Older people experienced and know the history, but for those who forgot how the GOP used Gay people as political tools against their will to make laws to use against them, or just never thought about it, let me remind you.

Back when Ronald Reagan ran for president, he got support from the Moral Majority, a name used by Jerry Falwell, to push an evangelical agenda on the United States. The Southern Baptists had lost big time when their go to monster under the bed, Black People, were “allowed” to exercise their rights as U.S. Citizens.

Jews were lost as convenient scapegoats with the knowledge of the Holocaust, and with the Blacks no longer the standby group because of recent civil rights moves, at a meeting of evangelical pastors and televangelists who could taste the money they could rake in by claiming only they and Jesus could protect the world from the enemy of their own creation, and as creators they could modify misrepresentations as needed to come up with a new enemy, the decision was made to adopt the new societal threat, Gay people.

The Stonewall Rebellion was not that far in the past and Gay people were slowly getting their Creator endowed rights recognized and the fact that they are part of “All Men” was finally being honored. Until then, the Gay Community had been rather silent for safety, but after Stonewall it was becoming more visible and, without a lot of knowledge about Gay people because truth was squashed by folklore and tropes, the religious right, knowing people were uninformed and needed education, chose not to educate people about facts but chose, instead, self-serving and monetarily advantageous tropes and lies.

The Moral Majority presented a new, fuzzily undefined target that it could exploit.

Gays had few mainstream outlets to explain facts, but the Moral Majority, connected to churches, had practically limitless access to ways to get their word out.

The information was purposely false but effective in misleading people into mistreating fellow citizens for political gain.

We were coming for you, your children and wives with the intent of destroying civilization as we know it.

Reagan owed his election to the religious right and he paid them back big time when AIDS hit.

He and his party used AIDS to show that God did not approve of us getting our rights and respecting ourselves, and the phrase “God, Guns, and Gays” entered politics. The Moral Majority loved him and, frankly, used him.

A quick review of history since the 1980s shows the many times Gays were invoked as the cause of whatever ill politicians and religious leaders claimed only they could cure.

The Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell were based on the falsehoods chosen because they were seen as effective. No facts backed up any justification for these laws as in some countries Gays could marry and join the military with no societal destruction. The basis for anti-Gay legislation were the falsehoods that produced church donations and contributions to political candidates.

It was the same in the past with Catholics and the Know Nothings, the Chinese, Irish, Italians, Blacks, and Jews, where laws were passed because people believed those who lied about them, and it is a tactic the GOP has continued with Mexicans, Transgender citizens, and all those Brown people coming from countries we screwed over creating the need for them to leave.

The only attention the GOP gave to the Gay Community was in finding ways to use Gay people as a wedge issue based on fear of the nonexistent to raise money and pass bills. Religion used it to scare people to Jesus because they realized they just weren’t getting the Good News across as good news.

There was no money in that.

Leading from behind, the GOP has seen society grow up around Gay topics.

I was once told by a bartender in a Boston Gay bar that one of the best things to happen for Gays being simply a part of society was that with the rising rents in Boston in the sketchy areas the Gays had transformed to desired housing, there was a Gay diaspora to the suburbs whose residents saw them washing their cars, mowing their lawns, going to work, painting their houses, in short doing the same things the neighbors did except it was two men or two women whose intimate lives were just as public and as relevant to the heterosexual neighbors as those of the other heterosexual neighbors.

Yet, during that time leading up to Marriage Equality in Massachusetts, politicians and religious leaders in opposing it, presented their stories as proof of the danger which in no way matched what people were seeing in the suburbs.

Because of Clarence’s post-Roe suggestion that Marriage Equality should go next, the House voted on a bill to protect it, and 47 Republicans voted yes. For decades the GOP has opposed Marriage Equality using it as a wedge issue and spreading hurtful tropes in the process.

In spite of Republicans insisting that marriage is between one man and one woman because of their chosen God, there is support for this federal law protecting Marriage Equality.

That bill is now in the Senate which is the wayward step child of the Moral Majority.

Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay senator, has been working for Gay rights since she entered politics in 1986 and acknowledges that the world has changed in its knowledge and attitudes. She is leading the attempt to get the needed votes in the Senate.

With 71% of U.S. adults in general and 55% of Republicans saying they think Same-Sex Unions should be recognized by law, Baldwin pointed out,

“People began to see that the sky has not fallen.”

