The religious right has yet another -totally- valid complaint against the godless capitalist market and its heathen ways - Hallmark has begun marketing wedding cards for homosexuals!

(Cue gasps of horror and disgust - or, if you’re like me, murmurs of “So?” or “And…?”)

The Family Policy Network has put together a petition asking Hallmark to withdraw all products that “celebrate, condone or otherwise encourage” teh gay. Petitioners are threatening to do their worst to Hallmark - a boycott!

This could mean serious trouble for the card giant. After all, One petitioner claims to make up 99% of all Hallmark revenue:

John in La Mesa, CA writes, “I will NOT buy from your store until this practice stops. 1% vs. 99%. Looks like a smart business move to me. I don’t think so!”

Oh, ho, ho! You’re in deep shit now, Hallmark!

And oh, snap! A gold crown customer has joined the boycott:

Kathy in Cobb, CA writes, “As a weekly gold crown customer in Montgomery Village Santa Rosa Ca I will no longer support you due to the current stand you have taken.”

As one petitioner notes, Ford’s loss of sales has nothing to do with the downward spiral of the American economy or the gas crunch - it’s the wrath of every Christian in America!

Sven in Herald, CA writes, “I’ll be sure to take my business elsewhere… I doubt you’ll be able to withstand the boycott of millions of Christians. Ask Ford how it’s doing.”

These Christians mean serious business. It’s a good thing that there’s nothing more important going on right now, like, say, a worldwide economic crisis. Or mass genocide abroad. Or a looming environmental disaster.

They have the proof: All gay men are identical faceless aliens.

This website - dubbed “Gay Answers” - is something else. The main notion presented is that anyone who doesn’t want heterosexual sex is no better than a racist. Confused yet? It gets worse.

Claim: Gay men are inherently misogynistic, anti-diversity sexists.

Try to wrap your mind around this one:

Most gay folks don’t feel hate towards the opposite sex. However, when it comes to ‘love’, homosexuality causes an otherwise loving person to always exclude equal treatment of the complementary gender simply because that person is different. This is why gay marriage is called same-sex, not diverse-sex. In fact, gays claim to have a genetic (preconceived) orientation for their own gender superior to the diverse gender.This is no better than a white person always preferring whites above blacks.

Riiiight. Because we all know that lust overrides every sort of love a person can feel, and that if you’re not willing to go to bed with everyone you meet for one reason or another, you’re being a discriminatory bastard.

I’m going to say right now that I love and am loved by people of many different gender identities and sexual orientations. Some of the friends I’ve made through my university’s LGBT organization have become my family away from home. College life has its ups and downs, and I don’t know how any of us would have made it through some of these rough patches unscathed had it not been for the unconditional support of our friends.

On the other hand, I’ve had my share of straight men who’ve been willing to say just about anything for the better part of a week in an attempt to get me in bed. We talk a little, maybe go on a date or two, and when they realize that I’m not really looking for a purely sexual relationship and won’t fall flutter-eyed at their charisma, they’re off after the next woman. According to “Gay Answers,” these men are the diversity-seeking progressives, and I’m just the unrelenting bigot.

Ironically, if the website’s statement somehow had any basis in reality, the obvious conclusion would be that the only way to avoid being a self-devoted bigot would be to become bisexual. Don’t hold your breath on that one.

Claim: Any woman who becomes a surrogate for a male couple is being relegated to the status of second-class citizen because… well, just because.

To support this, they provide the single most blatantly propagandistic (and over-hyphenated) monologue I have ever seen:

“…If our all-male-dominated same-sex union wants a child, we contract a woman as a second-class womb-donor or nanny to serve us, then our unproductive same-sex union collects the marriage tax benefits while the woman who bore our child gets nothing but what we give her. This is what we call equality… Equality for sex-segregated all-male-dominated public civil-marriage.”

If you’ve read any of my posts, you know that I spend the majority of my time tackling women’s rights issues. I have never been given any reason whatsoever to believe that surrogacy infringes on women’s rights when the women involved are emotionally and financially stable, informed, and willing. In my opinion, willfully using your body to help another person (through surrogacy, egg/sperm donation, organ donation, and so on) is a highly respectable decision. There is nothing inherently misogynistic about forming a fair, mutually agreed-to contract with a competent woman (unless, of course, you believe that there isn’t such a thing as a competent woman).

