A Place for LGBTQ Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists

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.

While I don’t have kids myself, I have a little friend of mine whose name is Grace.  I get to, for a couple of hours every week, immerse myself into the world of a two year old while her mother is pursuing her degree.  The world is a place to be investigated and adventured in, puzzles to be solved and questions asked.  I am refreshed in ways I didn’t know I needed, when I spend my several hours a week with her.

This last Wednesday, we went to a place in our city that is called the Ann Arbor Hands On Museum.  It’s a “museum” designed specifically for children, but it’s got some great things for grown-ups, too.  Everything is interactive, really big on touch and movement and thinking.  They’ve also got really great prompts so that adults can learn along with their kids and explain what is going on.  While I knew a lot of the science behind what was going on, I have to say those plaques did save me from going “How the hell should I know?” a couple of times.

This was my first time at the museum, so I was just as filled with wonder as Grace.  She ran around, playing and describing to me what she was doing and what she wanted me to do.  Eventually, we made it past the plush “bricks”, the slide, a tornado INDOORS!, and the musical stairs to some sort of set-up with plastic magnetic fishes, plastic magnetic fishing poles and lots of water.

And an Archimedes Screw.

It was a glorious contraption, with a turn crank right knee high to a grasshopper so even the littlest child could grasp and turn it themselves.  I couldn’t help myself and started turning it, watching it pointlessly move water from one place to another, splashing into the tub and creating bubbles.  I smiled, because it’s a beautifully efficient device and just fun to think about.  It makes my inner geek sing (badly).

Grace was first amused by the bubbles, the plastic fish and the plastic fishing poles.  She called me from my crank and I went to play with the plastic fish and the plastic fishing poles.  But eventually, we made our way back to the crank, and it was Grace’s turn.

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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.

I have been hearing a lot about trying to negotiate with communities of faith and get them on our side from a lot of leaders in our community. Wait, leaders isn’t the word I’m thinking of – whipped pussies seems to be more like it simply because they do not have the courage to come out and say what needs to be said. Believing this is like Obama not doing shit for the advancement of our equal rights, or health care, or pretty much anything at all because he is so worried about being viewed as non-partisan. I am not a fan of “affirming” or gay-friendly churches/denominations of the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths for many different reasons. I am unlikely to change my view either until I see a positive change in the lives of LGBT people simply because a church, religion or denomination has become more affirming of gay people. However, what I do see is evidence that strongly leads into the negative – that LGBT people are actively and continually discriminated against by the three big Judeo-Christian religions and even some of the smaller cults (I’d say religions but cults and religions are pretty much the same thing).

Gay people have an astounding gift that no other population has, even if it means we are subject to discrimination by these very people. We get to see the emperor with no clothes for what he truly is and we are under no real obligation to say differently because we experience the tyranny of this emperor and his minions first hand but they do not hold our lives in the balance as much anymore. While they try to exert what control they can get over us, such as denying us the right to visit our dying partners in the hospital or the ability for doctors and scientists to study the HIV/AIDS virus in order to find a cure, they no longer have the right to put us to death anymore. I guess that is one advance that we do take for granted but we should not be thanking the churches for this advance, for many of them have and are sneering at the fact that they cannot legally stone gay people because their book of fairy tales says to. Instead, gay people should look at this information, look at the acts and history of the church and tell yourself – is this really something you want to be supporting with your hard earned money and time? Hell, we know that the Christian faith, given the window of opportunity, would advocate for the death of gays in a culture that is not as enlightened. Is this belief system, which encourages misogyny, internalized homophobia and an unhealthy “holier than thou” superiority complex because you were able to jump the gate of common sense and believe this nonsense something that you wish to espouse? We know what the Christian church has done, and in many ways is still doing, to the LGBT population and we really need to speak out and put a stop to it.

Being gay is diametrically opposed to the core scripture and beliefs of the main doctrine of all three of the major Judeo-Christian religions. There is a real stigma against being gay in the Baha’i Faith as well but since I do not know that much about the Baha’i Faith, I do not think that I would be well equipped to debate it. However, apologists and gay people who are uncomfortable with standing up for the right to be who they truly are need to stop defending the Christian church. It really does come off as being the wife who defends the husband that beats her. Not only is it not cool but it actively hurts us and could even cause us to die if it were to have it’s way. The Christian faith is centred upon an act of capital punishment, while Judaism and Islam are just about commandments to kill all of the infidels.

