Apparently I am one of the “forces of hell.” This might or might not come as a surprise to those in my Sunday school class. And it certainly won’t shock readers of my blog.
Nevertheless, it took James Dobson to out me as one of the “forces of hell.”
On Tuesday, during his daily radio show, Family News in Focus, Focus on the Family Chairman James Dobson said: “…as you all very well know, marriage is under vicious attack now, I think from the forces of hell itself. And it’s either going to continue to decline, and as I told you in my office a few minutes ago, I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of Western civilization itself….We’re really in a crisis point, right now, right now…where the family is either going to survive or it’s going to fall apart and it will happen in the next few years….” In the past, Dobson has said same-sex marriage will destroy the U.S., destroy the earth, and is more important than the war on terror. He also has compared marriage equality advocates to Hitler and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I blame DCDemocrat for making me part of Dobson’s “forces of hell.”
I always thought of myself as being open-minded about equal rights for gays.
I didn’t know anyone who was gay until I was 17 when one of my best friends told me he had to talk to me. I was terribly worried because I had seen him hanging out with my favorite girlfriend and I was certain he was going to tell me he was going out with her. He was very serious and stammered and couldn’t get to the point. I finally cut him off and asked him point blank about my suspicions.
He began laughing. “No, I’m gay,” he said.
I felt relief. His coming out as gay to me I could deal with. His going out with my favorite girlfriend would have ended our friendship.
What James Dobson fails to see is that whether someone is gay or not gay doesn’t affect us. Tony didn’t change me. His relationship with his boyfriends didn’t change my relationship with others.
Tony, by the way, was deeply religious. I was the agnostic/atheist in high school.
I saw how difficult it was for Tony to tell me he was gay. And I empathized deeply with him. He was a good friend, but like all of my high school friendships I lost track of him over the years due to distances and time.
But Tony is part of why I’m in Dobson’s “forces of Hell.”
Flash forward 10 years.
I was between marriages living in a beautiful two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of an old mansion converted into an apartment building. A great place. My roommate took a job elsewhere so I had to find another roommate. A paramedic I knew told me his boyfriend was looking for a place to live. I worried about Scott’s age (he was 19). I didn’t worry about his sexuality. We had a few simple rules. Rule No. 1, the most important rule of the apartment was this:
If you drink the last of the Kool-Aid, you had to make another pitcher.
This rule could not be violated. Both of us skirted this rule terribly though, leaving just enough Kool-Aid at the bottom to pretend the pitcher was not empty. One time he was so worried about not violating the rule that he used packets of raw sugar to make the Kool-Aid because we were out of regular sugar.
The other rule was no one was allowed to have sex in the living room. He didn’t want to see me getting it on with the revolving door of women I dated at the time any more than I wanted to see him getting it on.
And that was it. We hung out watching programs about autopsies on The Learning Channel and playing Scrabble with friends. Scott stole cookies from his job as a waiter at a restaurant and we lived well together.
So Scott is part of the reason why I’m in Dobson’s forces of Hell.
Flash forward to the summer of 2004.
I volunteered at the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Martinsburg, W.Va. One of the first volunteers I met was a tall, well-spoken man from Washington, D.C., who had come out to the county to protest a visit by Bush once and ended up returning often to help volunteer for the campaign.
We got talking about different things and we learned we both posted on DailyKos. After he met me, DCDemocrat uprated a couple of my comments to salvage them from the hidden comments and a friendship was borne.
DCDemocrat worked his ass off for Democrats in a county 90 minutes away from where he lived. He shouted himself hoarse on waves and he wore his fingers to the bone on phonebanks.
DCDemocrat, out of a feeling of necessity, had kept his sexuality private while working in the Republican-dominated Berkeley County. The bigots were pushing gays as a boogeyman to fear.
Until then, I had always been a silent supporter of equality for gays. I made a promise I would be silent no longer on the issue.
Here’s some other diaries I’ve written on equal rights for gays and on gay-issues.
Fred Phelps: West Virginia ‘By Far the Worst’ WhooHoo! Take that San Fransico
Radical homosexuals seek to destroy me
Look to Montana for gay equality
and my favorite:
God bless gay-bashing Rev. Fred Phelps which might offer a lesson to the conservatives supporting George W. Bush’s faux marriage amendment.
