Proceed at your own risk

WHITEWASH

I know this post will outrage many, but somebody in this nation needs to maintain some kind of grasp on reality. 

Michael Jackson is dead, in case you're living under a rock in Lower Slobovia, and America has gone into a frenzy.

Adoration of Jackson was based less on his talent and more on our nation's bizarre belief that this man's sick, perverse and criminal habits and behavior were based on the notion that he was a tragic victim of success, vast wealth and global fame.   As a nation we came to adore him because he triumphed over a life of great adversity--success, vast wealth and global fame.

Unlike the rest of us mere mortals, Jackson was neither required nor expected to ever take responsiblity for his own actions, no matter how horrid they might have been.

Our society even placed Mr. Jackson above the law.

I know that no one will hear me in my obscure little corner of the Internet--especially as all other news is buried for the next week by a media and a culture obsessed with this mythological fairy elf creature--a thing that never existed.

As the throngs assemble for what appears to be shaping up as a "state" funeral to rival if not surpass Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy and Princess Diana, one must question the profound and frightening flaws in the American value system.

Michael Jackson was an extremely talented and entertaining singer/dancer; certainly one of the greatest pop artists of the 20th Century--maybe the greatest.  But he was nothing more.

And he was certainly no one to be admired or worshiped for anything other than his creative talent.  As a human being and a man he was a moral, ethical and cultural disaster.  Obviously, he suffered from severe mental illness that manifested itself in pedophilia, an extreme case of psychotic dysmorphia and a variety of other personality disorders that I am far from qualified to list or even understand.

But the worst part is how our society enabled this sad and tragic life of self-destruction and pathological self-indulgence.  From his multi-million dollar shopping sprees to his self-declared ability to father blond white children to his extreme self-homophobia, Jackson is a man to be pitied not worshiped.  We stood by and allowed him to engage in child prostitution, paying parents millions of dollars to turn over their young boys for Jackson's private amusement.  He dangled his baby over the side of a balcony and social services did nothing.

I have two theories about his sudden death, both of which will likely cause MJ fans to hunt me down.

In both cases, we're looking at a suicide.

The first is that over the last few days, he realized Peter Pan had run its course and he was not at all capable of moving forward with his world tour.  He took his very frail and surgery raped 50-year-old body home and took his own life--dipping into his legendary vast cornucopia of pharmaceuticals.  He returned home after six straight hours of rehearsal at the Nokia Theater, destroyed by the realization that he would not be able to perform.

The second theory is that on the eve of his world tour he learned from his attorneys that he was about to become embroiled in yet another pedophilia scandal.  One of his many victims, now of age, was about to publish a tell all book about his childhood love affair and sexcapades with the King of Pop.  The book's release was timed to capitalize on the publicity around the world concert tour.  Jackson then ended his life with the same drama and horror with which he lived it.

And now, dear readers, I pay homage to my DVR which has sufficient inventory to allow me to curl up in bed with Krypto and my television and not be subjected to 24/7 Michael Jackson tributes over the days to come.

BLACK SUPREMACY

Perhaps there's something in the American water supply that turns otherwise righteous human beings into blind fools?

For too many years, this nation has had to tolerate the poison of white supremacists. It still plagues us.  From the garden variety skinheads to the duly elected politicians, these are folks who claim exclusive rights to an Aryan Amerika. And they mostly build their house on the notion that white America is under attack by seditious sub-human minorities including blacks, Hispanics and Jews.

And now, in the new "everybody's equal Obama-America", some of these seditious minorities are themselves jumping on the supremacy bandwagon. 

So I suppose "equality" and affirmative action would eventually produce the black equivalent of "white supremacy".  And with a black man in the White House, increasing numbers of black supremacists are coming out of the closet and laying claim to an America defined exclusively according to their own narrow, hate-fueled and desperately bigoted world view.

White supremacists portray Jesus as a blond-haired, blue-eyed goose-stepping neo nazi.  Black supremacists portray Jesus as a Nubian prince.  In both cases, the truth has obviously no part.  Assuming Jesus ever existed, the one fact we do have about him was that he was a Jew and certainly looked more like Woody Allen than either Bjorn Bork or Snoop Dog.

And speaking of Jews....black supremacists have decided that civil rights is the exclusive property of African Americans.  Nothing even remotely compares to the plight of the black man in America and absolutely no one but a black man has a right to define the struggle for civil rights.

We see this from Washington State to New York to South Carolina to Tennessee to the District of Columbia.

As I've said before, if any one group of people can claim ownership of discrimination and persecution, it would be the Jews.  American blacks are rank amateurs in this game.  Slavery and Jim Crow on the table?  I'll match your slavery and anti-Jewish laws and raise you 2,000 years of cultural genocide, the Spanish Inquisition, Eastern European Pogroms and the Holocaust

And with those credentials under my belt, the claim made by members of the black American leadership and the black clergy that only they can judge what is a civil rights issue seems ridiculous and stupid at best and racist and disgusting at worst.

The Rev. William Gillison, pastor of Mount Olive Baptist Church, a large African-American congregation in upstate New York says he is insulted by the comparison of gay rights to "civil rights."