Seriously?!  That’s all I’m getting on this?

This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.

I’m seconding Reed’s post voicing displeasure with President Obama’s fulfilling , although I’m not featuring Jane Lynch in all of her glory.

He talks a good talk, but I want something a bit more than words before I’m going to get my hopes up again.

*Also, HRC, I’m not  giving you money just because our President punted on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  And, yes, thank you for the reminder to talk to my representatives about DADT.  I’m still holding out hope that it’s just rescinded by executive order because all I’m hearing is “Wait until after the next election, otherwise the Republicans win!”  I’m not holding my breath.

I’m going to go suck down NyQuil, because I’ve been hanging around the cute germ incubators that are also known as children for the last week.

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.

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Somehow, I have more faith in the iSlate…

(the latest from I Can’t Draw Feet)

I am not an avid user of YouTube, but I am well aware of the power that videos hosted on this site can have.  I’m also well aware of the false Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) claims that some people make to stifle videos they disagree with or dislike.  The big case that immediately springs to mind is Thunderf00t’s harassment by Venomfangx and his false DMCA take down requests.  And it seems a bit suspect that the burden of proof is shifted onto the accused as opposed to the accuser. 

So I was absolutely delighted when listening to The Pod Delusion (they’re in the UK, have delightful accents, and you should listen, too) when they had a way to tell Google that the YouTube DMCA shenanigans need to stop. 

Google is now asking for ideas on how to improve their products.  It’s only available for the next week or so, but if you go to http://productideas.appspot.com, you can up-vote the DMCA reform and hopefully Google will pay attention.  At the time I voted, it was by far the highest suggested item in the YouTube category.

Perhaps if I ask nicely, PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta will instruct their hordes to upvote as well.  I’m sure if they can crash polls about the afterlife, they could crash polls on whether illegal DMCA filings should stand.

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.

So it seems Mr. Braden beat me to the punch in covering this, and explainined why it means the Mormon church should have its tax-exempt status revoked, but since I’m all excited to get my first Gaytheists post up, here’s my take on the issue:

I’ll admit that I’ve been a bad homo this week; I haven’t really been following the Prop 8 trial as closely as I should. I think it’s a combination of a few things. Most obviously the stakes. If I think too hard about what’s at stake here, and closely follow every little up and down, I think I just may throw up. The whole thing also hits a little too close to home. I was raised in a Mormon family and took the whole thing pretty personally. I haven’t discussed the issue too much with the few Mormons I still keep in contact with from my youth. My mother and I have come to a sort of uneasy truce on the issue, agreeing to drop it for the sake of family peace since we only see each other once or twice a year. When we have had this fight in the past, she’s used the defense that lots of other people were involved (not just Mormons and Catholics), so the blame cannot be wholly placed on them, and that no documented link between church leadership and the campaign has really been proven.

Well, Towleroad reported on Wednesday that a letter had been submitted into the trial that made just such a link, specifically saying the following:

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.

Is this the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for? Not so fast. Once I posted the link, my brother-in-law was quick to point out that this is not a direct quotation from said letter. As Concurring Opinions pointed out, this “plausible deniability” language was never actually used in any church documents, and was in fact first used by the plaintiffs’ witness.

So this may not be as “explosive” as we all hoped, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. It has removed the LDS church’s “plausible deniability”, even if they didn’t call it that, and made the link that we all knew existed (well, everyone with a two eyes and a brain) even more clear. For all the crowing you may start to hear about how this reveals nothing, just look at the quotation Kaimipono at Concurring Opinions pulled directly from the document: “Salt Lake City conducted a teleconference with 159 of 161 Stake presidents in the State of California, and told the presidents LDS are involved in this issue but are not to take the lead.”

The Courage Campaign, quoted in the Towleroad piece, seems to think that the reason for all of this is simply that the public doesn’t really like the Mormon church (how many times have I heard it called a “cult”?) and they worried that their involvement would possibly hurt the cause. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Everyone already knew about the church’s involvement. it was no secret that they were the ones going door to door in California spreading their lies. I think they knew the hot water this could potentially get them into and wanted to avoid any official links between actual church leadership and the campaign; to sort of keep their distance, able to say that, while church members may be carrying out the church’s beliefs, they were acting of their own accord, and the church itself wasn’t involved. I think the documents submitted disprove just that. So while no desire for “plausible deniability” may have been uncovered, we’re certainly a step closer to exposing the church as the politically involved and money-motivated machine it is.