Please check out what John Scalzi has to say about this issue:

Make no mistake that supporters of the “California Marriage Protection Act” will be voting to destroy existing marriages. Every single person who says they support this initiative should be made to understand that is what they are going to do, and be made to acknowledge that fact. Every person who is on the fence about the initiative should be made to understand that this will be the consequence. Same-sex marriage is not some theoretical construct in California; it exists. And while no marriages will end if the “California Marriage Protection Act” fails, many marriages will end if it passes.

It does not profit anyone to ignore this reality, nor to ignore the shameful irony of claiming this act somehow “protects” marriage. It doesn’t. So don’t.

California didn’t end when gay marriages became legal. The sky didn’t blow up and the earth didn’t split open and devour those whom God found out of His favour. Teh Geighs aren’t destroying the world. Don’t let this proposition destroy their right to love.

The president of the Gambia—supported by one of the countries leading newspapers—has called for all the gays to leave the country immediately. The ultimatum seems to have been directed at “homosexuals, drug dealers, thieves and other criminals”—what esteemed company the gays seem to be keeping these days, but I can’t really think of anybody who fits all these categories besides possibly Omar from The Wire.

Seriously though, this is scary shit. The ultimatum includes “a mass patrol” to “weed bad elements in society”, including hotels and other lodgings where “this kind of individual” takes refuge. And the Daily Observer a leading newspaper, is fully behind this effort:

Yes, here they go again at the Daily Observer jumping on the President’s bandwagon—we hear some of you moan. Well, moan some more because we think this President of ours keeps saying exactly what we think here at the Daily Observer.

We have said it before and we will say it again. This is a Muslim and Christian country. Both the Holy Koran and the Holy Bible condemn homosexuality—pure and simple. So I hear you say that both the Koran and the Bible also condemn theft, adultery, lying, etc.

Correct – but we do not pass laws to make theft, adultery, lying and all other evil deeds acceptable. But we tolerate them, I hear you say. Yes indeed we do, to an extent.

Tolerance is indeed a virtue and without tolerance we would have much conflict in society. But I do not want anyone to abuse that tolerance either.

Unfortunately, homosexuals do by demanding that non-homosexuals should accept their life-style. Well, the life-style in The Gambia is one based around Family and Religion. Like God’s Adam and Eve, the Family is based around Mother (female), Father (male) and the rest of the extended family. Tony Blair’s definition of “marriage” and “family” as being of whatever conjecture (even man and goat!) does not apply in our religious context.

Look, we are not interested in stoning anyone, even homosexuals. What our President is saying, and we agree with him totally (”as usual” I hear you moan!) is this: Ours is a society guided by religious principles.

Those religious principles leave no room for homosexuality. Sex and marriage in our culture is between man and woman. Sex and marriage between a man and a man, a woman and a woman, is viewed as irreligious and gross by the vast majority of our people here (just as in the West they would view sex and marriage between a man and a goat)!

So, please respect our religions, cultures and traditions by keeping your homosexuality out of our country.

I seriously can’t think of what I could say after this besides offering, for what little it’s worth, my own personal fuck you to the Gambia, its president, and its newsies—at least, those responsible for this crap.

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when it takes effect in 30 days.

It’s about damn time. California has had domestic partnerships for a while, but these don’t carry all the benefits of marriage when it comes to taxes, immigration, medical benefits, and so forth. The California state legislature had passed two laws allowing gay marriage, and Schwarzenegger (remember him? the Governator?) vetoed both of them. Yet this is the man who also has said that he’s against a citizen-driven initiative to amend the state constitution to prohibit gay marriage, which looks like it’s going to be on the ballot before voters in November. Hopefully the presidential election in a “blue state” such as California will drive up the number of people who turn up not simply to vote for a president but to vote against this homophobic ballot proposition. A massive, well-funded, and well-organized effort to get voters to do both these things will be necessary starting very soon.

But for now, let’s rejoice in this ruling from a Republican-dominated court. Thank goodness there are still a few people out there who recognize that human rights should not stop with heterosexual couples.

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

Anyway, I’ll have some updates later in the day about the results of the by-elections. Look for the Liberals to make a few pickups, especially in urban areas like Vancouver and Toronto, due to dissatisfaction with the current government. Meanwhile, a few interesting links:

• How do you prove you’re gay when applying for refugee status?
• Religious groups are trying to shut down a Russian television channel because they show programming that is ‘anti-religious, violent as well as promoting homosexuality’, such as South Park.
• The hilarious malapropisms of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, such as ‘I deny the allegations and the allegators.’

