Thursday, August 30, 2007
Hypocritical, Puritanical Noise. Media have been abuzz the past couple of days about — heaven forfend! — sex. It seems a U.S. Senator from Idaho was arrested in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport for soliciting sex in a men's room. Except of course he didn't actually DO anything. He didn't touch anybody, didn't expose himself, didn't say a word to ask for sex. In short, he did NOT commit anything that the law should regard as a crime, not ANYTHING.
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He was entrapped by antihomosexual police in a supposedly liberal state. That is both unexpected and outrageous. If the police in the Minneapolis area have so little to do that they have to induce gay men into approaching vice officers, then the Minneapolis police force should be chopped drastically in size and budget, so Minnesotans — including gay Minnesotans — can save some money on their tax bill. Are all parts of the Twin Cities crime-free? Or are police too cowardly to face off against real criminals, preferring to work the men's room while armed thugs victimize Minnesotans elsewhere, free of worry that they might be caught by cops who are busy harassing homosexuals in safe areas?
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The evil cops working to trap gay men should be transferred to the worst neighborhoods of America's cities, to face down the Bloods and Crips, and protect college kids from being murdered in cold blood in schoolyards. Send them to Newark, L.A., or the South Bronx. Let them earn their pay and actually protect somebody.
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Hoping to avoid public exposure, Senator Larry Craig (Hm, "L. Craig". Now, where have I heard that?) pled guilty to disorderly conduct and paid a fine of several hundred dollars. He also got a year's unsupervised probation. For tapping his foot in a men's room stall. Has this society lost its mind?
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We have murders all over this country that the police can't solve, and we're misdirecting police resources to arresting men for tapping their foot in a men's room. Senator Craig should be fiting such nonsense, not paying extortion to the state. But it's worse than extortion by criminals. The typical blackmailer doesn't take the money and then tell the secrets anyway.
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The self-righteous claptrap — an appropriate word, considering how much venereal disease there is in this Nation of Whores — about how 'disgusting' it is of some gay men to seek sex in public places, is nothing but bullsh*t. Straight people, various media commentators declaim virtuously, don't cruise lavatories for sex. Oh? And why might that be? Because men's rooms and women's rooms are separated, that's why. And why, exactly, is that? Because if both sexes shared the same lavatories, nobody offended by sex could use them much of the day and nite because straight people would be screwing around in them at all hours, that's why. Late-nite cable TV runs a commercial for a phone-sex line in which a man and woman come out of a stall in a public restroom. But that's just fantasy, right? And, of course, 'normal', so not disgusting. Are we to believe that heterosexual sex in public restrooms never really happens? Then how is it we hear stories about it? Because it does happen. And heterosexual public sex doesn't happen just in lavatories when no one's around. Straights have sex everywhere!
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The delicate, antisexual sensibilities we hear all over the media would be persuasive in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but not in the United Whores of America. In the typical year, 1.5 million babies are born out of wedlock (36% of all births in the United States; 64% for black women). 19 million cases of venereal disease (or "STD's", to use this week's fad term) are recorded each year. Millions of (heterosexual) marriages have been destroyed by infidelity, including on the part of at least one leading contender for the Republican Party's nomination for President. There's an awful lot of illicit sex going on among straight people in this country, and everybody knows it.
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So why are so many people in media feigning shock over sex among gay men in supposedly 'public' places (tho plainly not in public view)? Straight people are having sex all over the place, in movie theaters, airliners (the "Mile High Club" we hear so much about), parks, parking lots, "lover's lanes" — hell, in the car at the curb outside their girlfriend's house. Under bleachers, behind garages, in alleys, in bars and dance clubs, in sex clubs, in strip clubs. Babysitters and their boyfriends screw on the couch while the kids sleep a few yards away. What about all those lapdances in "gentlemen's clubs"? Porno videos offered by 'legitimate' video rental companies? Porn on cable TV that is shown not just in one's bedroom but even in public places? Straight porno theaters and peep shows? Legal prostitution in Nevada? Brothels in other places that the police take payoffs to let operate unfettered? "Escort" services? Hardcore and softcore heterosexual porn magazines available on publicly viewable racks at newsstands? Talk Sex with Sue Johanson on Oxygen TV? The repellant dwarf Ruth Westheimer? As long ago as 1992-96, Bob Berkowitz had a sex-talk show on CNBC. Where there's talk, there's action. (More talk than action, perhaps, but still some action.) TV takes ads for phone sex. And the Internet is filled with sexchat. What about that ad campaign from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"? I don't think those ads are talking about sightseeing trips to Hoover Dam. And do we really need to point out that the Internet is filled with fotografic and video porn?
