#Pride101

Liberty Counsel (rule of thumb: "Liberty" almost always means "hate gay people") has made a lucrative industry of selling hatred toward gay people as an easy-sell loss leader to promoting less visceral add-on products like hatred toward non-Evangelicals and boycotts of Disney. Since 1989, they've enjoyed tax-free access to politicians and influence on public policy in their quest to literally kill gay people--among other undesirables--by halting funding on AIDS research, killing sex-education programs, preventing access to HPV vaccines, and defunding Planned Parenthood's low- and no-cost medical services. And now this: Liberty Counsel Chariman Matt Staver has issued a de facto endorsement of lynching gay and transgender people by removing them from a Senate anti-lynching bill. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated Liberty Counsel as an official hate group in 2015, yet it continues to exert influence on our elected representatives. Thankfully, many members of Congress oppose Liberty Counsel's amoral depravity and actively fight for all of our citizens. But it's clearly an ongoing war between good and Liberty Counsel's evil. THIS IS WHY WE NEED TO UNITE UNDER THE BANNER OF PRIDE.

#Pride101

Probably every gay, lesbian and trans person you know has been called a faggot. Or worse. I have. More times than I can remember. Probably every gay, lesbian and trans person you know has had something thrown at them with the intention to hurt or humiliate them. I have. It was a barrage of eggs as some friends and I stood on a sidewalk in Chicago's Boystown. Where we'd assumed we were immune from such bullshit. The worthless cowards who threw the eggs missed all of us and ran away cackling like they were big men who somehow mattered in the world. Many gay, lesbian and trans people have been physically, violently assaulted. I never have, but I have friends who've been assaulted so violently that they've been hospitalized. It's 2019. The homophobic violence that our forebears endured may have lessened, but it hasn't stopped. But we all still get up, walk out the door every day, and live our lives as openly as we dare and as comfortably as we can. THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

#Pride101

Before the 1969 Stonewall riots, virtually every aspect of being gay was illegal to varying degrees in America: being openly gay, showing public affection, having any kind of sex, marriage, adoption, assembly in public, assembly in private, going to gay bars … even owning bars with any form of gay designation. The only gay bars that existed were owned by crime syndicates, who definitely weren’t at the vanguard of fighting for gay liberation; they saw in the gay population a steady and highly dependent form of revenue that the mobs could protect via their considerable influence over law enforcement. We were exploited for our desperate need to find each other and for the money we were willing to pay to feel like we weren’t alone. We paid exorbitant prices for watered-down, bottom-shelf liquor. We gathered in buildings that were unclean, unsafe and unimportant to society. The subtexts were shame, risk, secrecy, and arrest and public humiliation if we were caught entering or exiting these bars. But in the gathering momentum of our achievements in equality over the last half century, our forebears demanded--and slowly, surely got--our growing equality and our freedom to live our lives openly and safely and without imposed shame and exploitation. THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

#Pride101

It's 2019--a literal half century after the Stonewall riots and the dawn of our demands for equality, justice and our right to exist in peace--and "religious" leaders like Tennessee pastor--and sheriff's detective Grayson Fritts--just today today are angrily demanding "the death penalty for someone being a homosexual" from their pulpits and on their wide-reaching media "ministries" and inciting continued harassment and violence against us from their morally bankrupt followers. And we continue to resist and survive and love and support each other and live the open, brave lives that our forebears fought so hard to pass down to us. THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Wasn't he the host of The Dating Qame?

Plus NOT QUILTY sounds vaguely homophobic. I find this to be totally rude.

Yay!

Actions beget consequences, Sarah

And feigned victimhood begets FUCK YOU. You can't deny your cake and eat it too.

If we locked guns in cages would we get the same lack of #MAGA anger and uproar?

Ah, the modern Republican Party!

No homo

Remember this picture?

It circulated on social media late last year toward the end of Trump's campaign. I wrote about how disturbing it was at the time -- disturbing for its vulgarity, disturbing for its public invitation to apparently consensual rape, disturbing for the Zeitgeist of near-normalized, something-to-be-seen-as-humorous sexual assault that it represented.

It popped up in my Facebook memories this weekend ... just as we as a country are being newly assaulted by avalanches of revelations about institutionalized, systemic, male-privilege sexual assault wrought by Harvey Weinstein and his ilk. The coincidence that this Facebook memory appeared now is odd in itself for its almost-year-to-the-date timing, but it's also horrifyingly disturbing for the fact that Trump's 2016 pussy-grabbing braggadocio has been buried -- albeit under an entire year of his almost daily acts of catastrophic, psychopathic incompetence -- to the point that we as a society have almost forgotten about it ... or at least become numbly inured to it.