And, please, let’s not pretend that women haven’t been used by men largely for their reproductive capacity throughout the entire history of the known world. SO overdone.

Claim: By nature, heterosexuals cannot be sexist or misogynistic.

This one is a little more subtle, but given the struggle women have put up over hundreds of years to only just recently gain basic civil rights in many parts of the world, I find it pretty damn offensive. You may also pick up on the “parts fit” and “it’s all about the babies” rhetoric:

Men and women are complementary by natural design, being uniquely qualified since the beginning of time, in every way psychologically, spiritually and biologically to be synergistically united together in love. Both sexes are required equally in order to create a complete family. This is true from any scientific, religious or evolutionary perspective. However, nature never gave any qualifications or significant purpose to same-sex.

First off, no individual is “in every way psychologically, spiritually, and biologically” qualified for ANYTHING based only on the sexual organs they possess. There’s a hell of a lot more to it than that, and individuals are far too diverse to lump them into any group based on sex alone.

Second, a “complete” family does not necessarily include children, and heterosexual lovers are not the only ones who can acquire or raise kids. Nor are they always capable of doing so. Adoption and surrogacy are nothing new, and scientific advances continue to give couples of all types more and more options. As a side note, a well-rounded person will have loved ones of both sexes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they must be parents or lovers.

Third - and this is a big one - no type of relationship is “required” to give equal consideration to all involved. For thousands of years heterosexual relationships have been dominated by males, and until recently women weren’t treated much better than livestock. Their input counted for little to nothing. Is this the “natural design” of the “equal” relationship? I think not.

And finally, nature gave human beings plenty of reasons to engage in sex aside from reproduction. Virtually everyone, no matter how far to the right they may be, eventually has sex with the hope or assurance that a pregnancy won’t result. Sex can be a deeply intimate bonding experience, and it can also just be a lot of fun.

For any anti-gay conservatives who might be reading this: If you’re going to keep your bigoted views, at the very least don’t try to promote them under the charade that you’re pro-diversity or give a shit about liberating women. It’s as pathetic as it is despicable.

For all the proud American flags and boisterous bumper stickers, I don’t think the religious right gets it.

Like when they suggest that marrying someone of the same sex is tantamount to marrying a corpse or animal.

Or when they insist that allowing terminally ill patients the option of choosing their own death is the same as government-sponsored genocide of “unworthy” groups.

Or, for that matter, when they suggest that the life of a zygote, embryo, or fetus with no conscious brain activity is equal to that of a sentient woman.

Someone, please tell me - where is the disconnect here? Why does consent mean absolutely nothing to these people? Why is human will and pursuit of happiness absolutely valueless?

How can anyone be so thick as to suggest that marriage is anything less than a deep commitment and a legal union, one that anyone in their right mind would recognize cannot be consented to by lifeless bodies and/or animals? Honestly. It’s a whole new realm of stupid. Even the most dimwitted of the Republican tribe should be able to comprehend that when you take one “I do,” out of a marriage, you don’t have one.

Advocating for the right to choose life and death on our own terms is about as far from advocating murder or genocide as you can get. And hey, even the occasional freeper gets it:

Freeper 1:

You have always had the ability to make that decision - if you really want to head out of here, you can breathe into a plastic bag that’s over your head, swim too far out to be able to return, shoot yourself, OD on any number of drugs.

Freeper 2:

You can do all of those things with a healthy body. The miserably dying who would want to end their pain often can’t do anything but lay in bed crapping themselves and pressing the morphine button harder.

For those who can do it themselves, brains and hair all over the wall and a closed casket funeral aren’t a very kind thing to do to their friends and survivors.

You certainly have a point with the slippery slope from choice to die to obligation to die, but as far as I’m concerned the obligation to suffer is worse.

What breaks my heart most of all is the Catholic stance against Amnesty International’s new policy advocating abortion access for rape victims in regions like Darfur.

One survivor’s testimonial:

“After six days some of the girls were released. But the others, as young as eight years old were kept there. Five to six men would rape us in rounds, one after the other for hours during six days, every night. My husband could not forgive me after this, he disowned me.”

Another woman -

“Women will not tell you easily if they have been raped. In our culture, it is a shame. Women hide this in their hearts so that men don’t hear about it.”

