"Stop Scaring Us!"

I don't know why this popped up on my YouTube page yesterday, but it's well worth a listen.  Jackie Goldberg, past president of the Los Angeles School Board, sounds off vehemently against the homophobes in this speech from June 2023.  Ms. Goldberg retired last December after a lifetime of political and social service.

I wonder if this speech would get her sent to Alcatraz today. 

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The History of Homosexualty, Part 2

The second of four lectures delivered earlier this year by Sir Noel Malcolm, political journalist, historian, and research fellow at Oxford University.   This one examines homophobia in Christianity and Islam in the early modern period.  These lectures are based on his new book,  Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750.

Sir Noel is soft-spoken, so when I watched it, I turned up the volume, slowed the playback speed to 85%, and turned on the captions - which, however, are often ludicrous when he is quoting a foreign phrase.  I'll be posting the rest of the series once a week. 

You can see last week's episode here, along with my recommended reading list in gay history.

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Sunday Drive: Without You

Once in a great while, I go searching through the internet for old friends and lovers.  More often than not, the search leads nowhere; too much time and distance have covered all tracks.  But a couple of days ago, just on a sudden whim, I tried one more time.  And I found Pat, my best friend in high school and church, more than half a century ago.  Or rather, I found his obituary.

Pat was my first love, though we were not lovers in the physical sense, I'm sad to say.  It would have been a glad and joyful thing - but damnation and denial got in the way.

He died in 2020, leaving four children and eleven grandchildren.  I had wondered over the years if he was still alive, where he was, and how he was doing.  The last I heard of him, in the late 70s, he was working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico - a high-paying but highly dangerous job. 

The picture below, from his obituary site, was probably taken 20 or 30 years ago; he looks hearty, healthy, and prosperous there.  The obit says he was much loved by his family and friends, and I suppose he had a pretty happy life.  I'm very glad to know that.

Dapper, dashing Pat in the prime of life, long after I knew him.
I've never had a picture of him until now, only memories.

We became friends in church when I was 16 and he was 17.  It so happened that we both had parents in the same distant city, so it was only logical that on school holidays and other times, we would drive up together.  I had a brand-new Chevy Malibu 350 V8, cherry red with a black vinyl top.  Pat had no car; didn't want the responsibility, he said.  So we had many long rides together and got to know each other very well.

We were an odd couple.  Pat dropped out of school to work in construction; I finished high school and started junior college.  We were about the same height, six foot in boots, but Pat had a sculpted, muscular body with washboard abs and a permanent tan from working outdoors year-round.  I was a bookworm.  He was blond, I was brunet.  He was the life of the party, I was the quiet type.  But opposites attract, don't they?

Early on, he asked me, "How did you get to be so smart?"  I answered, "I don't know, it just happened.  How did you get to be so strong?"  He replied, "I don't know, it just happened."  Despite the differences, we somehow gravitated together, and enjoyed each other's company greatly.  Pat was the big brother I never had: a role model, someone to be a guy with.  He filled a great need.

Horror in Colorado Springs

Another gay club shot up:  5 dead, 25 or more injured.  Nauseating.

 

The 22-year-old shooter is said to be the grandson of a MAGA state representative in California.

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Growing up Gay in the Country (Australia)

A mini-documentary from Australia about Ivan, a gay man going back to his roots in the homophobic small town of Tumut, New South Wales, shot in 2014. Ivan and his husband married in 2013 during a one-week period when same-sex marriage was legal in the Australian Capital Territory (like our District of Columbia) in 2013.  The Australian Federal Parliament legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in December 2017.

The film may be set on the other side of the world, but it all seems very familiar, somehow.

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Show Me the Way: Gay in Tennessee

A moving, enlightening documentary by Emmy Award winner Kate Kunath, released in 2019.  From the YouTube description:

The battle for LGBTQ rights hasn't only been fought on the streets of coastal cities; it has also taken place on the dirt roads, campuses, and in the homes of rural America. In this new short documentary‚ released 50 years after the Stonewall riots, which brought LGBTQ rights into the national consciousness‚ gay men living in central Tennessee, and their families, share stories of struggle and self-acceptance. We meet the retiree who spent his entire professional life in the closet, his devoted partner of 20 years, a pastor determined to overcome his own prejudices, and the pastor's gay son, newly in love and just starting to come into his own.

The location is Centerville, Tennessee, about 60 miles southwest of Nashville; Nashville is the home of Vanderbilt University, a large, prestigious private college.

