Short takes, just a few before I go to bed. . . why he was the sweetest, the smartest. . .
And tomorrow, I may have News.
Cartoon Harold!
Jack of Spades. . .
A man who deserves to be severely kissed (and kissed, and kissed. . . )
Monday, June 24, 2013
When gay really ISN'T OK
A Mother's Horror Story
From a web site called PFOX: http://pfox.org/default.html
My precious son was raped by a boy in the neighborhood when he was 9-10 years old. It happened after he returned home on the bus when I was still at work, an hour or so before I got home. I thought this older, nice teen was giving my son attention, playing ball with him, etc. -- as he never got that attention from his own dad. Even though I spoke to my kids, read books on "bad touch" etc. & was an educator--it didn't "take" with this one son. I've had well meaning Christians condemn me as not doing enough & that I'd not been a good mother or my boy "would have told me" when it happened. But I have peace that this accusation is absurd--as I was in a living hell with an abusive husband & I gave every ounce of love to my children that I could. However, I was married when not a Christian & his blood dad is a non-believer who did drugs & had a huge anger problem, putting us "in fear" in our home.
I came to Christ shortly after our marriage & did all of the Christian training of the kids myself, standing for almost 20 years for the marriage. My other kids are all strong Christians.....but my son fell away from the Lord during high school. This happened when a gay drama "teacher" (not certified but hired under adjunct faculty with other gays) became too "familiar "with my boy---later I found out he proselytized him along with those gay teachers into the hidden world of homosexuality (1990's).
No one listened to me when I complained to the principal & school district about this gay man’s behavior towards my teenage son at school. Instead, the school began to use my son as a "poster boy," writing articles/editorials on being gay & accepted at their politically correct high school. His dad (who was gone when my son was 15.. ..& divorced me), and a group of liberal parents in the acting/drama world encouraged my son that "he was gay or bi". This, after he broke up with his girlfriend when he was 15--deeply distraught & crying for weeks over the loss.
There are so many stories I could share in retrospect as I ponder "what could I have done differently". Yet, today, I know I did all I could with what I knew as a loving mother---but no one would listen to me at the school. In addition, I knew little about the dark world (& it IS DARK) of homosexuality as I'd not been exposed to anything like this in my life. But now I have spent more time in the gay bars, clubs (as I go with my son, counsel kids over a dinner, have them over to our home, etc) than the average older Christian. My present husband & I have spent countless hours counseling & loving this community of hurting individuals....& it is a privilege--in spite of not always being easy.
My son, who is now an adult and whose life thus far has been ravaged, had been my strongest Christian kid--shared Christ at school, sang worship with me, was a straight A student, leader & dynamic believer. He is still friends with the gay teacher--who was finally fired with a district cover up--as he apparently was caught doing drugs with his students.
This gay teacher still holds my son captive...stalking and finding him in other states and now back in our city—he had moved my son into his home. This teacher has gone back on drugs and stolen from my boy (last year). We have rescued my son from this guy's home...& now this man went thru rehab again pulling our boy back into his clutches this year.
Our son is like a "stockholm syndrome child"----feeling sorry for this former teacher & saying. "he was there for me & cared about me when I was young & hurting". Our son has swallowed the whole party line of GAY EVANGELISM & believes it all--even only attending gay AA meetings with his "people". It is similar to a cult. It's all sick/drama/victim mentality & perversity...full of drag queen stuff as well.
(Transcript of text: "I make choices everyday (sic). Where to eat. What to wear. Who to see. But as a gay man I never thought I could change WHO I was. Until I realized change was a choice. . . and I chose to change from gay to straight. It may not be a decision you want to make, but you should know thousands of us already have. Please respect our choice.")
ONLY GOD........
Only God will hold your molecules together in the grief of it all. Only God will have every answer to each situation & in those times of confusion, help us continue to walk by faith and not by sight. Only God will comfort us through the deepest of sorrows. Only God can make a way where there is no other way. Only God loves our son, daughter, spouse-- more than we do, as our loved one. Only God will bring the perfect conclusion of the matter. Only God will bring Peace amid the storm. Only God can take the perversity, insanity and constant death of the homosexual agenda that is ravaging lives, families and our culture to its end game- BECAUSE OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA, THE BEGINNING AND THE END, THE FIRST AND THE LAST IS OUR OVERCOMER, AND HE HAS THE FINAL VICTORY.
