If it wasn't bad enough that his singing and songwriting skills leave much to be desired ("Girls, he’s lying when he says he needs it. Boys, she’s going to give you a disease."), but he's also a "former homosexual" (he "lived in the homosexual lifestyle for nearly twenty years" and repented). Yes, an ex-gay -- though I don't think anyone will pay him to go professional in that regard.
Without further delay, view the live performance (with a mocking audience) of his epic ditty, "It's Not OK To Be Gay! (It's not OK to be a homo)"
Beware -- this outlandish song will stick in your head.
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"Jesus loves the homosexual, but he doesn't love homosexuality. This is about holding each other accountable." -- Dave Daubenmire, the founder of Minutemen United and Pass the Salt Ministries, who thinks breaking into church services to rail about the homos share "the word of God" is appropriate. (more on him below)
A "Christian" extremist group has decided to take their anti-gay message on the road and try to shake some sense into renegade churches that dare to be gay-affirming.
Members of the organization, Minutemen United, have crashed services at the First Baptist Church in Granville, Ohio every Sunday since July when, the church landed on the Minuteman hit list for hosting "Love Makes a Family," the Family Diversity Project's traveling photography exhibit of LGBT families. (Columbus Dispatch):
On one of the first Sundays, six people came to the church's 11 a.m. service and addressed the congregation during a time designated for prayer requests and comments.
[Senior pastor Rev. Kathy] Hurt said a man, who introduced himself as a minister from the New Beginnings Church in Warsaw, Ohio, started to give a sermon about how the church was acting against God's word by accepting homosexuals.
The other church on the Minuteman list was Columbus's King Avenue United Methodist Church in Columbus where the Rev. John Keeny said: "They rebuked me as a pastor for preaching that God's love is for everyone."
Alex Blaze of The Bilerico Project hits the nail on the head about these "Christians":
But this comes down to respect for people's religions, and the Religious Right always declares themselves on the side of religious freedom promulgating paranoid fantasies of police rounding up pastors after hate crimes legislations gets passed or school teachers locking away students with Bibles or whatever. But then when it comes to anyone who disagrees with them, suddenly the word "freedom" gets exposed for the window dressing that it is.
And about that Daubenmire fellow. Let's just say that he shouldn't cast stones, as his son was convicted on a child pornography charge.
Not only that, he's yet another fundie with a very odd fixation on homosexuality. He forced himself to attend a Gay Pride parade in Columbus and made these keen observations (something I blogged about back in July):
The homosexual leadership, those who work iniquity, has done a great public relations job. They have convinced us that Tommy and Billy who live down the street are the real face of homosexuality. Sadly, as those who walked into the den of iniquity with us on Saturday can attest, the under-belly of sodomy is a despicable thing to see. A friend once told me that I should never go to a meat packing shop and watch hot-dogs being made. If I did, he warned me, I would never eat another hot-dog as long as I lived.
The same can be said for the sodomite parade. The "meat" on display will forever change the way you view homosexuality. Sin has no boundaries, no clutch, and no emergency brake. Once you dip your toe into the pool of sin, especially sexual sin, there is a magnetism that will not let go. The debauchery parading down our public streets is abominable.
The Bush administration assault on freedom of speech continues, but the government ended up on the short end of the stick this time. Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, were handcuffed and tossed out of an Independence Day rally at the West Virginia state Capitol, where Bush delivered a speech. Their "crime"?
The front of the Ranks' homemade T-shirts bore the international symbol for "no" superimposed over the word "Bush." The back of Nicole Rank's T-shirt said "Love America, Hate Bush." On the back of Jeffery Rank's T-shirt was the message "Regime Change Starts at Home."
A White House spokesman said the $80K settlement was "not an admission of wrongdoing."
The other news about the settlement, however, is that some of the contents of a purported "sensitive" Presidential Advance Manual have been revealed, which, as ABC's Blotter reports, "laid out the White House's meticulous efforts to protect the president and his public image from dissent." Some nuggets:
"As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event," the manual instructs. The government turned over a heavily redacted version of the manual to the ACLU in the course of the lawsuit.
The first step to keeping demonstrators out of events, the manual tells the president's event staff, is to encourage the Secret Service to "ask the local police department to designate a protest area...preferably not in view of the event site or the motorcade route."
Inside the event space, the manual advises, White House advance personnel should preposition "rally squads" that can swarm any protesters at the event and "use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform." The rally squads can be formed using "college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities," the manual notes.