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On the Tonight Show this evening, a young man told of staying at his girlfriend's house overnite. The girl's parents put him and their dauter in separate rooms. After they had all gone to bed, however, he sneaked into his girlfriend's room. They thought they had got away with it until the following morning when the family dog sauntered into the kitchen during breakfast, with a used condom in his mouth. What a deliteful, charming story about today's upstanding youth. (That particular youth was Canadian (as is Talk Sex hostess Sue Johanson), but American kids sneak around in their parents' house too, to screw around very quietly while their parents sleep in the next room.) So why the pretense that gay men's looking for sex wherever they might find it is somehow outrageous, but heterosexual society's obsession with sex is completely unobjectionable?
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Straight society needs to admit that it is saturated in sex. Four-year-old girls dress up like sluts in kiddie beauty pageants and 12-year-olds gyrate suggestively in talent contests, their face painted like that of an aging $5 hooker.
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John McCain, the Superloon among the announced Republican candidates for President, has disgraced himself yet again in urging Senator Craig to resign from what is called "the world's greatest deliberative body" because he tapped his shoe on a men's room floor! The 'crime' of which McCain complained was a misdemeanor, about as significant, legally, as a speeding ticket. I've said it before and will probably have to say it again: John McCain is out of his mind. I don't know if he always was, or if the North Vietnamese destroyed his mind in the Hanoi Hilton. At end, it doesn't matter. He's nuts.
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Mormon candidate for President, Mitt Romney, member of a cult that has ruined myriad lives with its lunacy, forced Craig out of his campaign committee, apparently fearful of being 'tainted' by association with homos. Romney is more than a bit too goodlooking to be seen as comfortable with "faggots". I wonder about him. That's called "gaydar", and mine pings when I watch Romney.
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I am indignant and contemptuous of all this ridiculous posturing by imitation-righteous straight people that gay men are somehow depraved for looking for sex in public restrooms. Straight society makes it impossible for gay men to meet one another in the wholesome places straight people go to "hook up". We can't look openly at each other at a church social, PTA meeting, supermarket, laundromat, or (straight) bar, and strike up a relaxed conversation, to find out if we have enuf in common to investigate forming a relationship or even just take a quick roll in the hay. No, we're forced into the shadows, and then bitched at for living in the shadows!
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By contrast, this supposedly antisexual society pushes boys and girls at each other from a very early age. It not only countenances sexual activity that it supposedly disapproves of, but actually facilitates it. Prom nite is almost a required virginity-ender, and despite the best efforts of modern-day Puritans to promote abstinence, the age at which Americans typically lose their virginity is 17, and only 4% of Americans remain virgins their entire life. Presumably many of those people have serious physical handicaps or are in religious orders that forbid sexual activity (not that that stops everyone in such orders).
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Last nite, on MSNBC Live With Dan Abrams, the host and fellow rightwingers Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson all played very innocent, as tho a sexual thought never entered any of their heads. Carlson bragged about having fought back against a man who "bothered" him in Washington. The poor baby was so scared he had to run for help to a friend, then bring the friend back, throw the offender against a wall, and have him arrested. For what? Today he clarified why he reacted so violently, while denying the violence he had admitted the nite before:
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Let me point out to these innocent babes in the sexual woods that WOMEN are harassed by heterosexual men all the time, everywhere they go. They are "hit upon" by men they have no interest in. They are whistled at and hooted at by men on the street as they simply go about their business. In bars, aggressive men crowd them, brush against them, say suggestive things to them, offer to buy them drinks (which would, the men think, indebt the woman to the man who treated them), put their hands on them, in innocent places and not-so-innocent places. If every heterosexual man who crossed the line with a woman were thrown up against a wall and arrested, our entire national budget would be spent on jails and prisons.
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So cut the crap. The little Mother Tucker was subjected to some of what women go thru every day, and it hurt his little feelings! Poor thing. That's the real issue here: heterosexual men's feeling threatened by being treated, to their mind, like women. That threatens their manhood. It shouldn't. A gay man's "hitting on them" proves not their lack of manhood but their masculine appeal, because gay men want men, not women. It is a compliment to his manhood that a gay man might be drawn to a (straight) man.