-- PFOX mom of a sexually abused son
This is a dramatic cutdown of a piece that just went on and on, from a site called PFOX, standing for I-don't-know-what. The other day I posted about Exodus "ex-gay" ministries folding because the founder suddenly realized after 15 years of damaging people with guilt trips that "maybe this ex-gay stuff doesn't work quite as well as we thought it did". But obviously, the agenda hasn't disappeared.
The way gays are demonized in this piece is pretty horrific, but this is a woman who needs someone to blame for the fact that her kid is fucked up. Being gay isn't the problem. She seems to believe he has as much individual will as a jellyfish, so easily is he taken over by demonic influences like high school drama teachers. She takes no responsibility for how damaged he is and sees her rampant right-wing version of Christianity as the cure for everything that she perceives is wrong with him.
All through reading this amazing rant and tearing out chunk after redundant chunk so I could post it, I was reminded of Sheldon Cooper's fundamentalist Christian mother on The Big Bang Theory. It's never spelled out that Sheldon is gay (though Jim Parsons seems comfortably "out"), so his mother doesn't have too much to work with except his physics-induced atheism and extreme attachment to his Mee Maw (grandmother), who calls him Moon Pie. Now, does that sound heterosexual to you?
Moving on.
In spite of much rhetorical fancy dancing and the legions of gay ministers in the United Church, I don't think the gay/Christian schism will ever entirely heal. In fact, I think it could get wider as the BLT-with-a-side-of-fries community (sorry, I can't ever remember all those initials) becomes more visible. Even "tolerant" Christians (and what does it mean if I "tolerate' you? Really, that I can barely stand you) stop short of believing God is "OK" with all this, that it isn't a sin. The Bible tells us to stick to the good old model, the Adam-and-Eve, penis-in-vagina, John-Wayne-on-a-horse idea that kept our civilization strong ever since Adam toted his Flintstones lunch pail to the gravel pit.
Supposedly. It has always interested me however that there is not one word against homosexuality in the New Testament. Not one word FOR, either. Jesus must have had more important matters to attend to.
Homosexuality has always been around, persecuted to one extent or another because people don't understand it. Now that a percentage of gays and other BLTs are "out", the more conservative faction of society is even more baffled because they aren't used to seeing men marching in parades with fake boobs and hair extensions.
I had an issue with drag queens - namely, that they were way more feminine than I am, though I have actual boobs - until I decided to forget my envy and just enjoy their joie de vivre and dazzling fashion sense. I may not get it, I mean really understand why they do it, but why do I have to? I've seen some pre-Stonewall footage of gay protestors, and someone must've told them they all had to wear suits and ties (even the women). It was so dull, passersby probably thought they were just a bunch of disgruntled Rotarians.
At a certain point you have to ask yourself if sexual orientation is really our call, if we have the right to dictate how somebody else "should" feel about other people. I like what my daughter, a TV news reporter, once said. "Why should we disapprove when it's something that has no ill effect on us whatsoever?" What horrific damage will be done if people of the same sex like to hang out together, go to the gym, fall in love, get married, adopt children and. . .WOAH! That's where a lot of people put on the brakes.
But the thing is, as the definition of family becomes more soft-bordered and inclusive, it will happen. In fact, it already is. As usual, celebrities (who are, of course, the epitome of stability intelligence and good taste) lead the way. What will the long-term social impact be? Hell if I know. But it has to be better than having the shit kicked out of you for having Justin Bieber on your lunch pail.
This is a dramatic cutdown of a piece that just went on and on, from a site called PFOX, standing for I-don't-know-what. The other day I posted about Exodus "ex-gay" ministries folding because the founder suddenly realized after 15 years of damaging people with guilt trips that "maybe this ex-gay stuff doesn't work quite as well as we thought it did". But obviously, the agenda hasn't disappeared.
The way gays are demonized in this piece is pretty horrific, but this is a woman who needs someone to blame for the fact that her kid is fucked up. Being gay isn't the problem. She seems to believe he has as much individual will as a jellyfish, so easily is he taken over by demonic influences like high school drama teachers. She takes no responsibility for how damaged he is and sees her rampant right-wing version of Christianity as the cure for everything that she perceives is wrong with him.
All through reading this amazing rant and tearing out chunk after redundant chunk so I could post it, I was reminded of Sheldon Cooper's fundamentalist Christian mother on The Big Bang Theory. It's never spelled out that Sheldon is gay (though Jim Parsons seems comfortably "out"), so his mother doesn't have too much to work with except his physics-induced atheism and extreme attachment to his Mee Maw (grandmother), who calls him Moon Pie. Now, does that sound heterosexual to you?
Moving on.