Also, because of increased visibility and refusing to be forced into the closet, rather than suddenly coming into being in great numbers, it is being seen we have always been here, that Americans, including members of congress, have friends, family, and co-workers who are Gay, and that we had been there in the old days but they just didn’t know.

“That probably has the biggest impact on where people land. This is a vote of conscience.” she said.

Many people may not realize that the Defense of Marriage Act that allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states is still on the books. The new Respect for Marriage Act would make recognizing marriages national and also recognize as legal marriages regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin. These rights, to marry beyond the heterosexual model and the limits of race, are not listed in the Constitution so people like Clarence Thomas could move to rescind related rights because they are not so enumerated and, therefore, do not exist.

Like the legality of his marriage does not exist.

Obviously Marriage Equality is no longer the Bogey man it had been, except for those who desperately need to hold onto old worn out tropes for money or religious conversion, which translates to money. It is becoming a non issue.

Proof of that and the obvious effect ignoring the statistics could have on politicians, when asked how he would vote when the bill gets to the senate, Ron Johnson said simply,

“I see no reason to oppose it.”

He is joined in supporting the bill, at least for now until other political considerations enter, by Republican Senators Rob Portman, Susan Collins, and Thom Tillis.

Tammy Baldwin has a chance of getting the votes from the acknowledged undecided Republicans, Mitt Romney, Roy Blunt, Joni Ernst, and Mike Braun.

Democrats need 10 Republican votes and they are close and the bill could pass, unless senate Republicans pull a stunt like the one with the bill to help veterans.

Mitch McConnell has not stated where he stands, preferring to wait until Schumer holds a vote.

Finger in the wind?

In the House, Republican Representatives Elise Stefanik, Scott Perry, and all four Republican members of Utah’s congressional delegation supported the bill, but the majority did not.

The basic GOP argument is that SCOTUS is unlikely to overturn Obergefell, this is in spite of Thomas’s dissent and four justices on the bench who voted to rescind Roe v Wade after saying under oath they wouldn’t do that during their nomination hearings.

The other objection, rather Ironic considering how the GOP weaponized Gay rights, Marriage Equality, and Gay people, is the claim that Senate Democrats are playing politics by putting the bill on the floor.

They seem to forget that the defense of Marriage Act was introduced in the House by Republican Bob Barr and in the senate by Don Nickles, the 1996 Republican Party platform endorsed DOMA, and that all Republicans in both houses voted for the bill with only no vote coming from Representative Steve Gunderson an openly Gay man who watched what his peers were doing to him and heard the tropes they seemed to have no problem invoking while he was in the room.

Among the Republicans are the usual suspects who attempt to hide their bigotry by pretending their concern is not about substance but process.

Marco Rubio thinks the bill is a “stupid waste of time” because, “There is zero chance, below zero chance, that the Supreme Court or anyone is going to outlaw gay marriage in this country.”

Roe.

Johnson’s reason for voting for the bill is that it’s being settle law makes such a vote unnecessary, one way or the other, so he will just go with the flow. Just go through the unnecessary motions.

After all, “society has pretty well accepted it and moved on.”

Roe.

Ted Cruz, the Dominonist, opposes the bill but recognizes that “reasonable people can disagree” with him “and there is room for a diversity of views on that question.”

Senator Kevin Cramer says he will vote against it “unless I can be compelled somehow,” because of his evangelical Christian faith. but does admit “it’s not like I feel super strongly about it, either.”

And, as vital as the issue had been to getting donations, political office, and the resulting power for decades, his noncommittal stance is because “It’s more that people are ambivalent about it.”

Senator Portman who, as noted, supports the bill, has supported Marriage Equality since 2013 when his son came out of the closet. It hit home. He not only knew a good person who happened to be Gay, he had raised him to be that good man who happened to be gay and he did not validate the tropes. He believes people should be respected for who they are.

He got a lot of flak back then from his Fellow Republicans who have come closer to him by growth or, as in the case of Cramer, lack of principle for the sake of political ends.

Two possibilities.

The GOP, having moved on from what they had previously thought was the whole non-heterosexual thing, Gay men and Lesbian women, unaware that there is a lot more to sexual orientation that are contained in their philosophies, Gays and Lesbians, at least, are rather main steam and that let’s us know we have to use that acceptance as allies to all the other Letters and numbers.

Gays and Lesbians can relax.

Or, as foolish as they assumed women were by believing the Trump nominees’ lies under oath saying they would not touch Roe before rescinding it once they got the job, in this case, as in many future ones related to other group, they will issue assurances knowing full well that when the vote comes up, like Mitch McConnell, they will then expose their real vote.

