The Progressive Puppy

DADT Is Finally Dead

That sound of wailing and gnashing teeth you hear comes from religious conservatives, right-wing pols, and professional anti-gay bigots who had hoped to keep America's gay and lesbian soldiers cowering in the closet. 

Charley Keyes reports for CNN:  The reactions range from gloom-and-doom predictions to big countdown parties and smaller celebrations to ho-hum business-as-usual as the U.S. military changes its rules Tuesday and allows gay men and lesbians to serve openly.  A minute into the new day, 12:01 a.m., the old "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule that has been in force since the Clinton administration is gone.  In its place is a policy designed to be blind to sexual orientation and that the Pentagon brass insists will maintain the military in fighting trim and have no negative impact on "military readiness, military effectiveness, unit cohesion and recruiting and retention."  ... One of the most prominent congressional supporters of the change, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said that from now on thousands of Americans will be able to serve their country without concealing part of their identity.  "They will no longer have to lie in order to help protect us," Levin said in a statement released by his staff. "The end of 'don't ask, don't tell' is an important victory not just for equality, but integrity."

Institutionalized homophobia will be harder to suppress.  From Asbury Park Press:  Mark, a former enlisted Marine who is now attending the Naval Academy and working to become a Marine officer, said that although most will meet the commandant's expectations, there will be some who won't.  "I feel like you just can't beat the camaraderie in the Marine Corps," he said. "But with that, comes the whole homophobic attitude."  ("Boys will be boys" is the excuse du jour of those who ignore bullying in public schools.)  The message of enforcement needs to be clear from the top down, said Jeff, a captain and company commander in an infantry battalion at Camp Pendleton, Calif., who is gay. He recently watched his battalion sergeant major use gay slurs in a briefing with staff noncommissioned officers and junior officers.  "Every staff NCO in the room and potentially even junior officers could have gone out the next day, said something like that in front of their Marines and say, I was just following the example of the battalion sergeant major," Jeff said.

In this touching video, a soldier phones his Dad and tells him that he's gay.   (Hat Tip:  AmericaBlog)

Pastor John Hagee's Toxic Spiel (video)

Anti-gay pastor John Hagee, admired by conservative pols, delivers some serious preachifying in this video from Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch.  Hagee, a Texas evangelical who has repeatedly blamed LGBTQ Americans for Hurricane Katrina and the Jewish race for the Holocaust, a man who claims that the antichrist is gay and that abortions are easier for students to obtain than aspirin; could probably recite his overwrought spiel while sleeping.  I suspect he often does. 

Watch this venom-engorged fundie tick off his Taliban-esque list of grievances: 1) Harry Potter is teaching black magic to youngsters.  2)  Heather Has Two Mommies who will suffer eternal damnation.  3) Secular Humanism is the root of All Evil.  Listen to the porcine dominionist drool, smack, dribble, sputter, and slurp - self-satisfied as a possum eating shit.

When we lived on the Texas Gulf Coast I actually saw a possum chowing down on a dog turd, so I know whereof I speak.

Flash Mob Dances Against Homophobia in the Golden State (video)

In the following video from Sunnyland Pictures, California equality advocates protest the "pray away the gay" conversion therapy advanced by GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann and her curiously effervescent husband, Marcus.

Lest someone thinks Progressive Puppy's descriptions of Michele and her bubbly hubby are uncharitable, I would remind them that if installed in the White House, this power couple would reverse whatever small advances LGBT Americans have made in equal rights.  They also want to re-criminalize intimacy between consenting adults of the same gender. 

Ms. Bachmann has compared gays and lesbians to pedophiles and sex offenders.  Like a nosy neighbor, the conservative candidate once crouched in the bushes to spy on the goings-on at an equality rally.  This strange behavior leads voters to conclude that Michele's motto is:  I believe in smaller government, except when it come to bedrooms.  God and the GOP get to decide whose relationships are morally acceptable.

"It’s part of Satan I think to say that this is 'gay.' It’s anything but gay." - Republican Michele Bachmann

Texas Struggles With Abstinence

Lubbock Pastor Ed Ainsworth travels around Texas to address high school assemblies.  He encourages students to refrain from sexual intimacy until they're married - a laudable goal - but his message places the burden of gatekeeping on teenage girls instead of boys.  (In patriarchal societies, this is business as usual.  Adolescent youths are encouraged expected to "fool around" at every available opportunity.  It's the girls who must remain chaste and circumspect.)

