Robert Stacy McCain vows to kill his gay children on a hill

by CynthiaYockey on May 3, 2009

Robert Stacy McCain has six children, ages five to 19. He has written repeatedly that opposing equal marriage rights for lesbians and gays is a “hill to die on” for social conservatives. I don’t know if any of them are gay. But, then again, neither does he.

Why do social conservatives always forget that at least 12 percent of them HAVE gay children and they are denying equality to THEIR OWN CHILDREN? My 12 percent estimate is based on the estimate that eight percent of any population is lesbian or gay and that those children have two parents, but the two parents may have more than one gay or lesbian child.

Suicide is a leading cause of death for teenagers, especially gay and lesbian teenagers. This does not include the death toll of lesbian and gay teenagers who are thrown out by their parents when their homosexuality is discovered and they die as a result of the complications of homelessness and lack of skills and credentials to get employment that would allow them to live independently.

While Dick and Lynn Cheney support and include their openly lesbian daughter, Mary, and her life partner, and the Bush administration treated Mary and her life partner the same way they would treat a straight married couple, that is NOT how we usually are treated. What happens too often is what Alan Keyes did to his lesbian daughter, Maya. In 2005, after Maya spoke at a Maryland rally about a gay friend who had been thrown out by his parents for being gay and died three years later of starvation, Keyes cut her off financially and evicted her. She was 19. (I haven’t found any recent news of her so I don’t know how she’s doing or whether she was able to attend college.)

So, social conservatives, you may think equal marriage rights is your “hill to die on,” but for quite a lot of you, it is the hill where you have vowed to their faces to kill your gay and lesbian children. The fact that you didn’t know you were condemning your own children to death by your words and actions does not wash their blood from your hands.

Tagged as: equal rights for lesbians and gays, Gay marriage, Robert Stacy McCain, Totalitarian social conservatism

Dan Collins

I’m sorry, Cynthia, but how are we killing our children?

And then God spoke to Abraham and said, “Take your gayest child to the top of the mountain, and sacrifice him unto Me as did your fathers of old.” And Abraham took with him his gayest child, and did tie him up, and was about to sacrifice him when the Angel of the Lord stayed his hand . . .

Denying marriage to gay couples is not the same thing as causing children to suicide. I’m sorry about Alan Keyes’s daughter, but I hardly think that you can generalize out of that example.

Does a child’s disagreement with a parent mean that s/he doesn’t love her/him? Does a parent’s disagreement with a child mean the same thing? There are times when all of us are inevitably disappointed with one another. There are times when, as children, we fantasize, like Ralphy in A Christmas Story, that we will die, and then they’ll really be sorry. But we grow up, and we adapt, and we make our own decisions, and we cope with the ways in which we feel life might be unfair to us, and the ways in which we’ve been wronged.

http://www.aconservativelesbian.com Cynthia Yockey

Dan,

Are you serious about not generalizing from Alan Keyes? Because you have indicated on your blog that you want to punish the entire lesbian and gay community for the remarks of a few angry persons, who, frankly, have every reason to be angry. I am extremely skeptical you would be courteous under the same circumstances since you resorted so quickly to name-calling (“cocksucker”).

Social conservatives who believe they can force their gay children to be straight, who demonize homosexuals to their gay children, who tell their gay children that they SHOULD have fewer rights than straight people and should NOT have the right to marry do, indeed, drive their children to suicide, or to their deaths by driving their child out of their house for a BEING crime. Just because there is not a one-to-one ratio does not mean that none of them were the instrument of their children’s death. The ones who were do indeed have blood on their hands. Homosexuality is not an opinion. You can’t make someone straight — this is far, FAR beyond being a disagreement.

What I want social conservatives to remember as they denounce homosexuality and strive to make the government the instrument of imposing their religious beliefs on other people is that they can be talking to their own gay and lesbian children. If they do not destroy their child, they certainly are forcing their child to distance himself or herself. One way or another, they have lost their child through their own malevolence. Also, forcing lesbians and gays into second-class citizenship denied of a host of basic rights goes way past the bounds of the ordinary ways that “life might be unfair.”