The casual indifference expressed by people like Johnson is suspect.

In 1971, as Samuel Alito was approaching graduation from Princeton and entry into Yale Law, he wrote  the forward in a student taskforce report on “the boundaries of privacy in American society” saying,

“We sense a great threat to privacy in modern America. We all believe that action must be taken … to preserve privacy.”

Two conclusions in the report might have led people, especially Gay ones, to believe upon his nomination to the Supreme Court years later that he would be an ally:

“No private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden”

and

“discrimination against homosexuals in hiring should be forbidden.”

However, his record as a judge before this nomination indicated otherwise.

In 1986, during the opening years of the AIDS Epidemic with all the foolishness that allowed people to die because of bigotry, Alito advised  the Justice Department that employers could fire people with AIDS based on a “fear of contagion, whether reasonable or not.”

In 2000, he ruled against the State College school district in Pennsylvania whose anti-harassment policy prohibited harassment on the basis of “actual or perceived race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other personal characteristics. ” Because the policy included “name-calling and degrading behavior”,  one member of the school board had challenged the new policy on the grounds that his children could not express their Christian view that “homosexuality is a sin.”

Alito ruled that the policy violated free speech, which includes the right to make derogatory remarks on such things as sexual orientation when it comes up because it is a contentious topic.

He did not explain how someone calling another person a derogatory term or launching into a you-are-going-to-hell speech as they are simply walking down the street is part of a discussion

Seemingly in contast in 2004, when two New Jersey parents wanted to enroll their son in a high school outside their area because he had been severely harassed at the school and they did not want him to return to it, the Shore Regional High School Board of Education took actions to prevent that (number of students in a district determines funds). Alito ruled that “most of the harassment focused on … (the student’s) perceived effeminacy” and that bullies constantly called him names, “such as ‘faggot,’ ‘gay,’ ‘homo,’ ‘transvestite.,'” and concluded that the student would not be able to receive an education unless he was placed in a school where he would not be harassed.

This may seem like a good decision, but notice that the action was to remove the victim from the victimizer while nothing was done to the harassers.

Remember his 2000 ruling

In 2001, Alito ruled against Centre County, Pa. because he saw its policy that prevented families with foster children who were HIV-positive from taking in foster children who do not have HIV as a “blanket policy discriminates against the Does because of  (their son’s) HIV-positive status even though the probability of HIV transmission, and consequently the risk, is next to zero.”

In 2020 the Supreme Court ruled, in Bostock v, Clayton County, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex-based discrimination, extends to Gay and Transgender workers, but Alito beleives the decision to had been “in my view indefensible”.

“It is inconceivable that either Congress or voters in 1964 understood discrimination because of sex to mean discrimination because of sexual orientation, much less gender identity. If Title VII had been understood at that time to mean what Bostock held it to mean, the prohibition on discrimination because of sex would never have been enacted. In fact, it might not have gotten a single vote in Congress.”

The old” if they get it, we all lose, so deny them” rights killer

 In his dissent he explained that,

“The Court’s opinion is like a pirate ship. It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Jus­tice Scalia excoriated — the theory that courts should ‘update’ old statutes so that they better reflect the current val­ues of society.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in this case and Roberts supported it, so it was not a radical left move.

The argument overused against Gay American citizens having the rights all men are endowed with by the Creator without asking for anyone’s opinion, is that if the Gay people had the same rghts as heterosexuals, they would be receiving special rights and privileges.

While my brother may have the right to healthcare, my having that same right is somehow special. 

When two things are the same they are equal, neither is special.  But that is the go-to claim.

No one should have special rights.

At the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit in Rome, Alito was the Keynote speaker on July 21.  After telling his audience,

“If we look around the world today, we see that people of many different faiths face persecution because of religion” and “Religious liberty is under attack in many places because it is dangerous to those who want to hold complete power. It also probably grows out of something dark and deep in the human DNA — the tendency to distrust and dislike people who are not like ourselves,” he went on to explain,

“It is hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection. The challenge for those who want to protect religious liberty in the United States, Europe, and other similar places is to convince people who are not religious that religious liberty is worth special protection. That will not be easy to do.”

Well, yeah, it will be difficult as we see the religious people claiming rights for themselves while denying those rights to the “Other”.

