A Conservative Lesbian
My father told me “Chesty” Puller said this, and it always makes me smile when I’m in a similar situation:
Men! The enemy have us surrounded!
The poor, dumb bastards! They can’t get away from us now!
There are other versions of the quote here, but I like this one best. Wikipedia has his biography here.
Son of a bitch, another celebrity I have to give up as a liberal fool! During the 2008 election campaign it was like a stampede of celebrities to the brink of our last nerve and beyond as Cuban Diva BFF and I commiserated by phone over our losses.
So, today I’ve had it with Roseanne Barr, but before I say good-bye, I have to tell you her best line EVER:
“They say that lesbians hate men. How can that be? They don’t have to fuck them.”
Update: Welcome, gentle readers from The Other McCain!
All my adult life I have had to work at being optimistic in the face of an assortment of crushing and deadly adversities and I have learned a lot about how to do it. So today I am going to start a category of posts on affirmations because I have been using them for over 30 years now and there is both an art and a science to being successful with them. My objective is to put in my gentle readers’ hands tools that have helped me and which will help them, too.
My biggest religious influence has been the work of Catherine Ponder, who is a minister of the Unity Church. I recommend every single one of her books, starting with her first, The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity. On page 11, she writes:
Success Adores the Prosperous Attitude
Another of the shocking truths about prosperity is that thoughts of our mind have made you what you are, and thoughts of your mind will make you whatever you become from this day forward. The more you realize this, themore you will come to know that people, places, conditions and events cannot keep your God-given prosperity and success from you, once you decide to deliberately employ prosperous thinking as your ally for success. Indeed, you will discover that the things, people and events that have previously worked against you will either begin to work for and with you, or they will fade out of your life, and new people and events will appear to help you succeed. That is the power of prosperous thinking.
Some authorities believe that one prosperous thought is more powerful than a thousand failure thoughts; and that two prosperous attitudes steadily held and expressed are more powerful than ten thousand failure attitudes! Success adores the prosperous attitude — of that you can be sure. A loving Father seems to adore the prosperous attitude, too. Surely others adore it and are attracted to it and work for it. More about these things in the next chapter.
Meanwhile, remind yourself often that God is the Source of all your supply and then make spiritual contact with Him, His rich substance and rich ideas that await your appreciation: I am the rich child of a loving Father. I now accept and claim his rich good for me in every phase of my life. My own God-given success in the form of rich ideas and rich results now appears!
The affirmation to use is the text in boldface. Elsewhere Dr. Ponder recommends decreeing an affirmation aloud or writing it by hand at least 15 times, or as long as it takes to get a sense of peace about the problem that concerns you. If this is something that resonates with you, or you are so desperate you are thinking, “What have I got to lose?,” then I suggest you start with this one because it is focused and she has tested its success power.
The mistake most people make when they compose their own affirmations is that their affirmation is a conglomeration of desired outcomes and a conglomeration does not have success power. I’ll write more on that in the future.
As a minority, lesbians and gays have few, if any, friends and allies willing to expend political capital on our behalf — although other minorities accept all the golden eggs we produce for them with endless handfuls of gimme and mouths full of “much obliged.”
We also have less family support than any other minority due to the paradoxical effect that very religious, pro-family people apparently feel commanded to disown their lesbian and gay family members — even their own children. And many of the ones who don’t go that far achieve the same effect by constantly insulting and harassing their children in the name of God and family.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a sample: watch the episodes on the reality series “Working Out” where the openly lesbian star of the series has encounters with her mother.
And think about this: what African-American children ever have lived in terror of being thrown out like trash when their parents find out they are black? How many have committed suicide because they feel so hopeless about how their families will treat them when they find out they are black?
Well, since lesbians and gays KNOW that we can’t turn to others to help us or do our work for us, the happy result is that we do it ourselves. Can’t get a job? We make our own. Businesses don’t sell the things we want? We make our own — the things and the businesses to sell them. Restaurants won’t serve us? We make our own. Lack of healthcare or discrimination in healthcare? We make our own. Churches discriminate against us? We make our own. Can’t get housing? We make our own.
