christian fundamentalist on the anti gay marriage amendment in Texas

October 16, 2005 10:47 AM

The politics of fear 101: Meet the Fundies! The Texas senate is about to vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage AND civil union. Here are some of the proponents in their own words.
posted by threehundredandsixty (72 comments total)

Is it the heat and the fire ants that fry their brains?
posted by Rothko at 10:58 AM on October 16, 2005

thats just Texas, the land of the not-so free.
posted by subaruwrx at 10:59 AM on October 16, 2005

Mary Ann Markarian: "Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming, the process of licking the rim of the anus and ingesting various amounts of fecal matter. Forty-seven percent of all males engage in fisting, the act of placing their fist in their partner’s rectum for sexual pleasure."

You just KNOW she wants it in the ass.
posted by papakwanz at 11:11 AM on October 16, 2005

Tolerating intolerance makes for an amusing and eye opening effort for me when I read stuff like this. I just want to say God bless & BLOW ME!
posted by alteredcarbon at 11:12 AM on October 16, 2005

papakwanz writes "Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming, the process of licking the rim of the anus and ingesting various amounts of fecal matter"


Do all teh gays have mud-butt?
posted by mullacc at 11:26 AM on October 16, 2005

Well nuts, if Mary Ann doesn't want to know what gay men do in the privacy of their own homes, she shouldn't ask!

It's not like gay men are breaking into her home and "injesting fecal matter" on her dining table.
posted by ilsa at 11:27 AM on October 16, 2005

How do you know, ilsa? That may be the problem!
posted by brundlefly at 11:40 AM on October 16, 2005

Can't we just give Texas back?
posted by Thorzdad at 11:40 AM on October 16, 2005

Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming

So what? What business is it of yours, you interfering prude? And what about all the straight people who do, too? God, I loathe these creeps.
posted by Decani at 11:53 AM on October 16, 2005

How did Mary Ann Markarian manage to poll all the gay males in the world? hmmm? She must have gathered them all in one single place, luring them in with a promise of a free cruise to Brazil, and I can only imagine what happened after that. Poor little Mary. Imagine the trauma.
posted by funambulist at 12:00 PM on October 16, 2005

Can some kind, generous blue state please come adopt Austin? Please?
posted by blendor at 12:02 PM on October 16, 2005

Rimming? Fisting??? That's sooo gross!! Somebody should totally make a law that trample on the civil rights of those sickos!

Okay, I am onboard with the fact that people can believe whatever they want about where homosexuals are going after they die. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that they're all going straight to hell. Could someone tell me what that has to do with outlawing marriage or civil unions? Afterall, everyone who is not evangelical is ostensibly also going to hell, and I don't see too many laws preventing them from getting married, or from having babies and making more little hell-bound sinners. Or is that just on the secret Coming Attractions list?
posted by LittleMissCranky at 12:04 PM on October 16, 2005

OK, this is all very amusing, but y'all are focusing on the wrong thing. These jokers won't be satisfied with stopping gays from marrying or forming civil unions. What they really want is to stop everybody from forming any kind of "civil union" that's not marriage.

Most of these anti-gay-marriage laws are so broadly targeted that they effectively revoke precedent on domestic partnership rulings, not to mention invalidating many powers of attorney held by non-blood-relatives:

The proposed amendment defines marriage as the union of one man with one woman and prohibits the state or any political subdivision from creating or recognizing "any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

It's really a fairly bizarre movement, when you think about it. It's all about relation by blood or by religiously sanctioned ritual. Sure, marriage is still civil, but you'd better believe these folks would have it otherwise if they could.

Aside: Ya gotta love the quality control in modern newspaper writing:

Staples said the U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized the right of states to define marriage: "Polygamy is against the law."

We don't know if the person being quoted actually tried to make the connection between polygamy and states rights, or whether the juxtaposition is just sloppy reporting, but it would behoove the Chronicle to mention that polygamy is, in fact, in violation of federal law. And since federal law trumps local law (as the SCOTUS has ruled many, many times), any Texas anti-polygamy law is effectively irrelevant.

Thorzdad: What makes you think Mexico wants it?
posted by lodurr at 12:09 PM on October 16, 2005

When these fuckers stop eating shellfish and cheeseburgers, and marry their sister-in-laws when their brothers die, they can start talking about the "abomination" of gay sex.
posted by bardic at 12:22 PM on October 16, 2005

Alan Ward is a mental giant. There's no question he should be in a leadership role, especially here in the United States where freedom matters.