Cynthia

Dan Collins

I don’t at all wish to punish the entire gay and lesbian community for the remarks of shitheads like Musto or Perez Hilton. That’s why I’m quite explicit that it’s not that they’re cocksuckers that makes me despise them, it’s because they’re cocksuckers.

For reasons that I’ve debated with you before, I think that government ought to be out of the business of specifying what constitutes marriage, and to leave it up to the various denominations, some of which are gay friendly. I don’t want to see gay people made unhappy, neither do I want the religious browbeaten by apparatchiks. These people have no more right to force their beliefs on anybody than any other person does, and going after a woman who expresses an opinion that you find hurtful (boo hoo) as a “bitch” and a “cunt” opens them up to the use of reductive epithets. Is it really more offensive for me to call one of them a cocksucker–which is wrong, how?–than for them to call a woman a bitch? REALLY?

I’m sorry, but you have differences with someone, you make a case. If they don’t hear you, that’s too bad. I can tell who the “bitches” are in this story, and they’re not Carrie Prejean. It would help, if they want to be treated as people in full, not to be so viciously inhumane, and if one of these brave speakers of truth to power said this to a woman I knew, whether I agreed with them or not on the subject, I would–seriously–give them an excuse to experience plastic surgery firsthand.
http://americanelephant.wordpress.com American Elephant

Hi Cynthia,

I stumbled upon your blog via Moe Lane today. I am also a gay conservative, but I would respectfully suggest you are conflating two things that ought not be conflated.

Yes, there are horrible people in the world who treat their gay children abominably, but they are not the 53% of Californians who voted for proposition 8 or the majority of Americans who oppose gay marriage. Suggesting they are is little more than name-calling.

While Alan Keyes treatment of his daughter (a horrible story I had not heard before because, well, I dont particularly like Alan Keyes to begin with and as such avoid articles about him) was deplorable, and he does indeed oppose gay marriage — you speak approvingly of Vice President Cheney (I like him too) but neglected to mention that he also opposes gay marriage.

My experience has been that supporters of traditional marriage are far more often like the former VP and much less like Crackpot Keyes.

My point is this… despite the fact that we pretty much take marriage for granted in modern America, the institution nonetheless plays a vital role in society. Children born out of wedlock are far, far more likely to fail in life. They have much higher rates of illiteracy, are more likely to drop out of school, more likely to be poor, get involved with drugs, commit crime, and their life expectancy is much lower. Marriage matters.

It is right and good that people should be very concerned about changing the institution because our attitudes towards marriage will shape society for good or for ill.

Is it legitimate to be concerned that changing marriage to allow couples that are categorically incapable of reproduction will harm an institution that has always, as its purpose to society, centered around creating the ideal circumstances for procreation and raising children?

Yes. I think its a very legitimate concern.

Gays should show that they are just as serious about the welfare of the country and not solely about how marriage makes them feel. And that means to stop declaring that everyone who disagrees with gays about the crucial role of marriage is a bigot. They aren’t.

http://www.aconservativelesbian.com Cynthia Yockey

American Elephant,

I’m not sure what two things you think I’m conflating. And I did not do any name-calling.

What I’m doing is reminding social conservatives that they should remember that every single time they denounce gays, they unwittingly may be talking to their own child and destroying their connection with that child, that child’s trust in them and even their own child’s will to live. I simply used Alan Keyes and his wife as examples of a couple who threw away their own 19-year-old daughter for a BEING crime — the crime of BEING a lesbian. And I do think social conservative bloggers and dead-tree columnists should answer for the fact that they did not condemn this reprehensible behavior.

You need to study the history of marriage. I don’t think it has ever been about the ideal circumstances for procreation and raising children.

I didn’t call anyone a bigot. I am in the process of pointing out how marriage for gays and lesbians has benefits at every level of society. I can’t complete that job in just one post. The most important point I made in this post is that social conservatives need to know that with their relentless negativity towards gays and lesbians, some of them will be killing their own gay and lesbian children. Of those, some will be like Alan Keyes and will not care, except for narcissistic reasons. But I am trying to reach the ones who would and DO care and who therefore may find their way to acceptance of equality for lesbians and gays when that cause is presented to them in the person of their own child.