Ainsworth thunders from his podium du jour:  "Will a condom protect your heart? As a female, will a condom protect your reputation?"  (Youths grin when they realize Ainsworth's message isn't really aimed at them.  But watch out those of you cursed with Eve's Sin!  Your reputations may be compromised!)  "It might protect you from getting pregnant, it might protect you from getting a disease, but there’s no way it will protect your heart, mind, emotions, and reputation.  There’s no way.  So how can we call it safe?"  (This evangelical minister from Generations Church promotes the obsolete ideas of Generation Geritol.  On a MySpace page Ainsworth refers to himself, absurdly, as "Pastor Sex ED" - a misnomer if there ever was one.)

An Undisputed Fact:  The Lone Star State is saddled with the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the country - but the GOP-controlled Board of Education has for more than a decade ordered educators to teach abstinence-only in our public schools.  On the Texas Tribune, Morgan Smith reports that this anti-contraception mindset is slowly beginning to change at the local level.  He writes about the West Texas oil town of Midland:  After watching the teen pregnancy rates creep up year after year — 172 pregnant girls were enrolled in the town’s public schools last year — many in the community realized something needed to change. "These are girls as young as 13 that are pregnant, some of them are on their second pregnancies," said Tracey Dees, the supervisor of health services in the district of just under 22,000 students, adding that many of them reported having sexually transmitted infections as well. Eighteen months ago, with input from parents, staff and other community leaders, the school board decided to implement a new curriculum for seventh and eighth-graders — one that emphasizes that waiting to have sex is best, but also teaches students about condoms and birth control. Midland is just one of a number of schools, from West Texas to the suburbs of Houston, that are moving toward "abstinence-plus" education at the urging of their health advisory committees made up of community members.

Back when I attended high school - and admittedly, this was during the Pleistocene Epoch - Southern Baptist preachers would from time to time show up at school and warn girls about the danger of loose morals.  Boys were commanded to "help protect a girl's virtue."  This approach fell neatly in line with Biblical precepts.  Of course kids were different then, and Christian zealots in those days were far less obsessed with sex.   (Things changed dramatically with the rise of the Religious Right.)

In the following trailer for the award-winning documentary "The Education of Shelby Knox," you'll hear Ainsworth telling students: "In your high school and in your college, there are young people acting like dogs having sex."  (What an odd way to win over an audience of impressionable youngsters.)  The pious pastor later defends his stance:  "I haven't got a dildo out there showing them how to roll a condom down it.  And I'll never do that."  (What? No lubricant?  Ainsworth speaks these words while oozing the same aw-shucks charm employed by megachurch celebrity Rick Warren.)

Students need to learn the facts about sex, not an ideological agenda that presumes every child is cut from the same cloth.  It has been shown that school districts which provide information about contraception and safe sex have lower pregnancy rates - not that this would matter to Christian fundamentalists whose primary goal is to keep their children (and yours) as ignorant as they are. 

Related Post:  Thirty Percent of Texans Think Dinosaurs Lived With Humans

ProPup's Weekend Roundup

Bil Browning posted a video of two jurors discussing how they came to be deadlocked in the Brandon McInerney murder trial.  The women recall shedding many tears while having "to decide this child's fate," calling McInerney "intelligent" and "damaged."  (Lawrence King, the victim of McInerney's hate, is not just damaged - he's dead.)

Rachel Maddow weighs in on the increasingly tiresome Massachusetts senator/Tea Party gasbag Scott Brown and how he stacks up against certified-fresh candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Speaking of Tea Party gasbags, Michele Bachmann appeared on The Tonight Show, hoping to demonstrate her so-called "legendary humor."  Host Jay Leno had some serious questions for her, though, drilling the presidential wannabe about her strange (and obviously religion-fueled) opposition to the HPV vaccine.  Bachmann chattered about the vaccine's rumored side effects.  Leno proceeded to ask her about the family's anti-gay reparative therapy clinic - Bachmann said it was staffed by Real Psychologists! So there! - and then he observed: "That whole ‘pray the gay away’ thing, I don’t get that."  Bachmann replied with a limp joke:  "When I heard that I thought it was a mid-life crisis thing, pray away the gray."  (Why do so few conservatives understand comedy?) 

On Huffington Post, there's a passage from Aaron Belkin's "How We Won."  The recently released e-Book is described as "a behind-the-scenes account of the strategies that helped overturn the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military."  A disturbing excerpt from Chapter One shows the depths to which professional homophobes - many of them leaders in America's armed services - have stooped in order to smear the gay community.  Both straights and non-straights will be nauseated by the unhinged claims of these military commanders and their irrational civilian counterparts.