"Logically, [policing sexual behavior] is out of the reach of the government, but I’m not saying that I believe it should be. There is not enough manpower—not enough people working for the government—to go into every home of every professing homosexual to put eyes on them and watch to see that they do not commit homosexual acts. That’s not possible. There is not enough manpower."

If only we had enough people to go from bedroom to bedroom, making sure that gayness was not happening! Alas.
posted by mullingitover at 12:22 PM on October 16, 2005

Regardless of issue, these people represent an appaling segment of our society: those that know how you should be living your life better than you do and will make sure that you do live your life in accordance with their wills.

How, precisely, can the personal behaviour of others that occurs in private be of any impact on your life? It is behaviour, not a disease, not an infection. You can't catch "the gayness".

Then again, maybe it is viral. Teh gay is a meme!

The homos are subverting everything with their canny guerilla marketing tactics. Secretly hiding homo porn between the bible pages of all good little christian children everywhere. And though at first these children know these acts to be evil and vile (they are, of course, dilligently studying the word of God) they are seduced by images of ingesting fecal matter. I mean, who could possiblt resist!

Good grief.

Am I gay? No. Am I a gay sympathizer? Not really. I could care less one way or the other. Am I arrogant enough to believe that my lifestyle should be forced upon everyone else regardless of their preferences? No, most deffinately not.

I'm going to complain loud and long though, until everyone else is open minded, just like me.

Wait a minute...
posted by C.Batt at 12:24 PM on October 16, 2005

In addition to being entirely irrelevant, those statistics smelled made up to me, so I went Googling for a source, and came up with this page, which attributes them to Nebraska Medical Journal, 1985 and Lancet, June 9, 1984. 20 year old research is ridiculous, but I'd like to find the actual publications and see the context, sample size, etc. I suspect it goes beyond ridiculous to just plain lying.
posted by scottreynen at 12:38 PM on October 16, 2005

The "hate the sin, love the sinner" logic really gets to me. Homosexuals are okay being homosexuals, as long as they don't act like homosexuals. Hmm.
posted by hopeless romantique at 12:46 PM on October 16, 2005

It's interesting how those featured in the first article choose to justify their beliefs. There seem to be two approaches - one, is simply that they believe/feel/have had it revealed to them that homesexuality is a sin. The other takes that but tries to lay a rational argument on top of it.

In a bizarre way I have more time for those who say it simply comes down to believing that the moral code their faith instils should be transplanted into secular society. At least they are up front about the fact that they want a theocracy, even if they may not recognise what they describe as such. But to take the first person, Mary Ann Markarian, as an example, if you look at her argument there are various points at which it diverges from dogma into pseudo-empiricism. "They only have two signs over at the hospital: blue ones for the boys and pink ones for the girls". "Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming". "The median age of homosexual men dying with AIDS is thirty-nine years old; that’s wrong, not natural". Assertions and statistics gleaned from who knows where are put together as "conclusive" evidence to back up God's supposed take on homosexuality. But although this type of argument is far more irritating, at least it gives the potential to be argued back to. It seems to me that the left - for want of a better word - needs to engage far more with these arguments.

Yes, it's fun to point and laugh at what might seem medieval beliefs... But I think it's only by actively showing the religious right that homosexuality is no more destructive of family values than heterosexuality, that there is no objective difference between rimming and any other sexual activity between consenting adults, that homosexuality presents no danger to you or your children - and showing them through hard evidence, rather than just by shouting back - that we are ever going to bridge this gap. Dismissing those who disagree with you out of hand only tends to entrench the gap. For that reason I'm glad that articles like this exist (thanks for the link). I am guessing that the linked site is pretty liberal in its politics, and there was some implicit criticism in the introduction, but the point about these people being our neighbours is well made, I think.

(throws in 2c worth... thank you for the link, threehundredandsixty)
posted by greycap at 12:46 PM on October 16, 2005

Forty-seven percent of all males engage in fisting, the act of placing their fist in their partner’s rectum for sexual pleasure.