Cynthia

http://americanelephant.wordpress.com American Elephant

You need to study the history of marriage. I don’t think it has ever been about the ideal circumstances for procreation and raising children.

Actually, I am very familiar with the history of marriage. I am also familiar with law and the Constitution. And what marriage is “about” is not defined by the reasons people get married, but by the reasons government gets involved with it to begin with. And State after state has defined, in law, that reason as being something along these lines:

“The Legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by children’s biological parents,” SCOWA

And yes, what you have done is compare people who think traditional marriage fulfills essential purposes in society to people who have driven their children to suicide by treating them horribly. And pardon me for not towing the gay line, but I think that is a particularly heinous, irresponsible and unfair comparison.

Tell me, if I were to suggest that you shouldn’t be allowed to get a tax credit given to people who buy hybrid cars because you bought a Hummer instead, would you kill yourself?

These people are arguing that people should not be allowed to marry a person of the same sex, because the function marriage provides to society is dependent on coupling people of the opposite sex.

You are arguing that we should forget marriages function in order to make gay couples feel like they are the same as opposite sex couples, which, check your biology book, they aren’t.

And you are arguing that anyone who disagrees with you risks driving people to kill themselves. I think its horribly irresponsible and frankly hysterical.

http://www.aconservativelesbian.com Cynthia Yockey

American Elephant,

I just looked over your blog, AmericanElephant, and I note that you are one of three authors of the blog and all of you are identified by pseudonym alone. There are no biographies of any of you. Why is that? Are you sock puppets? Or just cowards? Would you lose your job if you were openly gay? Are you married to a woman as a cover? Would she leave you if you were openly gay? Would your parents, siblings and grandparents still welcome you into their homes if you were openly gay? Are you openly gay at your church? If not, why? Do your friends all know you are gay? If not, why? Would equal rights locally and federally give you the courage to be openly gay and honest about who you are to everyone in your life?

I won’t be publishing any more of your comments until you publish a bio and photo of yourself at your blog that I am able to confirm is you. This is because you currently are behaving like a troll. Troll-wise, I figure if it argues like a troll and hides its identity like a troll, it’s a troll — and will be treated accordingly.

But right now, you are asking for a fisking, so let the fisking commence:

1. I haven’t compared “people who think traditional marriage fulfills essential purposes in society to people who have driven their children to suicide by treating them horribly.” I told people who have been duped by self-serving religious leaders who have cloaked their greed and lust for power as the word of God that they cannot know if their own children are gay, and that they really cannot make their gay children straight, so that they should be aware that the negative and destructive things they are saying about gays — in the belief that “the gays” are a strange, far-off people — are things they are saying about THEIR OWN CHILD. I’m warning them that their destructive attitudes and word will distance them from their child, will destroy that child’s trust in them and may even result in that child committing suicide. I am trying to reach the social conservatives who cannot stand the thought of losing their child in one of these ways and who might change as a result. I’m especially speaking to the social conservatives who also want their own children to have equal rights with every other citizen of this country.

2. Are you sure the Hummer is the example you want to use when you are posing as a gay person denouncing equal rights for lesbians and gays? Dude — think of the picture you called up in so many minds! But, seriously, there’s no comparing sexual orientation and gay marriage to tax credits. I am an ex-ex-lesbian. You do not choose your sexual orientation. The people who have been manipulated, shamed and brow-beaten into believing they are ex-gay are just going to hurt a lot of innocent people on their path to standing up for who they really are and becoming ex-ex-gays.

3. I know from having a successful relationship for over 20 years, which ended in my life partner’s death due to complications of multiple sclerosis, that all of the legal rights that go along with marriage are tools for building a life together as a couple and that couples need them. Society benefits from gay marriage because people who build their lives together are more successful than single people or unmarried couples in staying off of welfare, keeping jobs, buying homes and contributing to their communities.