In spite of much rhetorical fancy dancing and the legions of gay ministers in the United Church, I don't think the gay/Christian schism will ever entirely heal. In fact, I think it could get wider as the BLT-with-a-side-of-fries community (sorry, I can't ever remember all those initials) becomes more visible. Even "tolerant" Christians (and what does it mean if I "tolerate' you? Really, that I can barely stand you) stop short of believing God is "OK" with all this, that it isn't a sin. The Bible tells us to stick to the good old model, the Adam-and-Eve, penis-in-vagina, John-Wayne-on-a-horse idea that kept our civilization strong ever since Adam toted his Flintstones lunch pail to the gravel pit.
Supposedly. It has always interested me however that there is not one word against homosexuality in the New Testament. Not one word FOR, either. Jesus must have had more important matters to attend to.
Homosexuality has always been around, persecuted to one extent or another because people don't understand it. Now that a percentage of gays and other BLTs are "out", the more conservative faction of society is even more baffled because they aren't used to seeing men marching in parades with fake boobs and hair extensions.
I had an issue with drag queens - namely, that they were way more feminine than I am, though I have actual boobs - until I decided to forget my envy and just enjoy their joie de vivre and dazzling fashion sense. I may not get it, I mean really understand why they do it, but why do I have to? I've seen some pre-Stonewall footage of gay protestors, and someone must've told them they all had to wear suits and ties (even the women). It was so dull, passersby probably thought they were just a bunch of disgruntled Rotarians.
At a certain point you have to ask yourself if sexual orientation is really our call, if we have the right to dictate how somebody else "should" feel about other people. I like what my daughter, a TV news reporter, once said. "Why should we disapprove when it's something that has no ill effect on us whatsoever?" What horrific damage will be done if people of the same sex like to hang out together, go to the gym, fall in love, get married, adopt children and. . .WOAH! That's where a lot of people put on the brakes.
But the thing is, as the definition of family becomes more soft-bordered and inclusive, it will happen. In fact, it already is. As usual, celebrities (who are, of course, the epitome of stability intelligence and good taste) lead the way. What will the long-term social impact be? Hell if I know. But it has to be better than having the shit kicked out of you for having Justin Bieber on your lunch pail.
YouTube at the opera: the bad, the good and the sublime
The things you find while snooping around YouTube. This morning for some reason, maybe because it's Monday and awful out, I found myself digging around in videos of operatic bloopers - just an awful thing to do, sadistic, for opera is like figure skating: one slip of the blade and you're spinning around on your ass.
There were several categories. Quite a few, actually. An obvious one was singing off-pitch, invariably flat, and usually all the way through the piece. One wonders how someone with a trained singer's ear can do such a thing, but there they were (professionals, I mean, like Pavarotti, Roberto Alagna, and even the legendary Callas), slipping farther and farther off the wire like some floundering Wallenda.
There were the gargled or yodelled high notes, usually afflicting tenors who probably should have realized they were off their game. Sometimes that little bit of muscle at the back of the throat just won't cooperate, and can't be coerced. Sopranos tended to shriek like squeezed chickens. There were elaborate choruses which were completely incoherent: SOMEONE had started off on the wrong foot, thus making proper entrances impossible while the conductor tried frantically to get everyone back on board. In one case, I swear I heard him skip several bars, but to no avail.
There were complete silences. I mean, stunned and stunning silences in which the singer just stopped what they were doing in total disorientation. In a couple of cases the tenor (it was always a tenor) would shout out an excuse to the audience, something like, "Don't blame me, blame Puccini!" Almost worse were the "saves", the singer deciding to skip the triple-axel and sing something far less challenging.
The lyrics to these disasters all translated to approximately the same thing: "I should have cancelled, I should have cancelled. . . " Knowing when to cancel is a fine art in itself, but too many performers seem to want to go on with the show even as the ship sinks under their feet.
Though the videos contained their usual near-complete lack of information (where, when, even WHO), you could sure tell what theatre you were in. It was not hard to get the good folks at La Scala going, not just shrill whistling and booing but standing up and yelling things like, "Dog!", "This is murder!" and "Off the stage, charlatan!" North American audiences seem to be a little more restrained, but there is something limp and even baffled about the applause after such a fiasco. And definitely disappointed.
Having said all that, I'm not posting any bloopers today. I've had enough of them and felt a high degree of schadenfreude (thank you, Matt Paust) while listening to them. I suddenly thought of the glorious Flower Duet from Lakme by Delibes, once worked to death on airline commercials and elsewhere, but now beginning to heal and regain its lustre. And I found this one, and within two seconds I was crying, all thought of bloopers erased.
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