James Gau pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder for asking a police informant in July to go to his wife’s American Fork, Utah, home, pretend to be a robber, and strangle her.

Gau said left his family and moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual.

The article (from the AP) makes note of this point twice in its five sentences: he wanted, apparently, to ‘live as a homosexual’. What does that mean, and just how much underlying homophobia is there in this particular formulation? (On the other hand, the jokes basically do write themselves…)

The phrase to live as X generally entails, I believe, the notion to adopt the characteristics of other Xs. If the article said ‘moved to Brooklyn to live as a Hasidic Jew’ we would know what it meant: we would suppose he grew a beard and sidelocks, stopped watching television, and attempted to commit fraud on federal subsidies. Of course, I don’t mean to paint Hasidim with such a broad brush, but this is exactly my point: the phrasing to live as X brings up a particular set of images, not all of which may be appropriate, but many of which would certainly be present, rightly or wrongly. So what does ‘he moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual’ entail? Certainly it evokes particular images—both of Reno and of a specific type of homosexual—again, rightly or wrongly. Does this reflect latent homophobia? Possibly, but I’d be more inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, if only because ‘to adopt a homosexual lifestyle’ would have been far too obvious and ‘because he realised he was gay’ doesn’t really have the same ‘ring’ as a motivation for murder, does it? Mental instability, sure, but homosexuality? Doesn’t really work.

Hat-tip: Jess.

Of course, this goes much deeper than mere desire for their own space on the part of those who support this policy. Transphobia is one of the root causes here, and among lesbian, gay, and bisexual cisgender types (cis- is the opposite of trans-), there can be some pretty nasty transphobia. One of its most instructive manifestations is in the so-called ‘radical feminists’, my (least) favourite example being the noxious blogger Heart of Women’s Space, which I won’t link to, but you can find pretty easily if you really want to. Once upon a time she accused the really excellent blogger who goes by the pseudonym ‘little light’ of plagiarizing sentiments from the feminist author Robin Morgan without giving credit, but the discussion thread very quickly degenerated into bashing of transpeople, beliefs that transwomen were really men trying to ‘colonize’ women in yet another way, claims that ‘men think they can be better women than women’, and so forth. All little light had said was that ‘It is time to create a feminism of the monstrous’, and for expressing a thought that I’m sure Heart and her commenters agreed with, she got a whole heap of transphobic abuse dropped down on her. (She responds to these claims here, in one of the most delightfully snarky bits of prose it has ever been my pleasure to read.) The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has message boards where, I’m told, many similar sentiments about transgender people can be found. I haven’t checked it out myself because I have far better things to do with my time.

The reason I bring this up right now is not simply because this issue has been remaining latent in the LGB community for far too long, and whatever exposure of it I can provide to the dozen or so people who actually read my blog has been judged necessary for me to try to give this morning. Demanding more immediate attention is an essay by Cicely, reposted on Questioning Transphobia and originally posted on the aforementioned Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival message boards, detailing how she changed her mind on women-born-women-only spaces. It is truly wonderful to see such a thought-out and detailed consideration of this issue—worlds away from ‘transwomen are men colonizing women’. I also recommend Holly’s reaction to it over at Feministe.

The conclusion of the essay says it all:

It’s my opinion that if you accept that trans women are women, it’s not good enough to say trans women are too different, they make you uncomfortable, so you don’t want them in any particular women’s space. Anti-discrimination legislation isn’t designed to pander to people’s feelings of comfort. It’s designed precisely to challenge and even override them when they deny other people their equal rights. Asking or expecting individual trans women or all trans women as a group to agree to participate in discrimination against themselves (or agree that what they experience as discrimination actually isn’t), is not a reasonable request, and one which can never in practice be satisfied. Either this conflict will go on indefinitely, or it will be resolved by removal of the boundary.

I live in hope that the festival will go on, and become welcoming of trans women.

I have nothing to add beyond a heartfelt (as it were) ‘amen’.