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Five Minutes of Hot Tea

Fabulous, funny, and true:  a Texas native tells it like it is, bitch. And I can tell you that everything he says about small-town Texas people is the God's truth.





By the way: As spot-on as this satire is, there is a greater point to be made here. It's not just about Texas, and it's not just about the South. I'll just say two words: Minneapolis. Brooklyn.

Racism and bigotry know no borders.

At the Intersection of Hate and Murder

I am still trying to take in what happened in Orlando, but although I've read numerous accounts of the massacre, I still feel strangely numb - I think it's just too big and too horrible to comprehend.  And too much of the same old hate, hate, hate we have all endured for a lifetime, a nightmare fear now brought to a terrible reality.

But I offer a couple things to my readers today, for consideration. First, I am irritated with the media-manufactured controversy on whether it was terrorism or a hate crime, or whether it was directed at gays or at Americans, and yada yada yada. Of course it was ALL those things at the same time, and more. I couldn't find an image to convey what I mean, so I made up this simple graphic of what seem to me to be the four main causes of this crime:

It's important, very important I think, to see ALL these factors as valid causes of this tragedy; human beings are complex, and people rarely do anything just for one simple reason.

If you don't believe me, just ask yourself why you ate what you ate for breakfast this morning, or for dinner last night - whatever you put in your mouth, was it because you were on a diet, or falling off one, because the cupboard was bare or overflowing, because you were sick or well, tired or inspired, or because you ate alone at home or out with friends, or, or, or - what?

And perhaps a few more causes could be added to my graphic; for example, I just read this brief but highly significant report in the Orlando Sentinel:

Gunman Omar Mateen visited gay nightclub a dozen times before shooting, witness says

Was he casing the joint, or was he locked in a closet of self-loathing and trying to break out?

And I am quite touched by this interview with the murderer's father - despite my anger and grief, I see a man struggling to come to terms with his own enormous pain and loss, and not yet quite understanding the part he played, at second hand as a parent, in this massacre:

Father of Orlando Mass Murderer Apologizes, Clarifies

(Video not embeddable by me)


The Orlando victims have been remembered around the nation and the world: in New York, the Empire State Building spire went dark in mourning, while the World Trade Center spire was lit in rainbow colors last night:

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

In Sydney, Australia, the harbor bridge was lit in rainbow colors too:

Embed from Getty Images

Crowds gathered at the Eiffel Tower in Paris:

Embed from Getty Images

One man held a sign saying, "We are a 'certain idea of the world,' never targeted 'by chance'" - a riff on a famous quote by Charles de Gaulle:

Embed from Getty Images

The Eiffel Tower was lit in the colors of the rainbow:

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While an illuminated balloon bore the colors of Old Glory:

Amsterdam also remembered at the Royal Palace:

Embed from Getty Images

Crowds gathered in Seoul:

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And on a beach in India:

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And in London, a vigil was held in Soho:

Embed from Getty Images

Will it ever end?  A chilling report from the Guardian: 1,000 mass shootings in 1,260 days.

Queers, Fears, and Crocodile Tears

Taking care to speak out of both sides of his mouth at once, His Grace the Most Reverend and Right Honourable The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Primate of All England and Metropolitan, has appeared on British television to say "how sorry I am for the hurt and pain, in the past and present, the Church has caused" to gays and lesbians. 

This after chairing a meeting last week of the Primates of the Anglican Communion that effectively suspended The Episcopal Church in the United States of America from the high councils of the Anglican Communion for the next three years.  Full text of the official communiqué is here. 

Why?  Because the Episcopal Church loves teh gayz so much they even marry them!  Horrors!  What terrible wickedness!  It's just the worst thing in the world!  Isn't it?

Meanwhile, the heads of the backwoods Anglican churches in Africa, South America, and other places are shouting hallelujah at this blow they have given - with Welby's help - to the "evil of homosexuality."  Some of those archbishops have outspokenly pushed for things like the infamous Kill-the-Gays bill in Uganda, and similar measures elsewhere.

All this is the latest chapter in the slow-motion breakup of the Anglican Communion - all on account of the filthy, nasty, perverted, unnatural gays, like you and me - a pity in one sense, but if the Archbishop of Canterbury wants to end up as merely the tool and titular head of a bunch of howling, foaming, murderous homophobes, that's his lookout.

The American church, of course, has been entirely independent of the Church of England since 1776, and will keep right on loving the gays, as newly installed Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says, more charitably than your Head Trucker is able to do:

Wikipedia map of the Anglican Communion,
comprising 38 provinces and 85 million members,
the third-largest Christian denomination in the world, after
the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.
Click to enlarge.  For legend, click here.