"Placing"? She makes it sounds so easy.
posted by PantsOfSCIENCE at 1:18 PM on October 16, 2005

It occurs to me that I probably wouldn't have even thought to associate things like rimming or wild bath house orgies with homosexuals if it weren't for the hysterical outcries of the anti-gay crowd. That I knew about the supposedly homosexual acts of anal sex, rimming and fisting during my early adolescence was a direct result of this kind of fear-mongering.

If it weren't for the graphic descriptions of these acts, the teenaged children of these people wouldn't know how to get around the obstacles of their abstinence-only education.
posted by mullacc at 1:19 PM on October 16, 2005

The sin/sinner dichotomy has always confused me. More so in the case of homosexuals. How is "homosexuality" defined by these people? Is it having homosexual urges or desires? Or is it limited to satisfying said urges... engaging in the homosexual lifestyle (which evidently involves peeing on each other)?

Say some gay guy comes to the conclusion that sodomy makes the Baby Jesus cry. Is it enough that he does not engage in it? Or is he still a sinner just for having the desire to do it?
posted by brundlefly at 1:20 PM on October 16, 2005

"Texas is not Alabama. This is not discrimination," Staples said. "Texans of all different colors have said this is not about discrimination."

So there you have it; it's not discrimination. You can all go home now.
posted by Citizen Premier at 1:38 PM on October 16, 2005

Someone needs to tell these morons that conservatism is dead.

That's the new meme ... conservatism is dead.
posted by Relay at 1:42 PM on October 16, 2005

Massachusetts has had the lowest divorce rate in the US for about five years in a row.

Latest statistics available indicate that since the legalization of gay marriage in Mass., divorce rates have continued to decline as fast or faster than previously.

___________

I've constructed an index of "social pathology" rates based on :

Murder, violent crime, rape, divorce ( I included this factor because it's such a hot button for the Christian right ), teen pregnancy, and rates of venereal disease.

The data comes from the US census, the FBI, the CDC and other standard US government statistical sources.

When these data are compiled into a state "pathology index" and mapped against anti-gay sentiment as measured by percentage of voters voting in favor for one of the "marriage=one man, one woman" amendments recently passed in ten or eleven US states, an interesting pattern emerges :

There's an apparent correlation between anti-gay sentiment and social pathology rates. The more extreme the anti-gay sentiment, the higher the rates of societal pathology.

Go figure.
posted by troutfishing at 1:47 PM on October 16, 2005

An odd thought just occured to me--back in the day, many were afraid that black men would marry their daughters. Maybe now they're afraid that some big scary man will marry their son. Or some big scary woman will marry their daughter. That's the only way I can understand anyone being so against gay marriage.
posted by Citizen Premier at 1:52 PM on October 16, 2005

The Bible is very clear - we have to put to death those who curse their mother and father and those who work on the sabbath. This is not just my opinion. This is God's opinion.

(adapted from Mary Ann, Leviticus something:something, and CNNNN -- click on the "holy homosexuals" link on the right sidebar in real player)

There is not enough manpower—not enough people working for the government—to go into every home of every professing homosexual to put eyes on them and watch to see that they do not commit homosexual acts. That’s not possible. There is not enough manpower.

Ye people of poor faith! Sure the government doesn't have enough resources for that, but why go to the government when you can sell your idea to Endemol?
posted by funambulist at 1:55 PM on October 16, 2005

scottreynen - unfortunately neither of those two articles are online (for free) and I don't feel like making a trip to the library.

The Nebraska Journal of Medicine is hardly a high impact journal, and it's actually kind of quaint to look through an issue of the Lancet from '84.

I *think* this might be this Lancet article, Changes in Sexual Behavior and Fear of AIDS, that was being referred to. I think that it might be possible to buy the article (PDF) but I don't want to can't afford $30 USD.

Does Coitus Embarass the Fetus? is another article from the same Lancet issue...
posted by PurplePorpoise at 1:59 PM on October 16, 2005

Citizen Premier, after speaking to a lot of these people, I don't think that's it. What's interesting is that a lot of these people aren't against homosexuality at all. They don't care what others are doing in the privacy of their own home and they don't want the government peeking into bedrooms. While these people aren't against gay sex, they are against gay marriage. That's the distinction that matters. Essentially, as it was mentioned above, these people want a theocracy. They want the government to support their religious beliefs; more important, they want a government that's going to say 'This is right, and this is wrong.'

