The Caucasian Race allowed Jodie Brunstetter to happen.

The latest argument against marriage equality: “Because white people need to breed more.”

Pam’s House Blend points us to Yes Weekly, which shows us…this:

MICHAEL:

“I had my back to her like this. She said, ‘The reason my husband my husband wrote Amendment 1 was because the Caucasian race is diminishing and we need to uh, reproduce.”

UNIDENTIFIED POLL WORKER: “(Mrs. Brunsetter said) … the Caucasian race is diminishing. ?The reason that’s a problem is that it was white people that founded this country.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Brunstetter is all like, “Sure, I said that, but if I said ‘Caucasian,’ it wasn’t about race! Why won’t you people leave me alone, with your gotcha questions and your ‘facts’!”

This may seem incoherent, as reading this exchange has cost me a couple dozen IQ points.

So…like…North Carolina needs a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality, because by barring same-sex couples from marriage, they’ll be able to force white people to have more kids, relative to people of color?

But…what? On what planet does that even begin to make sense?

Pastor Sean Harris is a horrible person who hates humanity.

Sometimes, they just let it all out for everyone to see:

Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? “You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.”

The rules for girls are a bit more flexible, and yet somehow, even more fucked up:

And when your daughter starts acting too butch you reign her in. And you say, “Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.”

How do I put this?

This man hates people. He hates boys, he hates girls, he hates LGBTs, he hates straight people who don’t perfectly tow the gender line.

How do I come to that conclusion?

Because Pastor Harris’s diatribe is not affecting only gay people, or only children who belong to sexual minorities. If it did affect only those groups of people, that shouldn’t make it more acceptable, but to the extent that his congregants follow his advice, he is not encouraging abuse of JUST those kids who are growing up gay. He is encouraging abuse of ALL children. He is telling parents to berate, control and assault their children as soon as they deviate from gender norms, and you know what? We all do that. We all fail to meet our gender’s standards in some ways, because gender norms are socially constructed, subject to change, and arbitrary. All children will here and there do something that doesn’t exactly follow the rules of the gender marked on their birth certificate.

And here’s Pastor Sean Harris, instructing the parents in his congregation to beat their kids into behaving like socially approved, heterosexist boys and girls. He hates gay and lesbian children, he hates straight children, and he hates the adults they will grow up to be. Shame on him for parading his hatred from his pulpit, and shame on all those people who sit in those pews, laugh and nod along with his sermons, and pay his salary. They are all part of the problem.

(And it needs to be said: these same people almost inevitably believe that gay and lesbian couples are unfit to raise children. The irony is terrifying. Kill it, Mommies! Kill it with fire!)

American Nuns > Vatican

I think it’s time for a new schism.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization which involves 80% of U.S. Catholic sisters, is having the hammer brought down on it by the Vatican for not being a pack of bigoted assholes. I wish that were an exaggeration:

The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

Yeah, I’ll bet they say things like, “A mother of four should not be left to die of pregnancy-related causes.”

The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.

Yep. Women who support universal health care need to STFU, while old guys in fancy robes, who would rather let Americans die by the millions of preventable causes than tolerate birth control coverage, are the “authentic teachers of faith and morals.”

“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Oh, yes. Oh fucking yes. The nuns care too much about alleviating poverty, and not enough about demonizing gays or attacking women who think they get to control their reproduction.

Oddly enough, I don’t even recall Jesus saying anything about homosexuality or abortion. This is the guy who hung out with a bunch of single men and a woman of ill-repute. He did, however, have some strong opinions about how we treat the poor.

Sisters, you all are so much cooler than your church. Break away from those ridiculous bigots. Start your own religion: the Church of Actually Giving a Shit About Humanity. All the Catholics who are horrified at the Church for their homophobia, misogyny and support of child-raping priests but who keep making noises about “social justice” and “ritual” will have a better place to give their money and time. The ones who want their religion to be more focused on persecuting gays, letting pregnant women die, and preaching against using condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, can fend for themselves.

You’re better than they are, and they’re not even trying to hide how threatened they are by that. Let those assholes rot.

NOM are a pack of slimy mofos, but that’s hardly news.

I am still trying to write an impressive amount of text into Fait Accompli, but I’d just like to point your attention to this find by Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters. The hilariously named NOM, which uses “marriage” as a euphemism for homophobia, has chosen a deliberate strategy of divide and conquer. Specifically, they’ve chosen to turn African-Americans against gays.

The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two key democratic constituencies. We aim to find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage; to develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; and to provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots. No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of the party.

Their goal is to portray the “gay marriage base” as racists, to frame opposition to marriage equality as a “black issue,” and frighten Democratic politicians away from supporting equality. This will do nothing good for race relations, but as far as NOM is concerned, whatevs. It will also make life increasingly, needlessly difficult for African-American LGBTs, but NOM cares even less for them.

