The swell folks at Defend Maryland Marriage write:
We want to be perfectly clear. We do not hate those who live the homosexual lifestyle. Those who would label the defenders of traditional marriage as homophobes or with any other mean spirited word should know that we love and pray for all men.
Reading this, you’d think that the only reason for calling them “homophobes” is being “mean spirited.” There couldn’t possibly be any substantive reason for calling them homophobes.
Well… not so much. Turns out that they’ve recently edited out some comments from the front page of their website – comments that they refused to own up to or acknowledge when I emailed them (as their email explained, “the goal of this organization is not to satisfy your need to know”). Happily, I took a screen shot of the google cache of their website before the change. The missing paragraphs:
We believe it is necessary that church leaders across Maryland be exposed to the vile and militaristic agenda of extreme homosexual activists. Moral leaders must become aware of their intent to sodomize our children. For this reason, we continue to schedule Pastor, Elder, Deacon and Church Leader meetings wherein we show firsthand the words and plans of these activists.
We are committed to unifying the universal church (God’s Church) into action and we urge that every church exposes the ugly realities of the homosexual movement to its members. Their intent is to indoctrinate our children with the homosexual lifestyle. This is currently happening in many public and private schools across our state. We will remain silent no longer!
Gosh, why would anyone but a meanie call these nice people homophobes?
i’m a meanie. i’ll call them homophobes.
hey! DMM people! you’re a bunch of nasty homophobes!
and you’re stupid too. :P
Therein lies the most perilous aspect of Christianity: the ability to couch hatred in velvety Doublespeak.
I really dislike the rhetorical strategy of trying to give your hateful speech directed at group plausible cover by inserting the word extreme or extremist in opportune places. I would expect that if they did bother to defend these paragraphs, that would be their tack: “Oh, we’ve got no problem with non-extreme homosexuals!”
Yes, of COURSE all homosexual men are intent on sodomizing children. Of COURSE homosexuality and pedophilia are the same thing! Nevermind that most pedophiles are straight men.
Oh my God! Extremist gay homosexual sodomites are making attractive Mexican furniture for our children! And then spamming blog comments with ads for them!
Only calling them homophobes is being way too nice, to me anyway. I would (and I do) call them fascist, bigoted, ignorant fuckwads who are too warped by their religious hateful dogma to realize that marriage is nothing but a social construct…….not some divine gift from some invisible deity who lives in the sky.
Marriage is a domestic and social contract between two individuals who have agreed to live together, share the same name (though not all the time), share money, share property/assets, place each other on insurance plans, have monogamous sexual relations together, and sometimes choose to have or not have children. Marriage was originally just an institution for promoting procreation and raising children. Marriage was like a business and the children were the products “manufactured” from that business. Which is why childfree married couples are nagged by everyone around them to have kids all the time.
There is NOTHING divine about any social construct! Religions only promote marriage to ensure the propagation of children, which means more church attendees in the future. It’s about making sure that their religion survives for another generation. Social constructs such as marriage are always open for reform and it sure as hell needs one now.
Really, only calling them homophobes is being all too generous. They’re practically nazis with all vehemently anti-GLBT hate-speech…..”extremist-militaristic homosexual lifestyle”, you gotta be shittin’ me?!!! The only people I see marching around and indoctrinating children with all kinds of dangerous and ominous propaganda are these churchy homophobic nazis. Moral values my ass!!! There’s nothing “moral” about hate and fascism.
In their spirited denial of being homophobic, I see that our Maryland friends assure us that they “love and pray for all men.” Do they mean men AND women here? Or just men, in that only men are gay (the whole lesbians are invisible thing). Or that they only pray for men meaning just men (gosh, I hope I’m being left out of their prayers. That’s would be a lucky break).
Isn’t the Google cache a wonderful thing? ;)
I’m wondering whether we should protest the extremist Christian Right agenda of messing with our children’s heads, ensuring they are not exposed to alternative points of view (oh, I don’t know, like EVOLUTION, or CATCHER IN THE RYE), and ranking that as child abuse.
A quote I read from a student at a rightwing Bible college: they didn’t need to read those books/learn those things because they already know they’re WRONG.
CHILD ABUSE!
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Thanks for drawing attention to DMM — how unfortunate for those of us who live in its shadow.
Over at Ex-Gay Watch, I identify and profile the operators of the DefendMarylandMarriage web site. They’re about as “reputable” as one might expect.
I won’t call them homophobes, but I will call them psuedo-Christians who have perverted the word of God for their own political benefit. Given that the bigotry and prejudice against God’s children that comes out of their mouths cannot be from God, it has only another source…
Could it be…
SATAN! (all props to Dana Carvey for that one).
That’s right, we should call them what they are: Satan-worshippers.
Watch their heads explode on that one.
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An interesting assumption behind these attitudes is that there is such thing as the “homosexual lifestyle,” or the “homosexual agenda.” My mother is lesbian and has a lesbian partner who participated in the upbringing of my brother and I. During my childhood, numerous gay and lesbian family friends trooped through our house for dinner. In overhearing conversations, I didn’t notice any homosexual agenda (or maybe they kept it hidden from me so I wouldn’t bring their plans to ruin?). Neither did I see any evidence of any one “homosexual lifestyle;” actually, the lifestyles would be quit varied. And nobody tried to “indoctrinate” me into such a lifestyle. When my mum would talk to me, she used to say stuff like “when you have your first girlfriend… OR boyfriend, blah blah blah,” but that hardly qualifies as indoctrination.
P.S. And hello to Ampersand, because this is my first post here. We shall see how long I stick around.
Hey, Atrios is reporting via 365gay.com that a New York trial judge has just ruled that gays and lesbians must be allowed to marry under New York’s constitution!
Damned gay activists & activist judges. Don’t they know that they’ll lose the elections for us? How dare they uphold the various constitutions!
You people, YOU PEOPLE!!! are correct. Marriage just a social construct in a socially degenerative society. This civilization is past its zenith and is doomed to fall just as rome, just as egypt, so why bother at a lame attempt to save it? Legalize everything! Who cares! Hasten the destruction, hasten the fire! Civilization and the current messiah of its time, Jesus, such as Akhenaton, such as Zoraster, shall be flushed, useless, into the abyss of nihil. We live in the age of Kali Yuga. Everything we see is a sign of weakness and degeneration. The romans did not even have television nor the internet and even their society collapsed, it is we who are the problem, it is we who shall be tested by the coming fire. And what a fire! I predict it to completely wipe out the last 5000 years of recorded pot-luck “progress.” This would be totally cool, Rad even. The “messiah” is soon to be forgotten. Don’t worry gays, most likely there will be thousands of years of other Christs invented to bitch and complain about right before times call for rebirth through destruction again. Such is a moronic, pointless, ciclical human existance.
Aegis, they probably were speaking in the secret, demonic tongue of Homosexuals, which pure and innocent children cannot understand.
“We want to be perfectly clear. We do not hate those who live the homosexual lifestyle. Those who would label the defenders of traditional marriage as homophobes or with any other mean spirited word should know that we love and pray for all men.”
This is a homophobic and sexist comment in itself. Firstly there is NO one individual homosexual lifestyle, in the same way there is no one individual heterosexual lifestyle. Everyone is a unique individual. And secondly why is the focus always on men? I think the religion is just an excuse for the bigotry based on disgust and hatred. And what are they defending traditional marriage from? Straights have already made a complete and utter mockery of it!