Gay marriage is the ultimate values debate. It's the exact lever that's needed to push for such a theocracy. Just the kind of thing you can use to appeal to far right and the center. Abortion never worked like this; abortion as an issue affects everybody--particularly the young--and support for abortion has always been quite popular. Also with the abortion issue, there's no 'Enemy'--nobody you can point it and say 'Those are the bad people.' But with the gay marriage debate, you get everything you need. You get an Enemy--the gays. And they're aren't a lot of gays so demonizing gays is quite alright. Gay marriage remains a sufficiently abstract that most people don't have to think about it at all. These are always the best issues. So it's the perfect issue to push if you want to sneak God into the government.
posted by nixerman at 2:02 PM on October 16, 2005

"Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming"

Well nuts, if Mary Ann doesn't want to know what gay men do in the privacy of their own homes, she shouldn't ask!

You're playing into their arguments -- the point should be that those statistics are totally bogus (to the point of absurdity. Ninety-two percent of gay males don't even fuck; I'd be surprised if more than 10 percent rimmed).

Here's an article discrediting some of the other statistics. (They're all drawing from one repeatedly discredited study whose contents are endlessly circulated.) Here's a quote:

Bennett is a busy man, but even he has access to the back of an envelope. A moment's thought might have suggested a few simple test calculations. Suppose he assumes--wildly pessimistically, given current incidence data--that half the gay male population is destined to catch the AIDS virus and die of it. The actual average age of AIDS patients at death has been about 40. (Presumably protease inhibitors will extend average longevity, but that will only increase Bennett's difficulty.) For the number 43 to be the true average death age for the entire population of gay males, HIV-negative gay men would, on average, have to keel into their graves at 46. Looked at another way, if even half the gay male population stays HIV-negative and lives to an average age of 75, an average overall life span of 43 implies that gay males with AIDS die at an implausibly early average age (11, actually).

Against this, Cameron and his supporters argue that, according to their survey of obits, even if they don't have AIDS, homosexual males tend to die by their mid-40s (and lesbians by their late 40s). Some downright peculiar results followed from this inference. One is that--contrary to the opinion of virtually everyone else in the world--AIDS in fact hasn't reduced gay males' life expectancy by that much--a few years, at most. Moreover, the obits also recorded lots of violent and accidental deaths. From this Cameron and company concluded not that newsworthy deaths tend to get into newspapers, but that gays must experience shockingly high rates of violent death. With a perfectly straight face they report, for example, that lesbians are at least 300 times more likely to die in car crashes than females of similar ages in general.

posted by Tlogmer at 2:09 PM on October 16, 2005

I also googled looking for some straight dope on those statistics and was unable to find anything but page after page of fundie sites repeating them as "gospel."

In my experience exploring the evolution debate, these types are more than happy to repeat utterly false statements as true, making no effort to determine their veracity despite the fact that "liar" appears both more frequently & more prominently in lists of people going to hell in New Testament than "homosexual" does.
posted by lastobelus at 2:22 PM on October 16, 2005

Hmm, the "Changes in Sexual Behavior and Fear of AIDS" article from the Lancet, from a PubMed query (still no abstract) is just a Letters (hence the lack of an abstract).
posted by PurplePorpoise at 2:25 PM on October 16, 2005

The anti-gay-marriage thing is not a religious issue for Christians. The support in Christianity for seeing homosexuality as a sin is somewhere between slim and non-existant.

This is a bigotry issue, plain and simple. There is no other side of the coin. "It's just not right" is the only justification that anyone will ever be able to bring to the table on this one.

Any thing else is bullshit, plain and simple.
posted by teece at 2:29 PM on October 16, 2005

ok, I found an article describing how this life expectancy statistic was derived. By averaging the age of men with obituaries in popular gay community papers. What utter bullshit. How can so-called Christians engage in this sort of crap when the New Testatment is clearly far more concerned about honesty and avoiding hypocrisy than it is about sexuality?

They should all be forced to only use cars, airplanes and power tools designed and manufactured using only information found in the Bible.
posted by lastobelus at 2:42 PM on October 16, 2005

@ troutfishing; re correlations:
There was a study along those lines, recently in the news. The conclusions were essentially that the greater the prevalence and intensity of religious faith (counting only the Western, patriarchal, monotheist variety), the greater the incidence of various social problems - "homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases".
posted by jam_pony at 2:44 PM on October 16, 2005

It's all based on bullshit. Unfortunately, with Bush appointed new Supreme Ct. people, we can't even look there for it to be declared unconstitutional. And it's not just Texas either.