No, it doesn’t end there. I just had to follow the link to the HRC document, which gives us this precious nugget:

“The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so in the future, both because of demographic growth and inherent uncertainty: Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity – a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.”

“Interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for [institutionalized bigotry] a key badge of Latino identity”?

We wouldn’t want America’s fastest-growing ethnic group to get too comfy with an increasingly non-homophobic dominant culture, would we?

There are times when I am embarrassed to be white. This is one of those times. NOM, you suck. You suck so incredibly hard. You are all a disgusting waste of food, housing and oxygen. Short pier. Long walk. Go. Now.

Won’t someone please think of the children who don’t exist!

By gum, Pastor Aaron Fruh is mad as heck and he’s not going to take it anymore! He’s not bigoted at all, it’s the gays who are prejudiced and hateful by demanding their right to marry their partners. The word salad is so special that I think it warrants a crazy-looking graphic. The emphasis is mine, but this is a direct quote…

Anoka-Hennepin suit settled on the side of sanity and compassion.

When “neutrality” means looking the other way while some teenagers torment and terrorize others to the point of suicide, neutrality doesn’t lead to anything good:

At first, the school board stood by a curriculum policy passed in 2009, which on paper instructed teachers to “remain neutral” about sexual orientation and in practice operated as a gag order. Teachers were required to refrain from saying that being gay is not a choice, even if they were quoting the position of the American Psychological Association. When history teachers included gay rights in a unit about how the strategies of the black civil rights groups influenced subsequent movements, the district deleted the reference. For a staff diversity training session, the district rejected a book called How Homophobia Hurts Children   because it did not “include an opposing viewpoint.” The schools also scrubbed LBGT support services, like a gay and lesbian helpline, from the list of health resources given to students. And a conservative Christian parents’ group called the Parents Action League pushed for teaching gay students about “reparative therapy”—how to root out their homosexuality—by promoting groups that treat it as a sin against the will of God. In 2010 the head of the group told the Minnesota Independent that LGBT students had killed themselves not because of bullying, but because of “homosexual indoctrination” and their own “unhealthy lifestyle.” (The statewide sponsor of the Parents Action League is a group called the Minnesota Family Council; last spring, Bachmannn and Newt Gingrich were the headline speakers for an MFC fundraiser.)

In theory, I’m sure the district’s “remain neutral” policy was about not taking a side, simply staying out of the debate over the dignity and rights of sexual minorities, but no matter how you spin it, when students have to go to school in this kind of environment, refusing to take a side is effectively leaving bullied students to suffer. It is morally bankrupt for a school district to tell its teachers to keep their mouths shut about the fact that people of different sexual orientations do exist and that they’re up against a lot of violence and hate because of their minority status, when they have many students keeping that violence and hate very much alive in the schools’ hallways.

So, let’s call a spade a spade: teachers were instructed to put arbitrary, artificial limits on their teaching of psychology and history. IOW, teachers were asked not to teach too much in certain subjects, lest their students be too educated about sociological issues surrounding certain people who were already their classmates. The Parents Action League are instructors and enablers of bullies. Ta-Nehisi Coates points out that homophobic teenagers don’t get that way all by themselves:

I’ve argued in this space before that homophobic kids do not spring from the wretched earth, but are often stewarded by homophobic adults–the kind of adults who abolish LBGT support services, promote reparative “therapy,” and deem homosexuality a sin against God.

Parents Action League, under the guidance of Minnesota Family Council, are undoubtedly the parents of many of the current worst perpetrators of homophobic bullying in Anoka-Hennepin schools. They are asking for their children to have carte blanche to assault and abuse their peers who do not march in perfect lockstep with gender norms. PAL are themselves current perpetrators of bullying by telling the Minnesota Independent that homosexual indoctrination and gays’ unhealthy lifestyle, rather than bullying, are what lead to suicide. Again from TNC:

What I like about the settlement in Minnesota is that it doesn’t simply pass the buck by calling on kids to dime out each other. It’s easy to pass this off simply as kids being cruel. Surely kids often are cruel and need instruction on compassion. But beating and pissing on people for being gay is about a kind of cruelty which is regularly endorsed in the polite corridors of the country.

This is not simply a matter of kids being kids. When you take hundreds of children and stuff them all into the same building for six hours a day, a certain amount of cruelty is inevitable, but the impulse to beat queer or non-gender-conforming people to the ground doesn’t occur without some adult input. Adults are responsible for putting all those teenagers, some of whom are more bigoted and/or aggressive than others, and some of whom are more vulnerable to abuse than others, into the same building for several hours a day, adults are responsible for teaching some youngsters that queer or non-gender-conforming people are abnormal and need to be attacked, and adults are responsible for what happens to those youngsters at other teenagers’ hands when they are forced into a common environment. I would blame parents more than teachers for students’ homophobic bullying, but since those parents are clearly uninterested in teaching their children any differently, it will have to fall to the school system to protect their students from others.