When the bigots go after the Tonys, Scotts, and DCDemocrats of the world, they’ve unleashed the forces of hell all right. Except they’re the ones who are doing the Devil’s own work.
Of course, Dobson has apparently failed to see recent divorce rate statistics. One in two I believe. Does that mean western civilazation has ended?
Oh, I’ll join you in the forces of hell.
of Western “civilization” (particularly the Christianist version we’re enduring at the moment), I say DOWN! with marriage. I’m ready for the present Western civilization to be over. However, I cannot get my neural synapses to get together and make a connection between homosexual preferences and heterosexual marriage. The two seem about as mutually exclusive as two concepts of interpersonal relationships can be. Therefore, how one can threaten the other is beyond my reasoning ability.
Could my inability to see the linkage be because I’m Carnacki’s twin force of hell? Or yours, boran2? [Insert BWAAA HAAAA HAAAA! here.]
Thank you from the bottom of my gay heart for being the friend you are to the community. This dairy and others today have me crying from appreciation as I type. I know and have always known that the communit has many fine friends and supporters but on this day it means more than you will ever know.
You are not alone. We have your back.
Damn straight we do.
Or, considering the whole ‘forces of hell’ thing, maybe that should be: damned straights, we do.
{{{RF69}}}!!!!!!!!LOL!
🙂
Come to the lounge for a drink tonight, and bowling I think.
because it includes a “no” option.
Let me give you a little bit of background here. I come from a religious tradition that believes that the devil and his minions can masquerade themselves as angels of light. (I can’t give you exact words, but that’s the gist of it.) And the Bible itself (Matthew 24) says that there will be many who will come in the name of Jesus, and deceive many.
It is my opinion, which I give you for free and guaranteed to be worth at least what you paid for it, that Dobson falls under this category. There are ways to tell whether a message comes from God or from the devil, and the primary one is: Does the message harmonize with God’s other messages?
Now the central message of Christianity as offered by Jesus is this: Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. Does Dobson’s message square with that central teaching? It does not. In fact it preaches intolerance and hatred, exactly the opposite. He is therefore condemned by his own words.
So much for Monday School. Of course I do not expect Dobson to ever accept, internalize, or even acknowledge this truth, since it’s also true that getting a man to understand something is next to impossible when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.
Omir,
As a preacher’s son, I was taught to examine any ministry based on its fruits. I believe that you have described the “fruits” of Dobson’s ministry with complete clarity! Anger and hate fills Dobson’s “teachings” and that is a recipe for pushing more people into a dark world which can not project love and support.
Thanks for the Monday School Lesson!!!
Love your neighbor as yourself…I don’t recall any addendums to that such as Love your Neighbor unless she’s Mexican or Love your neighbor unless he’s Black, or if they are Iraqi, or if they are Native American, or if they are White or if they are Gay do you?
Let me try to distill your remarks into a version more like talking points:
(Then with this setup, open a discussion of the messages.)
This is one of those issues where I can’t even comprehend the winger arguments. Their mouths open, they speak, but no sense comes out. I know this isn’t an unusual phenomena, but I find myself wondering how on Earth they can even begin to justify opposing gay marriage to themselves, much less to anyone else.
Obviously you don’t understand what a enormous threat gay marriage is.
In gay marriages there are two penises or two vaginas.
This is too confusing. How can we tell who is doing the fucking and who is getting fucked ? How will we know who is dominant and who is subordinate ? We all need to know this, just like we need to know a baby’s sex before we pay the parents a compliment. Even one’s potential fucking status determines how we relate to them.
This will wreck heterosexual marriage because some misguided souls might get the idea that the fucker/fuckee dichotomy doesn’t automatically determine who’s superior.
Seeing examples of egalitarian relationships, grounded in loving cooperation, might lead some to question sex roles, hierarchies, and even authoritarianism.
And wouldn’t that be a shame ?
This is appropr of nothing, but tomorrow, in Hell, Michigan (a real place, near Ann
Arbor – as the rightwingers would expect, I’m sure), they are having 666 day, in honor of it being 6th month, 6th day , 6th year of the century.
I’m sure the forces of Hell will be present, and having a jolly time. . . You’d be quite welcome, Carnacki!