“We know what we have gone through as an ethnic group. We feel the terminology, the definition itself, has really been hijacked,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s just another ploy to garner more support from people who may not understand what the civil rights struggle was all about.”

Bishop Michael A. Badger, pastor of Bethesda World Harvest International Church also in upstate New York explains that he doesn’t doubt there is discrimination against gay people but that it is hardly on the order of what African-Americans have encountered and still face.  I suppose Bishop Badger thinks being legally at risk of an involuntary lobotomy is a walk in the park.

“As an African-American, I don’t have a choice in the color of my skin. I have a choice in whether I’m abstinent or not,” Badger said. “I don’t think you can compare the two.”

The head of yet another African American congregation, Pastor Jeffery Bowens, who leads Love Alive Christian Fellowship, also disagrees with the comparison.

“It doesn’t add up to me,” Bowens said. “It’s really attempting to get empathy more than anything else.”

Make no mistake about it, there are plenty of African Americans who see the common ground between the black civil rights movement and the gay civil rights movement--New York's governor David A. Paterson, Coretta Scott King and Barack Obama among them.

Governor Paterson recently compared the fight to eliminate slavery in the 1800s to the current effort to legalize gay marriage. He later chided religious leaders for not having spoken out against discrimination of gays.

But what Paterson and others are failing to recognize and condemn is the rise of a black supremacist movement, led by a racist and fundamentalist clergy very much akin to the American white supremacist movement.

Another member of the black clergy, Ralph Chittams has been turned out of restaurants, denied jobs and called unprintable names because he is black. He says he understands discrimination. So forgive him if he doesn’t believe that denying a marriage license to a gay couple is morally equivalent to denying fellow black men the right to sit at a lunch counter.

Characteristic of both black and white supremacists, Chittams makes an argument that is so offensive and so profoundly ridiculous that one can only stand and wonder at the idea that someone this stupid can even craft a complete sentence.

Oof course, I agree with Chittams.  Denying a black man the right to sit at a lunch counter can't possibly be compared to denying a gay man the right to build and protect a family, especially when that gay man can order a tuna salad sandwich wherever and whenever he so pleases. 

Obama is right when he says that we need to open a more candid dialog on the subject of racism and bigotry in America; and that means overcoming our fear of condemning black supremacy--which is as disgusting and as American and as morally, ethically and intellectually as bankrupt as white supremacy.

AMERICA'S WORST SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE

Nope, not AIDS, not some super new version of syphilis.

It's fame.  Yup.  Fuck a celebrity and wake up the next morning, no, not with crabs, but with fame.  I'm not sure what this says about our culture, but it's most certainly not a good thing.  It speaks to a degree of cultural and social sleaziness that makes mulch seem like a gourmet great.

Oh, you know the victims.  After all, they're famous.  Ashley Alexandra Dupre, Golan Cipel, Monica Lewinsky Mike Jones, Jennifer Flowers, Paula Jones--men and women who fucked a celebrity and became famous for no other reason.

It is a most odd American phenomenon.  Contact with a famous penis makes you famous and a media darling, worthy of book deals, made-for-TV movies and Oprah.. 

The symptomology is interesting.  The victim first exhibits indignation and self-righteousness. A range of emotions are expressed with lines like, "I had no idea he was Governor of New York"  to "He refused to pay the dry cleaning bill from my blue Gap dress."  This is all quickly followed by book deals, the talk show circuit, blogs and nude centerfolds.

And then within a few months, sometimes weeks, their assholes, vaginas and blow holes stuffed with cash they are then consigned to the underbelly of American sleaze.

The latest victim of this onerous STD is Beau Breedlove, the once and noble lover of Portland's openly gay mayor Sam Adams.  Beau seemed like a decent guy until he was "outed" as the mayor's "indiscretion".  And then Beau caught the malady.  Big time.

Breedlove originally handled the scandal with dignity and concern, issuing a statement to the press back in January:

“ I also wanted to protect Sam Adams' reputation, considering our valuable friendship. Sam Adams has always been a positive influence and a friend to me. He has many outstanding qualities to bring to his position as mayor of the city of Portland, and I wish nothing but the best for him. I hope this subject can ultimately be put to rest, and I sincerely believe in Sam Adams and what he can do for the city of Portland as mayor. Again, I truly apologize to those were affected by my mishandling of the situation in 2007. "

But then Breedlove's STD medical bills started to mount and he had no choice but to sell out to the gay media and enthusiastically embrace porn.  From dignity and respect for the mayor's position to sexploitation and wiggling his penis for all the world to see.

Unzipped.com, the enablers in this mud-crawling venture, praised Breedlove, as if one who sells his naked ass to the highest bidder in order to embarrass a former lover is praiseworthy.

"Beau Breedlove was extremely professional at his first erotic photo shoot in Los Angeles this past weekend," Unzipped online editor Sean Carnage told Advocate.com. "He came to LA to prove that the Portland scandal does not define his sexuality.  The photos portray the real Beau--a confidant and extremely handsome young man who is openly sensual, openly sexual, and has nothing to hide."

Huh?  In the old days, one might have called this shameless, sleazy and crassly opportunistic.  Obviously, I'm all for photographing naked men; I live for it.  But flashing the world for money to demonstrate that you're a good guy and not some sleazeball?

