What The Planned Parenthood Controversy Means For LGBT People

Dr. Marci Bowers is an extremely skilled surgeon with a good “bedside manner.”  Like any other first-rate professional, she has fine people working with and for her.

Among them are the screening nurses, counselors and others who prepare people like me for surgery.  The ones who worked with Marci when she was in Trinidad also worked with the local Planned Parenthood, right next to the hospital in which Dr. Bowers practiced.  In fact, on the morning of my surgery, I went to the PP office—where I passed a lone protestor—and, from there, was escorted to the hospital.

I am thinking of that now in light of the furor over Planned Parenthood.  To religious fundamentalists (who, almost invariably, are trying to follow a literal interpretation of a translation of a book written, at least in part, in languages that haven’t been spoken in more than a millennium), Planned Parenthood can be defined in one word:  abortion.  And if something has anything to do with abortion, they are not only against it, they are willing to believe the absolute worst things anyone can say, true or not, about it.

So it’s really no surprise that they’re in a lather over the story that PP is selling tissue from aborted fetuses for use in medical research and treatment.  Of course, when stories are passed along, parts of it are exaggerated, distorted or otherwise changed.  So, somewhere along the way, some hysterical or simply mendacious person announced that Planned Parenthood is “harvesting’ fetuses for tissue.  That story gave the conservatives just the sort of weapon they’ve wanted.

What’s commonly forgotten is that abortion is actually a very small part of what Planned Parenthood does.  For many women—especially the poor and those who live in isolated rural areas—the Planned Parenthood office is one of the few places, if not the only place, where they can find compassionate and competent gynecological health care.  Sometimes even men in such situations rely on Planned Parenthood for their needs.

Knowing such things, I can’t help but to think that Planned Parenthood is a lifeline for many LGBT people.  There are still many health care professionals who won’t treat us or, worse, can’t or won’t treat us with the same compassion or diligence they would provide other patients.  I had one such experience early in my transition, and I have heard stories from other queer people who were treated with contempt or simply given inappropriate advice or care. For example, the doctor of  a lesbian I know told her that if she doesn’t want to get breast cancer, she should have a baby. I doubt that anyone in Planned Parenthood would have told her that.

He Tried To Kill In The Name Of God

When it comes to LGBT equality, Israel has one of the best--if not the best--record in the Middle East.  

That makes what happened in Jerusalem yesterday all the more distressing.

Yishai Schlissel, an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish man, stabbed six marchers in the city's Pride parade.  Two of the victims are in serious condition.  Not long after he attacked, Schlissel was pinned to the ground and arrested on a central Jerusalem street.

He had just been released from prison after ten years of incarceration.  He was locked up for a very similar attack not far from where he struck yesterday.  In his rampage a decade ago, three marchers were stabbed.

The Jerusalem Pride march is smaller than the one in Tel Aviv.  But, the one in Jerusalem attracts more ire from ultra-religious Christians and Muslims as well as Jews, who see homosexuality as an "abomination", as Schlissel put it and the march as a "defilement" of their sacred city.

They probably think what Schlissel said out loud:  He'd come to the march to "kill in the name of God."

Haven't we heard that one before?

Marching For What?

Isn't it funny that when people want to "defend" "marriage", they almost always are talking about one kind of marriage to the exclusion of the others.

Such was the case at the "March for Marriage" held the other day in Washington, DC.

When New York State legalized same-sex marriage in June of 2011, four of the Senate's Republicans voted for it.  In doing so, they joined all except one of the Senate's Democrats. 

Guess who was at the March?  Right...the Senate Democrat, none other than Ruben Diaz Sr., a Pentecostal minister.  (Now, what was that about separation of church and state?)  He was joined by a contagion of conservative clergy people from his native Bronx, which City Council member Ritchie Torres (who represents part of it) calls "the Bible Belt of New York City".

Some people may genuinely believe that God (or Allah or whomever) deemed that marriage is a relationship of one man and one woman for the purpose of procreation.  However, I get the feeling that too many other people--including, I suspect, many in the March--simply don't want gays or other people to have the same rights they have, just as certain white people didn't want racial equality because it would strip them of whatever social and economic superiority they enjoyed vis-à-vis blacks.

Then there are those who seem confused about what it is they're marching for:

Her sign reads:  "People are designed to be seeing and hearing and with all body parts intact and 'Tab A fits Slot B' perpetuates the species.

OK. So is she saying that blind or deaf people--or amputees-- shouldn't be allowed to marry?  And what's that about 'Tab A' and 'Slot B'?  Is she telling us that sex, reproductive or otherwise, is just a matter of getting one piece to fit into another, like a puzzle?
 

Making LaHaye When He Hates

Was this a Freudian slip?:

"The Christian community needs a penetrating book on homosexuality."