I’m telling you, people, lesbians and gays are natural born fiscal conservatives, Obama and the Democrats will never stop ripping us off AND WE ARE UP FOR GRABS BY THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT!!!
So, what is the no-cost way of turning blighted neighborhoods around?
Harness the power of lesbian and gay self-reliance and resourcefulness by passing civil rights laws protecting the rights of lesbians and gays to jobs, housing and public accommodations. Want to put a jet pack on that turnaround? Legalize gay marriage.
In addition to enormous self-reliance and resourcefulness, the unique ability of lesbians and gays to go into blighted neighborhoods and turn them around is based on the fact that the majority of us do not have children, so we can buy in neighborhoods that have lousy schools. (Speaking as a former Realtor, the ONE thing that has the most influence on your home value is the reputation of your neighborhood’s schools. Making them excellent pays you BIG dividends.) Once we turn the neighborhood around, the schools follow.
Also, since we are a rainbow minority — people with disabilities and every race, ethnic group and religious group has lesbians and gays — we are more likely than most other minorities, with the exception of people with disabilities (which also is a rainbow minority), to have friends and acquaintances who are very different from us, so we are not afraid to move into neighborhoods where we don’t look like anyone else there.
I did not figure this out on my own, I heard an author being interviewed on talk radio about a book his book and the unique contributions lesbians and gays make to society. I think the book was about the conditions that make businesses, communities and nations thrive and was not exclusively about lesbians and gays. When I find it, I’ll update this post with the info, since the author supported his point with research, while what I’m saying comes from glimpses of what acquaintances accomplished in blighted neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland.
I have the impression, from a very small sample of evangelical families, including one I have known many years, that their religious leaders urge them to adopt children as a way of adding more converts to their flock. I expect, if this is true, that they press this cause in more idealistic terms. But, from the outside, it looks like adoption is something social conservatives are motivated to do first as their duty to increase their church’s power and wealth by adding to the numbers of the faithful, and only secondly to increase the happiness of their own family.
I could be wrong. It’s the way it looks to me as an outsider.
So, when I read Little Miss Attila’s explanation today that adoption is one of the objections social conservatives have about lesbians and gays in general, and about gay marriage, it occurred to me that they may believe we are adopting children for the same reason many of them might, to add converts to the gay and lesbian community.
OK, let’s think this through. Lesbians and gays are brought up in a straight culture, which did not succeed in converting us to being straight, and some of us who really tried to be straight found the effort to be damaging and stunting and futile. This means we really have quite a negative attitude about anyone getting converted to a sexual orientation — you figure it out and go with it, that’s our experience.
Perhaps this is a good place to mention that I’m an ex-ex-lesbian. That is, I came out as a lesbian at 18 in 1972, became an ex-lesbian for spiritual reasons (and a break-up with an anorexic, emotionally abusive partner) in mid-1976. When I was 30 I decided that trying not to be a lesbian was adharma, which is the worst thing you can do spiritually because you lose your connection with your own path of spiritual evolution when you try to be someone else. So I came out as a lesbian again in the spring of 1984 just before I met Margaret.
Bottomline, lesbians and gays feel really solid about the fact that you can’t convert anyone from one sexual orientation to another and that it is abuse if you try.
That means that the idea of adopting a child to “convert it to the gay lifestyle” never even crosses the minds of lesbians and gays, so we don’t see the objection coming. It really is a completely unjust and unfounded accusation.
So, why do lesbians and gays fight for the right to adopt children?
Because there are some of us who love children and feel financially and emotionally and psychologically prepared for the challenges and joys of raising them. Because their hearts go out to children who are without parents and a home. Because their life partner had children before coming out and they want to be fully a parent to those children, too. Because children make a family. Because it is rewarding to go through grocery store aisles planning your family’s meals. Because it is fulfilling to provide for your children and watch them grow. Because it is fun to have family dinners. Because Christmas is merrier with children than without.
Maybe we have a completely different attitude about children than straight people do because when you guys have sex, the possibility that you could be making a baby is always there and MOST of the time, you are thwarting the babymaking aspect of the experience. Not that that’s a bad thing. You’re just pushing it away, or running from it. I think straights are more negative or ambivalent about having children than they realize, so they may doubt that we have pure motives when we want to adopt.