He went on to explain why religion should have special treatment and how to convince people that is best fo all of us with a list that seems rather blind to current events and history.

The benefits to society that justify religious liberty being protected are that it promotes domestic tranquility by providing a way for diverse people to flourish together and the charitable work done by religious groups and people of faith.

Tell that to GLBT people denied charity on religious grounds, or who have been condemned and spit at by the religious in the name of Jesus, literally, and who attempt to get laws passed that allow them to treat people as less than human in the name of that same guy.

He explained that religious liberty has often fueled social reform referring to the involvement of religious groups in abolishing slavery in the United States and Europe, making the obligatory reference to Martin Luther King Jr. who is invoked by white people who think they know the Black experience or use it as an incantation because he was an ordained minister.

Abolition began with Quakers who had been persecuted by mainstream Christian denominations and MLK was a Black minister in a Black Baptist church because the Southern Baptist Convention came into existence to support slavery and did not allow Black membership for quite some time.

“If religious liberty is protected, religious leaders and other men and women of faith will be able to speak out on social issues. People with deep religious convictions may be less likely to succumb to dominating ideologies or trends, and more likely to act in accordance with what they see as true and right. Civil society can count on them as engines of reform.”

I found his line that  “Religious liberty and other fundamental rights tend to go together” a little odd as I see Gays, women, and racial minorites losing rights to religious tenets.

He ended his speech with, 

“Our hearts are restless until we rest in God. And, therefore, the champions of religious liberty who go out as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves can expect to find hearts that are open to their message.”

That may be true, but in the present political climate with religion being used to strip people of their God given rights as if they are the ones He appointed to modify His will, we are not seeing what he claims, but we see the champions of religious liberty who go out as wise as doves and as harmless as serpents. 

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So, Joe Biden, handling an awkward but necessary moment, chose not to bow or show any respectful sign of greeting to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia that could be seen as some form of acceptance or forgiveness by going with a very generic Bruh fist-bump.

A greeting the does not greet. The over-the-head- attempt to greet someone in a crowded bar.

This was worse than a president wearing a tan suit.

The crown prince had Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist living and working in the United states, hacked to pieces after he was lured to a fake meeting at a hotel in a foreign country, and is part of a regime with a horrendous record of human violations.

Presidents should not have diplomatic contacts with such a person or country.

Well, that is an opinion that wavers with each president and his supporters.

We saw the former president remain strong against “Rocket Man”, rejecting his love letters, standing against Putin’s assault on American elections, and tell the leader of Turkey that in America our right to protest is in the Constitution.

He stood strong.

No fist bumps with him.

In his position as “Leader of the Free World”, Biden had a diplomatic meeting whose purpose was to strengthen America’s position in the Middle East and benefit its citizens. It was not necessarily a friendly visit but one of necessity.

Terry Strada, chair of 9/11 Families United, has her own and her organization’s response to cozying up to the crown prince.

She pointed out that on September 11,

“750 innocent people from New Jersey were brutally murdered, leaving over 1,000 children in our towns without a parent after nearly three hours of unprecedented terror by 19 Saudi-funded terrorists. Friends, neighbors and strangers embraced our suffering and helped us move through our devastation and pain.”

It would appear the fist-bump was not received well, but that is only the appearance.

What the families of those killed in the World Trade Center are upset about is the Golf Tournament sponsored by LIV Golf, the new Saudi competitor to the PGA, being held in a community that suffered from the 9/11 terrorist attack at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the last weekend of July.

The organizers of the tournament responded with a vacuous,

“As we have said all along, these families have our deepest sympathy. While some may not agree, we believe golf is a force for good around the world.”

The tournament is backed by a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and offers $250 million in total prize money and less demanding requirements, so many senior golf greats have signed up.

Strada believes that,

“LIV Golf is not about sports or good competition among worthy competitors, it is a multibillion-dollar public relations stunt bought and paid for by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. By joining LIV, players have shamelessly partnered with the very country that U.S. intelligence reports prove had numerous connections to the attacks on September 11th.”

In contrast, the owner of Bedminster, a person who once supported but failed to successfully compete with the NFL, has explained why the tournament exists.

“All of those golfers that remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year. If you don’t take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.”

Clearly from the introductory word salad, this is Donald Trump, the guy who did a fancy sword dance before putting his hand on a mystical glowing globe when he first visited Saudi Arabia and then ignored Jamal Kashoggi’s murder death while his son-in-law made millions during his time as White House Adviser from the Saudi’s for his real estate concern.