"Penetrating"?  Hmm...What does that word choice tell us about the writer of that sentence?

Said author is Tim LaHaye. Yes, that Tim LaHaye. Actually, he was quoting someone with similar views, but that LaHaye used it as a rationale for--and in the beginning of--his book The Unhappy Gays still, I think, confirms something I've long suspected about him and lots of other "Christian" homophobes.

More to the point, the esteemed Mr. LaHaye took it upon himself to explain homosexuals for likeminded people, i.e., those who use their religious beliefs as a smokescreen for their bigotry.  He's the sort of person who's articulate enough to explain to people what they can't explain about people they hate, but--not surprisingly--not honest enough to call that hate what it is.

I remember reading The Unhappy Gays not long after it came out.  I was in college and had joined a campus Christian fellowship for all sorts of reasons, all of which had to do with my inability--at that time--to understand, let alone articulate or deal with things I'd felt for as long as I could remember.  I actually "came out" as gay because, frankly, I didn't know what else I was.  Some members of the fellowship said they would pray for me, and I don't doubt they did.  At least they didn't try to "cure" me by fixing me up with sisters or other females they knew.  And being around them spared me from a lot of those campus activities that begin with alcohol and end with rape.

Still, I knew I wasn't one of them.  I didn't see anything the way they did.  No matter how much some tried to include me, I knew I ultimately couldn't be a part of their world, any more than I would be part of the world of white picket fences.

And from other people I faced outright exclusion and rejection.  Ironically, La Haye cited such rejection as one of the reasons for the "intense anger that churns through even the most phlegmatic homosexual". Although he was wrong to categorize all gays as angry, he did understand that rejection makes people angry.  And although I didn't fit most of the stereotypes he claimed to be elucidating for his audience, I knew I was angry--or, at least, unhappy.

Not to make excuses for myself, but what else could I have been, really?  However, rejection was only part of the reason why.  Most important, I think, was that I was someone I couldn't understand and didn't ask to be.  Like anyone else one who's born different from other people, I didn't start off thinking I wasn't worthy of the things most people wanted and enjoyed.  But, like too many who are "minorities" or outcasts, I absorbed the subtle and not-so-subtle messages that I wasn't worthy.  Those same people and institutions that sent us those messages were also the very ones who stigmatized us for not achieving what they achieved in the areas of relationships and even careers.  

Anyway, it's because LaHaye understood that much that he was able to say he was being "compassionate" toward homosexuals.  You know, in a "love the sin, hate the sinner" sort of way. Not surprisingly, he thought that because God loves us, all we had to do was to accept that love and we'd be "saved".  From what?  Our "sin".  And for what?  "Eternal life", or some such thing.   

I got to thinking about all of this after a seeing a post on the Patheos Atheist Newsletter today.  The author of that post outlined some of the lies found in LaHaye's book.  That post is definitely worth reading.  If nothing else, it offer you some insights into some of the things Christian "fundamentalists" say about gay (and trans) people--and how much worse they were in 1978.

This Barber's Thinking Is Clipped

A month ago, I mentioned something a police commander once told me:  "Lucky for us that most criminals are stupid".

There is a corollary to that among transphobes, homophobes and haters of all other stripes:  We're lucky that, most of the time, their prejudices are based on a complete lack of reason or empirical evidence.  

And in the case of one member of the species, I don't know how in the world he got a law degree.  He fancies himself a constitutional lawyer and uses that platform to spew his bilge.

I'm talking about Matt Barber, founder and editor-in-chief of BarbWire.com.  He's called self-styled Christians to join him in hatefests disguised with fasting, prayers and other trappings of fealty to the God he claims to believe in.

Now he's claiming that same-sex marriage is "rooted in fraud and child rape".  

First, the "child rape" part.  I thought almost nobody who hasn't been living under a rock for the past thirty years still believes that all gays are paedophiles, or that having been molested or raped as a child will make someone gay.  Now, I know that my own experience, all by itself, doesn't prove anything, but I must mention that as a child, I was molested by a man who probably never even thought about having sex with an adult, or even post-pubescent, male.  I know of plenty of men who were sexually molested or abused by men but didn't "turn out" gay or even bisexual.  In my case, I had my gender identity long before the man I've mentioned ever laid a hand on me.

So how does Barber make the connection between between same-sex marriage and child rape?  Well, that's where the "fraud" part comes in.  You see, Barber claims that Alfred Kinsey instigated the "sexual revolution"--which, he says is responsible for the "artificial construct" of gay marriage.  Barber claims that Kinsey was "promiscuous homosexual and sadomasochist" whose research has been "discredited".  By whom?  Well, by no less than Dr. Judith Reisman, who claims, among other things, that Planned Parenthood funds itself through sex trafficking and that the "homosexual movement" in Germany gave rise to Nazism and the Holocaust.

