for money or drugs, but others characterize him as bisexual. A former lover of Shepard’s confirms that Shepard and McKinney had sex while doing drugs in the back of a limo owned by a shady Laramie figure, Doc O’Connor. Another subject, Elaine Baker, tells Jimenez that Shepard and McKinney were friends who had been in sexual threesome with O’Connor.”
The Greeks had a better means of avoiding the confusion the one word for “love” entails for the undiscriminating. Eros, that is, desire or lust, is not the same as agape, which is disinterested concern for the other’s well being. In fact, unbridled eros can lead to crimes of passion up to and including murder. (Anyone see the opera Carmen?) Conflating genuine care and love with multiple partners, exhibitionism, spreading around STD’s and AIDS is only for the very stupid to accept.
If one really loves, then the overall hygiene of society should be the main concern, not elevating sensual pleasures to the status of holy.
I’m sorry but the general attitude and this bears out with my own personal experience: “If we can’t have it (marriage, traditional values, etc.), we’ll destroy it for everyone else who does.”
I don’t care about what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms and hope they will keep it there. Rather, I am distressed about a social engineering experiment happening right under our noses that can turn out to be the Trojan Horse that no one will be able to get rid of, destroying society as we once knew it. Good willed people who earnestly do not want to hurt others join the bandwagon but as most people are not thinkers, they will not be aware of the consequences. Those who set this process in motion about 40 years ago however knew damn well what they were doing.
This starts with the misunderstanding of the concept of rights and padding the meaning of the word so it becomes meaningless. There is no intrinsic right to self-indulgence particularly when elevating that concept trumps the rights of others. One recent fallout is the ridiculous right of transgendered to use restrooms of the opposite sex because they imagine themselves as having the wrong body. A more serious corollary however is depriving children to have a mother and father. Who decided that children do not need male and female modelling, not to mention the traditional nurturing of a mother and the strong protection of a father?
The freedom of religious belief is now being subverted if it doesn’t fall in line with political correctness, what people can or cannot say on the streets or even preach in their own churches. Businesses are being run into the ground if they don’t bake cakes or take pictures of same sex weddings, or not wanting to host same sex couples in a Family Bed and Breakfast. Charities have been forced to close down if they believe that placing a child with a father and mother is in its best interest. This is getting progressively worse.
This is a much bigger deal than the “live and let live” that was allegedly sought out originally by the gay community. Having special protections is not the answer either since one can get beaten up just because someone doesn’t like your face or even beheaded in Britain by feral Islamists.
The real face of this movement is expressed by sneering at any notion of public decency and forever pushing the lowest limits in the so-called Pride Parades.
http://www.campaignlifecoalition.com/shared/media/editor/file/Pride_2010_4-lg.jpg
If people really want to strut their ugly bods, let them rent a convention center closed off from the general public and have a Lupercalia or dance naked around a Golden Calf. I and my children shouldn’t have to avoid walking down any street because we might be confronted with visual pollution. And this is only the tip of the iceberg:
http://www.campaignlifecoalition.com/shared/media/editor/file/Pride-2010-Mock-Sex-Acts-LG.jpg
http://www.campaignlifecoalition.com/shared/media/editor/file/1-Bondage-Pride-LG.jpg
All the above is teaching Russia, Middle East, India, China and Africa what they can expect once Pandora’s box of rights is opened. If you want to want to convince these countries that the intent is benign, then seriously consider cleaning up your acts.
The notion of rights should be soberly confronted, what would benefit society more, opening the floodgates to sexual license (calling it LUVVE) or the protection of children in traditional family units, shielded from sexual propaganda and living pornography on the streets.
You don’t like the word “animus”? Very well then, let’s settle for “contempt”.
I’m well aware that aspects of Shepard’s legacy are now contested, but that doesn’t get away from the fact that his murderers felt perfectly secure their “gay panic defence” would mitigate their crime, or from the fact that gay people are bullied, hunted, bashed and killed daily if not hourly somewhere in the world for merely existing. Anti-gay bullying, assault and killing are rife, and you know they are. Worst of all, the fires of hate are being stoked by none other than religion itself, the scourge of the homosexual:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1163510/All-homosexuals-stoned-death-says-Muslim-preacher-hate.html
YouTube Muslim video votes to kill all gays:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV710c1dgpU
Westboro Baptist Church:
http://www.godhatesfags.com
I’m sure you’re also well aware that myths often prevail over facts, and no better example exists than Christianity itself. Do you really want me to do your research for you and dredge up every untainted murder caused by pure and unadulterated homophobia? How about the murder of oneself? Here are some bullying related US gay teenager suicides (in no particular order) to occupy your afternoon. Will you now pick out a couple of meth-heads to prove they ALL brought it on themselves?