Straight people may have a hard time believing how prepared lesbians and gays are for children when we seek to adopt because straight people can bring children into their lives without thought or preparation or gladness and often shrink from the responsibility. Again, perhaps they question our motives about adoption because they believe we would have the same mixed emotions they have.
However, gays and lesbians have sex without worrying about babies. So we’ve never, or hardly ever, had the negative or ambivalent feelings about having children that straight people have. So when we want to add children to our families, we are really behind that plan. It is on purpose. We are 100 percent on it. What adoption means to lesbians and gays is that we want to adopt children to love them and raise them and be a family and someday see them have their own families that they bring to visit Mom and Mommy or Dad and Daddy. That’s it and all about it. To give love and be a family.
Little Miss Attila kindly asked me what I thought of this post at her blog, and here is my answer:
My concern with Steele’s put-down of Limbaugh is that it makes me question his personality, his judgment and his qualifications for the job of chairman of the Republican National Committee, which Rush correctly pointed out is not the same as being the leader of the Republican Party and is definitely not the same as being the leader of the conservative movement.
To the extent that a leader articulates principles and inspires people to adopt and advance them, then Rush Limbaugh is indeed the leader of conservatism right now and he proved it with his CPAC speech, which I heard in its entirety in one of the overflow rooms thanks to having the sense to stay put in my chair after the Conservatism 2.0 session ended.
As a brand new conservative who has only ever heard snippets of Limbaugh from the MSM, along with its demonization of him, I was absolutely flabbergasted at how warm, compassionate, inclusive, courageous and insightful his speech was. I’m glad my remarks from the first session of Conservatism 2.0 are on PJTV video so I can prove this isn’t a “me too” statement regarding Rush’s comments about conservatism and the individual: what I said there is that the essence of conservatism is about creating the conditions for individuals to succeed AND the reason that conservatism isn’t selling as well now as it used to is that the victim entitlement demagogues, especially lesbians — my people — and African-Americans (Wright, Sharpton, Jackson, ACORN leaders et al.), have successfully stolen the dreams and ambitions of their constituents by persuading them that they have no power as individuals to succeed due to various all-powerful demons (who are usually white, not that there’s anything racist about that).
Obama personifies this pernicious, soul-killing ideology, and the reason people were open to him as a savior, and to the idea that big government is their salvation, is this loss of belief in themselves, their inability to imagine that they could succeed as individuals instead of giving up their individuality to become true believers in a conformist and totalitarian mass movement dependent on a big government nanny state to take care of them.
In his CPAC speech on Saturday (2/28), Rush pointed out how conservatism loves individuals and wants everyone to succeed. But the reason I jumped out of my chair on Thursday at Conservatism 2.0, and that I am going to keep banging this drum, is that longterm fiscal conservatives — I know I’m repeating myself — are acting like there’s something wrong with their ideas and that modifying them will be the key to current and future success.
NO! NO! NO! NO! A THOUSAND TIMES, NO!
The necessary condition for condition for fiscal conservatism to succeed is that the majority of the population MUST believe they can succeed as individuals in realizing their goals. START THERE, conservatives, and victory is in your grasp.
Remember, the number of people that conservatives need to reach with this message is not overwhelming.
In the 2008 election, 58,343,671 people — 46 percent of votes cast — believed in themselves as individuals, rejected Obama’s flim-flammery and voted for McCain/Palin; 66,882,230 people — 53 percent of votes cast — voted for Obama, some as true believers who wanted a savior; and some as idealists-cum-suckers-who-will-spend-the-rest-of-their-lives-with-trust-issues-when-they-wake-up, who believed in his magical powers to make mutually exclusive things exist simultaneously in the same space.
A seven percent margin of victory, when it is comprised centrists who did not pay attention to the candidates until the last two weeks before Election Day (if ever), of the hopeless, the suckers/idealists — and, it has to be said, the ACORN coalition of the existentially-challenged, serial voters who cast ballots in multiple states, and illegal aliens eager to support an “open borders” candidate — is not an overwhelming number of people to reach in order to turn the tide.
We can do this, people!
