red fuzzy jesus

When All Else Fails... Just Make Stuff Up

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is a “national” group founded to prevent marriage equality.  They are interesting for a few reasons.  They try to stray away from traditional religious arguments.  Since invoking one’s personal faith has not been a winning argument in the courts and is losing validity in politics they rely on an imagined threat from gay marriage.  They want their followers to believe that recognition of same-sex unions will result in someone else’s loss of freedom.  It’s a duplicitous claim to say the least.  You would think if this threat were real then it would have manifested by now in one of the places where gay marriage is recognized.

There aren’t any real examples.  There are cases that can be manipulated and spun to sound very scary and NOM’s new commercial does just that.  They have actors pretend to be “real” people who were hurt in some way by gay marriage.  You may be wondering why the actual people affected didn’t appear in the commercial instead of actors.  Well, the supposed people negatively affected were not available.  It could be because the people represented in the commercial knew what their actual stories were quite different than the way they are depicted by NOM.  How do we know?  The audition tapes for the “real” people telling their stories have leaked.  It’s hilarious to watch bad actors try to muster up the hurt and indignation imaginary people experience as a result of gay marriage. 

Even better, there’s already been a response commercial made to mock and refute the original.  You can check them all out below.   And for good measure, there’s Portia deRossi’s commercial apologizing to all the people hurt by her marriage. 

NOM PSA

NOM RESPONSE

Audition 1

Audition 2 

Portia Commercial

For some extra fun, read the comments after the original NOM commercial. 

Turkey Is Not European

I was a little surprised to hear President Obama endorse EU membership for Turkey on his recent European trip.  I understand his strategy of linking a Muslim country to the European community rather than other Muslim countries.  But I do not think Turkey meets the criteria necessary to be part of the EU.  I don’t consider Turkey European.  Europe by and large is Western and post-Christian.  Turkey is Muslim.  Officially they are a secular country but the secular citizens are a minority and have only a tenuous hold on the government.  They have government supported, draconian crackdowns on gay rights organizations.  They ban access to books such as Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion (and his website).  They have more in common with Jordan than Germany. 

Much has been made about drafts of the EU constitution making no mention of Europe’s religious history or even god.  There’s a good reason for that.  Much of the conflict and violence that has kept Europe divided and Europeans oppressed is rooted in its religious history.  The secularism – true, unapologetic civil institutions – is the right direction for EU member states.  Turkey and its citizens are insufficiently liberal, progressive, and secular to be part of the European Union. Citizens that can be whipped into hysteria over a cartoon threaten the triumph over history Europe is trying to achieve.  Someday it may be possible for Turkey to think of itself as European.  But it needs to go through a lot of progress and change to catch up to the real European continent. 

Useful Links:

Why Turkey Will Not Join the EU

Human Rights Watch on Turkey’s Harassment of Gay Rights Groups
(no country should be allowed in the EU that tolerates this level of oppression)

Jihad Watch: Why the EU Should Reject Turkey

Turkey Bans Richard Dawkins’ Website
(Dawkins is the premier intellectual in Europe) 

Turkey Neutral Mediator in Cartoon Row?

Openly Advocating Theocracy

The following is Concerned Women for America's response to the Iowa Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage:

"Until we rightly handle these issues in God’s house, we will continue to fail in the court house, the state house and the school house. George Washington warned us it would be impossible to rightly govern without the Bible, until we repent and return to those same principles, we will fail to properly govern and succeed as a nation."

This is a Christian version of Sharia, meaning, these groups openly advocate that Christian teachings should be the law of the land.  They nakedly assert, without any qualifying statements, that their religion should be the basis of law in the United States and that there should be no difference between church teachings and civil institutions. 

The religious right does not oppose any particular political position.  They oppose our system of government. 

IOWA

I’m excited and a little surprised that the Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of marriage equality.  To me that is a no-brainer given the equal protection clauses of state constitutions.  What is interesting to me, always, is the counter argument?  What even is the counter argument?  Well, it comes in two forms common among every RR website going nuts about the court’s decision. 

1.    Judicial tyranny, will of the people, blah blah blah, a movement… an agenda.
2.    Or, this violates my religion.  God will be upset… marriage in the Bible.

For the first argument, the whole reason we have a judicial branch of government is to protect minority rights against the tyranny of the majority.  I have made this point 100 times before and I will make it again.  The religious right goes further than opposing any political position. They oppose judicial review and minority rights protections; two essential ingredients in a liberal democracy.  They oppose our system of government rather than any particular policy or subgroup.

For the second argument, they are unable to make a legal case without relying on personal religious teaching as a justification for law.  Personal religious teachings are not a justification for civil law.  An orthodox Jew might think it is a sin to eat pork.  That is not a valid justification to make pork illegal.   A Christian conservative might belittle the relationship of a same-sex couple based on some religious narrative or portion of a religious text.  That is not ample justification for civil law. 

The religious right keeps losing court battles because of these two primary arguments.  That is why the case in Iowa produced a unanimous court decision.  They argued poorly and lost at the state supreme court level and at every court leading up to the supreme court.  They don’t make sound legal arguments.  They then complain about judicial tyranny failing to recognize a deficit in their side’s logic.  If you lose in every court at every level it is not judicial tyranny, unless you want to suggest that we should not have courts review laws at all.  There is a fundamental lack of legal reasoning in relying on a Bible verse to justify a law and as long as that side does that they will continue losing in court. 

Oh So Close

For a brief time this week I thought Peter Labarbera might be divorced.  I don’t care if people are divorced but I thought it would put his criticism of others’ relationships in a more hypocritical light.  I still can’t imagine his poor wife being married to a man that obsesses about (to use his term) “homosexual behavior”, whatever that is.  The text from his post that had me thinking he was divorced was,

“I’m all for matchmaking (although my “matches” have been duds so far."

Here is a thought though:  Peter Labarbera’s activism repeatedly asserts that there is no such thing as sexual orientation, only same-sex behavior.  He touts ex-gay programs fully admitting that they do not succeed in altering one’s attraction to members of the same gender but instead use religion in strategies for celibacy.  An “ex gay” is someone that has chosen to no longer have gay sex, not someone who is no longer primarily attracted to his own sex.  AFTAH and ex-gay sites fully admit this.

By this reasoning, if Peter were divorced he would presumably stop having straight sex with his wife.  Would he then be an ex-straight?  Following his logic by no longer having straight sex and choosing to be a celibate divorcee would Peter be choosing an “ex-straight lifestyle”?  Of course not.  To suggest that would be silly.  But it does point out the huge logical shortcoming in the whole ex-gay movement.

People are not ex-gay because they choose repression over intimacy.  Ted Haggards is still gay.  He admits it in the HBO documentary.  He says his former church’s assertion that he was “completely heterosexual” after treatment was untrue and didn’t come from him.  Currently he chooses not to cheat on his wife with a gay prostitute.  But, he is still a gay man. 

Haggard has every right to believe God does not want him in a relationship with another man.  He has every right to be married to someone for whom he does not share an attraction.  But the assertion that homosexuality is “changeable” and therefore undeserving of civil rights protections – used by Peter and his cohort – is intellectually dishonest.  Sexual orientation is not as mutable as one’s religious identification. If Peter’s right to live a conservative Christian lifestyle is granted equal protection under the law he should support the same rights for those who do not ascribe to his religious teachings.