Boogeymen

Cross posted from MNPP

Gay Roots of Evil? or Evil Roots of Homophobia and Intolerance?

You know who…..

This is what propaganda looks like, called out by the Bilerico Project.
from the Bilerico Project:

“Today, many evil forces have set their sights on the dissolution of marriage and the debasing of family life. Sodomy, abortion, contraception, pornography, the redefinition of marriage, and the denial of objective truth are just some of the forces threatening the stability of our civilization. The source of these machinations is none other than the Father of Lies. Satan knows all too well the value that the family contributes to the fabric of a good solid society, as well as the future of God’s work on earth.”
– John Nienstedt, the notoriously anti-gay archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, revealing the depth of his homophobic animus in an op-ed for Legatus Magazine. Nienstedt is clearly still smarting about the fact that over his strenuous objections, the state of Minnesota now allows all loving and committed couples to marry, regardless of sexual orientation.

Who, hold the phone here Nienstedt!
Satan? Father of lies?
Denial of objective truth? Threatening the stability of our civlization?
Really? How about when the early Christian church sanctified same sex marriage, back in the day?
Because they did.

But the Roman Catholic church, and it’s minions like Nienstedt, happily deny any reality that contradicts their current policies of hatred — policies which one and all have NOTHING to do with spirituality or with genuine religious belief, and have everything to do with generating the greatest number of offspring as gist for the church mill. The quality of the lives of those who are adherents to the religion be damned, so long as the church maintains power, wealth and prestige. They promote “Do as I say, not as we do…..or did.”
This is a perfect example of lying for gain, of propaganda used to frighten and intimidate to exert control over people, and of the premise that power corrupts to the extent of the power obtained.

cover art, from the Boswell book

It would be one thing, if new texts that were clearly divine in some demonstrable way, showed that the first 300 years of the early Christian church just somehow lost that bit of the Bible.  But that is not the case; rather it is clearly all about a self-serving policy being put in place, with little secret made about it at the time as to the justification.  NOW however, that justification for everything from contraception, to abortion, to same sex marriage has been entirely subordinated to the greatest possible numbers of more-or-less warm bodies for the church hierarchy to stand on – and from whom to extract wealth, power, and influence BY frightening them with idle, unconfirmable threats about the devil, should they fail to conform.
From the amazon.com site:

Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, Paperback by John Boswell
Both highly praised and intensely controversial, this brilliant book produces dramatic evidence that at one time the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches not only sanctioned unions between partners of the same sex, but sanctified them–in ceremonies strikingly similar to heterosexual marriage ceremonies.

The approach by Archbishop Nienstedt is remarkably similar to that of white supremacist Craig Paul Cobb, out to the west of us on the plains of NoDak, via Raw Story:

A Neo-Nazi constructing an all-white community in North Dakota dismissed questions about his criminal status in Canada by saying the term “gay” was constructed by Jews as a tool of oppression against white people.
“When you say I’m wanted in Canada, that’s for a so-called ‘hate crime,’” Craig Paul Cobb told radio host David Pakman. “And just like ‘gay’ and so many other terms, these are terms devised by Jews to oppress whites.”
Cobb, who was originally arrested in June 2010 for promoting hatred online, left the country before being formally charged with willful promotion of hatred, a statute not found in the U.S.
He also admitted to Pakman that he had no proof to back up his statement, prompting Pakman to respond, “That’s what I figured.”

The 61-year-old member of the “Creativity Movement” — which has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — also seemed to back-peddle from earlier statements about white supremacy, which didn’t hold up well under scrutiny.
The Southern Poverty Law Center notes about the movement’s violent conduct:

Over the years, some so-called Creators have acted on their group’s calls for RaHoWa — “racial holy war” — and been arrested and imprisoned for violent, race-based crimes. In 1992, for example, George Loeb, a Church of the Creator “reverend,” was convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying a year earlier of Harold Mansfield, Jr., an African-American Gulf War veteran, in a parking lot in Neptune Beach, Fla. Loeb was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