Clearly I'm out of touch with modern definitions of common decency, self-respect and hypocrisy.

My sympathies to the mayor of Portland. He tried to keep his relationship with Beau Breedlove a secret. Now we know why.  Not because beau is a boy, but because Beau is a whore--and not the good kind.

AMERICAN REALITY AND OTHER BAD ACID TRIPS

Americans clearly have an aversion to reality.  I suppose this accounts for “Reality TV” which obviously has nothing at all to do with reality.  It's about people portraying themselves in completely staged situations rather than living as themselves.  What's more apple pie than that?  Anti-substance.

This morning I was reading about a legal battle underway in some suburban high school over the school district's decision to block the formation of a gay-straight alliance. Obviously, they didn’t get the memo on bridge building.  School board officials claim that by allowing gay students to openly associate with straight students, the school will risk the appearance of promoting an un-Christian degree of tolerance.

Huh?  In what reality is that real?

The hideous truth--the truth that  Obama seems incapable of grasping--is that America has become a society that is more tolerant of intolerance than of tolerance.

The last time I experienced that kind of topsy-turvy reality I was on Acid.

Laws that protect the so-called rights of bigots and hate-mongers are far more common state by state and even federally than laws that protect minorities from persecution and intolerance. 

And while it may seem unrelated, America is celebrating in Obama our nation's  triumph over racism while black unemployment remains four times greater than white unemployment and 80% of our prison population is non-white.  We also have the highest per capita rate of incarcerated citizens of any other modern nation, including Russia and China.

Of course, Russia and China don't have millions of black people to lock up.

American "reality".

The compulsion to bury truth and portray American reality according to some neo-fascist Christian ideal currently seems to be the dominant zeitgeist.

In the high school gay-straight alliance controversy, the gay students have worked for an alliance to combat the abusive and prevailing bullying in the school, including food being thrown at gay kids in the high school cafeteria as part of the daily routine.  Better than rocks, I suppose which is the preferred method in Islamic countries.

School Superintendent John Ruis denies that he's being intolerant insisting that he would allow a gay-straight alliance as long as it is not a gay-straight alliance.

American reality again at play.

Ruis said: "We were willing to let the proposed GSA meet on the condition that the name of the club was changed to prevent bullying and discrimination."

And it's not only a gay thing, this alternative reality notion.

The Miami-Dade School Board has banned a book "A Visit to Cuba” from its school libraries because it said the book offers too positive a portrait of life under the Castro regime.

Some First Amendment freaks sued but a federal appeals court upheld the ban.   Apparently freedom of speech only applies to Christians and neo-conservatives.

“A Visit to Cuba” and its Spanish edition, “Vamos a Cuba,” are part of a series of books for children ages 4 to 8 that introduces them to the geography, customs and daily life of different countries. The Miami-Dade County Public School District had 49 copies in its elementary and middle schools. The father of an elementary-school student, complaining that the portrait of Cuba in the book was inaccurate, petitioned to have “A Visit to Cuba” pulled.

The First Amendment freaks are appalled that any American court would condone and allow the suppression of political viewpoints.

In an editorial, The New York Times raised an interesting point.

"If the Miami School Board wants to oppose the totalitarianism of the Castro regime, banning books is an odd way to go about it."

Yesterday, outraged Republicans who pissed away over $3 trillion on Iraq condemned Obama for wanting to commit $634 billion over 10 years to overhaul the health care system.

At the moment about 48 million Americans are uninsured and the cost of guaranteeing coverage for all could easily exceed $1 trillion over 10 years--less than a third the cost of the Iraq misadventure.  Republicans are horrified.

The new American reality.

HYPOCHONDRIA

LANDLORD'S RIGHTS AND OTHER AMERICANISMS

You really have to marvel at how conservatives have convinced themselves, the media and even President-elect Obama that bigotry is a viable and credible political point of view.  It's kind of like Dick Cheney claiming that illegal torture is not illegal when done by an American patriot--Congress and the courts have bought into that outrage so why not embrace bigotry as a Christian sacrament?

Remember the bad old days when KKK members were criminal terrorists and Arabs were flying magic carpets in storybooks?  Now Aladdin is a suicide bomber and Klan members are praying with our first African American President on global television.

My oh my, how the world has changed!

In fact, the United States, once the leader of the free world today seems to be it's most passionate adversary; and it's all about the words.

The new American habit of redefining reality continues to expand on a global scale.  Bigotry is Christianity.  Fascism is Republicanism.  Torture is patriotism.  And now we have Gary Bauer and his friends. (That's Gary, third from the left.)

Former Republican Presidential candidate, John McCain supporter and American "conservative" Gary Bauer is furious with France for trying to push the United Nations to accept homosexuality as a human right.

“The United Nations really has no business in telling anybody how they ought to deal with homosexual conduct,” Bauer, president of American Values, told the Christian News Service.

Bauer is stunned that those corrupt Europeans would consider any sexual orientation other than his own to be a human right.

Bauer, of course, is only leading a growing choir of heavenly Christian angels.

Focus on the Family's U.N. "expert" (yes, they claim to have one), Thomas Jacobson adds that the United Nations, led by France and the European Union is embarking on a new brand of Imperialism.  "The French, the British and the other industrialized European nations are busy promoting a new form of “imperialism” – a cultural imperialism to force a radical pro-abortion, pro-homosexual agenda on the world. This is a form of imperialism that is coming out of a very liberal mindset in Europe – and increasingly in the U.S -- to force smaller, less powerful countries to conform to their will in their internal policies in matters of sexuality."

Jacobson, in what is certainly an astonishing endorsement from conservative America of the fundamentalist Islamic world, says that American Conservatives can only hope and pray that the more than 70 U.N. members that currently outlaw homosexuality -- many of them Islamic nations--will stand their ground on this religious and moral issue.

“What’s really going to make the huge difference," says Jacobson, is if the OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) countries and the other developing countries, especially from Africa--and we would hope from Latin America--will stand their moral ground against this."

Apparently Focus on the Family and other right wing American Conservatives have no problem jumping into bed with Islam when it comes to the much greater threat of homosexuality.

Bauer talks about betrayal.  "Countries who owe their entire existence to Western civilization and to Judeo-Christian values are working to undermine it.  Some of these countries seem to think that the best thing they can contribute to the world--especially world health--is to undermine the teachings of Judeo-Christian civilization, and attempt to pressure other countries to go down the same road they are going down."

As an aside, let me say that I love Christian history. It has the charm of not being based in fact.  Although Christianity is a rather modern development in the course of European history, Bauer would have us believe that the ancient and glorious civilizations of Europe culminating in the Roman Empire were, in fact, Christian.  Makes no sense, but that's the beauty of conservative Christian belief.

Bauer goes on to explain that "homosexuality is not a human right."

“The notion that [homosexuality] is somehow an area that is comparable--or in any way can be compared to--religious liberty or the freedom of speech or the right to assemble, or the right to vote, is just absurd."

As I read the comments from Jacobson and Bauer, I kept thinking "fringe", but then I dug a little more deeply into exactly why the United States refused to side with every other democracy in support of the global decriminalization of homosexuality.  Why did the United States side with nations that are engaged in monstrous acts of gay torture and genocide?  Surely, the United States representatives to the UN didn't stand up in the General Assembly and say "We're voting no to the decriminalization of homosexuality because we just plain hate faggots."

The answer knocked me off my feet, and I'm not easily knocked off my feet.

The nation that championed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights voted against extending this historic document to homosexual and transgender people because--take a very deep breath--it would violate the legal rights of landlords who do not want to rent apartments or houses to gay Americans. It would also violate the rights of American companies that do want to employ gay men and women.

The answer to the American "no vote"?  Landlord rights take moral precedence over human rights.

United Nations representatives of the Bush Administration actually said that signing the declaration would cause a conflict between state and federal governments because of laws already in place. American military personnel are not allowed to be openly gay, and in the majority of states landlords and employers are allowed to discriminate against a sexual orientation.

Carolyn Vadino, a U.S. spokeswoman to the UN, said that the refusal to sign the declaration does not mean the U.S. believes human rights violations related to sexual orientation are acceptable but if the U.S. were to sign such an agreement it would violate the rights of Americans who have the legal right to openly discriminate against gay men and women in 44 of our 50 states.

A number of European groups have expressed anger at the United States' decision.

Imagine that.

One Dutch minister called the American "reason" for not signing appalling.  Even former chief U.S. spokesman to the UN Richard Grenell said the United States' reasons for not signing the declaration were "ridiculous", adding that "the U.S. lack of support on this issue only dims our once bright beacon of hope and freedom for those who are persecuted and oppressed."

High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay was stunned by the American "reason" for not signing.  Pillay compared anti-gay laws to Apartheid laws, adding that stigma was to blame for unpunished violence and discrimination.

But the U.S. is standing firm, defending the right of landlords and employers to evict and fire queers as a more important issue than genocide and torture.

HOMOS AND HAGS AND HEBES, OH MY!

California fags, their hags (aka straight women) and those money-grubbing Jew bastards drawn to the pink dollar were the only three demographic groups that voted decisively against Prop 8.

Heterosexual male crackers , darkies and beaners went the other way.

I get it.

Darkies are under the sway of Christian fundamentalism, an evil Middle Eastern cult that has infiltrated our democracy.  Never mind that this same brand of Christian fundamentalism that now stomps on queers once used the same Bible to justify slavery as righteous.

Hetero male crackers have only one claim to fame: breeding rights.  Take that away by legalizing same sex marriage and they're nothing more than a useless mass of sinew, muscle and throbbing love sword.  Now let us hands and say "throbbing love sword" one more time. Sigh. Throb.

As for beaners, when you eat the way they eat, anal sex seems especially dangerous and frightening.  Can you blame them?  Yuck.

So how many pejoratives and epithets have I used so far?  Well, Obama wanted us to talk openly about race.  Be careful what you wish for?

Personally, I love the bigotry blame game and our rich American vocabulary of demeaning pejoratives.  Without them, life in America would be dull as dishwater.

And since November 4, we've been in scapegoat hell, generalizing out little hearts out, carving each other up like bloody little Jack the Ripper clones.  Better than a 3-ring circus!

Sure.  Seventy percent of African American Californians voted for bigotry and against civil rights on November 4.  That is undeniable.  The reason is that a majority of black clergy are telling their parishioners that gays and lesbians are responsible for the crippling and pervasive dysfunctionality of marriage and family within the black community.

Does this make a black man more homophobic than a white Evangelical or a racist Mormon?  Certainly not.  In fact, heterosexual white male Californians voted at the same rate as blacks against gay marriage.  The fun fact here is that black Californians in general and straight white men think alike when it comes to queers.  Sounds like an Obama bridge-building opportunity!  Another fun fact is that black churches and Mormon churches fought together to defeat civil rights for gay Americans; and that would be the same Mormon Church that preaches that dark skin color is God's punishment for evil-doing. (Of course, the Mormons say they've changed their minds about that, the same way they changed their minds about polygamy; but it still remains a key part of their sacred texts.)

The gay community has singled out blacks as one of the main reasons bigotry triumphed in California.  Does gay anger at black voters make gays especially racist?  Certainly not.  Surely racism is as prevalent and as profound among gay whites as it is among straight whites.  I wonder what Prince and Trick Trick have to say on this subject?

In fact, the villain in this piece is neither race, nor gender, nor age.  It is as it has always been: organized Christianity.  If you want to attack blacks, don't attack them for buying into homophobia, pity them for buying into the most racist, imperialistic, militaristic, bigoted religion in human history.  No, I don't mean "Christianity", I mean Western Civilization.

The last 2,000 years of human history is a graveyard of races, nations, cultures, tribes and entire civilizations raped, pillaged and destroyed in the name of Christ.  Black Africa stands prominent among the gravestones, and American slavery is it's greatest achievement.  American queers are just the latest scapegoat.

Why anyone black or gay would subscribe to Christianity remains a mystery that I daily ponder.

While I don't agree with most of what Louis Farrakhan has to say, his view on Christianity makes a lot more sense than millions of African-Americans flocking to Baptist churches.

During the 60s, the views of Malcolm X always made much more sense to me than anything MLK had to say; but that's just me.

In the interests of fair balance, I will say that a man who cuts away all the trappings of organized Christianity that have buried the legacy of Jesus under a shit storm of hypocrisy, lies, gaudy architecture, crimson robes and global violence is a man I would support.  This is a man who pursues the core message of this iconoclastic Rabbi, a man who stands on his own two feet as a free-thinker and a revolutionary, not as an adherent working from within to fix institutions that have betrayed humanity, human dignity and the basic principles of freedom and the rights of man.  But such men are too rare and sadly not in the driver's seat.

MY SUFFERING IS BIGGER THAN YOUR SUFFERING

And why did Jews vote against Prop 8?  Simple, the Jewish community knows a civil rights issue when it sees one.  It was a no-brainer. Hebes are just that way. We generally don't claim ownership of suffering, as much as we are entitled to do so. Nor do we believe that Constitutional rights should be prioritized based on who has been shat upon the most.  And we certainly don't blame our problems on queers or blacks.

The other madness that has spread like the flames that will soon engulf Oprah's house, is this moronic game of competing suffering.  In fact, both blacks and gays are new to this peculiar game and are pipsqueaks when it comes to a history of suffering and persecution.  The enslavement of Jews, genocidal wars against Jews, and the wholesale torture of Jews are major themes in the Bible that both black and white Evangelicals so fucking treasure.

When it comes to minority creds, nobody beats the Jews.  Blacks may have Martin Luther King Jr. but Jews have Moses Sr.  Of course, Jews are happy to share Moses and his message with everyone.  Evangelicals on the other hand are inclined to hog Jesus while they totally ignore his message.

The gay assumption that blacks are to blame for passage of Prop 8 is as stupid as the notion that blacks have some kind of superior claim to ownership of civil rights and suffering.  Both sides of this particular argument are idiotic.

I was once kicked out of a minority support group meeting at the LGBT Community Center because the blacks, Hispanics and Asians who were in the majority told me that Jews are not a minority.  I thought that those members of my family who had been toasted--literally--by the Germans just a few years earlier would be glad to hear that.  Was my eviction from the group racism or just plain old stupidity?  Jews are rich. Jews run the media and the banks. Jews can't possibly know what suffering or oppression is all about.  Fortunately our brains are bigger than yours, so we're able to better manage our anger when confronted by such bigotry.  Blacks and gays are such children, so prone to hysteria.

Speaking as a Jew, I do not see the burden of bigotry suffered by Jews, blacks, or queers to be comparatively measurable as better, lessor or worse.  This game of who owns civil rights and who has suffered the most injustices is appalling and breathtakingly stupid.

Anyone--and I mean anyone--who has suffered persecution and then plays this game and diminishes the human and civil rights of any other human being was not paying attention, did not learn the lesson and is wallowing in a cesspool of voluntary stupidity (as opposed to dropped on your head as a baby stupidity.)

Believe it or not, I really wasn't going to touch on this issue, hoping that both sides would just calm down and move on; hoping that our new President would stand up and condemn this nonsense as an affront to his own civil rights triumph.  Sadly, he has not.  In fact, Obama has risen above his racial heritage and lessons, remaining as disinterested in the plight of gays these days as any typical heterosexual alpha male would. 

But an editorial in the prestigious and influential Dallas Morning News finally pushed me over the edge and now, as you've already realized, I've entered the fray, hurling bigoted pejoratives left and right along with the rest of America. (Makes me feel like a true patriot.)

Now let us be perfectly clear. I'm right and if you disagree with me, you are wrong.  And if you insist on comparing the size of sufferings, black vs gay for example, think of Jewish suffering as a 14-inch dick while the rest of you come in at around 4 inches--on a good day.

But size really doesn't matter, at least not in this case.  It takes one abused child, one ruined life, one person denied the right to dignity and the pursuit of happiness, one suicide, one murder.  That's all it takes.  The rest is window dressing and meaningless statistics.  Should we take the plight of 20,000 abandoned, shunned and homeless gay teens less seriously than the wholesale incarceration of black teens?

I'm appalled by this insanely irrational and bigoted nonsense and the general inability to take responsibility for mistakes and missteps by all sides, black, white, straight, gay, good Christian, bad Christian.  Yes, I know there are good Christians as there are good Republicans; misguided fools with hearts in the right place.

I'm not a big fan of most other gay bloggers who mostly bore me or annoy me with their dishonesty and lack of authenticity (but that's a rant for another day.)  So I'm not surprised at the crap spat out by Andrew Sullivan. He's a pompous self-righteous bare backing asshole.  Dan Savage gives sex advice for a living and should in no way be seen as representing the gay community on the subject of rights.  And Wayne Besson, well, he means well, but isn't the brightest star in the sky.  But seeing these three and many others resort to racism under these circumstances is tragic.

On the other side, too many black pundits are equally as guilty of bigotry and simple-mindedness.

A prominent black columnist writing for the Dallas Morning News responds to "racism" among gays with a series of sick lies and ridiculous "my dick is bigger than your dick" claims.  (Of course your dick is bigger, dude, you're black.)

This fool explains:  "The civil rights once denied to black Americans included the right to register as a voter, the right to cast a ballot, the right to use numerous public facilities, the right to get a fair hearing in court, the right to send their children to an integrated public school, and the right to equal opportunity in housing and employment. Have gay people been denied any of these rights? Have they been forced to sit in the back of buses? Confined to segregated neighborhoods? Barred from serving on juries? Subjected to systematic economic exploitation?"

OK, moron, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.  You're not dishonest, you're just fucking stupid.

Just for fun, let's play the who suffered most game--not with Jews, got you beat hands down on that score.  But how about queers, those happy gay folk who want to legalize their families and their love for each other?

American gays have been criminalized and still are in 80 countries around the world, subject to arrest for no other reason than love.  Just a few years ago, gay gathering places were illegal, under constant threat of police raids.  In my lifetime, gay kids were legally shipped off by their parents to psychiatric institutions for lobotomies and electro-shock therapy.  Are gay kids provided a safe and nurturing school environment in which to learn and grow into productive members of society? Gay Americans can still be fired from their jobs, tossed out of schools, denied health care  and evicted from their homes in all but six states.  As for segregated neighborhoods or ghettos where queers huddle together for safety and security?  Do I even need to go there?  This Dallas dude is one stupid man, but he's out there along with too many other black man and too many gay men like Sullivan, Savage and Besson.

And then there is the profoundly offensive "you can hide who you are and enjoy a life of equality" argument--and black folks can't.

This one causes me to foam at the mouth--and not in a good, he just came in my mouth kind of way.

Of course, unlike most blacks, queers can pass for something they are not.  They can live a life of lies, self-loathing and constant fear of exposure, a half life of misery, unjustified self-sacrifice, frustration, and self-abuse so that they can enjoy the same rights and privileges of their fellow heterosexual Americans minus the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Yup, that's a viable option and makes us less entitled to civil rights than blacks.

Our Dallas pundit concludes his column saying:

"If black voters overwhelmingly reject the claim that marriage amendments like Proposition 8 are nothing more than bigotry-fueled assaults on civil rights, perhaps it is because they know only too well what real bigotry looks like. Perhaps it is because they resent the assertion that adhering to the ageless meaning of marriage is tantamount to supporting the pervasive humiliation and cruelty of Jim Crow. Perhaps it is because they are not impressed by strident condemnations of "intolerance" and "hate" by people who traffic in rank anti-Mormon hate mongering.

"Or perhaps it is because they understand that a fundamental gulf separates the civil rights movement from the demand for same-sex marriage. One was a fight for genuine equality, for the right of black Americans to live on the same terms, and under the same restrictions, as whites. The other is a demand to change the terms on which marriage has always been available by giving it a meaning it has never before had. That isn't civil rights - and playing the race card doesn't change that fact."

After reading this black writer's Dallas Morning News column, I was less angry at the likes of Savage, Sullivan and Besson; thinking everyone is an asshole, that's the one thing we all have in common, black, white, gay, straight.  It's an American thing.

At the end of the day, we must ask ourselves a very disturbing question.  Will the election of our first minority group President make America a better place, or a much uglier place as more lines are drawn and more anger is unleashed?

This insanity around Prop 8 suggests ugly.

I should be in a state of bliss over Barack Obama, this fulfillment of a dream that fueled my generation.  Instead, I'm looking at an America gone even more mad and hateful.

Some suggest that we are looking at the last desperate gasp of American bigotry as the forces of good, led by Barack Obama sweep over the land.  I hope this is true; the alternative is too horrific to even consider.

HOMOPHOBIA HONORED

America's leading homophobe and bigot laureate has been honored by the prestigious Radio Hall of Fame and Museum of Broadcast Communications.  The Museum is one of the Chicago's top ten tourist attractions.  Dobson now stands beside such American broadcasting icons as Burns and Allen, All Things Considered, Benny Goodman and The Hit Parade.

The Christian press is rightfully hailing this as a triumph over homosexual activists, securing Dobson's crusade against gay rights a place of honor in American history.

In fact, Dobson's Focus on the Family is the first faith-based radio program to be inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.

Dobson's anti-American, hate-mongering filth, the “Focus on the Family” radio program was founded in 1978 dedicated to "a return to conservative, Christian values." The internationally syndicated show has been on the air ever since and is heard on over 4,000 stations worldwide.

Carried by over 1,000 FCC-licensed stations across the United States reaching tens of millions of listeners weekly, the 30-minute program is essentially the official voice of American fascism.

Jim Daly, president and CEO of the Focus on the Family ministry, told The Christian Post: “To have Focus on the Family honored in this manner means we've made a difference in families all over the world."

Indeed, Focus on the Family has been critical in making sure that millions of Americans and American families are denied civil and human rights as well as standing firm as a driving force behind tens of thousands of ruined lives, abandoned gay children and gay teen suicides.

“That Dr. Dobson’s listeners recognized the excellence and relevance of the content of the daily broadcast and voted to give him a much-deserved win shows Dr. Dobson’s influence is as strong as ever in the hearts of his fans, as well as in the culture,” added Daly.

Dobson's honor comes despite protests from a number of our consistently ineffective and self-proclaimed gay advocates including the duller than dishwater Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out and star-struck gala crazy GLAAD.

“It is an affront for the Radio Hall of Fame to honor James Dobson, a right wing demagogue, who built his radio empire on the backs of gay and lesbian people,” stated Besen in his press release.

“We vow to stand up and protest this outrageous insult and let the world know that Dobson is a dishonest, hate mongering ideologue.”

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) also decried the announcement, claiming that Dobson “has used his expansive, well funded media platform to perpetuate false and misleading information which contribute to putting gay and lesbian families in harms way.”

“GLAAD urges the media to scrutinize and shed light on Dobson’s record of inaccurate claims about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and include an in-depth analysis of his distorted and defamatory statements,” the group expressed in its statement.

The Broadcasting Industry responded to Besen and GLAAD by elevating Dobson to the official Pantheon of great radio luminaries and journalists.

Yet again, our self-appointed gay advocates have failed us.  Utterly and completely.

Dobson will be honored by the 20-year-old National Radio Hall of Fame & Museum at a gala dinner on November 8 along with radio personalities Art Bell, Howie Carr, Charlie Tuna, and Michael "Mickey" Luckoffi, head of San Francisco radio station KGOAM. Posthumous inductees included disc jockey Dick Whittinghill, and talk show hosts Jesse Cain and Bob Collins.

Voting for the 2008 Hall of Fame inductees this year was open to the general public for the first time, adding to votes generated by all active members of the Museum of Broadcast Communications and/or National Radio Hall of Fame and the over 2,000 radio historians and industry leaders selected to participate.

As you've likely read, Dobson intends to endorse McCain next week, once again handing the Evangelical vote on a silver platter to the Republican crusade to turn America into the Fourth Reich.

HELMS, MURDOCH AND LIES

The most astonishing thing about Rupert Murdoch's growing media cesspool is the silence from the FCC and Congress that greets Murdoch's almost daily criminal abuses of the press.

Our government and our nation today seem incapable of distinguishing between truth and lies, and between free speech and criminal propagandizing.

When a licensed news outlet deliberately and willfully abuses its power, influence and the public trust by spewing outright lies designed to further some fascist political agenda and goes unpunished and unchecked, our laws and our system have miserably failed us.

Many of you will raise a hue and cry when I state that The Wall Street Journal was until very recently an excellent example of traditional American journalism.  Without a doubt, the Journal has always been a conservative newspaper--not a surprise for an editorial board always to some extent focused on the health and well-being of Wall Street and American capitalism.  But conservative perspective aside, The Wall Street Journal has always been a shining example of responsible journalism.  And I say that as one who would be labeled a left-leaning liberal.

In fact, despite its conservative economic and political views, the Journal has frequently taken socially progressive positions and has never--until now--succumbed to the fascist Christian nonsense that has polluted too much of the American media.

So it was with some degree of shock to read the new Rupert Murdoch version of The Wall Street Journal praising the recently dead Jesse Helms as a great American hero.