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Straight men need to get a life — and stick to it. That's the real problem, and the real reason there are police actions against homosexuality, even after the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws on the basis that they violate privacy rights. So cops go out of their way to entrap gay men into public "lewd conduct".
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Straight men are terrified of their own homosexual thoughts and desires. They are afraid that if society doesn't keep them on the straight and narrow, they are going to find themselves in the arms (and other parts) of a man, because they know that they have all had thoughts about guys and cannot find men's bodies disgusting because they would have to find themselves disgusting. They may never have been tempted, yet, but, they think, that might just be because they haven't met the right man. Yet. Maybe there is a man out there, somewhere, with piercing blue eyes or a smile that lites up the room who would make their heart pound and other parts push them to contact.
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I'm the last person in the world to say it couldn't happen. But straight men are much more commonly tempted to heterosexual sex. That does not argue for them outlawing heterosexual sex or forbidding all situations in which temptation might arise. Where is the insistence that Louisiana Senator Vitter, who cheated on his wife with (female) prostitutes, resign? Nowhere, that's where.
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Senator Craig's real offense, and the reason people who should be sympathetic to a man who has sexual desires for men that cause him anguish, are instead indignant and out to "get him", is hypocrisy. He has made all kinds of antihomosexual noise, working to prevent gay marriage and otherwise promote antigay bigotry. We react to such behavior on the part of a man with overpowering sexual desire for men as we would to a "high yellow" 'black' man passing as white and becoming Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
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The hypocrisy of straight society about opposing gay marriage allegedly out of concern over the sanctity of (heterosexual) marriage is detestable. The bulk of states in recent decades made marriage so trifling and the legal causes for divorce so trivial that they catastrophically weakened the institution long before gay men pressed for the extension of marriage to gay couples. Nevada, which could be regarded as Satan's home state, dares to pretend to be concerned about the sanctity of marriage, and inserted a provision into its constitution to define marriage as a legal union of one man and one woman. So all those legal prostitutes in Nevada surely must determine that a man is unmarried before having sex with him, right? No? If not, then Nevada isn't concerned about defending the sanctity of marriage at all, just in reserving some rights for straight people, including the right to have sex for money, there being no legal homosexual prostitution in that model of propriety. Dare one ask how many marriages have been destroyed by a spouse's calling upon a legal prostitute in Nevada? Or by compulsive gamblers' losing fortunes they could not afford, in Nevada, land of virtue? I think the gay movement should promote a boycott of Nevada by all progressives, to make an example of Nevada for hypocrisy, and show there are costs to antigay bigotry.
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As for Senator Craig's state, Idaho, I have been to Idaho twice, once to Boise (which is pronounced with an S-sound, not Z) on my own and once to Coeur d'Alene with several members of my family. As I recall, there was a tiny gay contingent in Coeur d'Alene's Fourth of July parade who were not booed or threatened. I don't think Idahoans in general are vicious or fascistic, despite Idaho's reputation (like neighboring Montana's) for welcoming Neo-Nazi, survivalist groups. I don't think Idaho is a toxic place or that the people of Idaho mean to damage young gay people's self-acceptance. But they do, as all areas of the world do that assume that every child will be straight, and thus raise everyone to be heterosexual, and never so much as raise the possibility that something else will happen. Never raising the issue, they lead their young people to think that what the larger society has apparently not thought about is thus unthinkable. That causes kids who do think about such things, to think as well that there must be something wrong with them; that they are grotesque, abnormal, evil, not just something that most of the people around them haven't much thought about. Or admitted to thinking about.
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Senator Craig's story is hardly unusual. He was made to hate himself by an oblivious, intolerant, and insecure society that seems to feel that if homosexuality is given free rein, it will wipe out heterosexuality and the human race will disappear because, they fear, homosexuality is preferable to heterosexuality! Is the human race really in danger of disappearing from too few children? Or is the prime threat to our survival not depopulation but grotesque overpopulation? I don't really have to answer that, do I?
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If, as seems certain, Senator Craig is sexually drawn to men, he could still make the claim that he is not "gay", because he does not want a lasting, loving relationship with a man, and actively wants not to identify as gay. He is assuredly not "gay" in the ordinary sense, happy and carefree, which may be how he justified his denials. Bill Clinton was able to persuade himself that he wasn't really lying when he said he "did not have sexual relations with that young woman", because he played a definitional game in his head: "sexual relations" meant coitus. Senator Craig says he's not "gay". He may be able to say that with clear conscience because he has internally defined "gay" to mean wanting something more from men than sex, something emotional, something as to lifestyle and self-identity, and he doesn't want that (or so he may have persuaded himself).