During CPAC I felt a special calling to reach and free my people — the lesbians who have been rendered helpless and hopeless by women who have exploited and deluded them. Surely this has to compare with birds returning to Noah during the flood with branches in their beaks — a harbinger that the time adrift will soon be over. If CPAC did this for me, I think it was a success.
Now, to return to the doubts Steele’s remarks about Rush inspired in me.
First, Steele’s response to Hughley, who was a thoughtful interlocutor, to me sprang from a wounded ego. If so, that’s a personality problem that suggests he does not belong in the job of RNC chairman. If he is so easily shamed and can be gotten to respond so inappropriately so easily, he is now the bitch of Obama, who is the master of manipulation.
Second, when you’re down, you don’t get up by forming a circular firing squad, especially when your judgment is so poor that you take a shot at your movement’s most popular talk show host immediately after he has inspired and energized your base.
Third, making rookie mistakes like this after serving in elective office, non-entity that he was as Maryland’s lieutenant governor, suggests Steele does not have the qualifications to be a successful chairman of the Republican National Committee.
I have to admit, my own lukewarm support of Steele went cold at CPAC when an AOL reporter, who interviewed me, asked for my reaction to Steele’s statements about gay marriage on the Mike Gallagher show — it was the first I’d heard about them:
GALLAGHER: Is this a time when Republicans ought to consider some sort of alternative to redefining marriage and maybe in the road, down the road to civil unions. Do you favor civil unions?
STEELE: No, no no. What would we do that for? What are you, crazy? No. Why would we backslide on a core, founding value of this country? I mean this isn’t something that you just kind of like, “Oh well, today I feel, you know, loosey-goosey on marriage.” […]
GALLAGHER: So no room even for a conversation about civil unions in your mind?
STEELE: What’s the difference?
(Quoted at thinkprogress.org.)
My reply to the AOL reporter was that Steele may be more committed to Black Liberation Theology than anyone realizes. This thought occurred to me because black ministers in Maryland are very active in opposing equal rights and marriage for gays. I wonder how much influence they have had on Steele, and how much he is beholden to them? I am thankful that former Gov. Parris Glendening got a state-wide civil rights law protecting the rights of homosexuals to jobs and housing passed, in memory of his gay brother who died of AIDS.
It is this toxic betrayal of the “rainbow coalition” promise by black ministers that was the second thing to turn me against Obama during the primaries. (The first was his support of open borders. I lived for many years in a community overwhelmed by illegal aliens and while they are divided by an almost infinite number of hatreds, the two things they agree on is that women are property and gays should be killed. So I do not feel the least hateful about insisting our borders should be secure and illegal aliens returned to their homelands forthwith. To say nothing of the fact that tolerating breaking our laws by anyone makes a sap out of everyone who plays by the rules — nothing is more corrupting to the social contract.)
Conservatives can come to blows on many hot-button issues — gay marriage; don’t ask, don’t tell; illegal immigration; and abortion — but what won my heart at CPAC was the willingness of the speakers and everyone I met to emphasize our common ground that conservatism is about creating the conditions for individuals to succeed. Now we have to be the ones that inspire people to believe in themselves again. We took it for granted they still do, but a critical number had lost faith in themselves without our realizing it and the victim identity predators got them.
Our message is the one that will free them and show them the way to fulfill their full potential. To get them to believe in themselves again so they can connect with what conservatism has to offer, how about adapting this message from Napoleon Hill (author of “Think and Grow Rich”)?: What you can conceive, and believe, you can achieve. If that phrase seems corny to you, get over it. Do that because it will turn the tide for conservatism with a speed that will confound and astonish Obama and his fellow purveyors of confusion, helplessness, hopelessness and doom. That is because it has magic and power in it, because it connects with everyone’s deepest longing and unleashes their power, and because the best way to fight darkness is to turn on the light.
P.S.
Since we lesbians and gays do not have a national civil rights law to protect our rights to jobs and housing, quite a lot of us have to be entrepreneurs and make our own jobs. Conservatives, do you know what that means? It means that lesbians and gays are YOUR natural constituency, not liberalism’s. Think about that and let it sink in. Gays and lesbians ALONE would have swung the election to McCain/Palin. Plus, we’re fighting to be allowed to marry and to serve our country. Seriously, if THAT’S what we’re fighting for, how evil can we be?
