Lightning Times

Morning Report: 2014-04-25

Uganda: Persecution of gays intensifies. 'The law prescribes life imprisonment for some homosexual acts and also criminalises the "promotion of homosexuality", among other measures.' Activist Sandra Ntebi tells more, at the link.

Indonesia: Drunk passenger triggers hijack alert. 'A Virgin Australia Airlines official said there had not been an attempt to hijack the aircraft but a "flight emergency" when a 28-year-old male passenger banged on the door of the cockpit trying to get in an hour before it was due to land.' Australian Matt Christopher Lockley is in custody.

Mali: French hostage Leal reported killed by al-Qaeda affiliate MUJAO. 'A Portuguese-born French national, Leal was kidnapped in November 2012 from a Malian town near the Mauritanian border. At the time, it was not clear which group had physically taken him, although the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) claimed responsibility.' Full details at the link.

Lesbians Come Out of the Republican Closet

Sarah Wheaton at NYT:

In 1996, Kathryn Lehman was a soon-to-be married lawyer working for Republicans in the House of Representatives. One of her major accomplishments: helping to write the law that bans federal recognition of same-sex marriages.

Today, Ms. Lehman, 53, no longer has a husband, and no longer identifies as straight. And she is a lobbyist for Freedom to Marry, which is devoted to overturning the very law she helped write, the Defense of Marriage Act.

But Ms. Lehman is still a fervent Republican.

“I’m trying to break the stereotype that all gays and lesbians, especially lesbians, are Democrats,” she said. ...

From the comments:

As a conservative lesbian who spent many of my adult years as a Left-winger and registered Democrat, I don't exactly fit the profile presented here of the closeted life-long church-going Republican who figures out she's a lesbian later in her life.

I've been out since the age of 22 and have lived through those bad old days before homosexuals became the victim class du jour. Yet, as a white middle-class woman, I would never have the audacity to describe myself as 'oppressed'.

And calling the Republican party 'the oppressor', as one commenter did, and insisting that lesbians and gays place their sexual orientation first and foremost when it comes to the complex political issues of the day is to present us to the world as two dimensional people with absolutely no other concerns about our country and our culture.

I worked with a Tea Party organization as an out lesbian and never experienced any negativity around my sexual orientation. To the contrary---I was welcomed. Yet, on the liberal side of the fence, I have had to put up with confrontation, threats, and shunning for being an out lesbian conservative.

I host a little blog that attracts conservative lesbians and gay men as well as conservative straight men and women. Some of my biggest supporters have been straight conservative men. Quite frankly, I have found more acceptance and more open-minds on the conservative side than I have ever found on the Left.

SF Gay Activist Larry Brinkin Arrested on Child Porn Concerns

Advocate: 'Longtime San Francisco gay rights activist Larry Brinkin has been arrested on suspicion of possessing child pornography, but he has yet to be formally charged. ... Police arrested Brinkin at his home Friday night. In their search warrant, police said pornographic images of very young children were embedded in messages from Brinkin’s email account, the Citizen reports. According to the paper, the search warrant also noted that some emails from his account included fantasy stories involving the rape and torture of African-American children and one contained the words “White Power! White Supremacy!” ...'

Breitbart: 'The search warrant is a comprehensive list of terribles: images of year-old infants subjected to sodomy and oral sex, and perverse racial comments (Brinkin’s email: “I loved especially the 2 year old n----- getting nailed. Hope you’ll continue so I can see what the little blond b---- is going to get. White Power! White Supremacy! White D--- Rules!”).'

Ugh.

G, L, B ... and what's the other thing?

Transsexual neocon Zoe at A. E. Brain clears up a few points:

1. First, we're all human beings. That needs saying because we too often lose sight of the fact that everyone, even those we don't identify with, even those we feel uncomfortable being around, have human rights. And I speak as a conservative neo-con, not a tree-hugging kumbayah-singing liberal.

2. Then some of us are GLBT - people who do not fit in in some way with the standard bigendered model, where men look and act in accordance with society's norm for men and are only attracted to women, and women look and act accordance with society's norm for women and are only attracted to men. About the only thing such people have in common with each other is that it's the same people who persecute them. Many in this conglomerate - that is, a matrix containing parts of very different nature - don't remotely understand each other, and there's both phobia - fear - and loathing even when they do understand.