Run! Run for the hills! That is what several Republican Beltway denizens have chosen to do instead of facing the people--in the form of voters at a ballot box or members of a potential jury pool--with the recent mass exodus from all ranks of that risible, rotten political party once known as "The Party Of Lincoln," which might today more appropriately be called The Party of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Actually they'll probably lose there too.
And how is it that these Coitus Interrupters get to go on their merry way while we continually get screwed like a non-ambulatory hooker within 20 feet of David Vitter? That's the system baby.
Denny Hastert, who when not downing a box of glazed munchkins likes to cover up for pedophiles, Deborah Pryce who happily joined the Tom DeLay's leadership team, which thought of ways to launder cash that would stun Ferdinand Marcos, and now even Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi, are now all exiting stage right-wing nutjob.
That was just who we found out about this week. We've known for a while that waste-of-oxygen Wayne Allard was leaving the Senate and were told a few weeks ago about Ray LaHood, whose last name is quite fitting for a party who will soon have more members in the Big House than the Gambino family.
Rumors are abound that many others such as Senator John Warner will find a reason to go fishing. Altough perhaps one individual who hasn't signaled any desire to retire, who should perhaps think about it, is Susan Collins.
She has a blogger on her team whose cerebral infrastructure resembles New York after a rainstorm and she can't stop lying about her positions on Iraq and choice. Oh and sepaking of "infrastructure"--mines in Utah and West Virginia, a bridge in Minnesota, levees in New Orleans. Does anyone still think President Bush and the rest of these GOP morally-inept cockspurs will "protect" us?
You can hang your coat on the Pinocchio schnozz of Bill O'Reilly, who made Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" (yet again), this time for asserting mythical Pew Research poll results O'Reilly claimed showed "most Americans won't vote for you if you get an endorsement by a gay rights group."
A Media Matters for America search turned up no Pew Research Center poll on the topic nor any poll asking a nationwide sample whether respondents would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by a gay rights organization. However, as the News Hounds blog noted in response to O'Reilly's claim, an August 6-8 Quinnipiac Poll of voters in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania found that a majority of voters in each state responded that support for a presidential candidate by "gay rights groups" "doesn't ... make a difference" in their level of support for the candidate.
The Faux News Factor 'bot, when called on his lack of any documentation of polling statistics, tried to cloud the issue, but never admitted his "mistake."
During the August 15 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly read an email from Cindi Creager of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation that criticized him for "erroneously report[ing] that a poll found most Americans would not vote for a presidential candidate endorsed by a gay rights organization."
...While O'Reilly noted that the [Quinnipiac] poll was taken "in a few states," not nationally as he had earlier suggested, he did not acknowledge that his original assertion that the result applied to a "majority" of respondents was false. Rather, he simply cited the Quinnipiac poll results from Florida -- which found that 28 percent of respondents would be "less likely" to support a candidate endorsed by a gay rights group, while 60 percent said it "would make no difference," and 10 percent said it would make them "more likely" to support such a candidate -- and added, "That's what I was referring to."
Perhaps Mr. O'Reilly needs a better research assistant. Falafel boo-yah!
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They never offer a real apology. It's always some well-scripted line about how they didn't mean to offend you, or they're sorry if you were offended. They're not sorry for what they said. They're sorry if you misunderstood it. To wit: This idiot Republican Congressman, Rep. Bill Sali of Idaho, who said that the Founding Fathers never intended Muslims to be elected to Congress.
"We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes — and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers," Sali said, according to an article on the network's Web site.
Now he's offered an "apology."
Sali responded days later, sending Ellison an e-mail explaining he meant no offense.
"He said that he wanted to make sure that Congressman Ellison understood that he meant no harm or disrespect," Sali spokesman Wayne Hoffman said.
Did you get that? He meant no offense, harm, or disrespect when he said that the Founding Fathers would have never wanted a Muslim-American elected to high office in America. Then what exactly did he mean? What does he think of the substance of what he said?
Why does the media accept these non-apologies as true apologies. A real apology would be: I was wrong, I was rude, I was offensive, and I'm sorry. In this case, the congressman actually pretty much stood behind what he said, all he's talking about what his "motivation" in saying it. Well that's nice. But lots of bigotry in America isn't motivated by a desire to be a bigot. It's usually motivated by your sense that you're correct, that you have morality and God and history on your side. Very few people with bigoted views actually intend to be bigots. Usually, they intend to be Godly. But they're still bigots.