Jaheem Herrera 11yo
http://rodonline.typepad.com/rodonline/2009/04/antigay-bullying-drives-11yo-georgia-buy-to-suicide.html
Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover 11yo
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/mom_says_springfield_boy_11_wh.html?category=Deaths+category=Education+category=Springfield%3B
Kenneth James Weishuhn Jr 14yo
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/14-year-old-gay-iowa-teen-bullied-to-death-report/news/2012/04/16/38145
Jamie Hubley 15yo
http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Gay_Ottawa_teen_takes_own_life-10909.aspx
Jamey Rodemeyer 14yo
http://globalgrind.com/news/jamey-rodemeyer-suicide-funeral-lady-gaga-bullying-photos-video
Seth Walsh 13yo
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023083,00.html
Justin Aaberg 13yo
http://www.towleroad.com/2010/09/yet-another-gay-teen-lost-to-bullying-suicide-in-minnesota.html
Kameron Jacobsen 14yo
http://releasedorothy.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/14-year-old-bullied-new-yorker-commits-suicide/
Billy Lucas 15yo
http://www.care2.com/causes/education/blog/bullied-indiana-teen-commits-suicide/
Cody Barker 17yo
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/09/23/gay-teenager-kills-himself-in-wisconsin
Asher Brown 13yo
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/asher-brown-13-yr-old-commits-suicide-over-bullying-2686147.html
Raymond Chase 19yo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/01/raymond-chase-suicide_n_746989.html
Tyler Clementi 18yo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Tyler_Clementi
Brandon Bitner 14yo
http://www.queerty.com/suicide-brandon-bitner-14-kills-himself-in-early-morning-tractor-trailer-suicide-20101108/
Rafael Morelos 14yo
http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2012/feb/05/vigil-sheds-light-on-bullying
Jeffrey Fehr 18yo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/17/jeffrey-fehr-gay-california-teen-cheerleader-suicide_n_1211623.html
Dominic Crouch 15yo (and his dad 6 months later)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2068532/Roger-Crouch-father-bullied-boy-Dominic-committed-suicide-dies-suddenly.html
Jordan Yenor 14yo
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019035/9-student-suicides-Michele-Bacmanns-Minnesota-linked-anti-gay-bullying.html
Lance Lundsten 18yo
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/03/gay_teen_lance_lundsten_death_ruled_suicide.php
Aaron Jurek 15yo
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096922/9-student-suicides-Michele-Bacmanns-Minnesota-linked-anti-gay-bullying.html
Samantha Johnson 13yo
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019035/9-student-suicides-Michele-Bacmanns-Minnesota-linked-anti-gay-bullying.html
Thomas John ‘TJ’ Hayes
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019035/9-student-suicides-Michele-Bacmanns-Minnesota-linked-anti-gay-bullying.html
EricJames Borges 19yo
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086123/Eric-James-Borges-Gay-teen-film-maker-commits-suicide.html
Brandon Elizares 16yo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/14/brandon-elizares-gay-teen-commits-suicide-leaves-note_n_1598272.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009
David Hernandez 16yo
http://www.queerty.com/long-island-teen-commits-suicide-after-possible-anti-gay-bullying-20121010
Josh Pacheco 17yo
http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/bullied-gay-teen-michigan-commits-suicide051212
Tim Ribberink 20yo
http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/parents-publish-suicide-note-bullied-gay-son071112
Carlos Vigil 17yo
http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2013/07/bullied-n-m-gay-teen-posts-suicide-note-online-before-taking-his-own-life
AJ Betts 16yo
http://www.queerty.com/gay-teen-is-fifth-suicide-in-five-years-at-iowa-high-school-20130729/
Jacob Rogers 18yo
http://www.metroweekly.com/news/last_word/2012/01/another-gay-teen-phillip-parker-commits-suicide-af.html
Phillip Parker 14yo
http://www.metroweekly.com/news/last_word/2012/01/another-gay-teen-phillip-parker-commits-suicide-af.html
Jadin Bell 15yo
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/30/another_bullied_gay_teen_commits_suicide
I’m also well aware of the usefulness of the Greek categorisation of love into Agape, Eros and Philos. We modern day Barbarians are no less able to perceive these distinctions than the Ancient Greeks, even without the aid of lexical precision. I see no benefit in constructing a hierarchy of worthiness of one over another. When you enter into a marriage with another human being, promising lifelong fealty, there’s nothing surer than that you WANT that without all your heart, and surer still, that erotic passion for the object of your desire is driving it as a furnace drives a locomotive. I’ll bet money that when you proposed to your wife, it wasn’t to ensure other people would think you were ‘normal’, and that it was in your particular translation of the Bible. Atheists get married and have kids too, you know.
Your assertion that our desire to register monogamous fidelity in same sex relationships as marriage connotes a malfeasance to extirpate that which you have, is ridiculous. It is nothing of the kind. It is the polar opposite. Every time you attribute malice to my motives, I am going to deny it, because it is entirely false. The to and fro may outlast the existence of this thread.
Keep it shorter, please. These posts are off-topic and excessive.
…and if that is not an example both of “British Understatement” and a “Charitable Rebuke”, I dont know what is!
While every teenage suicide is a tragedy and case unto itself, it is known that that period is one of angst and searching for anyone going through it. As for bullying and rejection, who in the world hasn’t experienced it one way or another? Even bullies exhibit their weak egos by forcing others. They can’t tolerate any actual or implied criticism. The point is what makes a person feel (as Rose in the Titanic film) that there is no way out? Not everyone responds to adversity by self-destruction. A solid set of values, consistent modelling by adults and teachers build the character that withstands the storms of life.
As for myself, I never proposed to a wife, rather I got proposed to. And I don’t attribute any malice to your motives. I simply don’t care about them. There’s a certain amount of solipsism that repels me to no end whenever this subject comes up. My concern and I repeat has to do with the political implications as in the above thread header, hijacking concerts or events in order to make a political statements. That’s all.
Dismissing suicide by gay teenagers as just one of those things is tantamount to saying world war is nothing more than a mere tragedy because it happens all the time, and by so doing creates the impression that the mere utterance of the phrase removes it from cogency. Everybody has these problems, so let’s not address them? In any event, gay teenagers suicide at up to 6x the national average, so it is clearly NOT just some thing that everyone goes through at all. The comfort of knowing that bullies who drive teenagers to suicide are weak is lost on both perpetrator and victim, I’m afraid, once suicide ideation advances the final, fatal step. The gay teenager who suicides does so for reasons comparable to those of the revolutionary for whom life inside a prison becomes more tolerable than life outside it.
I don’t quite get the relevance of your response that you “got proposed to”, as distinct from having proposed to your present wife yourself. I don’t want to make this any more personal than it has already become, other than relevantly to ask whether this means you remain in the relationship under sufferance? If not, how does who proposed to whom matter, if the ardour is equally felt? And if it is not felt, then are you holding up a lack of emotional connection between husband and wife as examples?
For someone who “doesn’t care” about my motives, you’ve written screeds. The allegation of solipsism is not material to the primary case for equal and fair treatment. Put another way, if homosexuals were not being appallingly mistreated in most parts of the world, how likely do you think we would be to protest? In other words, who made the first move?
What actually produces world wars is not simple cause and effect and I daresay what makes for teenage suicide. Being out and visible has not reduced that statistic nor has it of AIDS. So there must be something else operative. You can’t force others to like you and human psychology has it that the more in the face you are of others, the more they resent it. The way to get friends or sympathy is to prove yourself and for those who do not want to listen, ignore them. The constant flaunting of sexuality has the opposite effect, not celebration, but when it is all going to STOP and don’t they think of ANYTHING ELSE?
I care more about how the radical homosexualist agenda is bullying Western society, depriving children of mothers and fathers while eroding freedom of speech and religion. Yes, and at least one person a young woman in college committed suicide because her principles were sneered and hounded at in her social work course. Others are forced into silence to accept what they don’t agree with so as not to fail or as it is now in many places, lose their jobs. This is the result of the inversion of “rights”.
BTW, in the Middle East homosexuals are not appallingly treated except for Iran where alleged adulterous women are stoned to death. More women are killed in the ME because of family honor than guys who just do their thing and on the whole are not bothered by anyone else. This is the cognitive dissonance between what Westerners think they know about societies that are constructed and function differently. They gallop into them like Don Quixotes (as in Iraq, Egypt, etc.,) preaching FREEDOM! RIGHTS! and wind up by making things worse than ever.