P.P.S.
Cuban Diva BFF loves talk radio and just sent me an e-mail with a screenshot from Rush’s Web site home page from 3/2/09 with this pertinent quote from Rush:
Mr. Steele, if it is your position as the chairman of the Republican National Committee that you want a left-wing Democrat president and a left-wing Democrat Congress to succeed in advancing their agenda — if it’s your position that you want President Obama and Speaker Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid to succeed with their massive spending and taxing and nationalization plans — I think you have some explaining to do. Why are you running the GOP?
Rush provides the full transcript here and it turns out he’s gone to bat for Steele more than once and really put himself on the line on Steele’s behalf. Now I think Steele should step down immediately, if Republicans want to win in 2010. He is too inept and disloyal for the job.
Here’s the thing about getting gay marriage legalized — it makes a LOT more sense for me to engage conservatives on the issue than liberal Democrats because I only have to educate conservatives about the “gay” part of the issue and joyfully, that work not only stays done, but actually begins to multiply itself virally through their social networks. I know this because I started doing this kind of education around 1973 when I was 20.
HOWEVER — I have decided with liberals and Democrats, it is completely futile to discuss gay marriage because they absolutely cannot comprehend WHY it is so utterly, passionately, life-or-death, heaven-or-hell important for us to have the right to marry legally NOW, if not sooner — for us, for them, for the children, for a strong nation and a better world now and forever.
The reason is that liberals and Democrats are so wishy-washy on marriage itself that every day is like weaving a Penelope’s web in their minds on what marriage means and every night that work is undone and we start at square one the next day ad infinitem.
So it totally doesn’t matter at all about how accepting liberals and Democrats are of us as lesbians and gays. As long as they don’t get the importance of marriage, they will never move the muscles and expend the political capital to make gay marriage happen.
Worse than that, my perception is that the Democratic Party has turned evil towards lesbians and gays. They have so successfully demonized conservatives and Republicans that they are now functioning like a cult, one of the traits of which is to terrorize members about leaving the fold. And, to continue the cult analogy, they are mercilessly and shamelessly exploiting lesbians and gays for money and labor with the promise that some day, some far off and ever-receding day, gay marriage will be important enough for them to reciprocate with the effort required to make it happen. Which they could do this week with just a couple of amendments to the omnibus spending bill, if they really wanted. Which they don’t. And never will.
After all, when you have total control of an industrious, educated and prosperous minority who are completely your bitches and will do anything you say and wait and hope FOREVER nourished by promises alone while they hold the door for less-deserving minorities, most of whom hate them and want them dead, to thunder past them, each and every one of whom has more rights than they do the instant their ass is over the border and regardless of any crime they have committed, including murder and treason, why would you give those slaves their freedom by delivering on their issues? Well, the Democrats won’t now, won’t ever.
Unlike liberal Democrats, conservatives now are talkable on the subject of gay marriage because they cherish marriage and therefore can grasp at an emotional level beyond words why we hunger for it so and must have it or die.
Unlike liberal Democrats, conservatives now are talkable on the subject of gay marriage regarding how it affects how people are taxed and whether permitting it can enable more people to create wealth and jobs and cost society less when they fall on bad times because they grasp that that is intellectually consistent with the tenets of conservatism.
And for me, the beauty of putting in the time and love, and, probably, sometimes tears, into going right into the belly of the beast to have it out with conservatives over gay marriage is that I believe that words have meaning to them and are connected to actions and that they are the ones who will make gay marriage happen, and be glad to do it, Nixon-to-China-style, because once you get something done with them, by golly, it stays done.
In the meantime, my liberal Democrat lesbian and gay friends, here is music to wait for your Democrat savior to come through for you, from Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly, which is apt on so many levels:
“Un bel di vedremo, ” (“One beautiful day we shall see”) Italian lyrics with English translation here:
André Rieu, “The Humming Chorus,” from Madame Butterfly:
During the hospitalization in September 2004 when we found out that my life partner, Margaret Ardussi, was dying, one of the nurses commented to me on our devotion to one another and then said, “I’ve only seen that level of devotion from gay couples.”
