God Bless This Mess

I have to say the thing that leaps out at me most about this report is that Geena Davis is, in fact, still acting. It's like finding out Coolio is releasing a new album.

Drudge (and the Drudgekateers) are declaring that this is "attempting to get us ready for Hilary in '08", although as is usual, the power of Hollywood's social conditioning is vastly overrated. After all, West Wing got the Democratic Party...it got the Democratic Party...it got Peggy Noonan a paycheck. Dammit.

You do, however, have to love the unironic link to the Newsmax summary of the Joe Klein article in which Klein points out that it might be a bad idea for Hillary to run because publications like Newsmax will go batshit crazy. What power has she, this Clinton? I believe it to be...REAL ULTIMATE POWER. And godless Hollywood lesbianism, which is much the same thing.

Alas, I digress. The push to ban gay and lesbian adoption hasn't progressed nearly as far, largely because it has an actual impact on the state. Covenant marriages are the vanity plates of matrimony; the adoption ban is taking cars off the road. The push to ban gay and lesbian adoption is being led by Greg Quinlan and his "Pro-Family Network", a Dayton-based paean to Quinlan's ability to maintain an erection around a woman. Greg offers such insights as:

Greg's mom was a born-again Christian who married an atheist with an attitude. That's where the trouble began My dad identified with Archie Bunker in every way," Greg explained. "The only difference was Archie had some mixed-up belief in God and wasn't violent. My dad was violent. And in an abusive situation usually one kid is the abused one, and I was it."

Yeah...I remember last time I went to an atheist meeting, we got this little brochure on how to beat a kid until he turns gay. Changed my life, that's for damn sure.

But at age 10, a neighbor boy introduced Greg to sex. His double life had begun. "But I kept going to church and playing the Christian role," he said. "Growing up as a teen, I was interested in sex with other men only because of that introduction," he added. "I've known thousands of homosexuals and I've never met someone who was not introduced to sex at an early age, generally with the same sex.

At age 23 Greg made his sexual behavior public, "blowing the doors off the closet," as he describes it. He had many sexual encounters, visited gay bathhouses all across the state, was a regular patron of porn shops and lived the party life within gay social circles. "I'm HIV-negative but it's just a miracle I'm not infected," he admitted.

So, let's get this straight. Kids experiment with sexual ideas and activities, even if they don't know what they're doing. It happens all the time, gay, straight, whatever. However, Quinlan has never met a single homosexual person who was not having the sex before puberty (presumably). Why is it that every gay person I know tells the exact opposite story, many of them fearfully celibate well past the age of normal experimentation? Oh, yes, because I hate children.

And it sounds to me like Greg was gay and self-destructive, which are two separate and non-related qualities. Being gay did not make him have sex with lots of other men, just like being straight doesn't make me go out and find someone new to boink every time I get it up. But this is a fantastic little bit of dictation - Greg had what he says is a hard life and was sexually irresponsible, which must mean that all gays and lesbians are the exact same. Did he talk to anyone he knew in gay circles?

Long story short, he got into "lunatic left" "gay politics", which he doesn't really define, much like everything else he's talking about. But it's easy to see where his stance comes from. Homosexuality is a sort of septic shock to the spirit stemming from the too-early introduction of sexuality (meaning that those games of "Doctor" should be turning me gay...well, just in time for Ezra's birthday party tonight), and gays and lesbians are, predictably, highly inclined to continue the lineage by whoring out their clearance babies to the local Creepy Uncles Network.

Quinlan isn't deriving much support from Ohio Republicans, thankfully, but it does raise the question of the right's hierarchy of value. The assumption on their part is that pro-choicers are nihilists on the subject of life's value, so if you appeal to them on the grounds that they can discard of a baby just as well as a fetus, you at least have a chance to waste several decades of a life rather than a potential that hasn't even been realized yet. Subsequently, we turn around and say that even though adopted babies are the byproduct of life's garbage disposal, gay people still can't have them, as the only thing worse than being a tossed-away loser baby is being a tossed-away loser baby that's gay.

-Jesse Taylor

(X-posted from Pandagon.)