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Senator Craig toed society's heterosexual line rhetorically, and may actually have believed what he said when he said that homosexuality should be proscribed, perhaps out of the misguided notion that if he didn't have the internal strength to fite off his homosexual desires alone, society's prohibitions could strengthen his will and keep him in line. He internalized the antihomosexual crap he was raised with and then publicly fed it back to an appreciative audience, just as a parrot — or perhaps more appropriately, parakeet — delites people around by making noises that sound just like meaningful words, when they are to the bird only imitative noise.
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Everything we hear from antigay activists is meaningless, empty noise. They have absolutely no basis for their hostility. They may, or may not, have reasons for any insecurity they may feel about society giving them, personally, too much freedom, freedom they can't handle. But temptations of many kinds are all around us. We find out, when first this ban is relaxed, then that, who has internal strength and who has not.
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When Prohibition was ended, some people became alcoholics. When states legalized various forms of gambling, some people with weak wills and addictive personalities became gambling junkies. Some ghetto kids who became sports stars saw all kinds of barriers drop, and they promptly fell into drug addiction, sexual abuse, and other outrageous vices, even dogfiting. It is not the availability of alcohol that makes an alcoholic, nor the legality of gambling that creates a gambling problem, nor the presence all around us of dogs that makes a person descend into staging dogfites and then killing poor performers. It is not what is outside us that is responsible for our internal feelings, nor our actions.
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Faithful people defeat temptations to infidelity, from any source, homosexual or heterosexual. People in love aren't interested in sex with strangers. And, most important always to remember, sex is TRIVIA. This country has got (literally) to grow the f*k up.
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Senator Craig should 'fess up and ask forgiveness. If he needs sex with men, he should be forthrite about that. If he really loves his wife, he should just control himself, just as he would if he were attracted to another woman. But if he married only because society demanded he play the game, and he would really be happy only as a gay man, he should apologize profusely to his wife, get a divorce, and live the rest of his limited days happy, as a genuinely gay man, in every sense. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Then Idaho would have an honest man as its senior Senator.
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He was entrapped by antihomosexual police in a supposedly liberal state. That is both unexpected and outrageous. If the police in the Minneapolis area have so little to do that they have to induce gay men into approaching vice officers, then the Minneapolis police force should be chopped drastically in size and budget, so Minnesotans — including gay Minnesotans — can save some money on their tax bill. Are all parts of the Twin Cities crime-free? Or are police too cowardly to face off against real criminals, preferring to work the men's room while armed thugs victimize Minnesotans elsewhere, free of worry that they might be caught by cops who are busy harassing homosexuals in safe areas?
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The evil cops working to trap gay men should be transferred to the worst neighborhoods of America's cities, to face down the Bloods and Crips, and protect college kids from being murdered in cold blood in schoolyards. Send them to Newark, L.A., or the South Bronx. Let them earn their pay and actually protect somebody.
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Hoping to avoid public exposure, Senator Larry Craig (Hm, "L. Craig". Now, where have I heard that?) pled guilty to disorderly conduct and paid a fine of several hundred dollars. He also got a year's unsupervised probation. For tapping his foot in a men's room stall. Has this society lost its mind?
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We have murders all over this country that the police can't solve, and we're misdirecting police resources to arresting men for tapping their foot in a men's room. Senator Craig should be fiting such nonsense, not paying extortion to the state. But it's worse than extortion by criminals. The typical blackmailer doesn't take the money and then tell the secrets anyway.
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The self-righteous claptrap — an appropriate word, considering how much venereal disease there is in this Nation of Whores — about how 'disgusting' it is of some gay men to seek sex in public places, is nothing but bullsh*t. Straight people, various media commentators declaim virtuously, don't cruise lavatories for sex. Oh? And why might that be? Because men's rooms and women's rooms are separated, that's why. And why, exactly, is that? Because if both sexes shared the same lavatories, nobody offended by sex could use them much of the day and nite because straight people would be screwing around in them at all hours, that's why. Late-nite cable TV runs a commercial for a phone-sex line in which a man and woman come out of a stall in a public restroom. But that's just fantasy, right? And, of course, 'normal', so not disgusting. Are we to believe that heterosexual sex in public restrooms never really happens? Then how is it we hear stories about it? Because it does happen. And heterosexual public sex doesn't happen just in lavatories when no one's around. Straights have sex everywhere!
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The delicate, antisexual sensibilities we hear all over the media would be persuasive in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but not in the United Whores of America. In the typical year, 1.5 million babies are born out of wedlock (36% of all births in the United States; 64% for black women). 19 million cases of venereal disease (or "STD's", to use this week's fad term) are recorded each year. Millions of (heterosexual) marriages have been destroyed by infidelity, including on the part of at least one leading contender for the Republican Party's nomination for President. There's an awful lot of illicit sex going on among straight people in this country, and everybody knows it.
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So why are so many people in media feigning shock over sex among gay men in supposedly 'public' places (tho plainly not in public view)? Straight people are having sex all over the place, in movie theaters, airliners (the "Mile High Club" we hear so much about), parks, parking lots, "lover's lanes" — hell, in the car at the curb outside their girlfriend's house. Under bleachers, behind garages, in alleys, in bars and dance clubs, in sex clubs, in strip clubs. Babysitters and their boyfriends screw on the couch while the kids sleep a few yards away. What about all those lapdances in "gentlemen's clubs"? Porno videos offered by 'legitimate' video rental companies? Porn on cable TV that is shown not just in one's bedroom but even in public places? Straight porno theaters and peep shows? Legal prostitution in Nevada? Brothels in other places that the police take payoffs to let operate unfettered? "Escort" services? Hardcore and softcore heterosexual porn magazines available on publicly viewable racks at newsstands? Talk Sex with Sue Johanson on Oxygen TV? The repellant dwarf Ruth Westheimer? As long ago as 1992-96, Bob Berkowitz had a sex-talk show on CNBC. Where there's talk, there's action. (More talk than action, perhaps, but still some action.) TV takes ads for phone sex. And the Internet is filled with sexchat. What about that ad campaign from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"? I don't think those ads are talking about sightseeing trips to Hoover Dam. And do we really need to point out that the Internet is filled with fotografic and video porn?
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On the Tonight Show this evening, a young man told of staying at his girlfriend's house overnite. The girl's parents put him and their dauter in separate rooms. After they had all gone to bed, however, he sneaked into his girlfriend's room. They thought they had got away with it until the following morning when the family dog sauntered into the kitchen during breakfast, with a used condom in his mouth. What a deliteful, charming story about today's upstanding youth. (That particular youth was Canadian (as is Talk Sex hostess Sue Johanson), but American kids sneak around in their parents' house too, to screw around very quietly while their parents sleep in the next room.) So why the pretense that gay men's looking for sex wherever they might find it is somehow outrageous, but heterosexual society's obsession with sex is completely unobjectionable?
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Straight society needs to admit that it is saturated in sex. Four-year-old girls dress up like sluts in kiddie beauty pageants and 12-year-olds gyrate suggestively in talent contests, their face painted like that of an aging $5 hooker.
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John McCain, the Superloon among the announced Republican candidates for President, has disgraced himself yet again in urging Senator Craig to resign from what is called "the world's greatest deliberative body" because he tapped his shoe on a men's room floor! The 'crime' of which McCain complained was a misdemeanor, about as significant, legally, as a speeding ticket. I've said it before and will probably have to say it again: John McCain is out of his mind. I don't know if he always was, or if the North Vietnamese destroyed his mind in the Hanoi Hilton. At end, it doesn't matter. He's nuts.
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Mormon candidate for President, Mitt Romney, member of a cult that has ruined myriad lives with its lunacy, forced Craig out of his campaign committee, apparently fearful of being 'tainted' by association with homos. Romney is more than a bit too goodlooking to be seen as comfortable with "faggots". I wonder about him. That's called "gaydar", and mine pings when I watch Romney.
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I am indignant and contemptuous of all this ridiculous posturing by imitation-righteous straight people that gay men are somehow depraved for looking for sex in public restrooms. Straight society makes it impossible for gay men to meet one another in the wholesome places straight people go to "hook up". We can't look openly at each other at a church social, PTA meeting, supermarket, laundromat, or (straight) bar, and strike up a relaxed conversation, to find out if we have enuf in common to investigate forming a relationship or even just take a quick roll in the hay. No, we're forced into the shadows, and then bitched at for living in the shadows!
