The civil rights battle of our time

Yes, it has been a while since I've written. I'm putting on a Road Rally this evening (similar to a scavenger hunt) with two friends. We're doing it because we won last year. All the clues are now created, all the support forms printed, all the envelopes stuffed and I have some time before I pick up the huge order of sandwiches. So here are just a few things that I've collected over the last week but didn't have time to write about.


Three congressmen -- Mark Schauer, John Dingell, and John Lewis (on the receiving end of bludgeons during Civil Rights marches) -- say health care is the civil rights battle of our time. I'd agree, even if it bumps gay rights down a peg or two.


An anti-gay group spokesman looked at the recently publicized bones of a 4.4 million year old proto-human and declared she shows evidence of pair-bonding -- which proves the definition of marriage hasn't changed in 4.4 million years. Never mind the evidence of pair-bonding is tenuous at best and that such bonding could just as easily be gay as straight and that rituals of marriage probably didn't develop until 40 thousand years ago. There's this to ponder: I thought they didn't believe in evolution.


The gay side of the marriage battle in Maine has been producing some hard-hitting ads in response to the lies the Fundies have been telling. Alas, that means they are playing defense -- the Fundies still control the message -- and the side that plays defense rarely wins. Sigh.


Try this experiment: Assign some students to be prisoners and some to be guards. Watch what happens. The experiment had to be stopped within a week because the guards were heaping so much abuse on the prisoners. That has become known as the Lucifer Effect. Given the right circumstances we all can become evil. One wonders if this is contributing to the way Fundies are treating gays?


The logic can leave you scratching your head. For instance, there is a push by PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-gays) to overturn DC's sexual orientation protections. Since they are now straight, don't they want the ordinance to protect them too? Have there ever been hate crimes perpetrated against ex-gays? But PFOX doesn't protect ex-gays, it works to make gays miserable so that they turn to discredited therapy to become ex-gay. So protections for gays means discrimination of ex-gays -- if you don't let us beat up gay people you're discriminating against us! Our organization with wither away!



"A village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot. It's as simple as that ... we have a village idiot in this country—it is called Fundamentalist Christianity." Frank Schaeffer on the Rachel Maddow Show