D.C. Archdiocese Competes in the Euphemism Olympics

Barbara Johnson is now endeavoring to have Father Marcel Guarnizo removed from his post at St. John Neumann Catholic church. She has good reason: at her mother’s funeral, Fr. Guarnizo denied her Communion because she is a lesbian, and walked out of the funeral while Johnson was delivering a eulogy. The family were left on their own for the burial.

Let’s go over that one more time:

1. Father Guarnizo denied Communion to the deceased woman’s daughter. Because she is a lesbian. He told her in so many words, right up at the altar with everyone watching.

“He put his hand over the body of Christ and looked at me and said, ‘I can’t give you Communion because you live with a woman, and in the eyes of the church, that is a sin,’ ” she recalled Tuesday.

2. Father Guarnizo abandoned the funeral midway through.

Family members said the priest left the altar while Johnson, 51, was delivering a eulogy and did not attend the burial or find another priest to be there.

This is, to say the very least, profoundly unprofessional behavior for a priest giving a funeral Mass. And how is the Archdiocese handling the matter? Actually not badly, but their language is just fascinating:

Late Tuesday, Johnson received a letter of apology from the Rev. Barry Knestout, one of the archdiocese’s highest-ranking administrators, who said the lack of “kindness” she and her family received “is a cause of great concern and personal regret to me.”

“I am sorry that what should have been a celebration of your mother’s life, in light of her faith in Jesus Christ, was overshadowed by a lack of pastoral sensitivity,” Knestout wrote. “I hope that healing and reconciliation with the Church might be possible for you and any others who were affected by this experience. In the meantime, I will offer Mass for the happy repose of your mother’s soul. May God bring you and your family comfort in your grief and hope in the Resurrection.”

Lack of “kindness”? Cause of “personal regret” to the administrator? Lack of “pastoral sensitivity”?

Archdiocese officials at first issued a short statement saying that the priest’s actions were against “policy” and that they would look into it as a personnel issue.

If Rev. Knestout is offering a redo of the funeral Mass for Barbara Johnson’s mother, that’s a good thing, but this is not merely about a shortage of “kindness” or “sensitivity.” Father Guarnizo tossed a monkey wrench into Mrs. Johnson’s funeral Mass and drove a wrecking ball into an already emotionally raw day for her family. That’s not just a question of “policy.” He was charged with a job and he did something very bad with it. If the D.C. Archdiocese wants to assure its parishioners that this will not be allowed to happen again, it’s quite simple: put Guarnizo out of a job. Tossing a bunch of watery corporate-speak at the Johnsons isn’t fooling anyone.

 

No, no, St. Petersburg, this is not how you do it.

Oh, what is that I don’t even.

Look, St. Petersburg, if you want to be a place where gay people don’t feel safe enough to stick around, this is a really sub-par effort. Look to Uganda for an example. That’s how it’s done.

If you want to protect children from molestation, however, leaving them to grow up in orphanages is probably not making them any safer. Just a thought.

 

Bed-Crapping: Not just for individual authors!

Just when I thought my week was nothing but getting a stitch in my side from the treadmill of catching up with the work I missed last week, here comes Romance Writers Ink with their More Than Magic contest, in which they fabulously and hilariously show themselves as a pack of oblivious bigots. Romance Writers Ink is the Tulsa, OK chapter of Romance Writers of America, which is kind of a big deal in the publishing industry. According to the Guardian, RWI amended the rules of their More Than Magic contest this year to say:

– Note: MTM will no longer accept same-sex entries in any category.

Now, those who don’t read romance novels, don’t hang out with a lot of people who read romance novels, and don’t keep up with publishing industry discussion may now be thinking, “Yeah, that’s unfortunate, but if it’s what their readers want…” No. This is not about responding to reader preferences. There is a major market for same-sex romance fiction. There are lots of people who are totally happy to pay money for novels about two men or two women falling in love and pleasuring each other. If RWI is trying to set their contest rules in a way that pleases everyone, this is a very strange way to go about it.

Why did they make this change? Kari Gregg got in touch with RWI, and this is what happened:

So…I emailed the contest organizer to ask why this change was enacted. The contest organizer replied that RWI chapter members were “uncomfortable” with accepting same-sex contest entries. “Same-sex was just too much.”

Yeah, you read that right.

Romance is defined by RWA as a love relationship between two individuals, but RWI has unilaterally redefined romance as existing between one man and one woman for MTM.