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By contrast, this supposedly antisexual society pushes boys and girls at each other from a very early age. It not only countenances sexual activity that it supposedly disapproves of, but actually facilitates it. Prom nite is almost a required virginity-ender, and despite the best efforts of modern-day Puritans to promote abstinence, the age at which Americans typically lose their virginity is 17, and only 4% of Americans remain virgins their entire life. Presumably many of those people have serious physical handicaps or are in religious orders that forbid sexual activity (not that that stops everyone in such orders).
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Last nite, on MSNBC Live With Dan Abrams, the host and fellow rightwingers Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson all played very innocent, as tho a sexual thought never entered any of their heads. Carlson bragged about having fought back against a man who "bothered" him in Washington. The poor baby was so scared he had to run for help to a friend, then bring the friend back, throw the offender against a wall, and have him arrested. For what? Today he clarified why he reacted so violently, while denying the violence he had admitted the nite before:
Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men’s room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men’s room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.Neither Hannity nor Abrams had ever had such difficulties, and gay men looking for sex are almost always easily discouraged by pointed shows of uninterest. If they persist, a firm "No" or "Hey, get away from me" suffices.
Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That’s absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn’t angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.
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Let me point out to these innocent babes in the sexual woods that WOMEN are harassed by heterosexual men all the time, everywhere they go. They are "hit upon" by men they have no interest in. They are whistled at and hooted at by men on the street as they simply go about their business. In bars, aggressive men crowd them, brush against them, say suggestive things to them, offer to buy them drinks (which would, the men think, indebt the woman to the man who treated them), put their hands on them, in innocent places and not-so-innocent places. If every heterosexual man who crossed the line with a woman were thrown up against a wall and arrested, our entire national budget would be spent on jails and prisons.
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So cut the crap. The little Mother Tucker was subjected to some of what women go thru every day, and it hurt his little feelings! Poor thing. That's the real issue here: heterosexual men's feeling threatened by being treated, to their mind, like women. That threatens their manhood. It shouldn't. A gay man's "hitting on them" proves not their lack of manhood but their masculine appeal, because gay men want men, not women. It is a compliment to his manhood that a gay man might be drawn to a (straight) man.
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Straight men need to get a life — and stick to it. That's the real problem, and the real reason there are police actions against homosexuality, even after the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws on the basis that they violate privacy rights. So cops go out of their way to entrap gay men into public "lewd conduct".
+
Straight men are terrified of their own homosexual thoughts and desires. They are afraid that if society doesn't keep them on the straight and narrow, they are going to find themselves in the arms (and other parts) of a man, because they know that they have all had thoughts about guys and cannot find men's bodies disgusting because they would have to find themselves disgusting. They may never have been tempted, yet, but, they think, that might just be because they haven't met the right man. Yet. Maybe there is a man out there, somewhere, with piercing blue eyes or a smile that lites up the room who would make their heart pound and other parts push them to contact.
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I'm the last person in the world to say it couldn't happen. But straight men are much more commonly tempted to heterosexual sex. That does not argue for them outlawing heterosexual sex or forbidding all situations in which temptation might arise. Where is the insistence that Louisiana Senator Vitter, who cheated on his wife with (female) prostitutes, resign? Nowhere, that's where.
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Senator Craig's real offense, and the reason people who should be sympathetic to a man who has sexual desires for men that cause him anguish, are instead indignant and out to "get him", is hypocrisy. He has made all kinds of antihomosexual noise, working to prevent gay marriage and otherwise promote antigay bigotry. We react to such behavior on the part of a man with overpowering sexual desire for men as we would to a "high yellow" 'black' man passing as white and becoming Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
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The hypocrisy of straight society about opposing gay marriage allegedly out of concern over the sanctity of (heterosexual) marriage is detestable. The bulk of states in recent decades made marriage so trifling and the legal causes for divorce so trivial that they catastrophically weakened the institution long before gay men pressed for the extension of marriage to gay couples. Nevada, which could be regarded as Satan's home state, dares to pretend to be concerned about the sanctity of marriage, and inserted a provision into its constitution to define marriage as a legal union of one man and one woman. So all those legal prostitutes in Nevada surely must determine that a man is unmarried before having sex with him, right? No? If not, then Nevada isn't concerned about defending the sanctity of marriage at all, just in reserving some rights for straight people, including the right to have sex for money, there being no legal homosexual prostitution in that model of propriety. Dare one ask how many marriages have been destroyed by a spouse's calling upon a legal prostitute in Nevada? Or by compulsive gamblers' losing fortunes they could not afford, in Nevada, land of virtue? I think the gay movement should promote a boycott of Nevada by all progressives, to make an example of Nevada for hypocrisy, and show there are costs to antigay bigotry.