So the Pope DID Meet with Kim Davis

I was sure yesterday's report was just a rightwing fantasy, but the New York Times has confirmed it with a Vatican official in Rome. Here's a report from ABC:




Ya know, fellas, I can never forget that dark moment ten years ago when my late husband was hardly cold in his grave, and I read that Pope John Paul II, now Saint John Paul, so-called, declared that same-sex marriage was part of the "ideology of evil" - this  at the very moment when I was suddenly left all alone in a tiny Texas town full of homophobes and bigots, with no rights whatsoever under the law, and had to leave what was only a few days earlier our home with a few clothes and my little dog in the middle of a bitterly cold night to seek a place of sanctuary. Under the laws of the great state of Texas, out of all our joint possessions I was not entitled to so much as a teacup, a pencil, or a shirt button. Because our relationship did not exist in the eyes of the law, and had no more significance than the coupling of two dogs or two cows.

The present pope seems like a kindly gentleman with a strong humanitarian impulse - but he just does not see or understand the enormity of the injustice and degradation that gay people have been put through by the teachings of his church, lo these many centuries.

Ms. Davis is a simple small-town woman who is hardly the devil incarnate, but as a deeply misguided zealot anxious for martyrdom she also has no idea of the real issue at stake here, nor of the harm she is perpetuating.

Your Head Trucker does not wish to require anyone to violate their own good conscience - but I would remind both His Holiness and Ms. Davis of Jesus's words:

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's,
and to God the things that are God's.

Same-sex marriage is the law of the land here. Ms. Davis is being paid $80,000 per annum to conduct the taxpayers' business. If she has a problem with that, she is perfectly free to resign and go take some other job that will not burden her Christian conscience. 

Otherwise, she had best get on with her duties. That's what she's being paid that big salary of Caesar's money for, right?

And if I had a chance to talk with His Holiness, I would just ask: where were you and your Church when I was homeless and alone, with not a friend in sight?


Update, 10/2/15:  Turns out, it was all a set-up, and the Vatican says only private 'audience' in D.C. was with gay ex-student, not Kim Davis.

But you know all the Vatican denials are just the work of the magical, superpowerful Gay Gestapo.  Of course.  We control the entire planet!  Oh Mary, don't ask.

Australian MP Recalls His Beloved Gay Uncles

This week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a former Catholic seminarian, torpedoed a parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage by Australia's federal parliament, instead pledging to hold a non-binding plebiscite on the issue if his governing coalition is re-elected next year.

Senator Eric Abetz, leader of the government in the upper house, told his fellow Senators that gay marriage is "the latest fad" and the example of Dolce & Gabbana shows that "lots of homosexuals don't want to get married."

Senator Tim Watts, calling Abbott and Abetz "anachronistic jokes" for their anti-marriage attitudes, delivered a moving speech about his two gay uncles, well worth your time to listen to:



For background on the marriage situation Down Under, see the Wikipedia article.

Alabama Supreme Court Halts Same-Sex Marriages

Last night, in a 7-1 ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court forbade probate judges in that state from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing as precedent Alabama laws dating back to 1823. There's nothing wrong with examining historical precedent - but enlightened minds have progressed a little further since then. WIAT in Birmingham reports:




Freedom to Marry summarizes the legal implications of the Court's ruling:

What does the Alabama Supreme Court ruling do?
•The Alabama Supreme Court has ordered four probate judges - Jefferson County's Alan L. King (Jefferson County), Chilton County's Robert M. Martin, Madison County's Tommy Ragland, and Montgomery County's Steven L. Reed to immediately stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples
•62 other probate judges in Alabama - all except for Mobile probate judge Don Davis, who was specifically enjoined from enforcing Alabama's marriage ban by federal court order - are temporarily orderd to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Each judge has five days to respond explaining why they should be issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
•Judge Davis of Mobile is ordered to file a response by Thursday explaining whether he believes the federal court order requires him to issue marriage licenses to any same-sex couples besides the four couples involved in the Strawser case, brought by same-sex couples and the National Center for Lesbian Rights

What DOESN'T the Alabama Supreme Court ruling do?
•The Alabama Supreme Court ruling does NOT call into question the hundreds of marriage licenses that have been issued in Alabama since February 9, 2015. These couples are married - and their marriage licenses are valid. The state must respect these licenses issued under guidance from a federal judge, from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and from the United States Supreme Court.
•The ruling is NOT a permanent decision, but rather a last-ditch attempt to delay the freedom to marry. It is a temporary, unnecessary pause that does nothing but damage the thousands of same-sex couples and their families in the state of Alabama.
•Above all, the ruling does NOT mean that the fight for the freedom to marry in Alabama is over. We will continue fighting - we must continue fighting - to show not only other federal judges that the Alabama Supreme Court is on the wrong side of history, but also the United States Supreme Court that Alabama is READY for the freedom to marry once and for all.

