Because nothing says "Christian love" like wishing a child's parents dead

Honestly, can they sink any lower in inhumanity?  From Think Progress: 

In a new blog post by IFI’s Laurie Higgins this week, the group takes on a new target: the children of same-sex couples, who Higgins expects would find “joy” in imagining their parents dead. 

....Her primary concern is that children should not ever see books about same-sex families, deeming any portrayal of a same-sex couple as  “homoeroticism” and “sexual perversion.” Instead, she suggests that librarians consider adding the following kinds of books (granting the premise that such books even exist):....

• Young adult (YA) novels about teens who feel sadness and resentment about being intentionally deprived of a mother or father and who seek to find their missing biological parents..... 

• Picture books that show the joy a little birdie experiences when after the West Nile virus deaths of her two daddies, she’s finally adopted by a daddy and mommy.

Undercover at an anti-gay conference

Gay journalist Carlos Maza went undercover as a delegate to the ITAF conference at anti-gay Skyline Church in San Diego, where he listened to Jennifer Roback Morse, Jim Garlow, and Robert Gagnon attack gay people with lies and demonization.  (This was the event that culminated in the "conversation about marriage" that included Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, which you can read about here.)

Despite claims that the conference wouldn't be about "gayness", Maza found otherwise.  It wasn't marriage that was under attack.  It was LGBT people--like him.

Despite the promise to focus on "marriage, not gayness," ITAF had been a veritable crash course in demonizing LGBT people. 

That's because, for NOM, there really isn't much distance between being "anti-gay marriage" and being "anti-gay" - the latter motivates the former. "Raising the negative on homosexuality," as one NOM memo put it, is a central part of the organization's effort to defeat same-sex marriage. Even Morse recently confessed that NOM's decision to publically attack gay marriage instead of gay people is purely "strategic." 

ITAF showcased the kind of anti-gay animus that activists have for years accused NOM of harboring behind closed doors.

I can't imagine being a gay person enduring that.  But as well as the expected hate speech, Maza found surprising evidence for common ground.

Against all odds, I caught myself agreeing with a lot of what she was saying. Morse clearly wasn't speaking with the LGBT community in mind, but her comments aligned with my own feelings about gay dating, relationships, and intimacy. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, coming to terms with the possibility that Morse - who had spent the last several years of her life fighting tooth and nail against the acceptance of same-sex relationships - might actually have some useful advice to offer to gay and lesbian couples.

I've argued before that there is common ground in pro-family politics on both sides of this divide--that gay couples actively seek the same commitment as straight, and that we all value healthy and stable families.  I said the same thing when David Blankenhorn shifted sides.   But the anti-gay forces won't admit any commonality.  The argument increasingly has nothing to do with marriage, and everything to do with attacking us simply as gay.  And until they stop dehumanizing us, common ground won't be possible.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

To new couples and to old ones, to those married, waiting to marry, wanting to marry, or just starting to think about it, for all those who know that the best relationships are worth all the effort, that love does indeed conquer all,  and most especially to my beloved wife whose presence blesses me every day,

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

"Children deserve a mother and a father"

I'm getting so tired of that meme, which is a standard now in the anti-equality arsenal. We saw it again in Abp Timothy Dolan's attack on equality legislation in New York. But doesn't make any sense. Amy Davidson, in the New Yorker, lays out why (spaces added for ease of reading):

That is, speaking very charitably, a non-sequitur. There are all sorts of reasons children are raised in families that don’t include “a mom and a dad”; Dolan must know that. Same-sex marriage isn’t one of them. 

Maybe Dolan believes that divorce, in any circumstance, violates a child’s rights; how about children adopted by gay parents—does he believe that their rights would be protected by lingering in foster care, bounced from non-home to non-home? 

Would he prefer that those born to gay or lesbian parents had never existed? If so, that is a pretty tangled position for a Catholic (or even for a writer of North Korean communiqués). 

Does he think that children should be taken away from gay parents (or single widowed parents, for that matter) who have loved them all their lives to be given to any heterosexual, or even just heterogeneous, couple? 

And even if he agrees with all of that, what on earth does it have to do with same-sex marriage? Allowing two people who love each other to marry will not stop people who don’t love each other from separating, or from getting married in the first place. Neither marriage nor love is a scarce resource. And yet Dolan talks as though there were thieves in his house.

If one’s only interest in all this is the rights of children, then gay marriage is really an imperative. (There are other factors, too, of course, that don’t depend on children: respect, fairness, kindness.) Marriage can protect children—legally, financially, socially—and same-sex marriage will give more parents more ways to protect more children. Making that possible is surely the right thing to do.

Yes, the FRC is a hate group

Here's a video compilation of the Family Research Council spewing the hate that got them listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It's as well to remember what they really think of us.

H/T AmericaBlog Gay

Please explain something to me.

The argument used by the anti-marriage equality side is that marriage is about procreation, and since gays can't procreate by hot man-on-woman sex, they can't marry. (Those straight couples who don't/won't/can't procreate apparently don't count.)

How does preventing gays from marrying have any effect on marital procreation?

Put in other words, how come if gays can marry, straight people apparently will stop having babies?

Thank you.

The convenient scapegoat: gays

WHat do social conservatives want? David Boaz comments about the language linking "family values" to economic wellbeing:

When Huckabee says that “a breakdown of the basic family structure” is causing poverty — and thus a demand for higher government spending — he knows that he’s really talking about unwed motherhood, divorce, children growing up without fathers, and the resulting high rates of welfare usage and crime. ...

But take a look at the key issues of the chief social-conservative group, the Family Research Council — 7 papers on abortion and stem cells, 5 on gays and gay marriage, 1 on divorce. ...

Why all the focus on issues that would do nothing to solve the problems of “breakdown of the basic family structure” and “the high cost of a dysfunctional society”? Well, solving the problems of divorce and unwed motherhood is hard. And lots of Republican and conservative voters have been divorced. A constitutional amendment to ban divorce wouldn’t go over very well with even the social-conservative constituency. Far better to pick on a small group, a group not perceived to be part of the Republican constituency, and blame them for social breakdown and its associated costs.
But you won’t find your keys on Main Street if you dropped them on Green Street, and you won’t reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and not letting them adopt orphans.