Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Riddle: Who Is The Surgeon?

I remember a riddle from the 1970’s sitcom “All In The Family.” It went something like this: A man and his son were in a car accident. They were both rendered unconscious and taken to the hospital. In the ER, it was determined that the boy needed surgery. So they took him into the operating room, and presently the surgeon entered. Upon seeing the boy, the surgeon said, “I can’t operate on this boy. He is my son.” So who is the surgeon?

I think many younger people would find it hard to believe that this actually stumped anyone forty years ago, but it did. Some speculated that the father had regained consciousness. Others thought that the surgeon was the boy’s stepfather and the man who was in the car accident was his biological father, or the other way around. Back then it was hard for many to imagine that the surgeon could be the boy’s mother. The mere thought of that was not only unimaginable but frightening to many. Some thought our society was headed in a dangerous direction. Many thought feminists were evil people out to destroy civilization, and they weren’t afraid to say so.

All these years later, we still have plenty of sexists around to be sure, but the idea of a female surgeon, or lawyer, or CEO, or president just isn’t that hard to imagine anymore. Our society changed, and most of us wouldn’t return to the days when it was almost unthinkable for a woman to be a surgeon even if we could.

Now our society is going through another change, and we could dust off that riddle and reuse it to illustrate this. That’s because now there is another legitimate answer. The surgeon may not be the boy’s mother, or his step-father, or the man who was in the car accident with him. The surgeon could be the boy’s OTHER father and the partner of the man who was in the car accident along with their son.

The prospect of a gay couple raising the boy is unthinkable and scary to some, but others realize it’s no big deal. Hopefully by the time 2050 rolls around, our society will have gotten past this new bend in that old riddle and the idea of two people of the same sex getting married and raising a family together won’t be so shocking or threatening anymore.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

So much for Michael Brown's pretense that he is a kinder, gentler homophobe.

Reflections on the Penn State Scandal and Other Recent News : Line of Fire

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I listened to about half of that, and I read the blog post that supposedly supports Brown's claim that there's "pederasty in the gay activist's closet." I'm pretty sure that Brown is bringing all this up because he wants to connect homosexuality with pedophilia in the minds of his listeners and readers. But even if you take him at face value, what he's saying is extremely prejudiced. If we're to judge gay men of the past by their sexual interest in and activity with younger men and teenagers, then shouldn't we also judge heterosexual men of the past in the same way?

Brown complains about the fact that gay activists want school children to know that Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo were gay, but even though, according to him, the evidence that supports the claim that they were gay is questionable, Brown says if they were, then they were pedophiles because they were supposedly interested in teenage boys. I recently read David McCullough's bio of John Adams, and in it, he claims that Sally Hemmings may have been as young as 14 when Thomas Jefferson began his affair with her, and Hemmings was not only much younger than Jefferson, she was his slave. So should school children be taught to think of Jefferson as a heterosexual pedophile? And should everything he ever did be rejected as the act of a heterosexual pedophile?

Brown complains about the that gay activists want school children to know that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were gay, and says that their supposed interest in teenage boys means they were homosexual pedophiles. Edger Allen Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin. And Lewis Carol is said to have been unusually interested in the little girl who inspired “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” He supposedly even took a series of nude photos of her. Were they heterosexual pedophiles? Should school children be taught this. Should their works be thrown out, burned, discarded?

Brown says that we should remember Harvey Milk, if at all, as a homosexual pedophile because he supposedly had a sexual encounter with a sixteen-year-old. My grandfather was 30 when he married my 15-year-old grandmother. Should I think of him as a heterosexual pedophile? Well, I refuse to do that.
 

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Diane Gramley of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania blames the Penn State child rape scandal on the "promotion of the homosexual agenda on campus" and "anything goes" mentality.

Read her comments at hate group American Family Association news site here.

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My uncle molested my cousin when he was no more than five years old.  The man is not gay.  He has never shown any sexual interest in men.  He's not a pedophile.  To my knowledge he's never shown any sexual interest in any kids, male or female.  I do not believe he had the slightest bit of sexual interest in my cousin.  I believe he did what he did out of spite and cruelty.  This was a case of one person using his power over another because he could and because he gave into his rage. 

I think many instances of child molestation are like that, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that is a blanket explanation.  I'm not sure we have a blanket explanation that explains all instances of abuse.  But I am sure that gay people are no more likely to abuse children than straight people.
 
People like Gramely and LaBarbera aren't really interested in understanding this issue or protecting victims.  They want to use stories like this to spread misinformation, and promote fear, and a general disgust of sex outside of heterosexual marriage, and a disgust of LGBT people and homosexuality in particular.
 
LaBarbera, in his zeal to promote his homophobic agenda, even went so far as to suggest the boys who were raped may now be gay.  He spends his life denouncing LGBT people, and now he wants to label the victims gay because that feeds into the lie that kids are indoctrinated or seduced into being gay.  It's obvious to me that he and people like him are using this case to promote their hate and that they don't really care about the victims. 

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Close Encounters On The Beach

Back when I was in high school, my sister talked my father into taking us to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She had already graduated by that point, and she had been to the beach a number of times with friends. But I had never been to the beach. I had never seen the ocean.

My father was reluctant at first. He was always reluctant. But my sister was persistent, and eventually he gave in. So on a muggy July evening, we piled into the cab of our pickup truck and headed out. Mom, Dad, my sister and I sat cheek by jowl the whole way. I’m not sure now why we traveled at night. To avoid traffic? To avoid driving in the afternoon heat? It was quite humid the evening we made our journey, but I’m sure it would have been much hotter earlier in the day.

I think this may have been the last time just the four of us went anywhere as a family. We went places together later on, but my sister would bring along her boyfriend or husband, or one of us would have to stay behind for one reason or another. The Myrtle Beach outing was the last trip we went on, just the four of us.

My mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and at that point, she was not receiving treatment. She hadn’t even been diagnosed. And that summer she was very ill. She was almost in her own world. Dad worried about her the whole time. She got away from him several times, and he was afraid a man may take advantage of her. She was obviously impaired.

My sister and I spent our days baking in the sun and playing in the Atlantic Ocean. Being in the ocean was exhilarating. I had been in swimming pools, lakes, and rivers, but this was different. You could stand in waist high water, and eventually a big wave would come along and knock you down if you weren’t careful. And the water was salty, just as I had heard it would be. My skin turned brown, and my hair turned blond thanks to Sun-In. Everyone’s hair has a tendency to turn lighter when they spend time in the sun, and Sun-In sped up that process.

After it got dark, my sister and I explored the souvenir shops and hung out at the midway. We were probably spending way too much time together, and one evening we got into a row as a result. I ended up walking away from her. I think I secretly wanted to get lost in the crowd on my own. I was at that age. I wanted something to happen to me, something that was mine, something private, and I ended up having a little adventure.

I went along the boardwalk, and I studied the people. I studied how they dressed, and listened to the way they talked. My eyes, of course, were especially drawn to the boys. And there were many, many boys. I longed to see some sign, some kind of slight hint that some of them, or even one of them was like me. After a while, I sat down on a bench. I just wanted to be there by myself and drink it all in for a few minutes before I went back to our hotel room. But just a moment later a man sat down on the other end of the bench. I found his presence distracting, so I got up and started walking again.

Soon I saw another empty bench and claimed it. But then a strange thing happened. Not more than a minute later the same man came along and sat beside me again. He didn’t look directly at me or say anything. He just sat there. I got a better look at him this time. He was just a man, about 30 maybe. There was nothing about him that made him stand out. He wore khaki pants, a white loose-fitting short-sleeved cotton shirt that buttoned up in front and sneakers. He wasn’t especially attractive or unattractive. He was just a guy.

I got the sense that he might be making some kind of play for me, and that both thrilled me and unnerved me, but I wasn’t sure I had him figured out. So I decided to test him. I got up, went farther along the boardwalk, found another vacant bench and sat down again. Sure enough, the man followed me and once again sat down beside me. That’s when I decided it was time I go back to the room.
Some may have been frightened. Some may think this man’s actions suggests he had a predatory nature. But I never felt in the slightest way threatened by him. This was back in the days when gay people were virtually invisible, and gay men had to learn how to seek one another out in a crowd without straight people noticing. And I think this guy sensed that we were of the same tribe, and he was going to find out if I wanted some company. I may have been a bit young for him, but I wasn’t a child even though I was inexperienced. And instinctively, I was looking. I was searching the crowd, as I said, hunting for one of my own. I was hardly innocent. And it was probably obvious that I was on the prowl to anyone familiar with the game. If I had felt some spark of attraction for this man, I may have been tempted to talk with him, hang out with him, maybe go back to his room with him. I desperately wanted an experience like that, but he just wasn’t the right guy.

I walked along the beach feeling intoxicated. What had taken place was of immense importance. I had gotten away from my family for about an hour, I mingled with strangers far from home, and I quickly found out that there were others like me out there, others who might be interested in me. It was a revelation. I had spent years feeling so lonely, so isolated, and in no time at all, I had a close encounter of the third kind with a gay man. I had made contact. And it was easy.

 

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Beyond Words

It has been my experience that a great many people whose lives revolve around religion have more than a tinny, not quite real way about them, and I think that's because they have adopted a belief system that doesn't really match the core of who they are. They sound half alive when they prattle on with their authorized cliches, and you know that they're not really letting you in. They're not really letting you see the real person behind the professed dogma. And often times they've been hiding behind a wall of dogma for so long, they don't even know who they are anymore.

My advice would be to let it all go. Start over. People are sometimes so afraid of living without an ideology. They think that's the only thing stopping them from going crazy and living in chaos. But you don't have to pretend to have all the answers to get up in the morning and go to work, do what you need to do, be supportive of your friends and family, avoid being selfish and hurtful, etc. You don't really need dogma to guide you through the day. You have your heart.

We're not perfect. We make mistakes. But being a Stepford Wife for Jesus doesn't really make life any less messy. It just prevents us from being real.

Someone once said that the best things in life we can't even think about. We can think about the second best things, but we can't talk about them. The third best things are the things we talk about.

Those who get tied down by dogma are hung up on words. They take everything too seriously, too literally. The poetry is missing for them, as is the awareness that nothing anyone ever says is really complete.

When sincere people talk or write about their experience, their beliefs, the things that gives their lives meaning, the words they offer are only shadows of what they actually feel. They genenerally take it for granted that those listening will understand this. And if there is more to life than meets the eye, then their experience of...whatever it is, which they can only talk about using the clumsy, blunt instrument of language, is surely only a shadow of that ultimate reality, if there truly is such a reality.

I think that if there is a meaning to life, it is beyond words.