Full text of the ruling here.

The ruling runs on at great length about marriage being for procreation; yet even as it does so, the animus of the Court is patently obvious. I have a cousin who was raised a few miles from the Alabama line. She is now nearly 70 and has been married three times. She has never had any children, and never wanted to. Yet the oh-so-Christian people of the Southland don't blink an eye at her right to marry, or to marry as many times as she pleases.

On the other side of my family, I have another cousin who is a widow, her husband having died several years ago just after their 50th wedding anniversary. They did have children, and now grandchildren. But she is long past the age of childbearing - yet, if she took a notion to marry again, the good Christian people of her community would not bat an eyelash.

Your Head Trucker is actually a bit tired of hearing about gay marriage now, after all this long time of debate and controversy - but I'm even more tired of being told, in acts if not in words, Go to hell, you dirty faggot, we don't want your kind around here.

Aren't you?

Millions of Queers (Our Homo America)

There is no chief, sole reason for homosexuals. “God made them, as part of his universe” is still the best and blindest answer to “why”. Don’t call on an M.D.; knock at Heaven’s Gate for enlightenment. . . .

Why is there homosexuality? Because there is pleasure in it. Because it is natural. Because it always was and always will be, as part of the universe. Because God so wills.

--Allen Bernstein, 1940

The other day, while poking around the intertubes looking for something else, your Head Trucker stumbled by chance upon a remarkable document of gay history: Millions of Queers (Our Homo America), written in 1940 by Allen Bernstein, a 27-year-old Jewish gay guy from New England. Although it's a long read at 140-plus pages, I heartily recommend it to all my truckbuddies as a vivid time capsule from our gay past.

And yes, Bernstein uses the word gay, as well as gayness, exactly as we do today - proof positive that the word was indeed current among our kind in the 1930's, and probably well before that.

Why have you never heard of this work before now? Because although Bernstein wrote several essays and some poems on gay subjects, none of them were published in his lifetime. But after he was arrested and booted out of the Army in 1944 with a Section 8 (psychiatric) discharge, as was required by law at the time for anyone discovered to be a homosexual, he immediately wrote to Army authorities appealing the decision.  They turned him down, of course, but he kept on appealing for the next 37 years, until finally the Army relented in 1981 and granted him a retroactive honorable discharge. 

Along with his first appeal in 1944, Bernstein sent a copy of his magnum opus, which was of course ignored - and somehow ended up in the archives of the National Library of Medicine in Washington, D. C., where it was discovered in 2010 by Richard Sell, a professor at the Drexel University School of Public Health. The typescript was published on OutHistory.org last March, along with a biography by Professor Sell and an analysis by gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz.

Bernstein's life story is very interesting in and of itself: born in New Hampshire and growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, after graduating from high school he went on to college and after that to the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in history in 1934. Somewhere along the way, he became familiar with

the nocturnal admirers of the juggling Jackson statue in front of the White House, the inhabitants of Boston's Public Gardens or Common, or of New York's or Chicago’s numerous parks, or the patrons of selected beer joints or restaurants in any large city, or the seatchangers in the grope theaters in every metropolitan area (viz. 42nd St.), many residents in Y.M.C.A. furnished rooms, . . .

and became what society would have called a practicing homosexual. In the introduction to his essay, he credits "a few close friends and many chance acquaintances whose phrases, experiences, or lives are included here."

But while he does limn the outlines of gay life in 1930's America, Bernstein also goes far beyond that. His wide research and reading in historical, literary, and legal sources shine from nearly every page of the typescript in quotations and references where he gives a broad outline of homosexuality in the Western world from ancient times to modern. As far as I know, such an extensive survey of gay life through the centuries was not attempted again until Katz published his landmark Gay American History in 1976, a work I have had on my bookshelves for many years, and I'm sure many of my truckbuddies have too.

Indeed, Katz himself in a review of Millions of Queers remarks:

Reading Bernstein’s rendering of homosexual American history in “Millions” I was personally and deeply moved to realize that he had found and consulted the same old, dusty bibliographies and quoted many of the same old documents that I had to rediscover three and four decades later . . . .