Straight couples shacking up are next--mark my words.
posted by amberglow at 2:44 PM on October 16, 2005

"The proposed amendment defines marriage as the union of one man with one woman and prohibits the state or any political subdivision from creating or recognizing 'any legal status identical or similar to marriage.'"

If only they were strictly logical, this would get the government out of the marriage business altogether, both hetero and homo. And accordingly I would enthusiastically vote for it. And so would libertarian-type conservatives - because regulating private relationships among consenting adults is not among the legitimate functions of government, at any level.

Alas, they are not logical. What they mean by "identical" is "like, but in addition to the marriage category which is already established, and now restricted to hetero couples". This, of course, would be invidious.
posted by jam_pony at 2:47 PM on October 16, 2005

"Only one percent of homosexuals die of old age; only three percent ever live to age fifty-five."

Well, sure, if you don't count priests.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 3:02 PM on October 16, 2005

you'd think that if they wanted to save the family, they'd be up in arms about divorce, spouse abuse and child abuse

you'd think ...
posted by pyramid termite at 3:07 PM on October 16, 2005

Shackleford, a former GOP delegate, is president of a radical right think-tank called the Free Market Foundation. He also works as a lawyer with the Liberty Legal Institute, where he helps to gin out prayer-in-school and anti-evolution lawsuits.


There you have it

* free market theories (as economic theories) used as ideological articles of faith to support low wages, competition for the masses but not for the bosses and other victorian-age "recipes" to recover from depressions.

* Liberty Legal , attempting to permeate the ideologies into places that should be studying ideologies instead of being drown into any particular one

* religious bigotry, attempting to create handy targets likes homosexuals as scapegoats and scares like terrorist to distract public attention from the misdeeds of their own leaderships

The terrorist have won indeed, time to recover.
posted by elpapacito at 3:10 PM on October 16, 2005

Mary Ann, allow me to introduce you to "Spreading Santorum."
posted by ericb at 3:11 PM on October 16, 2005

At least they are up front about the fact that they want a theocracy, even if they may not recognise what they describe as such

They don't consciously want a theocracy, because they don't even know what it really means. The ones at the top, those who make money out of these organisations and ministries, those are very probably cynical bastards who exploit people's bigotry for their own interests (and if they also believe what they're saying, well, it doesn't really detract from their cynicism anyway). The politicians who collect their funding and votes definitely are.

But the smaller fish, the ordinary people, they want government protection because do genuinely believe that they are threatened - and it's all a much more freudian affair than a political one. Their target is gay and gay rights movements because in some ways it's like with feminism, it's something that goes against their idea of a precise neat order where men do this and women do that and anything else is all deviation and abomination - see for instance dear Mary Ann:

I do not believe that you’re born homosexual. They only have two signs over at the hospital: blue ones for the boys and pink ones for the girls. God knows when we’re born what we’re supposed to be.

No she's not confusing homosexuals with transsexuals - she's saying that gender defines sexual orientation, there can only be one, boys must grow up to be men who penetrate women and girls must grow up to be women who are penetrated by men. The anal sex and rimming and golden showers would probably upset her just the same between a man and a woman. Although, of course, if they're married, then the formal requirement is there, so they're not going to bother decrying those acts when done by husband and wife, because after all heterosexual couples no matter what they do in private are still upholding their beloved family structure that is under threat. Priorities.

It doesn't make sense, but it does from their premise.

And this brilliant piece of manly intelligence here:

we are a family of heterosexuals who really believe in being heterosexual

Can you believe, now being heterosexual has become a matter of principle, a value to fight about, not something that just happens or doesn't happen and may not even always be that either/or clearcut.

You can't use logic with these people. The moment you try and argue with them you've already lost. The gay marriage fight has only emboldened them (and maybe it won't even be worth it). They just haven't had a lesson from history, they haven't actually lived under a theocracy or a dictatorship where people were put in jail or tortured or killed by the government also because of things like sexual orientation. They don't really have a clue. They're privileged, small-minded, puritanically sex-obsessed people who find nothing else to fight about. They may not be a majority but you can't ignore them, which would be what they deserve, utter indifference.