And as for your other incorrect suppositions, I don’t have a wife, never said I did.
You’re comfortable with laws that imprison homosexuals and sentence us to death. Allow me, as a homosexual, to feel very uncomfortable indeed about them. Your ‘whataboutism’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism is a distraction that should fool no-one.
If there is any “flaunting of sexuality” going on, it’s predominantly and overwhelmingly heterosexual, but I don’t see a world soaked in sexual excess the way you do. I don’t know what part of town you live in or what shows you watch on television, but in my city of Edinburgh, and on the programmes I CHOOSE to watch, life isn’t a perpetuum mobile of live pornography, homosexual or otherwise, nor anything remotely resembling it. I can walk down the street, go to the grocery store, visit the library and not see anyone copulating with either sex, nor even necking. The occasional couple holding hands maybe, but to me that is charming. To you with your obsessional paranoia on all things sexual, it is a monstrous affront and should be stamped out.
Live your life and allow me to live mine. Fortunately, for now at least, it’s still a free country.
In the Middle East, which I can cite from personal experience, archaic rules still exist on the books that people in general just avoid flaunting and live in peace. However, radical Islamists want to reinstall them as in Iran with stoning of adulteresses (not men so much), in Syria where a thief had his hand cut off and likewise in some African countries particularly Nigeria.
This reactionary phenomenon is ironically, the result of tragically misguided Western do gooders spreading their doctrine of rights and freedom while making things infinitely much worse than ever.
I don’t want to make this response the length of an encyclopedia article (not permitted anyway) since the numbers are disputed according to what data is examined, however, the people most persecuted in the world, not for actions but for their religious identity are Christians with actual martyrs that include children.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9041841/the-war-on-christians/
In Iraq the population of 1.5 million Christians in 1991 has dwindled to less than one third of that number. (Thanks Bush, pater et filius!!!)
“North Korea is widely considered the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian, where roughly a quarter of the country’s 200,000 to 400,000 Christians are believed to be living in forced labour camps for their refusal to join the national cult around founder Kim Il Sung.” And so on.
When the numbers are gathered up from all four corners of the world, they are quite staggering given the absence of media support and the reluctance to over dramatize the plight of Christians since they are supposed to be war mongers and colonizers anyway.
So, to answer you what you imagine I am comfortable with, frankly, I put it ALL in perspective. With regard to the Middle East again, libertine Western values that pour into the homes unchecked through TV programs, yes, they are the target of the radicals. They don’t want as a logical outcome pushing the limits of decency, naked Lupercalias strutting down the streets. Cairo doesn’t want it and neither does Moscow. If modesty is considered a value in Edinburgh, Christian tradition has a lot to do with it.
I also need to repeat since you really don’t get it the first or X time, I DON’T CARE about you or sexual obsessors as long as they keep it to themselves. My MAIN concern is the promotion of an insidious radical agenda to transform society, also pompously cloaked in the notion of “rights” that is already infringing upon rights of speech, religion and what one can do in a private business.
Belonging to a religion is an act of choice whereas having an innate homosexual orientation is not, unless you acquire a same sex partner. However persecution you describe of Christians is just as deplorable as persecution of gays on comparable grounds, i.e. the exercise of your right to belong to any religion your heart takes you to, and the exercise of your right to belong to any partner your heart takes you to. The two are analogous in terms of choice that each connotes.
Insofar as “Western meddling” has allegedly exacerbated the rights abuses of women, Christians and homosexuals, you are in effect accusing the United Nations, and the International Declaration of Human Rights, which many of these misogynist, racist and homophobic regimes have nevertheless signed up to, of meddlesomeness.
Kindly identify which cities have “naked Lupercalias strutting down the streets” as a quotidian norm. I might add to my holiday destination list of possibilities – research purposes only, you understand.
I’m sorry, Derek, most of your explanations are too facile, simplistic and melodramatic for me. This is not the place to fill out and add depth into some of the points. It would require too much time and energy refuting “born not made” for instance, that have so many exceptions to the rule, particularly women who are quite fluid in their relationships, not to mention the complexity of a developing sexuality, so as to be rendered meaningless; “follow your heart” being a euphemism for lust, not bad in itself but let’s be honest especially when partners get into the double or even triple digit; “persecution” when people don’t even CARE about your sexual orientation and are TIRED of hearing it AGAIN and AGAIN.