Bernstein's apologia has its flaws, though - as the much-marked typescript shows, it has the feel of a work-in-progress, a little rough around the edges and uneven in tone: sometimes erudite, sometimes slangy, and permeated with views long outdated now in light of our greater understanding of biology and psychology, and the progress we have made legally and socially. Katz observes:

Bernstein accepted many of the negative clichés about homosexuals, but argued that they should not be persecuted under the law. . . .

By calling “Millions” a homosexual defense I don’t mean that it’s a radical gay liberation manifesto of 1969, a liberal gay rights tract of the 1990s, or a 2014 critique of sexual neo-liberalism. Bernstein offers a libertarian argument that homosexuals don’t hurt anyone, should not be criminalized and stigmatized, and should be left alone to work out their difficult, non-conforming lives by themselves. Bernstein argues that the state (lawmakers, police, judges, and jailors), the medical establishment (doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists), the media, parents, and citizens, should stop harassing homosexuals.

Bernstein’s defense will disappoint anyone judging it against today’s dominant defense of homosexuals as “normal” exemplars of “mental health.” He takes seriously many of the damning judgments that cursed homosexuals in the U.S., in 1940. Bernstein’s essay documents an archive of bad feelings, the trauma of persons and a group despised and discounted, that he and other homosexuals suffered and had to transcend to survive

Thank goodness we got beyond all that; but this work, written long before "gay liberation" and all that followed from Stonewall, gives the reader a "You Are There" feeling - yes, you have all your modern ideas and attitudes about who you are as a gay man or woman, out and proud and a little bit loud sometimes - but would you really have felt the same way, truly, had you lived back in Bernstein's time? It's very, very hard to swim against the tide, to be the outsider, often isolated and alone, whom all the world hates and despises and quite literally damns to the fires of eternal hell - as some of us still remember from our youth, though the young people of today have no real clue about all that.

Bernstein married a woman in 1946, and told her when he proposed that he was gay; she accepted him anyway, and apparently they had a happy, harmonious marriage until her death in 1991. They also produced two sons, to whom Bernstein came out after their mother died, who have supported Professor Sell's research into their father's life and writings.

And there's an even happier ending to the story: Bernstein lived to age 95, and was able to see the progress of gay rights and even the first legal gay marriages in this country before he died in 2008. As Katz notes:

In 1940, speaking of the criminalization of homosexual acts and the imprisonment of homosexuals, Bernstein says:

It will probably be continued in most American communities for another century or three; let's be realistic, and stop day-dreaming about repeal of sodomy statutes.

Given his original pessimism, it’s nice to note that Bernstein lived long enough to witness the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, in effect, declaring U.S. sodomy laws unconstitutional.

But really, when you read between the lines of this cri du coeur, you see that, at bottom, Bernstein and his friends way back there in the 1930's felt pretty much the same way about themselves as we do - which I'll summarize as "we're not hurting anyone, what we do is none of your business, so leave us the hell alone." 

Well, enough prologue - go read the essay for yourself, a well-researched and candid contribution to gay history, which deserves to be part of the corpus of required reading for the gay generations to come.

Here's the link to the table of contents page at OutHistory, from which you can find the original typescript or, if you prefer, a cleaned-up, searchable and easy-to-read text version; Katz's critique is also listed on the table of contents. Enjoy.

Beat, Curse, Disown Your Gay Kid in Jesus' Name

What's love got to do with it? Joe.My.God. writes of this family in Kennesaw, Georgia:

440K views in one day of this YouTube clip in which a kid comes out to his family, only to have them curse him because Jesus, then physically attack him.

Dan Savage and others have set up a fundraiser to pay the kid's living expenses while he gets on his feet.


Update, 8/29, 9 a.m.: Donations for Daniel Pierce, who is staying with supportive friends, now exceed $50,000.

ARMAGAYDDON

From Irish activist group LGBT Noise:

Ugandan Anti-Gay Law Overturned

The Constitutional Court of Uganda in session

The New York Times reports:

A Ugandan court on Friday struck down a punitive anti-gay law that has strained Uganda’s relations with the West, but the court ruled on narrow technical grounds, preserving the possibility that the measure could be revived.

In front of an overflowing courtroom, a panel of five judges announced that the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which punishes some gay behavior with life in prison, was invalid because it had been passed by Parliament without a proper quorum.