From an Amnesty International press release (emphasis mine):

Women who have become pregnant as a result of rape are most likely to suffer further abuses of their rights. There is the trauma of the rape itself as well as the difficulties associated with carrying and caring with a child who is the result of violence. In the specific social context of Darfur, in a society where rape is considered a taboo and a shame for the survivor of this violence, the child who is a result of rape will mostly be considered as a child of the “enemy”, a “Janjawid child”. Survivors of rape and their children are most likely to be ostracized by their community and married women most likely to be rejected by their husbands. Women may feel forced to abandon the child who is a result of rape and face another traumatic decision to make.

The communities of the women raped do not seem ready to accept the need to provide their full support for these women and possibly the child who could result from such violation. In group and face-to-face interviews conducted by Amnesty International in May 2004, women and men said that while they would accept raped women back into the community, the child as a potential result of rape would not be accepted. This leads women who have become pregnant as a result of rape to a situation of further ostracism, trauma and abuses of their rights. The lack of medical and psychological care facilities to deal with survivors of rape in the refugee camps in Chad and the many more victims in the IDP settlements in Darfur further compounds this situation.

For many men in the refugee camps the human rights violation of rape seems to directly translate into a humiliation against themselves and the group they belong to.

This is addition to the psychological trauma of carrying a “Janjawid child” as the result of being brutally raped. This is in addition to the dangers of childbirth, many of which are exacerbated in abused rape victims.

The Catholic community doesn’t live in some lovely fantasy world where women and children don’t suffer or die from rape and its consequences. They just don’t care. The message is this: when you become pregnant, your most basic needs become irrelevant.

As Mindelle Jacobs wrote in her comment to the Edmonton Sun, “Zygotes matter. Women don’t.”

They just don’t get it.

Classy. A Texas church retracts its offer to hold a memorial service for a Navy veteran after discovering that he was, in fact, gay:

It seems incredible that no one at Arlington’s High Point Church saw the obvious: that Cecil Sinclair, a dying 46-year-old Desert Storm veteran awaiting a heart transplant, was gay.

The church had reached out to Sinclair in his illness because his brother was a janitor and a church congregant. While Sinclair was in the hospital, High Point’s audio-visual minister met Sinclair’s life partner. When Sinclair died, church officials knew the Turtle Creek Chorale, a gay men’s chorus, had been asked to sing at the funeral.

But it was only after Sinclair’s obituary ran that Pastor Gary Simons clumsily canceled a memorial service it had offered for Sinclair — the day before it was to take place.

Simons’ leadership was graceless, but High Point is a private institution and is entitled to reject whom it wants to.

As Sinclair’s partner Paul Wagner, a Desert Storm veteran and a member of the armed forces for 16 years, put it, “I have fought for their right to hate me.”

Appalled?

Later, Simons told the Dallas Morning News that the situation was comparable to a congregation member losing a son who was a thief or murderer. High Point might offer a service, Simons said. “But I don’t think the mother would submit photos of her son murdering someone.”

You simply cannot honor a person’s memory if you look upon the life they had with their loved ones with the same disgust normal people would attribute to murder.

“You can be charged with a hate crime if you make a statement or take an action that inflicts injury or incites a breach of the peace based on a person’s race, creed, gender or perceived sexual orientation.”

- First Assistant McHenry County State’s Attorney Thomas Carroll (Daily Herald)

Two 16-year-old girls have been charged with committing a hate crime after they printed and distributed fliers with a photo of two boys kissing (one of whom was a student at their school) and the statement, “God hates fags.”

Lifesite.net calls it a “nasty prank.” At FreeRepublic.com, rightwingers are ranting about free speech. But somewhere in Illinois, a gay teenager is dealing with the fact that inflammatory fliers featuring an intimate picture of himself are circulating his high school.

The target wasn’t homosexuality itself - this was about one SPECIFIC student (who the girls had been feuding with) and using his sexual orientation to bring as much harm to him as possible. Is there anyone naive enough to think that this little stunt hasn’t comprimised his safety at school?

To many, this is all about free speech and its imminent end. But if this had occured based on the race of a student, would anyone be defending the girls?

And what sort of penalties are the girls facing? (CBS2)

Tom Carroll, first assistant state’s attorney for McHenry County, said penalties for the girls could range from probation to a 30-day sentence in the Kane County Juvenile Detention Facility. If they were convicted, Carroll said, the girls’ records would be cleared at age 18 but those records would remain available to law-enforcement agencies.

In the not-so-distant future, it may be possible for lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters.

Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.

Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman’s bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.

The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.

But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons. The latest research brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer.

To rational people, this might seem like nothing more than an interesting (and possibly helpful) new development - but for the fundies, it is a sign of the masculine apocalypse:

Let’s see, now that the lesbians can reproduce free of “evil” men, I wonder how long it will be before one of them gets the idea to create Neo-Amazonia and purge all who possess the Y chromosome?

They’d have to get past Islam to do it.

Once the homosexuals succeed in destroying what’s left of Western Civilization, there will be nothing to protect them.

I new this day was soon approaching. The next step is the gender-specific virus.
I think there were a number of sci-fi episodes and even movies based on such concepts.

The Revolution will be swift; the Neo-Amazonians will soon have the entire planet in their rule. The newly-created man-killing virus will be unleashed into the water supply, and the few remaining men will become enslaved workers in the diamond mines. Witchcraft will be declared the New World’s official theology, and having abortions will become something of a national pastime. Buahaha!

Or, you know, not.

Nope, not kidding:

If sex bonds two people, then sexual pleasure without a partner will still powerfully bond you, but the bonding will be to whatever sights and thoughts are present at the time. For some people, the bonding will be to the sight of their own body. If so, it will be this – and possibly the sight of their own gender – that will begin to dominate their passions.

Likewise, looking at yourself in the mirror the wrong way is bound to turn you homo. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “damn, I look sexy,” you have already begun the transformation. You have been warned!

It gets better:

Then there are those who try to convince themselves they are being godly by masturbating while focusing on spiritual things. If Jesus walked this planet today, would you try to have sex with him? Sexual bonding is exclusively for a husband and wife. Anything else is a perversion. Sexual bonding must not be used to join a person to a relative or a friend or an animal or an object or to the Holy Lord.

And I thought my mind was in the gutter. I can honestly say that I have never, ever fantasized about taking Jesus to bed. Ever.

Recently, Disney decided to start allowing homosexual couples to purchase Fairy Tale Wedding packages. Disney had previously allowed gays and lesbians to take part in its vow renewal program, and Disneyland held commitment ceremonies - but gays were still barred from the far more luxurious wedding packages. As Pam at Pandagon noted:

Its problem was that it treated them like second-class citizens — homos got shuttled off to a Disney banquet hall or ballroom, not the Rose Court Garden where weddings with licenses are performed.

So Disney took their money and shoved them under the rug - but when Disney’s policies came under fire, the company finally chose to change them.

“We are not in the business of making judgments about the lifestyle of our guests. We are in the hospitality business and our parks and resorts are open to everyone.”
- Donn Walker, Disney Parks and Resorts spokesman

Here’s what some of the particularly nutty fundamentalists had to say about it when the story was reposted at FreeRepublic.com yesterday:

Let the homosexuals have Disney theme parks and cruises. Disney has proven time and time again that families are not in their corporate interest.

Homosexuals and their sycophants want to be inclusive and permit prancing about in front of a phony ‘minister’ all the while ogling our children.

“Humans’ who put their pee-pees and faces into another’s poo-poo are just plain sick and unworthy of mingling with normal families.

Translation: Perverts welcome at kiddie park.

Just what every child who visits disneyland needs to see. A couple of pervert homo’s being wed.

Close the place up for the public’s own good.

It’s simple. You teach your kids at a young that being a homo is simply wrong and in the same league as being a drug addict or a prostitute.

Being a ‘practicing’ (apparently they can’t get it right) homosexual is worse than being a drug addict or a prostitute.

Many homosexuals sodomize children and sometimes kill them. Others after sodomizing their victims eat them, or sometimes bury them under the house.

That would make them a form of life lower than most animals.

Legislator Introduces Outrageous Homosexual Bill - Oh noez!
And here’s what’s so “outrageous”:

State Senator Sheila Kuehl has introduced legislation that will ban textbooks and teachers from any instruction that “reflects adversely” upon homosexuality, transgenders, bisexuals or those with perceived gender issues.

The article uses fancy terms like “reverse discrimination,” to distract from the point, which is that this kind of legislation is meant to prevent blatant bigotry and religious biases from promoting hate and intolerance through public schools.

Really, how do you get it across to these people that it is NOT okay to push personal beliefs and biases through public institutions?