I spotted this in my headline feed for Ace of Spades HQ — the post is by-lined by Gabriel Malor, who is gay. It’s also in a post by Ben Smith at Politico. I don’t know if it first appeared at the milblog, Blackfive, but I link it below and if you follow the link, Uncle Jimbo there links all the milbloggers who signed the statement.
I am wary that the Pentagon is trying to slow-walk the repeal of DADT so it will appear to have died a natural death and no one has to take heat for killing it. So the part I like best about this statement is that the milbloggers note that the Pentagon will deliver the results of its study on how to allow gay and lesbian service members to serve openly on December 1 and that they call on Congress to act promptly to repeal. I have been criticizing the gay and lesbian Left for never setting a deadline for Obama to keep his promises to them. The milbloggers are smarter — they did. Here’s their statement:
We consider the US military the greatest institution for good that has ever existed. No other organization has freed more people from oppression, done more humanitarian work or rescued more from natural disasters. We want that to continue.
Today, it appears inevitable to us that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and law restricting those displaying open homosexual behavior from serving will be changed. And yet, very little will actually change. Homosexuals have always served in the US Military, and there have been no real problems caused by that.
The service chiefs are currently studying the impact and consequences of changing the DADT policy, and how to implement it without compromising the morale, order and discipline necessary for the military to function. The study is due to be completed on Dec. 1st. We ask Congress to withhold action until this is finished, but no longer. We urge Congress to listen to the service chiefs and act in accordance with the recommendations of that study.
The US Military is professional and ready to adapt to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell without compromising its mission. Echoing Sec. Def. Gates and ADM Mullen, we welcome open and honorable service, regardless of sexual orientation.
Matt Burden- Warrior Legacy Foundation & BLACKFIVE
Jim Hanson- Warrior Legacy Foundation & BLACKFIVE
Blake Powers- BLACKFIVE
Fred Schoenman- BLACKFIVE
David Bellavia- House to House
Bruce McQuain- Q&O
JD Johannes- Outside the Wire
Diane Frances McInnis Miller- Boston Maggie
Mark Seavey- This Ain’t Hell
Michael St. Jacques- The Sniper
Mary Ripley- US Naval Institute Blog
John Donovan- Castle Argghhh!
Andrew J. Lubin- The Military Observer
Marc Danziger- Winds of Change
Greta Perry- Hooah Wife
I don’t think the December repeal will come in time to save the career of Arabic translator and West Point graduate, Lt. Dan Choi — I posted a video of him here speaking in October 2009 at the Equality March. Lately he’s been chaining himself to the White House fence. Since both the Right and the Left support the repeal of DADT, I hope the milbloggers and others on the Right also call for an immediate moratorium on all DADT investigations and stopping all discharges on the grounds of being gay or lesbian. There’s no sense in throwing away our nation’s investment in training these service members, to say nothing of the wanton destruction to the careers of those being discharged.
Somehow this interview reminds me of the times I would be transferring Margaret from her wheelchair to something else depending on the place — a lift chair at our yogic flying program, a lift chair at the pool — where my attention would be totally focused on her until I had her settled and often when I looked up I would see someone staring at us who would look away and dab at a tear. People respect love and devotion. (And love and devotion deserve equality. What? Like I would let that go.)
We discussed Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, ranged back to the inauguration of the welfare state under LBJ and the destruction that it has wrought on the family and the individual’s ability to achieve his or her own full potential, and it seemed to me that we ended up at a place where her being a lesbian could be a positive contribution since there is a disturbing lack of diversity on the court — to wit, the justices are all from either Yale or Harvard and the three women all grew up in New York City. Basically, they’ve all been a part of the prosperous elite for so long none of them have a clue about real life or real trial courts, so, after all, how bad could Kagan be? Plus, as Clarice pointed out, Kagan should be recusing herself from cases she was involved in as Solicitor General as they come before the Supreme Court over the next few years. To me that means she’ll have plenty of time to learn the job.
The Jeff Katz show runs from 5 am to 9 am, Monday through Friday, The call-in number is 617-931-1200. If you click on the link above to go to Jeff’s Web page at Rush Radio 1200, the red button with the “Play” arrow lets you listen to the show.
Jeff had the perfect career preparation for becoming a conservative radio talk show host — he was a police officer for Philadelphia’s housing authority. A more detailed bio is here.