And that holds true for the Middle East that is probably the same as it was back in the time of TE Lawrence. No one is going around banging church doors for the right to marriage because most are not interested and some are already married anyway to women.
It was Al Qaida that stormed the US Ambassador’s compound in Libya. If it weren’t for the radicals, that would have been a most cushy job with attractive perks.
I already posted links to the yearly Toronto debauch. Boston is just as bad, if not worse. Nudity has been such a problem even outside parades that new city ordinances in California are needed to stop this stupid and childish exhibitionism.
You castigate my “melodrama” with this: ” TIRED of hearing it AGAIN and AGAIN”? If you’re so tired of hearing it, stop throwing down your handbag and trouncing about the debating chamber with provocatively misleading nonsense and I will desist forthwith from challenging it in perpetuo. If anything is “simplistic”, it is your tediously repetitious contention that homosexuals are nothing more than heterosexuals making sinful choices, and that whereas gays are driven solely by “lust”, superior heterosexuals like your goodself have a sexuality that is driven not by carnal desire, but by the purest virtue – a virtue that is hardly more desirable than it is attainable. Let me stop you right there. Men who marry women lust after their wives, who, for a while at least, lust right back at them. There is nothing wrong with such sexual desire, nor with same or opposite sex partners manifesting it. There is also nothing wrong with such relationships being portrayed in film, television, opera, theatre and dance as semiotic of the human condition. You think there is, I think there is not. We will never agree so we will have to agree to disagree.
You melodramatically declare “people don’t even CARE about your sexual orientation”. How then do you explain the 78 countries that imprison homosexuals, 7 with the death penalty, Nigerian courts recently handing down sentences for 4 gay men to be publicly lashed for being in same sex relationships, and as many recently sentenced to death in Iran, pogroms against gays in Russia and throughout Africa? If that’s how people who “don’t care” behave, what might one expect from people who DO care? For someone who “doesn’t care”, you’ve wasted voluminous amounts of my time and yours making it obvious in upper case letters how very much you care. People who don’t care, shrug their shoulders and move on, they don’t keep shouting “I DON’T CARE” x infty
Your claim that exhibitionist once a year parades in a few cities around the world are the quotidian homosexual norm is as mendaciously absurd as if I were to proffer Folies Bergère as the heterosexual norm Stop pretending you’re being forced to watch these parades every day. You know where and when they are, and you can far more easily not see them than see them. The fact is that neither homosexuals nor heterosexuals live out their lives in perpetual pornography, and you know it, nor are these parades pornographic, otherwise they would be being fined for indecency, or banned altogether. They are no more indecent than bathers at the seaside or the Folies Bergère.
Honestly, if you’re so pathologically disgusted by nudity, don’t go to the beach, and wear underpants in the bath.
Actually, cj, in the civilized world, acceptance of LBGT minorities is growing now and their legal rights including marriage are gaining lately, so your point of view is apparently losing, fortunately. As for your constant complaint about children being deprived of mothers and fathers, you are yet to name a single child who was legally taken away by anyone from his or her biological parents who were willing and able to raise that child.
So Africa, China, India, the Middle East, some Balkan states and Russia are not “civilized”? How interesting!
BTW, adoptive children that would have gone to traditional couples have been diverted to other arrangements in order to fulfil a quota in conformity to political correctness. Catholic Charities in some states in the US have been forced to close because they (horrors!) believe that children should have a mother and father.
Yes, cj, relatively speaking, most of the countries and regions you have listed are unfortunately less civilized than the rest of the world. As for the question of children, all I asked for was a single name. Sadly, there are far more children in the world waiting to be adapted than heterosexual couples wanting to adapt them, so the “diverting” argument makes no sense at all.
@m2n2k Adopting a child is a bureaucratic nightmare. Therefore many warm, loving couples are blocked from accepting children.
As for other countries being less civilized than the West, that is such insulting hogwash.
If anything, Westerners have taught the world how to destroy the environment, in other words, how to p*ss in the pool that everyone is swimming in. If you don’t believe that, check articles on ocean pollution and what sea gulls die from, a lot of it having swallowed plastic items and other trash floating around.
Of course adapting is not an easy procedure, but it looks like coming up with facts confirming your fear-mongering statements is even harder. As for the other subject, I am truly sorry for the seagulls but I also believe that countries’ level of civility is determined by their treatment of their minorities and that of course includes LBGT populations. When gays are being systematically mistreated and discriminated against, it is a good indication that such country’s actions toward its other minorities are bad too – and that means a lower level of civility.