Confirmation was made last week by a few disparate sources that people like me — homos, LGBTs, gays, etc — are both invisible and immoral. It’s not easy to accomplish both of those tasks at the same time, let alone in the same week. Only a person that doesn’t follow gawd’s plan could manage to be invisible and immoral.
Last week began with a visit to the UN from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After being denied a request to take a quick pee on the ruins of America’s altar of narcissism, he stopped by Columbia University to exercise his skills in western style politics.
While addressing the audience at Columbia, Ahmadinejad announced that homosexuality doesn’t exist in Iran. That statement must have been shocking to the men I saw in a photograph preparing to hang teenagers in Iran for being homosexual. If sexual variation doesn’t occur in the Middle East, it’s not because gawd’s law is being upheld. But, it might have to do with the practice of religious murder and torture that is condoned by government. Hey – if it’s impossible to live without the threat of extinction, then invisibility becomes attractive, don’t you think? Given the options, wouldn’t you consider invisibility? The government of Iran (and many other similar hot spots) is hoping you would consider it.
His remarks don’t necessarily make him a bad man. It’s not like President Ahmadinejad came up with this concept all by himself. The “if I close my eyes it doesn’t exist” method of dealing with reality thrives right here in the US of A.
It is evident in my favorite topic: marriage equality. If you listen to the religious zealots and/or the compromising, complicit, cowardly members of the Democratic Party, there is no bigotry involved in denying the existence of same sex couples. Encouraging states (let alone the federal government) to recognize LGBT families would force them to acknowledge that we exist and have done nothing to justify being denied full citizenship. There is only one place that The Family exists and that is within the framework of man-on-woman marriage. Just ask Peter Pace. While he didn’t go as far as Ahmadinejad did by saying that homosexuals don’t exist, it sure sounds like he would like us to be invisible.
Testifying midweek at a Senate hearing, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff restated his remarks made earlier in the year regarding the incompatibility of homosexuality and service in the armed forces. He said, “We need to be very precise then, about what I said …and that is, very simply, that we should respect those who want to serve the nation but not through the law of the land, condone activity that, in my upbringing, is counter to God’s law.”
Regardless of the fact that I doubt that this God person is too keen on war, bombs, and torture (I think it may stem from the way his “son” was reported to have died), Pace still seems to cling to his opinion that immorality is defined by sexual activity and not in the arena of killing. Further, Pace chooses to ignore the fact that the US Supreme Court has already decriminalized homosexual activity. He wants to ignore the decision of the court and cling to what he has decided is God’s law. That is what his momma told him to do and it doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court says or what any politician or deviate sympathizer says. If Pace says homosexuality shouldn’t exist, then damn it all, it shouldn’t exist.
He said: “I would be very willing and able and supportive” to changes to the (DADT) policy “to continue to allow the homosexual community to contribute to the nation without condoning what I believe to be activity…that in my upbringing is not right.”
In other words, as long you only have sex with your married different sex partner, you can kill as many people as possible and cause circumstances that kill and impoverish and maim hundreds of thousands and still be moral, according to Peter Pace and his mom. I hope I don’t ever have to meet her. She scares me.
At the close of last week, there was a burst of activity regarding ENDA legislation that has been kicking around for a decade in Congress. ENDA would make workplace discrimination against LGB people incompatible with Federal policy. The “T” was left off the description of the people that would be protected by this bill because the Democratic leadership in the House has stripped the Transgender community from the bill. They – specifically Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank – say the bill won’t pass if transgender citizens are included.
Here is a quote from Barney Frank rationalizing his strategy to drop the T from the bill and allow the LGB part to remain:
“…their (LGBT leaders) recommendation was that the Speaker (Pelosi) simply announce that she was not going to allow the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to come up at all. I believe that would be a disaster – politically, morally, and strategically. While their reason for this would be the debate over how ultimately to achieve transgender inclusion, the impression that would be given to the country was that Speaker Pelosi, the first Democratic Speaker in thirteen years, and a lifelong strong supporter of LGBT rights, had decided that we could not go forward on what had been the major single legislative goal of gay and lesbian people for over thirty years.”
He thinks it would be immoral for the Democratic leadership to risk the bill’s passage by not compromising it. He also sounds concerned that Pelosi would look bad if she couldn’t make this bill happen. We want her to appear powerful and influential and successful, don’t we? Well, then we (LGB and especially T people) need to put our integrity and ideals on the back burner. Frank loves to caution us little people about getting too demanding. He made similar statements about marriage during the 2004 election. In his narrow and condescending view, it would be immoral of us to not compromise our integrity.
After the lessons we learned about morality this week, I think immorality is underrated. If Pace and Frank and Pelosi represent what is moral, then I’m content with being immoral.
Their definitions of morality make Ahmadinejad’s invisibility sound compelling.