Second, and more legally interesting, a judge in Oregon has thrown out a lawsuit challenging a law passed by the legislature last year allowing the official recognition of domestic partnerships, allowing the law to come into effect immediately. The point being argued in court was whether or not one has a constitutional right, if one signs a petition, to have that signature officially tabulated. There had been a petition circulating in Oregon to put a referendum before the voters to ban any other form of union between two people of the same sex (read: gay marriage), but it barely did not receive enough signatures to appear on the ballot. The judge concluded that it is not a constitutional right to have one’s signature counted on a petition, which sounds like a counterintuitive position, but it is very soundly argued in the (surprisingly readable and understandable) ruling (PDF). Here’s the interesting bit from the ruling (pages 15–16):

I believe the State, through a variety of sources, has demonstrated to the average signer of a petition that it’s not making any promise that your signature ultimately will be counted. Some of those we’ve talked about. Some have to do with the fact that when you sign a petition, there are any number of ways in which your petition may never see again the light of day.

Now, admittedly, some of the most common of those have nothing to do with anybody acting on behalf of the State. The chief petitioner can simply give up and go home or raise some question in his or her own mind about a particular sheet and throw that sheet away just to save themselves the trouble of a challenge later. There are any number of ways when you sign a petition that you have no reasonable expectation that the State is promising it will make it all the way to home plate. …

If you’ll forgive kind of a folksy example, if one of my kids claims I promised them a Lamborghini when they graduated from high school, the fact that I cannot do so is some evidence that I never promised I would. And if the State is being said to have promised something that would be extraordinarily difficult to do, that’s some evidence, in my view, that it never promised it in the first place; it’s not within the original entitlement.

Legally, at least from the point of view of the common law, impossibility excuses a party from failing to fulfil a contract. But there was no contract here; the specific objection raised by the plaintiffs is that the state denied due process to those people who signed the petition expecting their signatures to count, and in doing so violated the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, the ruling found that the state never created the entitlement to having their signatures counted in the first place.

The upshot is that gay people can now go ahead and register their domestic partnerships in Oregon and receive many (but not yet all) of the benefits conferred by marriage in other situations. Thank goodness for two happy outcomes to cap off the week.

Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

This has already been kicked around by the blogosphere a bit, especially by Talking Points Memo and by John Aravosis, who rightly points out that it’s about time the media start treating Huckabee’s nutty religious views as the same sort of fair game as he seems to treat Mitt Romney’s supposed beliefs, as a Mormon, in the siblinghood of Jesus and the Devil.

But I haven’t yet seen anybody raise the question: if two gay men having sex is like a man having sex with a (non-human) animal, which of the participants in the H. sapiens-on-H. sapiens sex is equivalent, from a physical, metaphysical, and/or moral standpoint, to the non-human participant in the latter case? Follow-up question: how far removed from ‘human’, taxonomically speaking, does Huckabee intend this equivalence to extend? Surely he means to exclude things in kingdoms other than Animalia, thus permitting the usage of, say, vegetable matter in lawful sexual relations between husband and wife as God intended. I foresee some tricky grey areas here.

Oh, and one other question: if we are to take the bible at its word–you know, literally–the prohibition on bestiality would seem to apply specifically, if perhaps not exclusively, to women (Leviticus 18.23)):

וּבְכָל־בְּהֵמָ֛ה לֹֽא־תִתֵּ֥ן שְׁכָבְתְּךָ֖ לְטָמְאָה־בָ֑הּ וְאִשָּׁ֗ה לֹֽא־תַעֲמֹ֞ד לִפְנֵ֧י בְהֵמָ֛ה לְרִבְעָ֖הּ תֶּ֥בֶל הֽוּא׃

Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.

I have chosen the King James Version translation–which is close enough here to the Hebrew for my purposes–to try to reflect some of the theology underlying, as it were, the sexual philosophy of people like Mike Huckabee. What about it, Mike? Do you believe that women need to be specially interdicted from animal-human relations? Does this require a Constitutional amendment–perhaps in the same vein as an anti-abortion amendment? Why not just have a whole anti-female amendment while you’re at it? Oh wait, it’s halfway there already.

אֱהִי כֹּפֶר לְעֹפֶר קָם בְּלַיִל
לְקוֹל כִּנּוֹר וְעוּגָבִים מְטִיבִים
אֲשֶׁר רָאָה בְּיָדִי כוֹס וְאָמַר
שְׁתֵה מִבֵּין שְׂפָתַי דַּם עֲנָבִים
וְיָרֵחַ כְּמוֹ יוֹד נִכְתְּבָה עַל
כְּסוּת שַׁחַר בְּמֵימֵי הַזְּהָבִים.