And at RWA headquarters, no one seems to be willing to do anything about that. Chapters, apparently, are allowed to run their contest as they see fit, limiting contest entries by category and genre as appropriate. The only problem with this response is that LGBT is not considered a category or genre by RWA. If you look at the categories and genres for which RWA’s national awards are separated into for Golden Heart and Rita contests (2011 winners list), you will not find a LGBT category. Because there isn’t one. LGBT stories are entered into GH/Rita in the Paranormal category. Or Historical. Or Romantic Suspense. Whatever category fits the story without regard to the gender or sexual orientation of the protagonists.

 
Again: all it takes is a little browsing around the Romance section of Amazon or Barnes & Noble to see how odd that “just too much” part is. This is not a genre that’s known for tiptoeing around easily offended sensibilities. Courtney Milan gives it to RWI with both barrels:

Apparently, it’s possible for the MTM contest to get entrants’ books in the hands of diverse judges from multiple RWA chapters who are comfortable with all types of romances and heat levels. You can write M/F erotica. You can write M/M/F. You can write about aliens from another planet who have tentacles, or barbed sexual organs. You can write degrading rapes. None of those things are barred from entry in the More than Magic contest, and if you write them, they’ll try to find judges who are predisposed to like your books.

But they won’t do that if you write same sex romance–even if it’s a sweet romance with no sexual contact whatsoever. No–when it comes to same sex romance, the fact that they might be able to identify judges in their chapter or outside of it who would be willing to read same sex entries and judge them fairly somehow becomes irrelevant. In that instance, the majority gets to say that those entries don’t belong.

 
Yes; barbed sexual organs. She did not just make that up. Meanwhile, RWI is uncomfortable with stories about two dudes or two gals getting together. Milan is also unsatisfied with RWA.

Others have taken a variety of tactics. They’ve written to RWA (who apparently sanctioned this nonsense). They’ve written to the contest directly. I suspect that writing to RWA and the contest will result in much handwringing–there’s nothing in the P&PM or the Bylaws that prevent this, not without stretching overly much. There’s nothing in the P&PM that prevents a chapter from barring interracial romance, either. What should prevent such things from happening–is good sense and common human decency.

While we can put pressure on RWA to create and maintain more egalitarian guidelines, RWA as an organization moves at a snail’s pace.

Here’s the thing: some people like to buy and read same-sex romance. Some people like to buy and read het romance but are totally uninterested in same-sex fiction. Might there be some romance readers who are so homophobic that they’ll ignore the contest’s output if same-sex entries are included? Possibly, but if so, they’ve been ignoring the contest for years already; this is a new development. However, there are a lot more readers who either do like same-sex fiction, or maybe are indifferent to the fiction itself but don’t take kindly to needless exclusion, and who are getting seriously pissed off about this, and RWI should have seen that coming. I find it really funny that they apparently didn’t.

It doesn’t end there, though.

In response to the outrage, RWI went ahead and cancelled the contest rather than change the rules back to their previous, non-homophobic stance.

The Tulsa organisation has now cancelled the competition, saying in a statement on its website that “we have heard and understood the issues raised, and will take those concerns into consideration should the chapter elect to hold contests in the future”.

“Please note: our contest coordinator, Jackie, is a chapter member who graciously volunteered to collect entries and sort by category. It is unfortunate that she has become the object of personal ridicule and abuse,” added RWI. “We recognise the decision to disallow same-sex entries is highly charged. We also opted not to accept YA entries. We do not condone discrimination against individuals of any sort.”

“We do not condone discrimination against individuals of any sort” roughly translates as “I CAN’T STOP MY HANDS FROM HITTING THIS KEYBOARD.”

And then they expect us to believe that they’re not bigoted against gays and lesbians, no, not at all, because they also disallow YA entries.

Hmm.

No.

There are different arguments to be made for refusing Young Adult fiction in a romance contest. One is quantity control: YA is very popular lately and everyone and their sister is joining in the fun, so keeping the contest limited to adult levels is a way to keep the number of entries at a manageable level. Another is that, since Young Adult really means high school kids, and the novels have to be written accordingly, it may be very tricky to judge romance novels intended for that audience. Excluding YA from the contest may be problematic, but it’s a very different type of exclusion than barring same-sex entries. Wrong answer, RWI.

The butthurt about People Being Mean on the Internet is just the icing on the cake. If Jackie didn’t have any say in setting the contest rules, then it is indeed unfortunate if she bore the brunt of the anger directed at RWI. That being the case, she should blame RWI for making the rules that got them on the shit list. If she was aware of how they had changed their rules before she agreed to coordinate the contest, then she probably should have thought about that before she painted the target sign on her back. The news that her feelings have been hurt, even if she’s not in a position of authority in this contest, isn’t going to quell anyone’s anger over this.

The Gays Are Out to Destroy the Institution of Family

And this is what it looks like when they succeed!

If same-sex marriage means an increasing number of children will have grandfathers like that one, then this country is just gonna get more fabulous by the day!