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As for Senator Craig's state, Idaho, I have been to Idaho twice, once to Boise (which is pronounced with an S-sound, not Z) on my own and once to Coeur d'Alene with several members of my family. As I recall, there was a tiny gay contingent in Coeur d'Alene's Fourth of July parade who were not booed or threatened. I don't think Idahoans in general are vicious or fascistic, despite Idaho's reputation (like neighboring Montana's) for welcoming Neo-Nazi, survivalist groups. I don't think Idaho is a toxic place or that the people of Idaho mean to damage young gay people's self-acceptance. But they do, as all areas of the world do that assume that every child will be straight, and thus raise everyone to be heterosexual, and never so much as raise the possibility that something else will happen. Never raising the issue, they lead their young people to think that what the larger society has apparently not thought about is thus unthinkable. That causes kids who do think about such things, to think as well that there must be something wrong with them; that they are grotesque, abnormal, evil, not just something that most of the people around them haven't much thought about. Or admitted to thinking about.
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Senator Craig's story is hardly unusual. He was made to hate himself by an oblivious, intolerant, and insecure society that seems to feel that if homosexuality is given free rein, it will wipe out heterosexuality and the human race will disappear because, they fear, homosexuality is preferable to heterosexuality! Is the human race really in danger of disappearing from too few children? Or is the prime threat to our survival not depopulation but grotesque overpopulation? I don't really have to answer that, do I?
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If, as seems certain, Senator Craig is sexually drawn to men, he could still make the claim that he is not "gay", because he does not want a lasting, loving relationship with a man, and actively wants not to identify as gay. He is assuredly not "gay" in the ordinary sense, happy and carefree, which may be how he justified his denials. Bill Clinton was able to persuade himself that he wasn't really lying when he said he "did not have sexual relations with that young woman", because he played a definitional game in his head: "sexual relations" meant coitus. Senator Craig says he's not "gay". He may be able to say that with clear conscience because he has internally defined "gay" to mean wanting something more from men than sex, something emotional, something as to lifestyle and self-identity, and he doesn't want that (or so he may have persuaded himself).
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Senator Craig toed society's heterosexual line rhetorically, and may actually have believed what he said when he said that homosexuality should be proscribed, perhaps out of the misguided notion that if he didn't have the internal strength to fite off his homosexual desires alone, society's prohibitions could strengthen his will and keep him in line. He internalized the antihomosexual crap he was raised with and then publicly fed it back to an appreciative audience, just as a parrot — or perhaps more appropriately, parakeet — delites people around by making noises that sound just like meaningful words, when they are to the bird only imitative noise.
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Everything we hear from antigay activists is meaningless, empty noise. They have absolutely no basis for their hostility. They may, or may not, have reasons for any insecurity they may feel about society giving them, personally, too much freedom, freedom they can't handle. But temptations of many kinds are all around us. We find out, when first this ban is relaxed, then that, who has internal strength and who has not.
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When Prohibition was ended, some people became alcoholics. When states legalized various forms of gambling, some people with weak wills and addictive personalities became gambling junkies. Some ghetto kids who became sports stars saw all kinds of barriers drop, and they promptly fell into drug addiction, sexual abuse, and other outrageous vices, even dogfiting. It is not the availability of alcohol that makes an alcoholic, nor the legality of gambling that creates a gambling problem, nor the presence all around us of dogs that makes a person descend into staging dogfites and then killing poor performers. It is not what is outside us that is responsible for our internal feelings, nor our actions.
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Faithful people defeat temptations to infidelity, from any source, homosexual or heterosexual. People in love aren't interested in sex with strangers. And, most important always to remember, sex is TRIVIA. This country has got (literally) to grow the f*k up.
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Senator Craig should 'fess up and ask forgiveness. If he needs sex with men, he should be forthrite about that. If he really loves his wife, he should just control himself, just as he would if he were attracted to another woman. But if he married only because society demanded he play the game, and he would really be happy only as a gay man, he should apologize profusely to his wife, get a divorce, and live the rest of his limited days happy, as a genuinely gay man, in every sense. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Then Idaho would have an honest man as its senior Senator.