But, oh, it gets better.  I'm not an expert on Kinsey or, for that matter, gay marriage.   Still, I don't think it's a stretch to say that I've read most of the arguments for and against gay marriage.  Perhaps, at my age, my memory isn't what it used to be, but I feel confident that I haven't seen or heard a single argument in favor of same-sex marriage, anywhere, that makes reference to Kinsey's work.  

And Barber claims that the arguments for gay marriage are constructed on a house of cards!

To top everything off, he ends his diatribe with this little gem: "At this point, prayer alone may save marriage and keep, at bay, the wrath of a just and Holy God."

I'm not going to argue with or against his or anyone else's right to believe in such a God, or any other kind.  I simply don't understand how he, as a self-proclaimed Constitutional lawyer, can forget that the First Amendment guarantees the principle of the separation of church and state.  How can he advocate for or against a law on the grounds that it's God's will, or some such thing?

Fortunately for us, only those who have suspended their facilities for logic and reason--or never had such facilities in the first place--will place any credence in his arguments.  Still, that's not going to stop them from fighting viciously.  So, while they won't win, ultimately--they can't--they'll do whatever they can to forestall the inevitable.

Anti-Gay Day: Keeping It All In The Family

As I've said in a previous post, there's a corollary to Newton's Third Law in the struggle for LGBT equality.

That law says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  When it comes to LGBT equality--or any other social or political issue--we usually call that reaction "backlash".

That is why, after same-sex marriage has become legal in 36 of the 50 US States (and the District of Columbia), some of the holdouts are passing laws that make it legal to discriminate against us and calling it "religious freedom".

Now we've seen another kind of backlash in a McGuffey (Pennsylvania) High School:  an "anti-gay day", which some students held on Thursday.

It would be one thing if the haters wore flannel shirts--as LGBT people and allies do on "gay days"--and left it at that.  But no...They're hanging signs on gay students' lockers, which the teachers have been taking down.  Worse, the bigoted bullies are harassing gay students, sometimes physically, and have drawn up and circulated a "lynch list", which includes the names of gay students.

This awful spectacle also illustrates something else I've said:  Kids, especially teenagers, may not listen to the adults (actual or alleged) in their lives.  But they never, ever fail to imitate them.

And who are the role models for the young thugs in McGuffey?  Why, none other than such bastions of rectitude as Focus on the Family and the Illinois Family Institute, which organized antigay events like Day of Dialogue and walkouts to protest the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network's "homosexuality-affirming dogma".

Such organizations also prove something else I've said:  If an organization has "Family" in its name, there's a good chance it's promoting prejudice and worse against LGBT people.  It seems that you can get away with anything as long as you use that word--or mention your religious beliefs.  Wanna bet those kids in Pennsylvania figured that out?

A Paralell Universe?

From Diana, I learned that Roman Catholic Bishop Christopher Coyne of the Burlington (VT) diocese has affirming words for transgender people.  However, he sees same-sex relationships as "not matching up" to what the Catholic Church calls its members to "strive for".

A part of me is cheering:  Too often, trans people are “thrown under the bus”.  Too often, the throwers are gay men and, somewhat less often, lesbians and bisexuals.  Worse yet, groups that call themselves LGBT organizations and take our money (which, for trans people, is harder to come by than it is for anyone else) have sold us out by devoting all of their resources toward the singular goal of legalizing same-sex marriage. 

And, of course, many people who aren’t part of our alphabet soup are perfectly willing to welcome the first three letters into their fold but toss out T’s.  Some have positions of power and influence; others are examples for their children, students and others in their lives. 

Whether transphobia comes from gay, straight, bisexual or any other kind of people or organizations, the result is the same:  It divides trans people from lesbians, gays, bisexuals and others who don’t fit societal norms of gender and sexuality.  And, of course, it divides others in the spectrum.  The result is that when one has any sort of victory, the others believe (sometimes correctly) that it has come at their expense.  Such a perception, of course, makes all members of oppressed groups easy prey for further exploitation.

Really, all of this isn’t so different from the way plutocrats have created and exploited tensions between races and ethnic groups.  So, for example, many Italian immigrants of my grandparents’ generation detested Irish-Americans, most of whom preceded them by a decade or a generation in America.  And many African-Americans believe that Jews have done more than anyone else to oppress them.  Of course, the truly rich and powerful, who have exploited everyone I’ve mentioned, and just about everyone else, are, as the saying goes, “laughing all the way to the bank”.

My point is that if we, as trans people, should be glad that someone who could have “thrown us under the bus” chose not to do so, and should not rejoice or even breathe a sigh of relief that he chose to toss other groups of people—especially those who have been the objects of hate and violence similar to what we’ve experienced—instead.