I’d die for him, the fawn who woke at night
To the beautiful voice of strings and flutes,
Who saw the goblet in my hand, and spoke:
‘Drink, from between my lips, the blood of grapes!’
The moon looked like a letter yud inscribed
Upon the cloak of dawn in golden ink.

—Samuel ibn Naghrela (Shmuel Ha-Nagid, 993–1056)

Dunne, an Irish immigrant who first came to the United States in 1998, said the change also was prompted in part by racism the Irish once faced in the United States, his six-year stint in the US Army, and the war in Iraq.

“Members of the gay community are in combat and dying for their country, and yet they’re being denied the basic human rights they are fighting for,” he said.

Sacrilege! Heresy! Flip-flopping! Everybody knows that in the modern world of today you’re not allowed to hold multiple opinions at different points in your life. Opinions are sacrosanct, inviolable, immutable, and any previous opinion you ever had must always be held against you for the rest of your life. If you wrote on a piece of construction paper in kindergarten ‘I hate spiders’ you must never switch to liking spiders, for ever and aye, amen. And if you write ‘I want to be president of the United States of America’ on that same piece of paper in kindergarten, you can bet your Velcro sneakers that it will be taken as dispositive proof that you are an insatiable, power-hungry, tyrannical dictator in the making.

The cynical reading, of course, is that he realised he was going to look like a homophobe and a bigot when applying for jobs, so he saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides. But I’ll be more charitable with my judgement. Lee Swislow says so, anyway, and she’s the executive director of an organisation called ‘Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders’ (nothing in that organisation name about the protecting the polysyndeton of ampersands, apparently).

Talk to Hashem every single day in your own words, for no less than a half hour (preferably an hour), and spill your heart out to Him. Ask Hashem to help you overcome the lewd urges, which are nothing more than a stupid temptation fantasy from the “dark side”. This strategy completely disarms the Yetzer Hora (evil inclination).

Avoid any secular media, movies, TV, and even newspapers, and immerse yourself totally in kedusha [Sam: Hebrew for 'holiness'].

The same way that you don’t contemplate eating pork or cheeseburgers all day long, you don’t have to think about other women. This will be difficult for you at first, because your entire mission on this earth could very well be to lick the battle with homosexual or other lewd tendencies. [Sam: sic.]

Double-check yourself that your appearance outside the house is super-modest, and don’t try to attract anyone’s attention except your husband’s. For him, make yourself the most ravishing and appealing female in the world. If you don’t get back triple dividends on your investment, write me again and we’ll take it from there.

Be very careful about ritually washing your hands as soon as you open your eyes in the morning (”negel vasser“).

Rabbi Brody suggests that this should cure her of her homosexual urges within 40 days, and additionally suggests the recitation of several psalms, the motivations for some of which escape me (105? 150?). Two things upset me about this. First, none of these things, of course, are going to cure this poor woman from her obvious latent homosexuality. All that’s going to happen is that it’s going to get even more buried and only cause further mental torment. Time and time again, this is what happens with these ex-gay ’solutions’, particularly with the religious ones. Sublimating your homosexual urges into your newfound religious identity will only hurt in the long run.

What really irks me more, however, is the presumption with which Lazer Brody—a man with zero actual experience in human psychology, psychiatry, or medicine—dares to answer this question. His capacity as a rabbi should limit the scope of his expertise to spiritual matters, like ‘I’m having problems connecting with God’. Now, he and other believing Jews (and Christians and others, for that matter) maintain that this is a spiritual matter—the first thing he helpfully tells this woman is ‘Negative thoughts contaminate the soul’, and then goes on to laud her for bringing her problem to him, because ‘when you tell your problem to a rabbi that you trust, you in effect release the pressure of the problem (the lingering negative thought) on your soul, and create an opening for divine light to reach you’. What complete bullshit. This woman needs the assistance of a professional trained in psychological medicine, not a nutty Breslover rabbi who believes the solution to homosexuality is to stop watching television, recite Psalms, and make sure to wash your hands in the morning. If you don’t know the answer, there’s no shame in admitting it and referring the questioner instead to a person who does know. But if you’re an intellectually arrogant man with a god-based solution to everything, then this may well be beyond your capabilities.

If you go to the wrong source, you’re going to get the wrong answer. I just hope this woman doesn’t permanently damage herself by following Lazer Brody’s ‘advice’.