I checked YouTube and found a couple of clips I like. Regular gentle readers will know that I first began to part company with liberalism and the Democratic party when I found out about presidential candidate Barack Obama’s 20-year association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I had pretty much the same reaction that Jeff has here:
Jeff also spoke in Boston on April 14, 2010, at a Tea Party demonstration — he makes the point that the structure the Founders created is precious, but can be broken, so we must guard it so we can pass it to the next generation:
So, Jeff, I’m looking forward to talking with you and I hope our conversation will entertain, educate and inspire your listeners. Here are some posts to glance over to get to know me a bit better:
Update, 5/11/2010, Tues.: Jeff made the interview a pleasure, and I enjoyed talking with him. The podcast of our conversation is posted at Rush Radio 1200, but it doesn’t have a permalink so if you go to the podcast page you may have to search by my name or the date of the interview (5/11/2010).
I think Charlie Martin made history at Pajamas Media today when he defended the equality of lesbians and gays in the comment section of my piece on why it is a slur to call someone lesbian or gay, which came up due to the possibility that Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who is a lesbian, to fill the seat on the Supreme Court that will open when Justice John Paul Stevens retires this summer at the end of the court’s current session.
Here’s Charlie:
Theo, your comment came ->| |<- this close to ending up in the trash, since it has no point at which it responds to Cynthia except to make unwarranted assertions about her personally. In fact, I trashed it and hit undo twice before deciding to pass it through and respond to you instead.
(1) This comment is wholly unjustified. In fact, Cynthia lived for 20+ years in a committed relationship with a partner who was slowly dying from a chronic disease, and now lives with her father because her father needs a full-time caregiver. She deserves an apology which, I suspect, you aren’t sufficiently adult to give.
(2) When posting a comment consisting, as this does, entirely of an ad hominem against the author, you ought to re-read item 3 in the comments policy, and consider that the comments may be being moderated by a cranky old-fashioned SOB who may not be in a mood to suffer fools.
There’s more — click the link above to see. And pay attention to what you DON’T see — the ad hominem comments that are NOT getting approved that until today WERE considered valid contributions to the discussion of lesbian and gay equality. Based on past experience, I believe Charlie probably has deleted at least 30 or 40 anti-gay rants from commenters who have been accustomed to seeing comparable remarks get approved. Similar attacks on the concept of equality for women and Jews do NOT get approved in the regions of the conservative world that consider those settled questions. This is a tipping point moment in the conservative blogosphere in the direction of the paradigm shift toward equality for lesbians and gays under the law.
My piece on the conniption fit the Left went into a few weeks ago when Ben Domenech opined that it was a plus that Supreme Court nominee short-lister Elena Kagan is a lesbian was published at Pajamas Media today. Pajamas Media publisher Roger Simon was puzzled at the extremes the LEFT went to in order to deny that Kagan is a lesbian and he asked me, “Why is being called gay or lesbian such a slur?”
The short version of my answer is that it is profitable for nation-building totalitarians, whether secular or religious, to demonize all people and behaviors that are not producing babies to increase the power and wealth of their secular or religious masters. I tried to keep the piece about 1,000 words, so I didn’t add the point that my dear gentle readers have seen me make frequently here, which is that social conservatives work non-stop to impose their respective religions on the general populace through the laws of the land in total violation of the conservative values of liberty and individualism.
That is, while social conservatives are free to demonize lesbians and gays and assert that we should be second-class citizens or even inhuman under the tenets of their religions, it is a violation of conservatism and the Constitution to make laws in order to disadvantage us (with update here) because we are a minority that doesn’t serve them in order to use the power of the government to force their beliefs — gays are demons! — on everyone in the hopes of achieving through the coercive powers of government what they were not able to achieve through the persuasive powers of religion. The fact that social conservatives resort unceasingly to the power of the government to appropriate its coercive powers to impose their beliefs on the general population — and to get tax money to finance their operations — shows that the real slippery slope we’re on is toward the overthrow of the Constitution and the imposition of a theocracy. Equality for lesbians and gays IS a conservative value, if conservatives value liberty, individualism, the Constitution and the separation of church and state.
By the way, I don’t know anyone else making these points and I deserve and expect attribution when other writers pick them up, especially when they’ve told me they read A Conservative Lesbian regularly. For example, I called last month for there to be at least one place in the conservative blogosphere — besides mine — where it’s a given that lesbians and gays are equal to heterosexuals and deserve full equality under the law and that these publishers stop publishing rants to the contrary the way conservatives stopped publishing pieces proclaiming women, blacks and Jews to be less-than/wrong/bad. (I am still working on this behind the scenes.) If I don’t get attribution, I WILL be calling those writers out. It’s not just rude, it’s theft.
P.S.
My last piece published at Pajamas Media was my review of David Horowitz’s luminous biography of his late daughter, Sarah Horowitz, entitled, “A Cracking of the Heart and an Opening to Transcendence,” which was published Dec. 23, 2009.
Update, 5/9/2010, Sun.: Thank you, Instapundit, for the link to my essay, linked above, “Why Is It Such a Slur to Call Elena Kagan a Lesbian?,” at Pajamas Media.
The above clip from “We’re All Angels” features their producer, Alan Lett, and his mother, who speaks beginning about three minutes in about her feelings as a Christian about having an openly gay son. Initially she wanted to throw him out for being gay.
Here are Jason and deMarco talking about their experiences as Christians realizing that they are gay, integrating both these worlds into a whole and finding one another:
Jason and deMarco performing “This Is Love” — I adore their sweetness and devotion to one another and how this video shows a daily life of love:
I love it that People Magazine included Gabourey Sidibe in its list of the “100 Most Beautiful People of 2010.” I don’t believe they are holding her up as an ideal in the sense that they are telling slim women they should look more like Gabourey. I don’t believe they are sending the message to Gabourey, or other obese women, that there are no health risks associated with obesity.
But I do believe that People Magazine is sending the message that Gabourey’s heart and soul are very much a part of her beauty AND that she is doing the most in her current situation to be beautiful — and lovable — just the way she is. That kind of love and acceptance empowers people — in their own way, on their own schedule — to improve their health and appearance.
Criticism and shame have the opposite effect of love and acceptance in helping people transform themselves for the better. For one thing, when you love and accept other people just the way they are, it means you have healthy boundaries (that means you aren’t constantly judging and interfering with and bossing other people instead of minding your own business and letting them mind theirs the way THEY see fit). For another, someone who is being attacked with criticism and abused by shaming now has two more problems to solve than if they were just left alone to wrestle with their original problem. That is, now, in addition to being overweight, or whatever, they have to set a boundary and push their attacker out of their psychic space AND heal from the wounds the attacker inflicted. Having to worry about future attacks doesn’t help, either.
Women are so bullied and controlled by people who have some kind of power over them — the ability to bestow or withhold love, marriage, approval, career advancement — based on their appearance that that is why fat is a feminist issue.
I understand very well that some people try to make their hatred of fat people respectable by claiming to be criticizing and shaming us for our own good — that we are in danger from obesity and would be healthier if we were slimmer. Gee — why didn’t WE think of that?
The short version of how I got to obesity is that I have obstructive sleep apnea. Oh — and I’m 56. I was taking off the weight pretty well until I had to drop out of Body Pump class last year because when I bend over I feel like I have a hot golf ball where my right ovary should be. (No, I don’t have health insurance or the money for healthcare — why do you ask?)
But I’m very lucky. I had 20 years basking in the loving gaze of my late life partner and she was the most beautiful woman in the world to me and I was the most beautiful woman in the world to her. No matter what aspect of my body and appearance I am working to improve, I guarantee you that I will never settle for anything less from my future spouse than that — and it is certainly what I will give to her.
In college I had a lover who was anorexic. She was very emotionally abusive and since my own mother was emotionally abusive I didn’t know to dump her. She was a gymnast in her teens — when we met I was 21 and she was 23 — and when she wore a leotard and walked through the gym where the University of Michigan women’s gymnastics team was working out, every single one of those young women stopped what she was doing and stared in awe. Well, also, our sex life was so incendiary that to this very day I feel superior to ordinary mortals who know not what I know. Really, at the time I thought we owed it to the world to tour and give classes and demonstrations.
Where was I? Oh, yes — she was emotionally abusive. It took me several years to recover from the abuse and what really helped me turn the corner was the fact that books about anorexia began to be published in the late 1970’s. My opinion now, especially after watching two of my friends make one of their daughters anorexic, is that anorexia is caused by parents who usurp a child’s own choices and impose their own will on the child so that the child’s self never gets a chance to figure things out on its own and develop and grow. Then, when the parent lets go around 13 or 14 — still expecting the child to make only the choices the parent approves of — anorexia, which is about control, tends to manifest, especially if the child has a talent involving performing in sports, music or the stage.