They won't turn the US into a theocracy, that's highly unlikely, but they'll just continue to chip away and pollute political discourse with this and other religion-shrouded 'moral battles', and drive away attention from real issues like economy, employment, education, health care, military spending... That is why the politicians love them.

And they have children. Sweet little innocent kids they can brainwash at their leisure from a very young age, with the help of schools and churches, to turn into another generation of sex-obsessed paranoid bigots (when they worry about how the kids of gay couples will turn out? just projecting. It's all massive projection, where they think gayness can be passed on like ideology and the gays are going to brainwash people like they do). And some of those are going to be the ministers, radio hosts and politicians of tomorrow. Good luck with that.

Sorry for length and unoriginality, nothing that hasn't been said before...
posted by funambulist at 3:14 PM on October 16, 2005

Sorry for length and unoriginality, nothing that hasn't been said before...
posted by funambulist at 12:14 AM CET on October 17 [!]

Repetita iuvant.
posted by elpapacito at 3:19 PM on October 16, 2005

In case anyone's still wondering: the off-the-wall statistics are likely from a pamphlet entitled, "Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do," by Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute. Many of Cameron's figures come from a single survey his organization conducted in 1983 and 1984, and published in 1986. This page picks apart its less-than-stellar methodology, for which, among other crimes against science, he has been censured and expelled from numerous scientific associations.

Props where they're due: Tlogmer's earlier link, though not quite as thorough, is a lot more entertaining.
posted by skoosh at 3:32 PM on October 16, 2005

You can't use logic with these people. The moment you try and argue with them you've already lost

I agree , one can't present them an argument constructed so that the logical fallacies of it are evident even to the most superficial observer, but that doesn't imply that one can't plant the seed of doubt in them and exploit the implicit weakness of their ideologies as a fertile ground for reasoning.

Ideally one should learn and study formal logic and ways of correctly inferring causation..and that kind of education may find a fertile ground in internet users, less exposed to the hypnotic absurdities of television.

Even if one can't expect every person to obtain such and advanced education, one can offer some of the byproducts of it (without necessarily explaining all the process) in hope of shedding some light over obscurantism. After all Lucifer means "he who brings light".
posted by elpapacito at 3:34 PM on October 16, 2005

I would like a softball bat to "meet" these fundies' heads. Repeatedly. Until they stop moving.
posted by wakko at 4:53 PM on October 16, 2005

Someone needs to tell these morons that conservatism is dead. That's the new meme ... conservatism is dead.
Regrettably, the stinking, rotting body is still lurching around, crying out for brains to eat.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:56 PM on October 16, 2005

You people really need to get straight who is the status quo and who are the social revolutionaries.

If the package of public policy that religious conservatives in Texas want reinforced is "theocracy" than it was a theocracy that won its independence at Yorktown, a theocracy that promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation, a theocracy that brought about the minimum wage and organized labor, a theocracy that fought and won World War II, a theocracy that desegrated the south in the 1950s and 1960s...

Now, you are certainly free to advocate for social revolution -- many social revolutions have fine and meritorious results -- but you're certainly not free to pretend as if that's not what you're doing.
posted by MattD at 4:59 PM on October 16, 2005

i don't think one can argue with such people as mary ann markarian at all; their minds are made up, and countering their bad statistics with better statistics will not make any impression. the only thing that might work on such individuals is to be faced with a homosexual in their own close family; that has a chance of reaching underneath the protective bigotry shell (i believe most bigotry is based on quite primal fears).

the reason to keep talking is to reach those who've not yet made up their minds, even though they might be growing up in a family like mrs. markarian's.
posted by piranha at 5:03 PM on October 16, 2005

Uh, what is MattD talking about?
Can you explain your point? Not trying to snark, really not sure what you mean
posted by papakwanz at 5:24 PM on October 16, 2005

Texas should go back to being its own republic.
posted by tweak at 5:53 PM on October 16, 2005

Blendor: Austin was awesome to me and mine after Katrina. Every single person I met was sweet, accepting, and didn't seem to give a damn that four out of the seven of us were gay. I formally invite the city to merge with New Orleans, where rimming and fisting are not just tolerated but encouraged. We will form our own very blue state. Houston is not invited.

Also, I strongly suspect that Ms. Markarian got some cute, small-handed woman to pull those statistics out of her ass.
posted by honeydew at 5:59 PM on October 16, 2005

Can some kind, generous blue state please come adopt Austin? Please?