File this under It Ain't Over Till It's Over...  From Military.com:  Two prominent House Republicans are asking military leaders to keep the controversial Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in place past next Tuesday’s repeal deadline because several paperwork questions are unresolved.  But defense officials are already brushing off the request, saying the time has come for repeal.  The 18-year-old policy, which bars openly gay individuals from serving in the military, was voted down by Congress last December, but will not officially end until Tuesday...  Igor Volsky collars the hound for Think Progress:  The Pentagon has denied the request, saying, "The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will occur, in accordance with the law and after a rigorous certification process, on September 20. Senior Department of Defense officials have advised Congress of changes to regulations and policies associated with repeal. We take that obligation seriously."  Yesterday, Gen. Carter Ham, who co-chaired the Pentagon’s study group examining the consequences of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, predicted that lifting the ban against open service is likely to prove "pretty inconsequential." Ham told the Associated Press that conservative groups may still speak out in support of the policy, but those inside the military will adopt a business-as-usual attitude.

Social conservatives are responding with predictable outrage to the announcement that Kevin Keller, the openly gay character in Archie Comics, is getting married... to a may-an.

Peter Sprigg of the hate group Family Research Council clings to the ridiculous notion that bisexuality "proves" gays and lesbians can altar their sexual orientation.  Jeremy Hooper at Good As You de-fleas that mongrel. 

Blogger Pam Spaulding considers leaving the land of her birth in the wake of an anti-gay marriage amendment promoted by Bible-thimping zealots.  North Carolina is currently the only Southeastern state that hasn't written discrimination into its constitution - but that's expected to change once the GOP finishes frightening voters.

Despite well-orchestrated opposition from religious extremists who tossed around words like "abomination" and "Satan," the San Antonio City Council decided to provide some benefits to the domestic partners of city employees.  Sam Sanchez reports for Dallas Voice:  Those against the initiative monopolized the “Citizens to Be Heard” portion of the meeting, with mostly religious and moral objections.  The council chambers were filled with Christian protesters, including some with babies and school-age children. Some held signs that read “Vote for Marriage (I do!). ”  Sometimes the rhetoric got rough. Some speakers threatened political retribution to council members who voted to keep the measure in the budget. Mike Knupke of the San Antonio Family Association said the question of domestic partnership benefits had “awakened the sleeping Christian giant.”  Former Christian radio talk show host Adam McManus went to the podium with his infant son and pregnant wife to say that he did not support giving benefits to “the live-in lovers” of city employees, gay or straight.  (Mr. Mc-ANUS et al should stop being behaving like assholes and start treating all U.S. citizens fairly - allow Marriage Equality NOW.)

1)  When Rowdy strolls outdoors, he jingles.  2) Brother pauses by the pond.

If you have the stomach for it, check out this slick sick promo for an anti-education DVD dreamed up by the phobes at Focus on the Family.  Watch fresh-scrubbed actors portraying fresh-scrubbed students alarmed at all the "liberal bias" they encounter in college.  (Sigh.)  As expected, Youtube comments for this ideological trash have been... DISABLED.  (Interestingly, FOF is eliminating 49 jobs due to "ongoing ecomonic pressures.")

If you believe that Silicon Valley is a bastion for progressive policy and technology, you'd be wrong.  A group of venture capitalists have been guzzling the Religious Right Kool-Aid, and they're scattering considerable cash donations across the ultraconservative landscape.  Ralph Reed is involved in this dominionist power-grab, for what that's worth.

In New York, the opponents of same-sex marriage are predicting that lawmakers who vote for equal rights will be signing their own political death sentences.  To prove this specious forecast, they point to the outcome of a single congressional race.  On a related theme, the fear and deceit-based National Organization For Marriage (NOM) spent $53,000 in the Empire State on mailers and robocalls, reminding the electorate that Assemblyman David Weprin is - Gasp! - a friend to gays and lesbians.  ("Let this be a warning!" the Philistines shriek.)

Anti-gay bigot David Barton is suing bloggers who report that he speaks in front of white supremacist organizations.  Mr. Barton claims he's concerned about his reputation, dontcha know.

Recommended Reading:  The Culture of Satanic Panic

Top: Bird bell activity, Above: Brother and Chance

Oriole At Our Hummingbird Feeder (photo)

They're not common to this part of Texas, as you can see by the map.  This little fella showed up yesterday: