So a few weeks back I emailed some loony Christian organisation in the US as part of a protest, basically to tell them to stop being such total wankers (they were advocating a boycott of Hallmark because Hallmark, horror of horrors, were selling cards that acknowledged that not everybody is heterosexual, or something).

Their revenge, apparently, was to sign me up for their newsletter. Curses!

(Except not, ‘cause I had the sense to add "nospampleasefundiewankers" to the address, so I can filter it no problem…)

Wow, what an astonishing lot of bollocks this Cardinal Rouco has come out with. Typically for a Catholic spokesman [1], he manages to make a lot of claims (about how wonderful and perfect "God’s law" is) without even a shred of evidence — after all, why would he need evidence? He’s speaking on behalf of God!

I especially love the nonsense he’s spouting about "biological limits". Though he’s far from clear, I think he’s trying to make two points: a) that legal rights for gay people have come about because of "gender ideology" — feminism? — and b) that "gender ideology" is somehow opposed to human biology. I can’t be bothered commenting any further on this bigot.

Rick Santorum has been whinging about the recent California Supreme Court decision to legalise same-sex marriage:

The California judges also ruled, for the first time in American legal history, that sexual orientation is just like race.

The California court just declared that those of us who see marriage as the union of husband and wife are the legal equivalent of racists. And openly racist groups and individuals can be denied government benefits because of their views, including professional licenses (attorney, physicians, psychiatrists, marriage counselors), accredited schools, and tax-exempt status for charities. Have fun with the rest.

So, he’s upset that the Roman Catholic Church (and others, obviously) will be subject to legal sanctions if it continues to spread anti-gay hate speech. How sad for it. If the RC Church was openly racist, it would be subject to these sanctions; as it is openly homophobic it should be too. While we’re at it, why not force it to be an equal-opportunities employer, too — where are all the female priests?

Bigotry is not okay just because your God says it is.

Ellen Degeneres interviews Sen. John McCain; he’s completely unable to give a reason why gay people should be allowed to marry other than "it’s my belief! you can’t argue with my belief! lalalalala!". (To be fair, he does support civil unions and opposes the banning of same-sex partnerships, but that’s sort of the point — he supports everything except calling it marriage, with no readily-apparent reason).

The F-Word talks about why viability shouldn’t matter. It’s argued that forcing a woman to carry an unwanted child to term is exactly like forcing someone to donate an organ against their will — no matter how worthy the recipient, the donor always has the right to refuse to use their body to support another person’s life.

Some whisky company came out with adverts promoting stone-age gender roles, and this was the response, including things like "your mom built fighter jets", "your mom played sports", and "your mom was a pilot".

So, if you hadn’t heard, the Californian Supreme Court recently overturned a law that banned same-sex marriage as unconstitutional, deeming any law that restricted the rights of homosexual couples to marry to be discriminatory. This is frankly excellent news, as apparently it’s inspired several other states to attempt the same thing.

The utterly predictable reaction of the conservative religious lot, of course, was to rant and rave about the need to protect the sanctity of marriage and defend the family and so on (incidentally, one of the bills attempting to make same-sex marriage legal, in Minnesota, was entitled the "Marriage and Family Protection Act" — oh, the irony). A fun quote from some conservative nutjob: "No matter how you stretch California’s Constitution, you cannot find anywhere in its text, its history or tradition that now, after so many years, it magically protects what most societies condemn," says Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. Well, sorry, but a) the fact that most societies condemn it doesn’t make it wrong, and b) the fact that it hasn’t been interpreted specifically as protecting gay people in the past doesn’t mean that it doesn’t — or do you expect it to explicitly list every single group who’re entitled to equal rights? (I’d suggest that California’s constitution may be old enough not to explicitly list women and black people as deserving of rights, and ask if that means they should be considered inferior, but I’m worried he’d say yes.)

Then it hit me. Racist groups like the BNP say that it’s not that they hate people who aren’t white — it’s just that they want to help white people, to defend them in the face of the rampaging hordes of illegal immigrants (and legal ones, and people whose grandparents moved to England in the Fifties, and so on). Homophobic groups like the Catholic Church [1] say that it’s not that they hate gay people, it’s just that they want to protect straight people’s right to get married, and have all sorts of legal and financial benefits (if I remember correctly, married couples in the US get something like 1,000 different benefits that unmarried couples aren’t entitled to).

Bigotry is all the same, no matter who it’s directed at. Hopefully, one day people will learn to keep their neuroses to themselves, and allow the rest of us to live our lives without paying attention to what their imaginary friend tells them.

This blog post on Pandagon quotes some random Christian (a lawyer, of all things; I’d assumed Christianity and the law profession were as fundamentally opposed as Christianity and Satanism) thusly:

A 24-page pro-homosexual booklet is set to be distributed to all 16,000 school districts in the nation. The booklet produced by the National Education Association and the American Psychological Association falsely tells students that homosexuality is a "normal expression of human sexuality."

It falsely tells them, does it? Ignoring the split infinitive, who the bloody hell is Richard Thompson, that he knows more about what is and isn’t psychologically normal than a large group of psychologists? Where is his evidence that homosexuality is not a normal psychological state? If all the evidence that hundreds of psychologists can come up with shows that homosexuality is a normal expression of human sexuality, then I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to do better than "But my God says it’s not!".

Frickin’ nutjobs…

Al Gore describes why he’s in favour of gay marriage, and his explanation pretty much demonstrates the double standards of conservatives—they’re opposed (understandably, I suppose) to any kind of promiscuity, and in favour of marriage and commitment and "family values" and so on, but also opposed to allowing a sizable minority of the population to marry; that’s obviously not going to promote promiscuity, but neither is it doing anything to help their other goals.

"Shouldn’t we be promoting the kind of faithfulness and loyalty to one partner regardless of sexual orientation? Because if we don’t do that, then to that extent you are promoting promiscuity and promoting all the problems that can result from promiscuity."

On a similar note: an article on why "family values" doesn’t necessarily mean heterosexuality.

I meant to post this last night, but forgot. It’s a letter written a few years ago by Thomas Bushnell, explaining why homophobia isn’t like racism.

It’s on his LiveJournal, here.

(Actually, read more of his blog, there’s quite a bit of good philosophical stuff there.)