No need. Just use an existing provision of the Texas state constitution to form your own state.
posted by thewittyname at 6:21 PM on October 16, 2005

There is not enough manpower—not enough people working for the government—to go into every home of every professing homosexual to put eyes on them and watch to see that they do not commit homosexual acts. That’s not possible. There is not enough manpower.

A lack of manpower in homosexual bedrooms?

Sounds like a job for Alan Ward!
posted by Coda at 6:27 PM on October 16, 2005

Funambulist: I think I love you. In a purely heterosexual, non-rimming way.

MattD: Uh, what? I'm sure that your reasoning is entirely obvious to you, but I confess that I don't see your logic. Unless you're saying that these people are trying to enforce mores that were in place at Yorktown, therefore they're direct spiritual descendants of Washington. I also feel compelled to point out the irony in claiming spiritual kinship between those who are supporting what you call the "status quo" and those great events in American history, all of which (with the possible exception of WWII) were won by the "social revolutionaries" of the time.

I mean, really. Trying to claim that discriminating against homosexuals in Texas has any kind of continuity with desegregating the south? Please.
posted by LittleMissCranky at 6:33 PM on October 16, 2005

why do the fundies always focus on sex acts when it comes to gays? all of it is inflammatory speech meant to divide and paint gays as evil and perverted. of course they are free to speak their minds but not to spread lies and rubbish. they're all so sanctimonious, it's enough to make baby jesus cry!
posted by brandz at 6:36 PM on October 16, 2005

Care to explain WTF you're talking about MattD?
Are you saying that labor unions, civil rights, etc. are somehow equivalent to fundie homophobia and bigotry?

Clue: "traditional" fundie religions are a relatively NEW phenonom. Yorktown my unfisted ass!
posted by nofundy at 6:48 PM on October 16, 2005

I have an idea about how some of these fake anti-homosexual statistics might get started. Imagine the following scenario: Two gay guys are discussing an evening meal at a less-than-stellar restaurant.

Guy 1: Did you eat that crap?
Guy 2: Yeah, I must've eaten a ton of that crap.

A homophobic activist eavesdropping on the nearby conversation then concludes, "The average homosexual eats 2000 POUNDS of feces per day."
posted by jonp72 at 7:11 PM on October 16, 2005

Alan Ward is kind of cute, though. I think I want to "place my fist in his rectum for sexual pleasure."

kidding on the second point, but semi-serious on the first. i'm so sorry.
posted by the_bone at 9:07 PM on October 16, 2005

They ALL use fear.
posted by HTuttle at 10:46 PM on October 16, 2005

why do the fundies always focus on sex acts when it comes to gays?
For the same reason little boys chase little girls with dead animals or dog turds on sticks.

Mary Ann Markarian: "Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming, the process of licking the rim of the anus and ingesting various amounts of fecal matter."...
To my knowledge, anyone that would rim would only do so if the other person thoroughly washed their anal cleft first. Otherwise you're getting into that whole raunch area. Oh, and it's not like heterosexuals don't do this as well...for that matter, it's not like heterosexuals don't engage in fisting, watersports, bondage, role-playing...
posted by deusdiabolus at 1:05 AM on October 17, 2005

[i]why do the fundies always focus on sex acts when it comes to gays?
For the same reason little boys chase little girls with dead animals or dog turds on sticks.[/i]

Aww, they like us! They really like us!
posted by honeydew at 1:07 AM on October 17, 2005

I have two very large fists, and I'm gay.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Bwuhahahaha!

How wonderful to have a context in which to make that statement, and have it be so 'fitting'.

"Only an asshole would care,
What goes into our assholes,
and who puts in there.

"And only a person who's really repressed
would attempt to decide for the rest!"

