Dan Savage has the story and videos of Pastor Owens exhorting his flock to “burn fags.”
H/T: Little Green Footballs — yo!, Charles, it’s time to admit Hubert P. Yockey has demonstrated the origin of life is unknowable by any means using information theory and coding theory.
Update, 5/24/2010, Mon.: I should have read the later updates in Dan’s post with more care. The video sermon was delivered 15 years ago. Pastor Owens’ God is a God of love, now — or his local district attorney prosecutes people who incite mobs to acts of violence. Either way, he’s a changed man. It appears Pastor Owens’ has narrowed his mission to persuading people that the state of being gay or lesbian is both intrinsically evil AND a choice. If that destroys your connection with all your loved ones and drives you to suicide, well, that’s on you.
My observation is that the only people who think you can choose your sexual orientation are faking/have chosen the one they’re in.
“My observation is that the only people who think you can choose your sexual orientation are faking/have chosen the one they’re in.”
Gay bashers are both stupid and scary. However, I’ve never liked the insistence that sexuality is not a choice. I have no idea if it is or not. Frankly, I don’t care. I just sometimes worry about the idea that we shouldn’t be bashed or discriminated against *because* we can’t help it. It always brings the implication that, if we could, then discrimination would be okay. I think it’s far more useful to point out that there’s nothing wrong with liking people with matching pee pees, regardless of whether or not we can “help it”. I dunno, maybe I’m coming at this from a different generational viewpoint.
Lanny Short and Liz,
Hey, Lanny — thanks for asking — I hope you are well and prospering — to be honest, I am pondering a bleg post for help in making ends meet this month. I’ll decide what to do tomorrow.
I think Dan Savage — the gay man whose blog I linked — is a little young to remember the atmosphere of 1995, the year the pastor gave his sermon inciting his congregation/mob to murder. The AIDS epidemic was a conflagration in the gay community — most of my friends with AIDS died between 1992 and 1994. By then scientists knew it was a bloodborne disease that actually is fairly hard to catch, but straight people were freaked out about getting infected and gays were staging demonstrations to get cures so they could go back to the halcyon days of carefree bareback sex of the 1970’s and early 1980’s. (Most people forget that before AIDS was recognized, the big STD to dread was herpes, so calls for safer sex began with that.) Lesbians were dragged into this mess as the handmaidens of gay men because we’re supposed to succor and rescue everyone and never, ever, ever have our own space and our own turn, or, miracle of miracles, OTHER GROUPS SELFLESSLY SUPPORTING US FOR ONCE. Also in 1995, I was waging war against the top lesbians in the disability rights movement in Washington, D.C., to get them to choose wheelchair accessible venues for Passages, an annual lesbian conference — something they refused to do for years, then bungled bigtime for a couple of years. If you substituted “person with AIDS” for “person using a wheelchair” for the compromises they proposed so they could keep choosing venues that did not meet access regulations, they would have been denounced and mobbed. Instead, my quadriplegic life partner and I were denounced and when the Washington Blade published a column by a female-to-male tranny — who had visited us in our home — and he called on the gay community to run US out of town for my six-year campaign for wheelchair access. So much for the gay community’s devotion to diversity and inclusion. I knew I couldn’t keep Margaret safe after that in lesbian gatherings, and we stopped participating in the gay community. So this kind of stuff goes both ways.
Since 1995 Pastor Owens has fallen back to the default position of denouncing gays as intrinsically evil. This is allowed in his own church, but “Because God said so” is a violation of liberty and equality in the public arena. That is because lesbians and gays are entitled to consider themselves intrinsically good based on their own personal values and religion, and to have their morals and ethics judged the same way those of heterosexuals are — on the basis of their actions alone.
Liz, you are quite right that one of the best arguments for gay equality is that “there is nothing wrong with liking people with matching pee pees, regardless of whether or not we can ‘help it.’ ”
Still, I think it is worthwhile to keep pointing out that sexual orientation is part of your being. It is not a choice. People get confused on this point for several reasons. For example, people can be bullied into heterosexual lives, especially if they are outer-directed rather than inner-directed. In addition, ambitious people who know they cannot advance in their careers if they are openly gay or lesbian do marry and then lead double lives. And there are lesbians — I think it’s mostly lesbians who do this — and some gay men who date and/or marry opposite sex partners because they gave up on finding a compatible same-sex partner and settled. In addition, bisexuals like to claim bisexuality is a sexual orientation — my observation is that research is likely to show it is a predatory personality disorder based on an attraction to vulnerability. Life is not simple.
But the argument that lesbians and gays don’t deserve equality because choosing same-sex partners is a choice does not hold up. Why? Because belonging to one of the Christian religions is a choice. You are born into Judaism and Hinduism. You are forced into Islam. But no one is born into Christianity — it is always a choice. Yet, the people who choose it not only HAVE equality, they zealously seek to deny equality to lesbians and gays, and they believe one of their trump card arguments is that sexual orientation is a choice!
Cynthia
“In addition, bisexuals like to claim bisexuality is a sexual orientation — my observation is that research is likely to show it is a predatory personality disorder based on an attraction to vulnerability. ”
What?
No, seriously, what? It can’t just be that bisexuals just feel attractions to men and women? It has to be a “predatory personality disorder”?
