Good News in Oregon and New Jersey, While Rick Scarborough Foams at Mouth

What a lovely way to start off a Monday morning with good news for LGBT folk who want to get married. Today marks the first day for marriage equality in the state of New Jersey, despite Governor Chris Christie’s homophobic protest.  To make this story even lovelier, Senator Elect Cory Booker, is performing same-sex marriages right now in his position as Mayor of Newark. Booker has made a point of not officiating weddings while equality was blocked in his state. A NJ appeals court had ruled that the lack of marriage equality was unconstitutional but stayed that opinion pending further legal action; the state supreme court lifted the stay last week noting that equality was legally sound.

More good news across the country in Oregon. Last week, the state of Oregon now recognizes same-sex marriages performed in other states.  Now we just need to achieve full marriage equality in Oregon. Despite a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, the Oregon Department of Justice released an opinion that a refusal to recognize out-of-state marriages was unconstitutional. The state COO immediately issued a memo requiring all state agencies to begin recognizing legal out-of-state marriages. Oregon United for Marriage is moving a marriage equality initiative forward for Nov. 2014; it is widely expected to succeed. The effort got a surprise boost last week when all three Oregon professional sports teams (the Portland Thorns, Timbers, and Trailblazers) endorsed the initiative.

While I certainly am taking time to celebrate this movement forward in civil rights for the LGBT community, alas we cannot rest here or grow complacent. Sadly, one of the  homophobic leaders of the Tea Party (Gays, Blacks, any non-white “Christians” not welcome), the odious Rick Scarborough, has announced that he wants to file a class action law suit against homosexuality.  Hmm, I wonder how that will work? Of course, he has partnered with the nefarious homophobic Peter LaBarbera.

It is clear that the Tea Party learned nothing from holding the country hostage during the Government Shutdown.  When will this small racist greedy group get it? Is there no chance of them showing any sense of decency or humanity?  Of course, I guess when your pockets are being filled with Koch money, there is less to motivate people to love rather than to hate.

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Bigot of the Week Award: January 27, Pastor Patrick Wooden

Bigot of the Week

Thank you to my friend Ken for nominating Wooden for this week’s BWA.  How sad to see yet another religious leader spewing such venom and hate in the guise of Christianity, or what I like to call the new KKKristianity. Pastor Wooden, like many homophobes, is obsessed with men having sex with men.  He appeared with Peter LaBarbera (huge closet queen) to deliver his words of HATE.  Wooden said:

The God of the Bible made the human sperm, the God of the Bible designed it and it was not designed to be emptied into an area that is filled with feces, there is nothing for it to germinate with, it will most certainly mean the extinction of the human race. My belief is that if the medical community would just step forward and just would share with the American people what happens to the male anus, the problems that homosexuals have with their rectums, the damage that is done, the operations that are needed to sew up their bodies if you will, and how many of the men don’t even give these stitches time to heal before they are back out there practicing that wicked behavior. Some are bleeders, men who are not turned off by ingesting the feces of other men.

If the truth was told, people would literally gag and no one would want to be in a lifestyle like that. Who wants to practice anything that is going to ultimately lead a grown man to about the time he’s in his 40s or 50s, or what not, having to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels?

Wow!  Wooden sure does think about anal sex an awful lot.  I suspect he probably owns a butt plug of his own.  Forgive me for injecting actual truth here, but heterosexuals engage in anal sex as well!  I did not realize that people’s sex lives was any of Wooden’s business. I suppose he isn’t interested in being troubled by any medical facts while he spews out his lies and exaggerations; those pesky facts are so troublesome when you have hate to spread.

What worries me more is that Wooden is African-American and the message he is sending out to young people of color is dangerous!  We need to support and raise up our LGBT Black brothers and sisters!  Shame on you, Pastor Wooden.  How long before your boy toy jumps out of the closet?

Of Homophobia and Hypocrisy

“Matt Barber and Mat Staver are not Homophobes,” said the headline. As I was browsing through one of my regular bloggregators yesterday that line certainly caught my eye. It was as if someone had just told me, “You have eleven toes, one for each color of the rainbow!” Yeah, it made that much sense.

If you’re unfamiliar with these two charmers, a quick overview (with thanks to Jeremy at Good As You for the list of stories).

• Matt “Bam-Bam” Barber is an attorney, ex-boxer, and the Director of Cultural and Social Policy at Concerned Women for America. He’s infamous for the line “one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it ‘love’.”
• Mat Staver is the founder and chairman of the rabidly anti-gay law firm and advocacy group Liberty Counsel. If there’s a lawsuit to be filed against equality, you can bet Mat and his cronies have at least filed a brief. (Barber also works for Liberty Counsel.)

So how is this possible? I followed the link within the link and ended up on the homepage of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, the nasty group run by Peter LaBarbera who has made more than one appearance on this blog. Although I would have expected Peter and the Mat(t)s to wear “homophobe” as a badge of honor, it made some sense that this bizarre headline could be found in the truth-free zone of AFTAH.

It turns out that as part of a story on gay rights issues the PBS program Frontline included a quiz designed by researchers to gauge how homophobic someone might be. Matt and Mat took this quiz and shockingly found that they weren’t homophobic at all. This news so delighted them that they broadcast it on Liberty Counsel’s Faith and Freedom show. Peter was so enchanted that he linked the broadcast from his website and took the quiz himself. What do you know? He isn’t homophobic either!

Where to begin dismantling the hypocrisy of these three? The mind reels…

Let us note that all three men administered the quiz for themselves and made no effort to tell us exactly how they answered the questions. Matt emphasizes that he answered them “totally honestly” but provides no transparency. Peter gives his answer to one question (while wringing his hands that such an answer would certainly mark him as more homophobic) but stops there. Come on guys, show us how you answered each question and let us compare those answers with your well-established records.

All three men are also famous for mocking the word homophobia (as Peter does in his story about not being homophobic). They maintain that it is a made-up word wielded by activists to tarnish them for their noble works. Bad news, guys, this word has a long history and is recognized by multiple dictionaries.They say that they aren’t afraid of homosexuals, so they can’t be homophobic. More bad news: that isn’t what the word means. The first definition from that search:

noun: prejudice against (fear or dislike of) homosexual people and homosexuality

Please not the emphasis on prejudice. When you spend your careers actively campaigning against the LGBTQ community, raising and spending millions of dollars to prevent (or repeal) equality, all the while playing the “love the sinner hate the sin” card, you are practicing prejudice. That makes you homophobic.

At the end of the day, their actions speak much louder than their words. Playing cute games with a quiz doesn’t make their behavior or their organizations any less harmful or dangerous. In fact, all it does is add one more example to the long list of their obsessions with the gay community. Sorry, guys, but you’re homophobic to the core. Your hypocritical parlor games can’t change that.

(If you’re interested in the whole thing from Homophobic Pete’s perspective, the story on his website is here. WARNING: Abandon your lunch all ye who enter there.)