So, what is this Creativity Movement? It is a religion; in fact, in spite of behavior that is quite the opposite of what most of us would consider a model for proper conduct, the Creativity Movement, along with the KKK, and a number of other white supremacist groups, rely on a very strong faux religious foundation for their justification.  That the reality is they make it up as they go along, and that it has no foundation in reality – or history – doesn’t matter.  It forms their justification by citing a higher – and unchallengeable and unverifiable – authority.  As a result of having done some research into some of the far right wing nuts and their theology, I now periodically receive random emailing from some of these groups promoting all sorts of beliefs that lack legitimacy or any other virtue, touting new prophecies, end of days signs, alongside claims about Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, especially gays, and any other group over which they seek to contrast themselves as superior.
In spite of Cobb’s claim about white supremacy, he is far from honest about the beliefs of that movement.  Here is an excellent link to an interview:
And you know what? That hateful filth has no more valid or factual justification than what is claimed by Archbishop Nienstedt. Rather they play on the same technique of propaganda, spreading all sorts of fear and antipathy for others. Whether you claim the basis for hating or opposing same sex individuals and their relationships is Jewish or supernatural entities, or a fear of pedophilia, the appeal is to fear, not fact.
I have no doubt that both Cobb and Nienstedt, or for that matter those who claim falsely that gay men are all pedophiles, BELIEVE THAT SINCERELY, in the face of all the evidence factually to the contrary, because they are engaging in emotional thinking that selectively rejects, vehemently with the strongest condemnation, any facts which don’t fit what they choose to believe.
Here is the reality about sodomy – oral or anal sex – it does not harm our society.  Rather it is private choice for potentially healthy, safe, consensual, voluntary, pair-bonding sexual practice, including for individuals who lack the capacity for other sexual enjoyment of their partners.  In Minnesota, the last instance of a prosecution for oral sex included this guy, mentioned on the ACLU website, back in May 2001:

The ACLU’s clients in the case are state citizens whose jobs, homes and relationships with their children were threatened by the sodomy law, including:
A quadriplegic married man who lives in Minneapolis, identified for privacy reasons only as “John Doe.” Because of his disability, the only forms of intimacy he is capable of engaging in with his wife were among those criminalized under the sodomy statute.

Here is the reality about family and couples staying together; mutually gratifying sex is important to long-lasting pair bonding.  It does NOT destroy the family.  Family planning, both through use of abortion or contraception, does not destroy the family. That includes anal and oral sex for some couples, and orgasm relates directly to the release, in part of oxytocin, which in turn is significant in both pair-bonding, and in other instances to maternal and paternal bonding with offspring.  Further, there is NOTHING about the civil definition of marriage which impairs any traditional practice or definition of marriage.  If traditional marriage is all THAT threatened by same sex marriage, then there is something badly flawed with the traditional practice of marriage and family as promoted by either Cobb or Nienstedt.
There is no credible scientific support for the notion that same sex parents are better parents; rather we know that two parents, either same sex or opposite sex, are better statistically than a single parent.  But within those statistics, there are some really bad parents in each group, and there are some excellent single parents.  Gender or sexual orientation has no apparent bearing on either the quality of family life, or spiritual life, or the success of marriage.  Rather acknowledging the legitimacy of same sex marriage EXPANDS the base of stable families and stable couples in our state, which is good for all of our respective communities.
What is the FACT that supports that contention? That those states which allow same sex marriage and/or civil unions have a 20% lower rate of dissolution/divorce than states which ONLY allow heterosexual marriage.
From the HuffPo in late June of this year (2013) :

In states where same-sex marriages are legally recognized, the divorce rate is 20 percent lower than in states that only allow marriages between a man and a woman. For example, Massachusetts, which was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage (in 2004), also has the lowest divorce rate in the country.

So much for Archbishop Nienstedt’s claims, especially about “the father of lies” and “denial of objective truth” regarding stability and the family.
It would seem that by his own definition about lies and the devil, it is Nienstedt who is serving those.  Because he clearly is rejecting all the factual evidence to the contrary, he is clearly discriminating against people who are gay – but also all the MANY heterosexual couples for whom the sexual practices included under the definition of sodomy is part of what keeps their marriages or unions together, including heterosexual paraplegics and quadriplegics.
The reality is that GOD, or alternatively ‘the Devil’,  or some other variant of evil, is just an imprimatur that is stamped on a group of people that have been singled out for hatred and abuse by those who think they have some kind of monopoly over the control of others.  That is sick and that is sad; it is also deeply dishonest, and it is bad public policy.  Shame on Nienstedt and those above him in the hierarchy, and shame on Cobb and his ilk.  They are the only devils, the only boogeymen, on the public stage and at the very public altar.