Liz,
In my observation — no and yes. Bisexuality does not appear to me to be a true sexual orientation. These people are attracted to a vulnerability, or the opportunity for control or power — THAT’S what attracts and arouses them, so of course their prey, um, partner, may be either male or female. If you look into sexual predator personality disorders, you’ll see it is not uncommon that they do not discriminate by sex but by vulnerability. Bisexuals fly under the radar because their worst predatory behaviors destroy gay and lesbian lives, so no one cares, and they generally manage not to be criminal in their predatory behaviors.
Cynthia
Thank you for reminding me why I don’t tend to interact with the gay community.
I’m done here.
Liz,
How young ARE you? How much experience have you HAD with bisexuals? Do you not know how much predators use calls for “tolerance” to manipulate people into their power? Well, I expect you are going to find out.
I limited my remarks to my observations from my own experience.
DLTDHYOTWO.
Cynthia
Cynthia,
You are a class act my dear. I wish time and experience were better teachers to more people.
Ps….Tell Dad to hit the sack early tonight. Professors need their beauty sleep too.
Ad rem,
Thank you! I had to laugh when I read your comment. I appreciate it very much. The blog giveth, and the blog taketh away!
However, my heart goes out to Liz because experience is a cruel teacher. Most of the bisexual predators I’ve observed just break hearts and destroy their prey’s ability to trust and have intimacy, to say nothing of taking up their time. That is sufficient for my objection. But I came across one — who is not uncommon, although it’s been many years since I read personals ads, which are their hunting grounds — who was like a vampire devouring her lesbian victims and callously tossing them aside after driving them insane.
It did occur to me this evening that some women don’t come out until their 30’s or later, mostly because of the amount of self-knowledge and self-assertion that is required. In their 20’s they may consider themselves bisexual.
I’m going downstairs now to give Dad some low-sodium peach pie for dessert. I’ll have to take some photos and do a post with the recipe. Last summer we would buy half-bushel boxes of peach seconds and when there were more than we could finish I would cut up the amount that is right for our pie pans and put each portion in a plastic freezer bag. I’m still working my way through the stash. But things are looking good for getting to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.
Cynthia
Hey Ms. Cynthia,
How ya doing? Are you Ok? You can’t see the smoke coming off me right now as I type this. This man angers me to no end. I dealt with knuckleheads like this growing up as a Seventh Day Adventist. The church we attended was close to a university and we got a lot of students who would stop in every now and again. I distinctly remember when one of those students and his boyfriend stopped in. I can’t remember where they were from, but I remember my folks inviting them home for dinner and having a wonderful time. However, I also remember the next week when some of the elders took these two guys aside for a “word”. I never saw them again.
GOD LOVES US ALL!!!/h2> God made us all. Why is this so hard for people to understand? I’ve cited this verse before, so sorry if I’m repeating myself, but God warned us about folk like this so-called Reverend in Isaish 8:20 “To [God’s] law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to [the] word, it is because there is no truth in them. This means that our Reverend ain’t one of God’s guys. He should just Sierra Tango Foxtrot Union!! Ok, I need to enhance my calm now. Breathe in, breathe out. Ooooommmm…..
At my age I’m having trouble remembering this thing called sex. I will say that I have a distrust of anyone telling me to harm or shun someone who has done nothing to me or mine.
My God told me a few things, first of all to take care of and be faithful to my family. He commands me to love the sinner and hate the sin. I do the best I can with that one, there are more than a couple sinners whom I would love to run bullet penetration and expansion tests on. So far I have resisted that impulse. Those sinners are the ones that inflict damage on others without provocation.
.-= Peter´s last blog ..It’s Time To Say Goodbye =-.
I have a friend who insists she’s bisexual, even though she’s now with a man and only had one serious relationship with a woman in her life.
On several occasions, she has given me a speech about how victimized and misunderstood she is because she is bisexual. I think this is a crock, and after listening to the same sob-fest for at least the fifth time, I finally told her so.
Bisexuals are distrusted by gay people (lesbians at least) because they hide behind a mask of “heterosexuality” whenever it suits them, because they are forever hedging their bets in case the right man comes along (inevitably, he hasn’t), and because they show no mercy about tossing us aside when they think they’ve finally found him.
“It’s not the dreaded B-word we don’t like,” I informed her, “it’s the C-word.” As in closet — which they never really fully leave, and dive back into every time it is convenient. I advised her to disinvite me from all her future little pity-parties about the mean lesbians who don’t accept her.
I really don’t know whether they are “truly” bisexual or not. I only know a few people who’ve ever admitted to me that they’re bisexuals — all women, and all with men. All of them would sooner be smeared with strawberry jam and staked to an anthill before admitting to anybody else that they considered themselves bisexual.
Until they’re willing to stand tall and proud beside us and proclaim their bisexuality to the world, I’m going to have a hard time understanding how the “B” in “LGBT” bespeaks of anything more than the politically-correct desire to placate yet another aggrieved group.
.-= Lori Heine´s last blog ..Suns Sweep Spurs! =-.
Lori,
Tell it, sistah!
Cynthia
Hey Cynthia,
I’ll pray for you and your pops. I’ll pray for Liz as well.
Lanny Short,
Thank you! Your timing is perfect!
And it’s so kind of you to include Liz — my prayer is that after having to learn for herself the good excuses people will give for exploiting her that she gets better at telling who is true and good from the posers and scam artists, rather than discarding her idealism altogether.
Cynthia