(Romanovsky & Phillips)
posted by Goofyy at 1:24 AM on October 17, 2005

LittleMissCranky: thank you, here's a fistful of love right back at you! :)

You know what's funniest about this obsession with fecal matter as if it was something only gay men end up in contact with? Aside from what deusdiabolus said. I remember one tv show of the "how clean are you" variety where they took samples from the hair and armpit areas of a bunch of willing participants, and when they told them the results, that they had fecal matter in their hair and armpits, they were all so grossed out, and they had to explain to them that it was normal because everytime you have a shower, you're going to get particles of fecal matter all over you. You wash your crotch area, you wash your armpits and hair, there you go. Unless you scrub your hands like surgeons (and they wear gloves too after that), you hold someone's hand, it's likely you're touching their fecal matter too. All sex, including the most heterosexual married kind endorsed by fundies, involves direct contact with fecal matter, via skin if not via mouth. The closer you get to the crotch area, it doesn't take a genius to know you're going to encounter more of it, and in and around the anus, no matter how much you've washed, you're going to encounter still more of it. The air is filled with particles of it anyway, and you're breating it in every day, there is no escaping it. There is no human environment where there isn't some of it because there is no way a human body can be completely free from fecal matter unless they're dead. You'd think these gay-sex-obsessed people should at least be glad that gays are not licking dried up corpses, no?

Sorry, didn't mean to gross you all out. Just to point out the obvious reality that the human body is not a sterile lab environment. It's alive and it produces waste and sweat and dead skin cells and bacteria and all sorts of crap. And that's how God made it (god/allah/vishnu/nature/the cosmos/etc). Someone should tell Mary Ann she's covered in god-ordained fecal matter too. In a strictly scientific sense.
posted by funambulist at 2:48 AM on October 17, 2005

she's covered in god-ordained fecal matter too

Hell yeah, if God has every man and woman covered in fecal matter, stinky bacteria (armpits) and other fine selection of bacteria there must be a reason !

But hey, Mary Ann says you're a disgusting piece of funambolic crap villain homo erotic nazi lesbian nurse ! *stomping of feet* and that you must be censored ! You can talk about doody in public ! *histerical fits*
posted by elpapacito at 5:33 AM on October 17, 2005

elpapacito, tell Mary Ann that by having hysterical fits she's increasing her breathing rate which means she's breathing in even more of the fecal matter that's in the air. If she wants to stay clean and pure, should really stop talking, lock herself up in a sterile tent and avoid all communication with the outside world. For her own good.

Ok I've overdone it now...
posted by funambulist at 5:45 AM on October 17, 2005

related: ... The latest study, published in the April issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that teens pledging virginity until marriage are more likely to have oral and anal sex than other teens who have not had intercourse. That behavior, however, "puts you at risk," said Hannah Brueckner, assistant professor of sociology at Yale and one of the study's authors.

Among virgins, boys who have pledged abstinence were four times more likely to have had anal sex, according to the study. ...
posted by amberglow at 6:14 AM on October 17, 2005

Metafilter: An unfisted ass.

That was great nofundy.
posted by Talanvor at 7:23 AM on October 17, 2005

MattD: As far as I can tell, the American Pathological Christians of today bear VERY little resemblance to their predecessors, either politically or doctrinally. Deism on one hand, Quakers and similar groups in the middle, and a sort of poetic metaphysical Christianity (Philadelphian Society-types) on the other hand dominated the discourse.

The entire idea of the rapture and perpetually-eminent literal Apocalypse wasn't even invented back then. That's not to say there weren't a few doomsday cults, but they were the heretical aberrations they deserved to be.
posted by sonofsamiam at 7:52 AM on October 17, 2005

I still can't believe that MARY ANN MARKARIAN opened her paragraph on rimming with the phrase "the proof is in the pudding." Either she's joking, or she's got enough conflicted subconscious activity going on in her head to power all of Sugar Land.
posted by Pliskie at 8:24 AM on October 17, 2005

They only have two signs over at the hospital: blue ones for the boys and pink ones for the girls. God knows when we’re born what we’re supposed to be.

So in the case of hermaphrodites, God is not sure? God is playing a merry joke?

This is not just my opinion. This is God’s opinion

To me, this is the real sin. Presuming that you know the opinion of God


in fact, if you get ten Christians in here, you may get ten different beliefs.

And, of course, only I know what God really thinks!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 9:32 AM on October 17, 2005

Afterall, everyone who is not evangelical is ostensibly also going to hell, and I don't see too many laws preventing them from getting married, or from having babies and making more little hell-bound sinners.

give 'em time. But until then here's a little poem for you:

First they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
And I did not speak out –
Because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out –
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me –
And there was no-one left
To speak out for me.
Pastor Niemöller, 1938

This poem is a lie, because the first people they came for were the gays, maybe Pastor Niemoller chose to omit it because he was ok with that.
posted by any major dude at 10:05 AM on October 17, 2005