Trump will host two LIV events this year, one at Bedminster and the other at his Florida Doral course.

Ka-cing.

His involvement with LIV is about revenge too.

What about Trump isn’t?

In 2022 the PGA Championship was supposed to involve Trump’s courses, but the PGA pulled that arrangement because of the attack on the Capital and Trump’s obvious role in it moving from there to Southern Hills in Oklahoma, at least keeping it in friendly Trump territory.

His Artist of the Deal’s response to questions of his support for LIV was,

I made a deal with [LIV] They’re very good people. They’re very fine people. Greg Norman’s been a total gentleman, you know, and he’s wanted to do this for years and now he has the right backers because, you know, [the Saudi money] is unlimited. They can do the job right. I think when you put up first-place prize money for $6 or $7 million, I think a lot of people are gonna be showing up, to be honest with you.”

The term is “Sportswashing”, a way to improve a nation’s reputation by hosting a prestigious sporting event or financing a popular team.
It is a common thing done to the advantage of countries and sports team owners, as by introducing bread and circuses to a city, the taxpayers who build the stadiums and support the team re lulled to forget that this all benefits those people who will move on if their next attempt at extortion fails.

Everything done by the Saudis, no matter how wrong, is forgiven because of the financial windfall from golf.

Trump will make money, get attention as he will be a presence, if not in person, on his social media, and enjoy what he believes will be the bonus of hurting the PGA.

Money, attention, and revenge.

This supersedes the events of 9/11.

But you can be assured, seeing the reaction to it, he will not greet anyone with a fist-bump.

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Working to gain Gay Rights, with which we had already been endowed by the Creator, there seemed always to be resistance that often resulted in one step forward, two back.

There always was and, it seems, there still is, a gnat in the room, a mosquito under the top sheet.

Politicians and religio-political people oppose any progress in regards to Gay Rights and equality, and they are put in office by those who agreed with them for a personal advantage from their being elected.

In the Gay Community we have Gay Republicans who, while claiming they are doing their part to promote Gay Rights from within the party, actually merely helped elect people who would never see things their way but appreciated their support.

Claiming to be working for Gay rights, they worked to elect those against whom the Gay community had to fight, and they would at times undermine the progress being made.

It would appear there is hope as at least one chapter of the national organization, the Texas Log Cabin Republicans, have realized that, in spite of their best efforts and the sycophant devotion to the GOP, it will never be on their side.

While claiming to do so much for the Gay Community in Texas as Gay Republicans, something that would require acceptance as a group, support from the party on relevant legislation, and making inroads within the GOP to open their minds to who Gay people are and why their rights are American, they can’t even get a booth at the Texas GOP Convention.

AGAIN.

Anti-Gay language, whose previous removal from it was the LCR’s proof of its efficacy and why the cost of betrayal had to be paid, has been reinstated to the Texas GOP platform.

Facing this reality, but assuming no responsibilty for putting the people who made this decision in the postion to do so, the Texas LCR have admitted defeat.

The party’s first president, Paul von Wupperfeld, while admitting the failure “to moderate the Republican party,” also softened the blow stating,

“I’m glad we tried, and I think we did the right thing by trying. We’re actually going the other way, faster and faster.”

The hypocricy of claiming to support Gay people and their rights and claiming this could be done by electing those they endorsed after they stated clearly Gay Rights must go, is clear when this man admits that, inspite of all the endorsements for the conservative who would allegedly get things done for the Gay Community ,he hasn’t voted republican since 2000.He helped get people on ballots in a state whose voting record and mindset is perfectly clear knowing they would get in, but then didn’t vote for any of them just dumping them on the Gay Community to deal with.

“I didn’t believe it could succeed anymore. I sort of lost hope and got tired of the drama and the fighting internally and the fighting within the party.”

His successor, Dale Carpenter,  stated quite simply,

“I don’t believe we made any progress. In fact, I think the party got worse. [the GOP] views have not changed, but the wider cultures have. That’s a very striking thing to me. They’re like a fossil from another age. And it’s on everything. I don’t believe they support a single thing that’s happened over the last 25 years.”

These are the founders and leaders of the Texas Log Cabin Republicans.

Among the people who read my blog are many Gay Rights activists from the past and present who have had to deal with the Log Cabin’s interference with progress because of interstate proximity and saw the damage, and I will listen as each bellows out a loud roar of  We-Told-You-So frustration and release followed by tears for those who have and are suffering in spite of LCR being pled with to stop. 

