Nuns walk out

In Marin County CA, nuns who teach in a Catholic high school walked out, because they were offended that students were handing out flyers about GLSEN's Day of Silence. For those who don't know, this is a nationwide day of protest against bullying, where students who support LGBT rights simply say.... nothing. The nuns, however, feel that it is offensive and anti-Catholic. That is, that standing up in silence somehow is offensive to the nuns.

When some Marin Catholic High students began handing out Day of Silence-related stickers and flyers on campus Friday morning, the five nuns felt “felt compromised, offended and uncomfortable,” Sister Clare Marie, one of the teachers, later wrote in a lengthy e-mail to her students.

She said the sisters “do not support bigotry or any kind of prejudice,” but that they were compelled to act out against an event promoted by a group that “believes actively in promoting homosexuality in all classrooms, K-12.”

Her e-mail also accused the group’s members of speaking out “against Christians who do not share their views” and handing out materials that “say that any church which teaches homosexuality is sinful is an 'oppressor’ and should be opposed.”
....

 Okay, first of all, this is not about recruiting kids to be gay.  They are, or they aren't.  It's standing up to bullying, like the anti-gay flannel shirt bullies in the school in Pennsylvania.

The next day, a group of students walked the halls at McGuffey High raising awareness of what they unimaginatively dubbed “Anti Gay Day.” Some had “anti-gay” scrawled on their hands and a Christian cross etched on their flesh with a black marker to show how committed they were to being Jesus’ truest disciples.

Others let their freaky flannel fly on social media, where they “tagged” known and suspected LGBT students at their school with homophobic insults and Bible verses. A few GSA-affiliated students found pithy, but hateful, flyers saying “ANTI-GAY” stuck to their lockers....

.... What had a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender person ever done to them except get out of the way whenever these boys strutted en masse down the hall?

 But more than that, the sisters personify something identified by Irish equality campaigner and drag queen, Panti Bliss:

So now ... gay people find ourselves in a ludicrous situation where not only are we not allowed to say publicly what we feel oppressed by, we are not even allowed to think it because our definition has been disallowed by our betters.

.... And a jumped-up queer like me should know that the word “homophobia” is no longer available to gay people. Which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia – homophobes are.

You can't be "nice" and deny equality

As we move into the end game of the marriage equality issue, our opponents are trying to figure out how to live with us married LGBT folk.  (Mostly, they are trying not to , on the basis of religious freedom).

Some of them are trying to tell us there's nothing personal, that they may oppose our marriages but hey, they aren't anti-gay bigots.

Here's an oldie but a goodie, on how you can't be "nice" while denying equality. 

First, the author begins with a discussion of a writer named Halee Gray Scott , who wants to separate her anti-marriage equality views from that of a more openly homophobic man, Charles Worley.

Worley wants to deny LGBT people their basic civil rights and legal equality because he hates them. Scott wants to deny LGBT people their basic civil rights and legal equality for other reasons.

See? See how very different they are? Same result. Same vote. Same fundamental discrimination enshrined in law. But Worley is mean. Scott is nice.
...
That sort of assumption — lumping her in with people like Charles Worley just because she wants the same legal outcome as they do — is hurtful. It wounds her feelings. Being compared to people like that is not nice.

And people should be nice to her, just as she’s being so nice to all the LGBT citizens whose legal equality she wants to nicely deny.

“I’m not asking for anyone to approve or accept my views,” Scott writes, magnanimously.

And it’s true. She doesn’t want anyone else to approve or accept her religious perspective. All she asks is that they allow her to write it into law....

Yeah, that's the part they miss.

But the argument is that you can't be NICE and still treat people badly.

Look, here’s the deal: It doesn’t matter if you think you’re a nice person. And it doesn’t matter if your tone, attitude, sentiments and facial expressions are all very sweet, kindly and sympathetic-seeming. If you’re opposing legal equality, then you don’t get to be nice. Opposing legal equality is not nice and it cannot be done nicely.

...

It’d be terrific if Scott’s heartfelt plea for “a hermeneutic of grace” toward Christians who oppose legal equality had also thought to include such a presumption of grace toward the human beings whose legal equality those Christians continue to deny.
....

Scott wants to carve out a space in which she can be unfair, but still kind. Such a space does not exist and cannot exist.

How an Irish drag queen took the homophobes to task (video Sunday)

So, an Irish drag queen called Panti Bliss named several prominent anti-gay activists as homophobes.  They promptly sued the television station which paid up.

And Panti did not take this well. She made a speech.  The speech is long, but worth watching.



  A full transcript is here.  Here's part of what she said:

Three weeks ago I was on the television and I said that I believed that people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less or differently are, in my gay opinion, homophobic. Some people, people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less under the law took great exception at this characterisation and threatened legal action against me and RTÉ. RTÉ, in its wisdom, decided incredibly quickly to hand over a huge sum of money to make it go away. I haven’t been so lucky.

And for the last three weeks I have been lectured by heterosexual people about what homophobia is and who should be allowed identify it. Straight people – ministers, senators, lawyers, journalists – have lined up to tell me what homophobia is and what I am allowed to feel oppressed by. People who have never experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown in prison or herded onto a cattle train, then it is not homophobia.

And that feels oppressive.

So now Irish gay people find ourselves in a ludicrous situation where not only are we not allowed to say publicly what we feel oppressed by, we are not even allowed to think it because our definition has been disallowed by our betters.

And for the last three weeks I have been denounced from the floor of parliament to newspaper columns to the seething morass of internet commentary for “hate speech” because I dared to use the word “homophobia”. And a jumped-up queer like me should know that the word “homophobia” is no longer available to gay people. Which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia – homophobes are.