Wow.
I believe that legalizing gay marriage will strengthen the institution, not weaken it. And my perception is that we have to let the world see more of our devotion to one another to win the right to marry legally. Pictures have a power that words do not, and love has a power beyond pictures to reach into people’s hearts to open them so that we may have the legal structure of marriage, to protect the one of devotion that we make for ourselves because the power of our love for one another is so strong and transforming that to do anything else would simply tear our hearts out.
I’ll tell more of the story in words later, but today I am telling it in photos. I don’t have many — we didn’t often have money to spare for getting photos developed.
I met Margaret Ardussi on June 30, 1984, in Fairfield, Iowa, when I came to stay at the house where she rented a room for a World Peace Assembly at Maharishi International University (now Maharishi University of Management) for people practicing the TM-Sidhi program. Margaret had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1980 and was too disabled to work. I was an unemployed writer. She was eloquent, well-educated, cultured, the kindest person I’ve ever met in my life and I felt like I’d held her image in my heart all my life and at last I’d found her. I was 30 and she was 43.
If you want to know how it is possible for a couple to go through the kind of adversity you do with a progressive illness like multiple sclerosis — Margaret became paralyzed from T-5 in April 1992 and was quadriplegic by 1994 — plus, I had a progressive condition, too, that almost killed me in 2003 — and still have the bliss and radiance that you can see in our faces in the photos below, then I have a few tips.
First, when you argue with one another, and you realize you are wrong, besides having the ability to know when you are wrong, you also must be able to say, with kindness, “You were right, dear, AND, I was wrong.” It’s the second phrase that does the most healing.
Second, every day, every single day, say to her, “I thank God for you in my life! I am so fortunate to be with you! I love you with all my heart and you are the most beautiful woman in the world TO ME.” (It’s the “TO ME” that sells the truth of the statement.)
Margaret died on December 7, 2004, in our home under hospice care with me at her side of a stroke and complications of multiple sclerosis. In the last photo below, the bandage on the bridge of her nose is for a pressure sore from her respirator mask, which was almost completely healed by the time she died. Before the stroke took her ability to speak, her last words to me were, “I love you.”
I met Ed Morrissey of Hot Air at Bloggers Row at CPAC for the first time today and I have to say he is a scholar and a gentleman. He asked me how I first started on the path from liberalism to conservatism and I promised him I would write a post on this part of my story.
During the primaries, before I really became engaged with the campaign and the issues, I knew that I would never vote for Obama due to his support of open borders, his opposition to gay marriage, his upbringing in a religion that kills gays and regards women as property and his ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Black ministers have been especially active in Maryland in opposing equal rights AND marriage for lesbians and gays, so Obama’s 20-year connection to an anti-gay minister was a dealbreaker for me. Obama’s throwing Wright under the bus only made him seem worse to me for his disloyalty in his own selfish interest.
I wasn’t worried about Rev. Wright’s hurt feelings at all because I figured that if Obama were elected he’d waste no time in announcing an urgent need to bind up the nation’s wounds and welcome Wright back to his bosom so that Wright would be merrily God-damning America from the Lincoln Bedroom in no time flat. I still expect this.
But my remark that struck Ed was my complaint about the rogue’s gallery of bombers, sociopaths, loons and thieves that comprise Obama’s taste in companions, by which I mean — and this is only the short list — Rev. Wright, Fr. Pfleger,Tony Rezko, Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn and his ACORN BFFs.
“It’s like the people Obama surrounds himself with are his Picture of Dorian Gray,” I told Ed. “He may look angelic at times, but they are the portrait of his true character. They show what he is really like inside.”
I passed within a few feet of Ann Coulter today while she was giving a radio interview with Joyce Kaufman of 850WFTL on Radio Row at CPAC in Washington, D.C.
I just want y’all to know that Ms. Coulter in person has a touching air of vulnerability to her, which surprised me. She also has exquisite taste and her horns and tail really worked with her ensemble. Also, her pitchfork totally matched her shoes. And the scent of brimstone that envelops her is so elegant and understated that you adapt to it in a twinkling.
(Hoo-ah!)