“We’re very happy,” said Sylvia Tamale, a Ugandan law professor who has supported gay rights despite constant threats and harassment. “But it’s unfortunate that the court did not deal with the substantive issues that violate our rights.”

Uganda’s government, which is tightly controlled by President Yoweri Museveni, a former guerrilla fighter who has ruled for 28 years, did not immediately indicate if it was going to appeal.

Uganda’s vehement anti-gay movement began in 2009 after American preachers came to Uganda and worked closely with Ugandan legislators to draft a bill that called for putting gay people to death.

After an international outcry, with several Western countries threatening to cut aid, the Ugandan government modified the bill to make “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by life in prison. The bill was passed by Parliament in December, with advocates calling it an “early Christmas gift.” Mr. Museveni publicly signed it into law in February.

In June, the Obama administration announced it was cutting back on aid, imposing visa restrictions and canceling a regional military exercise as a message to “reinforce our support for human rights of all Ugandans, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.” Several other countries also suspended assistance to Uganda.

Proponents plan to appeal the ruling, however.

How Gay Obama Is Destroying America

From Free Press Houston via Joe.My.God.: anti-immigration protesters in Houston last week sound off about that homosexual boyfriend-killer Obama in league with the flood of gays, Chinese, Mexicans, and Muslim jihadists coming across the border to destroy America. A few pro-immigration protesters are also interviewed.




Why, even our embassies abroad fly the rainbow flag, and we have a bunch of queer ambassadors - isn't that terrible?! So God just might nuke America into oblivion any day now, says Houston pastor Rick Scarborough, for the evil, wicked, detestable sin of loving the gays:




Funny how all those liberty-loving, flag-waving, right-wing patriots, as soon as you take the whip and the rod out of their hands, they want to destroy "this great country" that they have always professed to love so dearly - isn't it? If they don't control it, they want to see it smashed to pieces, and then gloat over the smoldering ruins. A fine Christian attitude, ain't it boys?

The Gay Naughties

Naught = Zero, get it?

Where the Churches Stand on Same-Sex Marriage

Click to enlarge.

The chart above summarizes a new report by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center on official attitudes towards same-sex marriage held by major U.S. denominations. Another recent report by Pew discusses the hard-line anti-gay attitudes of most Evangelical church members, as shown below:

At its General Assembly in Detroit this week, The Presbyterian Church U.S.A., which already allows gays and lesbians to be ordained ministers, will consider resolutions to allow same-sex weddings in states where they are legal.

Update, 6/19: The Presbyterian General Assembly voted today 76%-24% to allow same-sex weddings.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (PDF, 1.42 MB) in 2008, which offers a sweeping analysis of religious beliefs and denominational identification among American adults. A short summary of their findings is presented in this table:

And per the U.S. Census Bureau, it appears that adults make up 76.5% of the 2013 total population of 316,128,839. So you do the math.

Dale Hansen is Ticked Off

Find out why in this clip of the famed Dallas sportscaster defending Michael Sam - even if, like me, you don't care anything about football, this is a three-snap putdown not to be missed.




And some poignant thoughts emailed to me over the weekend by my best friend and fellow Pork Boy, M.P., with permission:

Yes it's all so amazing, that what we never dreamed in our wildest we would see in this world . . . no one may understand what its like to be hated and still be invisible. Hated because you are just who you are, and invisible because you need to stay that way at least for your own safety, out of fear, to gain respect, even pretend to get love, but also for the pathetic reason that you can pretend that way that you are not hated, and move through day after day trying to eke out a life that seems to have no meaning in this world. That you will never be "as human" as real people, able to love and live happily as real people, to have jobs and bank accounts and normal lives like real people. Never be, especially in the eyes of God, as good as "real people" - in fact, you are hated and absolutely bound to hell, and would surely ruin all the world and those around you, bring them to hell with you, if you don't remain invisible. . . .

Today being a gay man means I'm a man like any other, and that a man who is Gay (and black even) can celebrate that he's an outstanding athlete, and kiss his boyfriend to show his excitement, and the world sees him as he's not invisible. And they celebrate his good fortune, even his kiss on national, even international TV. Today I can be a gay man and celebrate that I am a good cook and artist, love beauty, create beauty, love music, dance, poetry, philosophy, and those gifts are celebrated in me because of the fact that I'm GAY. and so I write these words to you my friend because no one but us who have been invisible get it. That all may become EX-Invisibles, and that children in the future who are like us never feel the need to be unseen, unheard, unloved - for them and for us is why tears run down my face as I write this, why tears ran down Michael Sam's face, and mine then as I watched him.