By the way, one of the reasons that anorexia is very difficult to treat is that if the therapist tells the parents of an anorexic teen the truth — which is that their domination of their child and enmeshed family dynamic is what is making their child so sick — to defend their own narcissism they will fire the therapist.
To illustrate my point that eating, obesity and being loved for what you are by people who have healthy boundaries and let you figure out on your own how and when to improve yourself, I want to share six videos — four of Margaret Cho and two of Karen Carpenter. The first is Margaret Cho, from her show, “I’m the One that I Want,” talking about how the producers of her sitcom, “All-American Girl,” nearly killed her by putting her on a diet and exercise regimen in which she lost 30 pounds in two weeks. That sounds great until you figure in the peeing blood and kidney failure (and probable permanent kidney damage and loss of bone density). Do the math on this: to lose a pound of fat you have to burn 3500 calories. A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds. Probably one-third of Cho’s weight loss was water — thus the kidney failure. She had to burn something like 49,000 calories in 14 days in addition to the 2,000 calories her base metabolism would burn.
In the first clip, Cho tells the story of how she was bullied into the nearly-fatal weight loss regime:
In the next two clips, Cho talks about how she felt accepted for the first time in her life when she found out her show was going to series and what it was like to give her mother this news on Mother’s Day (the good part is about seven minutes into the first clip):
Margaret continues by telling how the tabloids and celebrity magazines bullied her about her weight — and her boyfriend at the time, Quentin Tarantino, correctly told her that her show’s producers were stealing her voice:
Now, moving on, to Karen Carpenter, who rose to fame as a popular singer when I was in high school. Karen Carpenter died in 1983 at the age of 32 of heart failure due to taking ipecac to induce vomiting — the vomiting caused an electrolyte imbalance that made her heart beat so abnormally that she died. Carpenter was both a singer AND a highly regarded drummer. I’m including a video of her singing my favorite Carpenters song, “Top of the World,” and a video of her playing the drums — both to show how talented she was, and how emaciated:
I think the bass drummer in the following clip is John Denver — Karen Carpenter was an amazing drummer:
Now let my friend, Jennifer Lawson, The Bloggess, bring this all home and show you why “Everyone is beautiful.”
This is my heirloom tomato seed-starting set-up -- the photo is from 2008. The plant light that adjusts using two posts at either end is in front. Behind it is the shop light hanging from a chain over two garment racks.
I finished transplanting my heirloom tomato seedlings yesterday — 130 plants, 16 varieties. Tomato plants do better when they are transplanted to bigger cups once or twice before they are finally planted in the garden.
I was surprised I had not paid enough attention to how leggy my tomato seedlings were. “Leggy” means the stalk is very thin and tall with lots of distance between the sets of leave. It happens when the plant is reaching for light because it’s not getting enough. I finally realized that the plants that didn’t do well were under a special plant light I purchased from an online seed company because it had a stand that made it easy to raise and lower the four-foot-long fluorescent fixture. The plants I had under a shop light jury-rigged with chains adjusted by S-hooks over a couple of cheap garment racks did much better. Both fixtures had full-spectrum fluorescent tubes in them. The bottom line is that the 72-cell seed-starting kits I use need four full-spectrum bulbs, which I can get with two shop lights, instead of the two bulbs in the special plant light, which is the same width as the kits.
I’m also growing flowers and herbs. I have Burpee Purple Prince zinnias, which are lovely, and a mix of yellow and red zinnias. With room under the plant lights now the tomato plants are in their new cups — I use tall plastic drinking cups from the grocery store and cut a drainage cross in the bottom — I’ll start some yellow marigolds and bachelor’s buttons, which are blue, next. Let’s just say the front yard will be both eccentric — from the tomato plants and herbs in containers — and colorful — from the flowers — for the next six months.
Oh, yes, and the herbs! The oregano I had in a 15-gallon container came back and is thriving. I planted more this year, but I may give those plants away since the other ones are doing so well. Oregano has lovely little purple flowers and is a pretty plant. I also have more catnip seedlings for the kitties, although the ones I planted last year also are doing very well. And there’s parsley — the curly-leaf type is a showy plant that lasts well into the fall.
I also have several types of basil: mammoth basil, large leaf basil, Siam Queen basil, cinnamon basil, lemon basil and lime basil. The bees love the small white basil flowers! And, yes, I know I have to pinch off the flowers to keep the plant from going to seed so I can continue to harvest the delicious leaves. But at a certain point in the summer, I just give the basil over to the bees because they love it so much!