Many of the facts of what I wrote a year ago have changed -- I am now among the legions of people who have all but permanently ended relationships with Trump-defending friends and Trump-apologist conservative newsfeeds, and I cringed as I saw that in this post I'd tempered my outrage over this picture and what it represented by mentioning cat videos and me looking at pictures of men in speedos -- but my underlying incredulity, repulse and outrage have only grown in the last year.

Here is what I wrote, without being edited to reframe the snapshot of my mindframe and emotion a year ago. Re-reading it has both shown me how I've evolved in my white-male-privilege-I'm-never-going-to-do-it-and-it's-never-going-to-happen-to-me subconscious attitudes on the issue in the last 12 months and alerted me to the fact that I'm still not done purging those subconscious attitudes:

I subscribe to both liberal and conservative newsfeeds on Facebook and I have thoughtful, principled friends and acquaintances on here from multiple locations across the political continuum. As such, when I scroll through my personal Facebook feed, I see about 3% share-if-you-love-your-sister memes, 4% I-bet-you're-not-smart-enough-to-pass-this-egregiously-stupid-quiz clickholes, 9% adorable cat videos, 17% pictures of hot guys in speedos, and 943% political memes, forwards, rants and breathlessly dire warnings about the future of our very galaxy if X or Y becomes president. Aside from the occasional legitimate news article or mini essay from a thoughtful friend, most of what's on my feed is just noise between adorable cat videos. But it's still noise I pay attention to.

It's no secret that I have a visceral loathing for everything related to Donald Trump, from his willful ignorance to his inability to form a coherent sentence to his national isolationism to the sense of legitimacy he gives to racists, misogynists, homophobes and proud low-information voters. I realize there are deplorables on both sides of the aisle -- along with gotcha pictures and footage documenting their collective stupidity -- and I'm inured enough that I'm able to ignore the extremes in an attempt to form what I admit is a highly biased but still open-eared personal knowledge base as a citizen and voter.

But.

This picture of a Trump supporter in her hand-lettered shirt has appeared from multiple sources in my feed. At first I just scrolled past it like it was so much extremist noise. But it kept appearing, as more and more sexual-assault accusations piled up against Trump. It kept appearing as Trump dismissed some of his accusers as not hot enough for his tastes. It kept appearing as the idea of consent was thoroughly parsed by everyone from Morning Joe to Rush Limbaugh.

And this picture ... this gleeful woman giving pretty explicit consent for Donald Trump to sexually assault her ... this overweight woman presumably knowing full well that her body is nowhere near Donald Trump's beauty-pageant-level standards of attractiveness ... this judgment-impaired woman who not only found nothing wrong with wearing her message of consent with an arrow pointing to her vagina in public but who happily let herself be photographed in it by someone who obviously let it go viral on the Internet ... this picture thoroughly sickened me.

This woman willingly lowered herself to Donald Trump's lowest form of low. She let herself be mocked and vilified and humiliated on the world stage. And for what? Did she change anyone's vote? Did she elevate the national dialogue? Did she impress her family and friends? Did she advance her cause?

Was it worth it? Did she get her wish?

So how does this work?

Do I pick one from each column or do I get to mix and match any three like on the Denny's value menu? Or is this one of those brain teasers where I have to re-organize the list so the first letter of every line spells a common phrase or a popular song title? Or maybe I have to clear the board -- which automatically disqualifies me because I refuse to be yoga pants as a matter of principle. They should really pass out leaflets with the rules spelled out clearly or nobody's going to play ... which means nobody will ever win Eternal Damnation.

#NotVeryIntelligentlyDesigned

If. Only.

Just this month, Franklin Graham in a fiery keynote speech at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians -- yes, apparently that's a thing now -- declared without citing figures or sources beyond his own made-upness that "I am sure the number of Christians who are in prison or martyred each year would stagger our mind if we really knew what the total number really was."

Oh, the heartbreak of "if only." And I'm sure the collective singular "our mind" was just a typo in the transcript. Because surely these hapless persecution victims have more than one mind between them.

Putin's cock holster

I know #FireColbert is about ten news cycles ago but I spent my lunch hour today watching Paul Ryan all but literally screaming behind the House podium that it's essentially more important to keep a not-racist-at-all repeal-Obamacare promise than to replace it with something fair, equitable, just, true, or even refined through bipartisan negotiation and medical review. And since the grab-'em-by-the-pussy trumpcare plan that Ryan is so screamingly demanding into existence jaw-droppingly classifies rape as a pre-existing condition and there's nothing I can do to stop any of this moral, catastrophically loathsome carnage, I want to talk about something else.