Texas LCR began in the days when Marriage Equality did not exist and Gays were felons by nature because of the Sodomy laws.

In spite of Texas legislators and Congress members, many supported by LCR,  the sodomy laws were rescinded with the Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, the state’s Attorney General, Ken Paxton, in light of the recent Supreme Court decision on Roe and Clarence Thomas’s poorly veiled threat to marriage equality, has said that he was open to bringing anti-sodomy laws back.

He wants to make being Gay illegal in Texas again threatening the life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness for those who are.

Republican governor Greg Abbott has been targeting Transgender students and Ted Cruz has recently stated that Marriage Equlity is just wrong. 

Good job LCR.

Imagine if these two and their like had not gotten in because LCR took a stance, made a statement, and endorsed and voted for Gay allies.

If a person by claiming one Black friend, even if it has to be force a friendship, can then claim not to be a racist while voting for racist politicians and supporting racist legislation, I suppose the LCR can publicly endorse anti-Gay GOP politicians and then quietly vote out of sight, on a secret ballot, in a solo voting booth, that cannot be verified if claimed and know that will cancel all the votes LCR got for anti-Gay politician.

They may have come to their senses, but, cheese and rice, what damage they have done to all of us.

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JESUS

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
Blessed are those who mourn,
Blessed are the meek,
Blessed are the merciful,
Blessed are the pure in heart,
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven,

Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty.
Clothe the naked.
Shelter the homeless.
Visit the sick.
Visit the imprisoned.
Bury the dead.

 “My kingdom is not of this world.”

MODERN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

We are going to take over the country and force people to obey our religion’s rules.

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Last week, when Marco Rubio attempted to dismiss people’s legitimate reactions to the rescinding of Roe v Wade, Clarence Thomas’s statement that other unenumerated rights established over the years, especially marriage equality and the House bill to protect the stated target o attack, Gay Marriage, as simply a “stupid waste of time.”

This a fine example of Privilege, in this case cisgender, Christian, Male privilege as something important to others is considered a waste Foroff time by those it does not effect.

Remember how crazy he went when Obama moved to normalize relations with Cuba which would have removed certain special rights extended to Cuban refugees who just have to step on American soil to be granted entrance while others have immigration procedures that are much stricter?

There are things that affect one group of people that are of no concern to others.

But that does not make them so dismissible.

There are books to ban, abortions to deal with, forcnig little girls to have babies in Jesus’s name, protecting the right to own whatever sort of guns you want and how many of them you want without any limit as to clip capacity, but the Creator endowed rights given to all men, even beyond our borders being protecetd by and fo those who will lose them is a waste of time.

Peter Buttigieg had responded to this dismissal,of citizen taxpayers by pointing out that, if Rubio has

 
“time to fight against Disney, I don’t know why he wouldn’t have time to help safeguard marriages like mine. Look, this is really, really important to a lot of people. It’s certainly important to me.”

 At one point

Recently, Rubio had explained that Gay people are not worried about losinng their rights, they are concerned about the price of gas, and that was what the real, problem is and he is going to deal with that without saying how.

To Rubio, Buttigief is just a “Harvard-educated Transportation secretary” and is a married Gay man. How would Pete have any idea what the issuesn are.

“I’ll give you a real problem. We have a Transportation secretary named Pete Buttigieg, who believes that highways can be racist. Who believes that $5 gas, which is killing working Americans, is a great thing, because that means people are going to drive less or because everyone’s going to go out and buy a $65,000 electric car with a Chinese battery in it.”

A very factual and reasoned response, one must say, and one that will surely result in solutions to the decreasing cost of gas at the pump and the declining inflation rate

One of his chief objections to people wanting to preserve Gay marriage is that the only people who are concerned aboit it are ” a bunch of affluent elite liberals” a “bunch of Marxist misfits, who sadly today control the agenda of the modern Democratic Party.”

Well, there you go. Not only has he been able to explain to the world and the Gay Community what our real concerns are, but he is able to sum us all up in one complete package because he knaows all of us and our life experiences.

Rubio does not like that the House advanced the Respect for Marriage Act, which would codify marriage rights for same-sex and interracial couples.

Wait.

Interracial couples need that protection too?

Are they also as a group a “bunch of affluent elite liberals” and “Marxist misfits too”?