There's Androphobic Lesbians who see men, even Gay men, as a threat, Gynaphobic Gays who see anything redolent of femininity as beneath contempt, Homophobic Transsexuals who resent being conflated with those they see as morally corrupt, you name it. And straight Intersexed people who don't see why having an unusual medical condition automatically drafts them into a political activist group made up of weirdoes like mentally ill Transsexuals, Fetishistic Crossdressers, and perverted GLBs.

3. The there are some who are T. This is where it really gets confusing. T for Transgender. And what that word means changes from day to day. ...

Go read it all.

Zero Dimensional

“No, I mean they would kill me.”

There are problems, and then there are problems.

Mary Cheney's Baby: Answering TNR

Glen Wishard at Little Green Colloquium lets loose with both barrels on The New Republic:

Dear TNR:

I did not know that Mary Cheney was going to have a baby. Still less did I know that this baby presented a personal problem for me – a conundrum, no less. In a time of war and momentous ideological struggle, thank you for taking a moment to warn me of this fresh unforeseen threat. Forgive me if my reaction seems ungrateful.

Mary Cheney’s baby is none of your damn business. Who the hell do you people think you are, the Gay Standards & Practices Committee? Why don’t you keep your sheet-sniffing ferret noses out of other peoples’ laundry?

However many things I have failed to decry in this life, and however profound my baby-induced existential crisis is, I must decline your offer to have Andrew Sullivan dissect me for nine bucks and some change. In fact, if Andrew is looking for something to do, why don’t you tell him to get his own head and ass wired back together into some kind of functional apparatus? If he did he might start making occasional sense again.

Feel free to contact me if you have anything to say that isn’t utterly moronic.

* stands on chair and cheers loudly *

Glen adds: 'It’s not the fact that the New Republic has decided to pester a baby that makes me mad, per se. It’s the fact that so many responsible liberals, for whom TNR once served as a flag ship, still insist on retreating into frivolities like this one.' Go read the rest of this magnificent post.

I wanted to write to TNR too when I saw that article. The thing is, it's not substantially different from every other sneering piece from the left-of-center press. These are the guys that will go and dig up some quote from some fringe-right-wing group and say "Look! See what a hard time those lesbian Republicans have!"

It's because the liberal Left needs Archie Bunker. They can't deal with a rational, moderate, center-to-right mainstream; so they drag up the boogeymen they know they can defeat. And they have to convince their liberal audience, and themselves, that those Archie Bunkers are the threat to America that only they - the liberal establishment - can defeat. What a transparent farce. What an insult.

As I observed earlier, most of the news coverage of the Cheney pregnancy has been gratuitously nasty. The only unequivocally positive statement I could find came from - you guessed it - President Bush. I quoted the media on the couple of issues - specifically the lesbian couple's legal standing in their home state of Virginia and Bush's previous comments on same-sex parenting - that were legitimate and directly relevant to the story.

As my regular readers know, and as you'll know from reading my earlier posts, I do not shy away from speaking up on gay domestic issues, and I don't hesitate to criticize social conservatives when I think it's appropriate. But I also understand that the conservative world is far richer and deeper than the liberal media's caricature would allow us to believe. And I don't need the intellectual pipsqueaks at The New Republic telling me what I'm supposed to think about this.

Because, with all due respect to the late Carroll O'Connor, Archie Bunker is dead.

Self-Hating Queers Defend Mideast Fascists

Jeremayakovka documents one of the worst cases of internalized homophobia in the queer community: the love affair with the anti-Israel, pro-jihadi cause.

For several years, the misfit outfits "Queers for Palestine" and "Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism" (QUIT) have militated for the destruction of Israel under the banner of agitating for Palestinian rights. They have done so since the 2000 resumption of the Arab war-by-Palestinian-proxy against the Jews (also known as "the al-Aqsa Intifada"), and maybe from before. If you live in the real world you probably have never heard of "Queers for Palestine" and "QUIT," but the sad fact is that they are a freak-show fixture of the lib/rad "scene" in and around the San Francisco intergalactic zip code and beyond.

"Queers for Palestine" and "QUIT" consistently:

* oppose Israeli anti-terrorist operations in the Palestinian territories;
* endorse divestment from the region's most thriving economy (and most thriving democracy); and, most notoriously . . .
* endorse the Arab demographic atom bomb aimed at the heart of Israeli civil society, the so-called "right of return" ...

Go to the link for the rest.