4. Yes, I am totally saying that people who advocate against equality for lesbians and gays, including marriage equality, DO drive people to kill themselves and DO cause the deaths of others through deaths of a thousand cuts plus the thousands of ways lesbians and gays are thwarted and excluded for a BEING crime (as opposed to a thought crime). In addition, I believe that the behavior of social conservatives toward lesbians and gays is a form of sex abuse that is particularly destructive to children.

Cynthia

http://www.theflamingofactor.wordpress.com Lone Flamingo

cynthia…
(hi. former bluesmama…)

you are my freaking hero. you have gigantic, ass-kickin’ eggs and i want some of what you’ve got, sister. wow. yeah… kicked yourself a lil bit of elephant butt. cool.

it’s late so i really can’t go into a lot of what’s knocking around my brain right now about this whole topic, but i swear, every time i mosey over here to your blog i’m blown away. rock on, girl.

http://www.aconservativelesbian.com Cynthia Yockey

Lone Flamingo,

I was feeling rather down this week over how toxic the controversy about gay marriage has been in the Right Blogosphere, so THANK YOU!

Cynthia

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http://www.theflamingofactor.wordpress.com Lone Flamingo

oh cynthia…
first of all, you’re welcome!!
second of all, i agree. i’m having such a difficult time with the whole christian right, esp on talk radio. i enjoy hannity, ingraham, rush… UNTIL, they have to go THERE. they seem to think the reason the republican party tanked is that the party went to left. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. i’m here to tell them that the party in general tanked because of the uber intolerant christian right. they took the party over and will NOT accept that the vast majority of registered independents are not republicans because of them. jeesh. so yeah, it’s tough knowing that the traditional republican values that finally pulled me back into the R column are still being overshadowed by this incredible intolerance of choice and equality insisted upon by the religious nazis. oh, yes, i said it, and i mean it. i’m sick of it. when did my body become anybody’s business? when did total strangers get to decide that we get to be born either a boy or a girl that will like, want, marry and procreate with each other OR… NOTHING? who said? while it’s my business to “decide” with whom i make my life, if the government is going to allow a certain class of citizens special rights (because the bible says, though somehow they conveniently left out the rampant instances of polygamy…), then, um… i want that too. talk about special interest groups. i would say the straight married couple lobby is the biggest and, given their success rate, not that much to brag about and a big waste of money and time. but, that’s just me.

anywho, keep your chin up my dear. you’re doing great. you give me hope and let me know that i am not alone out here. and i tell you, it’s pretty damned lonely.

peace.
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http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com M. Simon

I followed the Maya Keyes story before it broke (not by much – a few weeks) and had found her on line diary. I thought what Alan did was despicable and although I consider myself a libertarian Republican I voted for Obama in 2004 (forgive me).

There is a LOT of hate loose in this country from all sides of the political spectrum (you of course have done some posts on Palin) and it is not looking good for the Republic. Let us hope and WORK for better days.
.-= M. Simon´s last blog ..Sarah Barracuda =-.

http://www.aconservativelesbian.com Cynthia Yockey

M. Simon,

So you voted for Obama for U.S. Senate in Illinois? I was in touch with someone in Illinois at the time and she said Alan Keyes got crazier and crazier as the campaign went on and in the last few weeks could barely get another Republican to stand next to him when he campaigned. Obama is so deceitful and has so many people covering up for him that there was no way of knowing then that Keyes was more sane and the better choice, if only because his election would have blocked Obama’s path to national prominence.

Just so other readers are clear, my posts on Gov. Palin praise her. There is an enormous amount there to respect and admire. I disagree with her about gay marriage and homosexual equality, but I hear tell she vetoed a bill that would have taken rights from gays. And when she and Joe Biden were asked about gay marriage in the vice presidential debate, I found his answer genuinely hate-filled and foreboding danger to our community while Gov. Palin’s was loving yet consistent with her faith. People who are coming from positions of love and seeking to do right are the ones I can work with. But in terms of practical results, no one sells out gays like the Democrats and Obama already is close to Bill Clinton’s record as the worst president ever for homosexual equality.

Cynthia