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As indefatigable as he is, after Marco Rubio’s recent whirlwind campaign the explain to the Gay people of the United States what their real concerns are as opposed to the ones they have been speaking of for most of living memory, he waated no time finding the answer to one of the death of Roe questions concerning justification for forced birth.

Regardless if it were a pregnancy due to rape or incest, and, perhaps, the victim of either being a child herself, and regardless of the mother’s financial status before, during, and after birth which will be for a considerably longer amount of time than the first two of the three, there will be forced costs.

If the latter is a stumbling block for women, as a way to address it and to answer people’s questioning why the “Pro-Life” people do not ease the financial burden by covering all costs of an unwanted or forced pregnancy and, upon birth, and by choice of the mother to either find an adoptive home for the child, or pay for its support in any situation until he or she arrives at their majority, Rubio has proposed requiring anyone who fertilizes an egg to begin paying child support at conception upon the mother’s request.

I suppose there will be some retroactive payments as it might take time to determine when exactly the payments should have begun, unless there had been a pre-intercourse agreement dealing with any issue.

Now it is assumed a mother to be wouldn’t have to request that of the father to whom she is married and with whom she went through a whole ritual with paperwork saying he would do stuff like that, not too difficult for her request to be met if it was a boyfriend, but it would seem a rape victim or someone who had a consensual, one night stand might put be put at a disadvantage.

At least we know the fact now, according to Rubio’s bill, that life begins at conception making the fertilized egg a person with all rights and responsibility of a U.S. citizen unless they are brown or darker, not heterosexual, a woman, or your mother might be Mexican or something.

“We should do everything we can to support American mothers and their children. This bill would allow expecting mothers to prepare and support their babies before they are born.”

I guess it’s anyone’s guess about the after bith years.

His bill is pure in its intent and purpose judging from those who support it, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and such GOP luminaries as Senators James Lankford and Marsha Blackburn.

Well, ladies.

You presented your concern, and Rubio allayed your fears.

And, without even asking for the defiitive aswer to an up to this point in time unanswered question, also now know that life begins at conception because Little Marco said so.

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Among the most annoying, if not the prime annoyance on its own, for anyone who advocates for any minority’s rights are those people not of those groups and have none of the attendant life experiences yet explain to those who are members what their lives were like and what their experiences have been.

I know some very well meaning white people in an organization to which I had been a founding member until recently. My exit occurred after the leader of the group explained to a woman of color why she was not correct in her perception of how people of color are treated locally because she had only grown up in the area and had not done the extensive reading the leader of the group had, and that I did not understand the Gay experience of which she was an ally for pretty much the same reasons.

She was not advocating for people as they were, but as she perceived them to be, and that is how she approached things.

Many have been the times when advocating for Gay rights in general and Gay student rights in particular I would be scheduled to speak at a meeting after a series of people wanting to deny these rights began by professing their innocence and purity by letting everyone in the room know, “I don’t truck with no homosexuals, don’t know any, have none in my family, and don’t associate with them in any way, shape, or form”, and then launch into telling the audience what Gay people think, say, and do, and why.

They confessed total ignorance of their subject and then launched into dissertations about which they just informed their audience they had no knowledge.

I have been told authoritatively after recounting an experience to illustrate a point that that isn’t how it was because I may have spent 18 years in Oklahoma City and had a few interesting Buckle of the Bible Belt moments but I had been born in Massachusetts, so, I really didn’t know about living in a red state, and the editor of my life in the state in which I live now proceeded to explain my time in Oklahoma to me and what he had heard roughly about Oklahoma during my years there and its politics on a podcast or two.

I, unlike the events at a rally one night, haven’t been attacked at a demonstration in L.A. by police horses, was never thrown in jail for a weekend for being gay in public, was never in the bar raids I was in, was never attacked and assaulted with leather bound Bibles during a Pride Parade by a famous local celebrity pastor and his congregation in Southern California, and never had my job threatened because of Gay student advocacy because the laws in Massachusetts protect me from that.

The fact that these events did not happen in Massachusetts but out of state over a period of a quarter century seems a detail apparently hard to grasp.

Somehow, where I was born negated where I had lived.

When I came out to my parents it was after a lot of soul searching and self discovery. I had had to separate what Gay really was from what I had been led to believe it was by people with as much knowledge as I had. There were some things that simply were not me and others that were to some degree, and it took some time to realize there was no model Gay man. You were Gay as yourself.

I didn’t need to start wearing dresses.