If you dont’ know the significance of 666, well, use your Google!
of Equal Protection under the law is undeniably business-friendly, to begin with, and I don’t think the importance of keeping the principle that rich men should make more money very closely aligned to religious beliefs can be overemphasized.
If business has felt at all constrained by the civil rights act, though such constraint may not be immediately perceived by the underclass 😉 enshrining a sort of Equal Protection caste system into the constitution has the potential to offer substantial savings to employers, as well as resonate with religious extremists, and maintain a level of anti-otherness that can be useful for any number of commercial and/or political purposes, though in the US there is little if any, real difference between the two.
There are also chilling implications involving fundamental threats to the doctrine of women as property, as marriage has long been used to reinforce this belief, even in modern western societies where women are oppressed in completely different ways than how it is done in the east, but one thing both east and west CAN agree on, female equality will invariably impact the arms industry, and not in a way any savvy investor wants to see!
It is also important, especially in a warlord state, to ensure that the populace is ready at a moment’s notice to obey orders involving whoever they are told is the enemy.
Since the beginning of time, religion has been one of the best strategies available to effect this, and because there is little to suggest that sexual preference is anything more than, let me think here, sexual preference, thus there is no real argument against one sexual preference or another beyond declaring that according to one’s personal interpretation of a sacred text popular with the local populace, a preference for whatever is the less prevalent preference, in the case of human beings, that would be a same sex preference – is evil, sinful, and a force of hell.
It was revealed the other day that loyal Americans can now use their computers to view webcams and notify gunmen in the area of indigenous people who are exercising their inalienable right to move from one part of their continent to the other.
Perhaps as more laws related to sexual preference are enacted, this same technology could be used by the devout to notify local gunmen of suspected forces of hell.
Count me in too. When my best friend came out to me, we were inseparable. He was 17 and I was 15 and he sat me down and told me he had something very important to say. But, he couldn’t spit it out. Mind you, we were good liberal kids with good liberal families and we had never thought bad things about being gay. He and I were soulmates and always confided in the other. I was the first person he told. But, still, I thought he was going to tell me he was dying of cancer or some such thing. When he finally blurted out he was gay, it was a total relief and I screamed at him, “Is that all?” “So What!” I didn’t understand why it was so hard to say. I continued to be his best friend and to this day, 26 yrs. later, we are very close. He is my daugher’s fairy godfather, a role for which he is very proud (being a memeber of the Radical Fairies and all) :>)
I went on to live with a gay man in college. We had lots of fun getting ordained and all together. I met my husband in that house and our having a gay roommate didn’t stop that from happening.
To this day, I have many dear friends who are gay and many of them in long lasting beautiful partnerships. My best friend that I mentioned earlier fell in love the same year I did, and he and his mate are still going strong after 15 years while my mate and I are now getting divorced. What’s that bs about family values?
I am with you BJ. I may not be gay myself (and goddess knows there were times where I wished I was), but I will stand right next my brothers and sisters and work for equality, be you white, black, brown, straight, gay, abled or disabled or any combination thereof.
My kid is so confused because I have pushed the point with her so often that I don’t care if she is gay, bi or straight. But, I will be damned if she finds she prefers women and is scared or ashamed of it. No kid of mine will go through the torment and shame and guilt that my best friend went through. I’d rather a confused kid who is willing to experiment than a confused kid who doesn’t understand that it is ok to like different people.
A friend of mine from college is the reason I joined the forces of hell.
We both graduated from a fundamentalist christian college and then moved to different states. She wrote me a letter that I still have today and I dare any winger to read it and not weep. She knew she was gay but had decided that the “christian” thing to do was to not act on it. So instead, she descended into a state of depression and alcoholism that almost killed her.
As she recounts this story, she talked about not wanting to do anything socially because she was afraid of her attractions. One time she did decide to go to a social gathering and was immediately attracted to a woman. And she ran home immediately to cry herself to sleep.
I too have lost touch with my friend. But last time I saw her, she had embraced her sexuality and was involved in a wonderful relationship.
My friend helped me realize that if there is a god, how can he be against a loving relationship that feeds the soul? And if such a hateful god exists, I don’t want any part of it.