So, yeah. That is-it-or-isn't-it-homophobic thing Colbert said.

Was it inappropriate? Yes.
Was it vulgar? Yes.
Did it lower the national political dialogue? Yes.
Was it offensive? The definition of offensive is highly personal and objective so I wouldn't even presume to make generalized judgments on behalf of the electorate. Clearly, enormous swaths of the population found Colbert's gay joke to be offensive for a range of personal and sometimes transparently political reasons. (I had no idea that conservative religious bigots were so concerned about homophobia and the moral importance of political correctness until this week.) I personally found his joke to be offensive more for its played-out lack of cleverness than for its crude sexual content. And even then, my only real reaction to it was that it was oddly out of character for him.

But the big gay elephant in the room is the homophobia question.

I'm a gay man. So I'm going to claim a level of earned authority on the topic. And I found his joke to be totally homophobic, but only in the best possible way. Colbert has years of well-documented bona fides establishing him as an intelligent, clever, evolved-world man who is in no way offended or threatened by homosexuality. Trump and Putin, however, have years of well-documented bona fides establishing them as vain, reactionary, defensive, narcissistic, homophobic bigots whose sand-and-fog masculinity prevents them from even joking about being gay. So Stephen Colbert accusing them of having big gay sex with each other on nationwide television probably brought them both some level of out-of-proportion self-loathing humiliation, no matter how much they might insist it didn't. Lord knows it offended their snowflake base to its gay-hating core.

I get that who I am shouldn't be used as an insult or a punchline. I also get that using who I am as an insult or a punchline lessens me as an equal in the half-wit minds of people who probably shouldn't be given that emotional ammunition.

But you know what? In this case I don't care. It's clear Putin has some sort of control over Trump, and political-cartooning it through a gay-sex metaphor simultaneously amplifies the scrutiny it deserves and sabotages their paragon-of-masculinity peacockery. And aside from contacting my legislators -- one of whom is on record anyway admitting he doesn't listen to or read the messages his constituents send him -- there's nothing I can do to stop their march to the sea but share my well-researched and hopefully-well-reasoned opinions and ridicule them with everything in my lexical arsenal. Those stupid faggots.

And for the record: Whether or not Trump and Putin are, in fact, having big gay sex with each other, as of this writing and as far as my research can confirm, the MacArthur-Meadows Amendment to the unholy "repeal and replace" trumpcare plan classifies rape, domestic violence and even Cesarean sections as pre-existing conditions.

Those stupid faggots.

Was it worth it?

Relive the horror here

No, really. That whole time you were filling the pot with water ... standing by the stove waiting for it to boil ... thinking and planning what you were going to do with it ... carrying it carefully over to the sleeping faggots so you wouldn't hurt yourself the way you intended to hurt them ...

Was it worth it?

Fifteen minutes of planning and preparation to inflict two lifetimes of agony and suffering and disfigurement and torment and humiliation. And for what? To prove that you're a man? To make sure those sleeping, defenseless faggots will forever know that they're less than human and deserving of unprovoked, unforeseeable physical violence?

It wasn't just enough to hate. And this wasn't just a fit of rage. You took time and effort to turn the ugly hatred you've been taught -- and that you chose to embrace -- into cruelty and barbarity so shocking ... so severe ... so sadistically permanent that you've physically and emotionally destroyed two lives and sent waves of horror and numbingly familiar pain into the hearts and minds of older gay people who've spent their lives suffering from and struggling to rise above your hatred and evil along with a new generation of gay kids who are just starting to learn about the hatred and evil they'll have to deal with the rest of their lives -- the hatred and evil perpetuated by you and all the people like you who work so tirelessly to make sure that the rot in their hearts and minds lives on to rot the hearts and minds of everyone else they can possibly influence.

And now. Forty years in prison. Where you'll no doubt be applauded by people like you and targeted by people who see how weak and cowardly you really are in the gay-hating/gay-obsessive hierarchy.

Fifteen minutes of planning. Two lives forever altered. A small man making a mighty splash of hatred over a new generation of gay people who can be hurt and the less-than-people who can hurt them.

All for only 40 years in prison.

Was it worth it?

"Sexual stuff"

Sigh. Christians sure have drained all the courtly romance out of sexually exploiting drug-addicted minors. They've made statutory rape and revolting hypocrisy nothing more than an exercise in cold, unfeeling efficiency. It's just sad.

Via JoeMyGod: Start burning your bibles here

He's not gonna climb the ladder to heaven with his hands full of penis

Via Towleroad: Feign your surprise here