When I began my journey out, my parents being Boston/Irish Catholic, went through a bit of Catholic guilt as being Gay was still not that easy to accept some 45 years ago, and they wanted to know if it was something they did that caused this or what. They were victims of the popular and religion promoted propaganda. They did not know how to get a good grasp on things and went to a counselor to find answers.

After a few sessions, the counselor asked me to come in for one session to answer questions in a monitored atmosphere that was guaranteed to be awkward for all concerned. Two Boston/Irish Catholic men, one Straight one Gay, were actually going to discuss sex out loud, possibly a lot of Gay sex stuff, with one man’s mother and the other’s wife, and another woman I did not know in the room. My mother had moved along in acceptance quicker than my father who did come around a great deal over time, but with residual Catholicism.

At one point my father said that what made the acceptance so hard is that he just could not accept the terrible things Gay people enjoy doing.

And then the moment came that actually influenced every encounter in my future that was similar.

“Rubicund of visage” my father, when asked, listed the immoral acts he had heard of like he was foreseeing the future interests page on Grindr.

When he trailed off, the counselor calmly asked my father if he got that list from a Gay person or from other straight people, and followed the lowering of his head with the simple question, “Have you asked your son what being Gay is for him and not your friends?”

On future occasions I always asked the politician or religious leaders what the source of their information was as I would like to approach things from an informed point of view as this gave me the advantage of having facts while they had to defend their beliefs which in reality they could not.

Women, Racial Minorities, non-heterosexual minorities are all told what their experiences are by those who have no clue, and are treated, not according to realty, but how others think realities is.

I was actually accused in a pubic meeting of just using Gay student rights as a political, pawn because there was nothing about me that was Gay. I didn’t lisp, mince when I walked, or wear any female articles of clothing. I was a straight man making political hay.

My boyfriend at the time did not agree.

Getting as many Gay rights as we have finally gotten, the rights all men are endowed with by their creator and no one should have to fight for, was not an easy fight and not only were we aware of the cost of the fight, but we had experienced the conditions we were fighting and knew only too well what we should have and the cost to live without it or fighting against it.

When SCOTUS killed Roe, immediately, without any pause for people to deal with that decision, Clarence Thomas brought up the possibility of doing the same to Marriage Equality.

Legal sanctioned marriages come with the right to file joint federal and state tax returns, joint bank accounts, receiving a marriage rate or family rate discount on life, health, car, and liability insurance, and more.
This is why citizen taxpayers wanted marriage. Not for any religious detritus.

Losing rights is a horrible concept.

And considering the battles fought and the cost in people’s energy and lives up to this point and knowing pre-rights conditions (I moved from Oklahoma to Massachusetts, I known there are differences in citizenship) this is not acceptable.

There is concern in the Gay Community about Thomas’s idea, and many are speaking up about it.

One such person is Marco Rubio, a conservative, cisgender, Heterosexual male. He understands that this potential loss of won rights is a concern for the Gay Community, but, he is also certain that the Gay Community is confused as to what it wants and is willing to be our voice.

The House passed the Respect for Marriage Act last week, and as it heads to the Senate.

After the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v Wade, red states began passing Bills and gleefully welcoming those Trigger Bills with the alacrity of the covered wagons in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run, and reasonable people saw the brakes needed to be applied.

Senator Marco Rubio sees the fear of losing Marriage Equality, as it does not affect him a “non issue.”

Yeah To him.

Well at least for now, until he goes back and reads the actual language of Jim Crow laws. I have a copy of a law book containing them that I bought at a used book sale in Oklahoma City, the capitol of the only state in the Union with Jim Grow written into the state’s Constitution, which lumps Hispanics in with the “Coloreds” as they are not, well, totally white.

“I don’t know why we’re doing that bill, there’s no threat to its status in America.”

Does he so easily dismiss Clarence Thomas and his statement he wants to look at it again.

But it was when he continued and spoke for the Gay Community letting the public know, and us, the Gay Community along with them, what Gay people are really concerned about, and it is not the loss of our hard won rights. His words let me see how wrong we all have been wasting our time getting human and constitutional rights when we just long for the days when gas was lower than a dollar and we could enjoy getting physically attacked, denied housing and healthcare, and being treated like second class citizens even though we pay taxes .

“But I know plenty of Gay people in Florida that are pissed off about gas prices.”

And here I am with a bicycle and an electric street scooter, but no husband.

According to Little Marco, though, since I don’t buy much gas so my cost is always low, I am the most fulfilled Gay citizen I know.

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