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Gay reporter Rex Wockner just forwarded this story. Rex doesn't think there's every been a mainstream-media headline quite like this before. I think he's right. Why does it matter that Merv Griffin was gay? Because it matters. Meaning, if Merv could marry, and if bashing Merv weren't one of the top planks of the platform of the Republican party, then Merv being gay would be as significant as his ethnicity - an interesting side note. But being gay isn't just a side note in America today. It's still a source of great prejudice, particularly political prejudice from Republicans (or at least the far-right extremists who currently run the Republican party). So until America treats gay men and lesbians with the same respect that it accords other Americans, Merv Griffin sexual orientation will remain relevant.
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[UPDATE: Mike Signorile has an excellent synopsis of the whole mess at The Gist.]
NOTE FROM PAM: There's a lot more to this story, which I've been covering over at my pad. The editors at the Hollywood Reporter spent a lot of energy fretting over Richmond's piece, which confirmed the impresario's orientation -- he had worked with Merv on his talk show and it was common knowledge that Griffin was gay. Discussing this in print, even after the mogul passed away, obviously raised the ire of industry heavy hitters (and likely advertisers) and the Hollywood Reporter pulled the piece, without explanation yesterday, and it disappeared from Richmond's site as well.
"This was a story from The Hollywood Reporter that ran as part of a Reuters news feed. We have dropped the story from our entertainment news feed as it did not meet our standards for news. GBU Editor"
What standard for news did Richmond's piece not meet? Someone at Reuters had already given it the thumbs up, so it must have passed those heralded standards before the irate calls came. That's scandalous on its own.
You'd think the matter of an obit about or reminiscence of a public figure wouldn't generate all this brouhaha, but that's what happens when the world outside of the closet is so frightening to people in Hollywood that all sorts of insane measures are taken to reinforce the message is that there is something inherently wrong with being gay.
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More details on Sunday's AMERICAblog get together here.
The Arts et Metiers metro station. You have to click the photo and see the larger version to fully appreciate this station.
I.M. Pei's pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. Mom hates it. I think it's cool. And below is another shot of the Louvre and pyramid at night (I shot it kind of quickly, so it may not be my best shot, but still you get a great sense of the ambiance at night here). I just realized that I uploaded a huge version of the day pic of the Louvre - click on it, it's pretty cool. Even though you can't see it all in one screen, I think it gives you a sense of being there, what it looks like to be in the courtyard itself, something that normal non-panorama photos don't do. At least that's my feeling.
FYI the day pic and night pic of the Louvre were shot from different ends of the park.
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CNN's upcoming Christiane Amanpour documentary on religious extremism in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, "God's Warriors," airs starting on Tuesday. Right here in the U.S. we have an example of one of those warriors, Ron Luce, whose call to action to retake America from the "virtue terrorists" (gays, pro-choice supporters, etc.) is "Battle Cry," a youth crusade that Amanpour visits at its stop in San Francisco.
Luce screams intolerance cloaked in nifty pyrotechnics, Christian rock music, and big-screen graphics to the teen-packed venue. The evils of secular society and pop culture have forced him to tell his young charges to be ready and "armed with faith, prepared for battle." Luce talks about "virgins being raped on the sidewalks."
Rolling Stone did a piece on Luce and his movement back in April, "Teenage Holy War."
They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off "harlots and adultery"; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God.
Someone please tell me how delusional (or cravenly manipulative) do you have to be to put on a show this outrageous:
[T]hese 4,000 teens are about to become "branded by God." It's like getting your head shaved when you join the Marines, Luce says, only the kids get to keep their hair. His assistants roll out a cowhide draped over a sawhorse, and Luce presses red-hot iron into the dead flesh, projecting a close-up of sizzling cow skin on giant movie screens above the stage.
"When you enlist in the military, there's a code of honor," Luce preaches, "same as being a follower of Christ." His Christian code requires a "wartime mentality": a "survival orientation" and a readiness to face "real enemies." The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the "techno-terrorists" of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. "Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world," Luce writes, "so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today's culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real."
Even as he tells kids to swear off pop culture, Luce doesn't swear off capitalism, cashing in for Jesus by making money selling Battle Cry books, t-shirts, and videos.
When you have cult of personality BS going at this level, you know the power over these kids has likely gone to Luce's head. At this rate, how long will it be before he's caught with a hooker, or at a rest stop blowing some guy, or, heaven forbid, molesting an underage kid? It's only a matter of time with folks like this if the current trend holds.
