I’m taking a short hiatus to work on a few other writing projects. Badger the others on Twitter to keep yourselves entertained.

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council said on Hardball with Chris Matthews on Tuesday that the Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision that struck down anti-sodomy laws was wrong, and that gay behavior should be outlawed.

Sprigg, a senior fellow for policy studies at the antigay FRC, appeared on the program to debate the repeal of the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy with Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

As Sprigg mounted an increasingly illogical defense of the policy based on discrimination, Matthews pressed him on the question: "Do you think we should outlaw gay behavior?"

"I think that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas which overturned the sodomy laws in this country was wrongly decided," said Sprigg. "I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior."

"So we should outlaw gay behavior?" asked Matthews again.

“Yes,” said Sprigg.

- The Advocate

All news anchors, when their producers force them to lower their quality of journalism by having morons like Mr. Sprigg appear on their shows, should do this.  Boil down the hatred of the “guest” to the simplest form and ask them, point-blank and repeatedly, if they will acknowledge their own bigotry.

What Chris Matthews did, with the help of Mr. Sprigg, was show the country in brief, understandable and highly portable soundbytes, that the opposition to repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is not about troop cohesion or military strategy or any of the other meaningless buzzwords people supporting DADT hide behind.  The opposition to repealing DADT comes out of a baseless fear of what gay people do in their bedrooms.

The people who discriminate against gay people in the military and keep them from getting married, holding teaching positions, adopting children, etc. can hide behind whatever rhetoric they want, but when grilled properly on national television, the truth comes out.  None of this is about troop cohesion, traditional values, protecting children or protecting marriage, this whole gay rights divide between conservatives and everyone else comes down to one thing and one thing only:  Fear of sex.

CotG 134  is up at Right to Think.

Homologous Legs will be hosting next, on Feb. 14.

Once again, Carnival of the Godless needs hosts!  Contact me and let me know if you’re interested in hosting.

From Funny or Die:

My doctor gave me a prescription cough medicine today that has the word “meth” in the name.  And I have to write a blog carnival!  Oh boy!

Andrew Bernardin over at The Evolving Mind has two posts that go hand-in-hand with the theme of my this blog… he must have known I was hosting.  When Two Moms Are Better talks about new research that claims to show that children raised by two men or two women are no more at a disadvantage than children raised by a man and a woman.  Religion — Good or Bad? gets it right in that religion is neither wholly bad or wholly good, but the worst you can say about it is that it is pretty much irrelevant.

Banquet Manager at So You Want To Be a Banquet Manager… offer’s today’s plucky comic relief:  Restaurant Refused To Give Man a Toothpick? Although, I do have a bone tooth to pick (sorry…) with this article:  I have injured myself with dental floss at least once in my life.  Dental floss is dangerous and not a safe substitute for those dangerous splinters of malice we call toothpicks.

Some quick online investigation unearthed a video of the incident that began the moratorium on toothpicks:

Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane’s Political Madness writes limericks, and although the metre isn’t perfect, they’re fucking hilarious!  Ode To Weak-Kneed Democrats, Rudy “Noun and a Verb and a 9-11″ Giuliani Loses His Mind and Shameless Republicans On Christmas Attack are three limericks to brighten your day after the previous video brought on the crippling realisation that we are all slightly autistic and/or we don’t treat our autistic siblings with the dignity they deserve.  In this world, you’re either mentally handicapped or an asshole, but at least we have naughty poetry!  (I would like to take this opportunity to remind my readers that I’m on loopy cough medicine and shouldn’t be held accountable for anything I say.)

Leave it to Carl Mitchell to bring the mood back down to serious business on his blog, My Humble Opinion.  In, Is President Obama’s desire to seek compromise greater than his desire to seek change?, he takes the President to task over his insistence on “bi-partisanship,” a word I don’t think the President fully understands.  When you seek compromise on healthcare, what do you get?  Compromised healthcare, correct.

Nick Ottens at The Atlantic Sentinel offers a brief history of Sarah Palin and post-Reagan (big-C) Conservatism.  The Palin Brief is better written, more informative and almost as long as the Palin book pamphlet recently published.

Alexander Bisignano over at The Chromosome Chronicles raises some interesting points about bioethics and personal information in the era of biotechnology in his article Genetic Identity Theft: Will You Need to Protect Your Genome? Personally, I think the idea of someone swabbing your glass at a party to gain information about your genome is far-fetched, but Bisignano is right in the regard that we are entering a new era of technology where some very personal information about all of us is pretty much publicly available and, for all practical purposes, unregulated.

On the other side of the Atlantic, at River’s Edge, Riversider laments a taxpayer-funded display of a warplane to be erected in the town of Preston, Lancashire:  Lancashire’s Angel of Death.  I’ve seen similar displays of warplanes on large stalks in at least a dozen cities in the United States.  Alexandria, Louisiana has one of the worst I’ve seen, with warplanes dotting the horizon everywhere you turn within a few miles of the airport.  There’s something unsettling about hearing a jetliner take off and looking up to see a WWII gunner with a twisted painted grin looking down at you.

This one I’m throwing in as an example of why more people need to submit their articles to blog carnivals:  Ella Moss at Zodiac Times claims to know how to read God’s clock.  She also hates it when liberals gripe about Obama reneging on his campaign promises because, well, he’s not Jesus.  (“But then, again, the last MIRACLE GUY we know of was crucified on the cross.”)  1 YEAR OLD PRESIDENCY

Back to reality, Josh Rosenau of Thoughts From Kansas brilliantly takes the Democratic Party to task over its pussyfooting on healthcare in On Healthcare.  He even works in a Jay vs. Conan reference!

Aaron Rogier on his self-titled blog wrote The Hard Reform, a knowledgeable obituary for the economy of the United States outlining where we went wrong, but not necessarily how to fix the problem.  Basically, we’re all fucked; but at least we know why.

Carnival of the Liberals needs more hosts!  Contact Leo Lincourt to set up a date when you can host the carnival.  Also, don’t forget to submit your blog articles to Carnival of the Liberals and my own carnival, Carnival of the Godless.

Don’t miss the next edition of Carnival of the Godless, which should be posted tomorrow at Right To Think.

Apple’s Steve Jobs just released a bigger iPod Touch.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates is donating $10 billion of his own money to get the vaccination rate of all the world’s children up to 90%.

I love juxtaposing unrelated news articles.

The New York Times is reporting that J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, died yesterday of natural causes.

Freedom of speech is the cause that lies behind everything I do and everything I write.  Everything in my life, from my revulsion of religion to my outspokenness as a gay rights advocate, boils down to one thing:  The freedom of people to say whatever they think, no matter how unpleasant or obscene it may be.

Because of my love for freedom of speech, Salinger, one of the most widely banned authors in libraries and schools in the United States, was a personal hero of mine.  We lost a truly great supporter of free thought in the death of J.D. Salinger.

Between working with two political campaigns, holding a full-time job, budgeting a move to Paris to be with my fiancé, working on the next edition of Carnival of the Liberals (which will be held here on the 30th of January) and raising two new kittens, I haven’t had the time I would have liked to have to dedicate to bringing you new, relevant posts on big news events.  Now I’ve come down with what I can only imagine is some mutant strain of bronchitis that was specifically engineered in a North Korean laboratory and crossed with Bubonic Plague in order to make me miserable.  All evidence points to my current illness being a personal attack against me by Kim Jong Il and his horde of evil geneticist minions.*

So far, because of Kim Jong Il’s putrid flu attack, I’ve missed, or been late to comment on; Haiti, SCOTUS selling the government to American corporations, Obama’s new spending freeze (WTF?!) and the shiny but completely unnecessary iPad.  And it’s always when the news cycle gets interesting that I get sick and side-tracked!

Derek and Jason have been busy with personal projects lately, so I brought in Jeffrey Spencer to contribute a few posts here and there.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to have The Gaytheists turn into a giant multi-blog mess of confusion like HuffPo and DailyKos.  This is it for the foreseeable future.

[Read more →]

On my last day of high school, my exasperated principle called me to her office to personally wish me luck in the rest of my life.  She said something that I will never forget:  “Be true to yourself and never compromise who you are.  You are a pioneer:  You have never done anything the ‘normal’ way, and this it why I see great things for you.  Reed, you will run into outrage and resistance at every milestone of your life.  Don’t stop fighting the norm.”

My friends coined a word meaning, “impulsive, controversial, slightly crazy and espousing the philosophy of, ‘DOOO IIIT!’ with little regard for consequences:”  Bradenous.

So this shouldn’t come as much of a shock to anyone:  I’m engaged to be married to Sabino Pena.

And this is where the Bradenous/pioneering part comes into play:  The Internet has changed the way people interact with one another.  Many of my best friends are people I have never met in person, but they are people who have changed my life for the better, even if I’ve never been able to physically touch them.  And it’s through the Internet that I have been able to get closer to my fiancé, Sabino, who lives in Paris.  In July, I will be visiting Paris to be with my fiancé, and I am being careful not to promise anyone that I will come back to the US before I move to France.

A memo from the Mormon church to the Yes on 8 campaign surfaced a couple days ago in the trial over Proposition 8 in California.  It read:

With respect to Prop. 8 campaign, key talking points will come from campaign, but cautious, strategic, not to take the lead so as to provide plausible deniability or respectable distance so as not to show that church is directly involved.

The Utah-based Mormon church was directly involved in orchestrating and funding the attack on civil liberties that took place on election day in 2008.  Their contributions to the finances and talking points of the Prop 8 campaign are undeniable, and this memo further proves that.

In an act of power-hungriness that swept California and robbed LGBT citizens of their newly-won right to marriage, the Mormon church unintentionally showed the world just how human their leadership is.  No divine mandate here, folks!

Jesus says in Matthew 22, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” and in John 18, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”  It would have behoved the Mormons to remember these teachings before they went on a blitzkrieg against the expansion of the marriage establishment.  In a way, this was the first mandate of separation between church and state, although that is one of many interpretations.

The Mormons would have done better to take into consideration the US Code of Law, which is less open to interpretation than the Bible.  This guide for churches written by the IRS is a handy little piece of literature to have:

In general, no organization, including a church, may qualify for IRC section 501(c)(3) status if a substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence legislation (commonly known as lobbying). An IRC section 501(c)(3) organization may engage in some lobbying, but too much lobbying activity risks loss of tax-exempt status.

Legislation includes action by Congress, any state legislature, any local council, or similar governing body, with respect to acts, bills, resolutions, or similar items (such as legislative confirmation of appointive offices), or by the public in a referendum, ballot initiative, constitutional amendment, or similar procedure. It does not include actions by executive, judicial, or administrative bodies.

A church or religious organization will be regarded as attempting to influence legislation if it contacts, or urges the public to contact, members or employees of a legislative body for the purpose of proposing, supporting, or opposing legislation, or if the organization advocates the adoption or rejection of legislation. Churches and religious organizations may, however, involve themselves in issues of public policy without the activity being considered as lobbying.  For example, churches may conduct educational meetings, prepare and distribute educational materials, or otherwise consider public policy issues in an educational manner without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status.

Basically, when a church gives large sums of money to, helps write talking points for, advertises for, and openly endorses in official letters and encyclicals a ballot proposition, as the Mormon church is being revealed undeniably guilty of through the documents being uncovered in the trial over Prop 8, they should definitely have their tax-exempt status taken from them by the IRS.  The government now has the ability—not to mention, the duty—to tax the properties of, the business and income of, and the donations to the Mormon church.

But will the IRS have the balls to do this and set a firm precedent for other churches who traipse across the line between church and state?

No.  No they will not.