I'd been wondering just how badly and quickly the Journal would sink into perfidy after Murdoch acquired the paper in 2007.  With the Journal's elevation of Jesse Helms to American hero and sainthood, the wondering is over.

We no longer have to rely solely on FOX News and The New York Post for our hourly dose of fascist lies.

Perhaps the most stunning claim made by Murdoch's Journal tribute is that "Jesse Helms was not a racist."

Upon reading that I poked myself with a scissor thinking that I was still asleep.  It hurt. I was awake. 

The examples of Helms' bold racist views would fill a dozen blog entries,but here are just a few of my favorite charming American hero Helms anecdotes.

In 1950, while working on a political campaign Helms create an ad that read, "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man.

At the height of the Civil Rights movement, in the year 1963, Helms wrote: "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights.  Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

Helms led the 1983 charge against Martin Luther King Day insisting that King and his followers were communists.

During his 1990 re-election fight against a black opponent, Helms unveiled a nakedly racial campaign advertisement in which a pair of hands belonging to a white job-seeker crumpled a rejection slip as an announcer explained that the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. Mr. Helms went on to victory.

In an even more recent incident, Helms once deeply offended a black colleague, Democratic Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, by singing part of "Dixie" on a Capitol elevator. 

As the story was reported by the Gannett News Service and TIME Magazine in the Fall of 1993,  shortly after the Senate vote on the use of the Confederate flag insignia on government property, Helms ran into Moseley-Braun in a Capitol elevator. Helms turned to his friend, Sen. Orrin Hatch and said, "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." He then proceeded to sing the song about "the good life" during slavery to Mosely-Braun.

Again, the Wall Street Journal writes: " His critics have a point that he sometimes exploited racial tensions in the post-1960s South, but Helms himself was no racist."

The Journal ends its July 5 tribute to Jesse Helms with the following words:

"He sought to reassert traditional American values, and above all to defend U.S. freedom against Soviet tyranny. Like Reagan, he saw more clearly than liberals the moral dimension of the Cold War. Like Reagan, he was a hero of that war."

The editorial also describes Helms as a champion of the people, tirelessly fighting the "liberal elites."

American values and liberal elites are two peculiar concepts that American fascists have redefined to suit their own hideous agenda of bigotry and theological dictatorship.

For me, American values are clearly defined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.  Jesse Helms and his kind would have you believe otherwise.  That is not heroism, it is betrayal.

In praising Helms, Murdoch's new and improved Journal makes no mention of the fact that Senator Helms was an active life-long racist, a decades-long crusader against civil right for African-Americans, women and Jews; a crusader for a federal government defined by Evangelical Christianity and a champion of gay genocide during the 1980s. Helms fought aid for the poor, the sick and the suffering on a national and global scale and was, I believe, the first Washington voice to link Evangelical Christian demands to foreign aid.  Helms was also the man who  gutted government support for the arts--because too many American artists were offensive to Evangelical "values"--and not just Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano; Helms was also offended by Alexander Calder mobiles.

Sadly, Helm's grossly criminal role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of gay men during the 80s is considered a fringe or extremist point of view by many of my fellow Americans.  That would be true if you accept invisibility and marginalization, if you accept the notion that a homosexual is an outlaw, a less than human, less than American creature that dwells in some unreal netherworld.

But if you dare to imagine that sexual orientation in no ways diminishes the humanity and the human and civil rights of an individual, then you must see Helms and his kind as genocidal monsters of no less "stature" than Nazis and the Khmer Rouge.

Despite desperate cries from the scientific community, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers--millions of American citizens--Helms led the charge against funding for the critical care and research that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives from the AIDS epidemic through the 80s and 90s.  One can easily argue that Helms single-handedly masterminded the deaths of thousands of this nation's most brilliant and creative minds. 

Faced with the facts of a national and international public health crisis, Helms responded:

"This disease is the result of unnatural and disgusting homosexual behavior.  Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”

The AIDS epidemic was in a sense a Reagan Republican policy, very much driven by Helms and his minions.

In his fight against the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill of 1988, Helms told Congress: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."

When Ryan White died in 1990, his mother went to Congress to speak to politicians on behalf of people with AIDS. She spoke to 23 representatives: Helms refused to speak to her even when she was alone with him in an elevator.

Helms continued to fight AIDS funding through the end of the 20th Century.  In one of his last public statements on the subject in 1995, he said:  "Those with AIDS were responsible for the disease, because they had contracted it because of their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.  Homosexuality is degenerate and homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches."

Jesse Helms, according to The Wall Street Journal died on July 4, 2008, an American hero.

Sure, Helms played an important role in the Cold War and may very well have been partly responsible for the fall of Soviet Communism; but if he's an American hero for that, then Hitler should be remembered as a hero for reviving the German economy.

While I can certainly understand the civility of not speaking ill of the dead, dispensing with truth is quite another thing. And while free speech and freedom of the press is vital to the survival of a free society, government-licensed lying and fascist propaganda machines allowed by the FCC and Congress to operate as free press is a very very different matter.

We live in a nation in which the FCC rules that 5-seconds of Janet Jackson's exposed breast on national television is grossly indecent, but Murdoch's lies and manipulations are free speech.

Jesse Helms was an American monster.