Early last year, Rev. Lonnie Latham, a Baptist preacher who railed against the evils of homosexuality, was arrested for inviting a male undercover cop in a seedy part of Oklahoma City up to his motel room for oral sex. Latham’s trial is underway now, and his lawyer’s opening gambit is interesting in light of the fact that many of Latham’s co-religionists would make homosexuality illegal if they could:
Latham’s attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.
“Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal,” Martin said.
Both sides agree that there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a “legitimate governmental interest” in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma has filed a brief alleging that Latham’s arrest also violated his right to free speech.
Before his arrest on January 3, 2006, Rev. Latham was a member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and preached against civil marriage rights for gays and supported a resolution calling on gays and lesbians to reject their “sinful, destructive lifestyle.”
But Rev. Latham is not on trial for hypocrisy, unfortunately, or for sleazy and stupid behavior. He’s on trial for offering legal sex to a stranger, who happened to be a cop.
If he’d made the same offer on the Internet or in a bar, rather than on a street corner, he would have gotten what he wanted without having to give up his pulpit — or his hypocrisy.
Earlier this month, Rev. Tim Ralph, one of the ministers charged with degayifying self-hating homo evangelist Ted Haggard announced that Haggard had been completely cured, and anyway, he only had sex with the gay prostitute and no one else:
We have verified the reality of that struggle through numerous individuals who reported to us firsthand knowledge of everything from sordid conversation to overt suggestions to improper activities to improper relationships.
In investigating Haggard’s assertion that his extramarital sexual contact was limited to former male escort Mike Jones, the board talked to people close to Haggard and found no evidence contradicting him, Ralph said.
“If we’re going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward, and that usually happens really quickly,” he said. “We’re into this thing over 90 days, and it hasn’t happened.”
Well, Rev. Tim, it has now. The people in charge at Haggard’s former mega-church have done what they say is a “reality verification” on their former leader, and it appears Ted may need further degayification:
“[We] have done extensive fact-finding into his lifelong battle with a ‘dark side’ which he said in his confession letter has been a struggle for years,” Pastor Larry Stockstill, part of the church’s board of overseers, told the 14,000-member congregation Sunday.
“We have verified the reality of that struggle through numerous individuals who reported to us firsthand knowledge of everything from sordid conversation to overt suggestions to improper activities to improper relationships. These findings established a pattern of behavior that culminated in the final relationship in which Ted was, as a matter of grace, caught,” he said.
Stockstill did not elaborate…
None needed. Ted was perving on men in his church, and even leading some of them astray. Looks like Pastor Ted has a lot more gay to pray away.
Mitt Romney’s dots don’t connect. That was painfully clear in his recent interview with George Stephanopoulos on This Week.
Every straight question George asked was answered sideways by Romney. He had a “yes, but,” a “not exactly,” and a “O.K., but let’s talk about now” for every query. The most interesting oratory gymnastics by the Republican presidential candidate concerned his membership — including being a bishop, the president of Boston Area Parishes, and a two-year missionary in France — in the cult of Mormonism.
Mormons: “It is our belief that the new Jerusalem will be established within the state of Missouri.”
Stephanopoulos: I just have one more question about this and it has to do with the Muslim world.
In your faith, if I understand it correctly, it teaches that Jesus will return probably to the United States and reign on earth for 1,000 years. And I wonder how that would be viewed in the Muslim world. Have you thought about how the Muslim world will react to that and whether it would make it more difficult, if you were president, to build alliances with the Muslim world?
Mitt Romney: Well, I’m not a spokesman for my church. I’m not running for pastor in chief. I’m running for commander in chief.*
So the best place to go for my church’s doctrines would be my church.
Stephanopoulos: But I’m talking about how they will take it, how they will perceive it.
Mitt Romney: I understand, but that doesn’t happen to be a doctrine of my church.
Hold on there, pard. Even though you went on to claim that you only voted for Democrat Paul Tsongas because you were a registered Independent; and that you were pro-choice but now you’re pro-life except not that much because it should be up to each state to decide; and that you used to favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military but since Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is working so well, now you want them to hide their sexual orientation; and that you supported the Brady Bill’s three-day waiting period but now we don’t need it since we have faster computer systems so you joined the NRA a few months ago…even though you wormed you way through all that and more, you were just flat wrong or lying about the Jesus coming to America bit.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, looking to improve his standing with the party’s conservative voters, said Sunday the court decision that legalized abortion should be overturned.
“I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned,†the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.
McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who “strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States and do not legislate from the bench.â€
McCain did not say whether local, state or federal law enforcement officials would be charged with ensuring that every pregnancy is brought to term. He also did not say whether women who illegally terminate pregnancies early or their doctors, or both, should be imprisoned.
In response to the article I posted today describing a couple of innovative and important proposals for saving the institution of marriage — criminalizing adultery and de-licensing marriages that do not produce children — a Christian conservative wrote a rather lengthy response that caught my attention.
If you have mowed the lawn, stopped by the office or baked a cake on Sunday, you are as big an abominator as the gayest person on the planet. Your earthly punishment is death and your cosmic penalty is eternal damnation.
It would have been interesting to hear what a right-wing Christian thought about a tight clampdown on the rules related to marriage. Instead, as is typical of the Limbaugh-Hannity-O’Reilly-trained mind, this writer focused on the style of my article (my questionable wordsmithing), railed fantastical charges against “the Left” and offered wild suppositions about what I don’t know — but never got around to addressing the substance: locking up adulterers and annulling non-procreative marriages.
But this bit of Dittohead bombast made me chuckle:
The piece is also filled with fallacies, and I give the writer (and most activists) the benefit of the doubt in that they don’t read the Bible, and that they have been spoonfed the lies about what it contains and base it off of stereotypes instead of lying themselves. “In fact, there is nothing of any consequence about gay sex in either Testament.” Oh really? Ever read Leviticus? Probably not.
Leaving aside the fact that I am not an “activist” (and calling me one insults those who are), as it happens, I am extremely familiar with the contents of the Bible, especially Leviticus, and especially the part of Leviticus that says being gay is an abomination unto the Lord:
Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
Yup, and since “lying with” is Bible code for “having sex,” I’m in deep shit. But as bad as this is, a couple of lines down it gets worse — much worse:
Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”
What? No boiling in oil?
Yes, the biblical sentence for being gay is the death penalty. It is unambiguously clear. Gay people must be killed on sight, and their corpses are to be drenched in their own blood.
It says so in the Bible.
Which brings us to the tricky part. If you believe the Bible, and you believe that gay people are doomed to hell because of this edict in Leviticus, then you also have to believe gay people should be executed on the public square. If you don’t believe all those things, then why bother believing any of them?
The experience of human spirituality might well remain constant from millennium to millennium, but it is impossible to take seriously today judgments made by desert nomads 5,000 years ago about food storage, apparel, animal sacrifices, women’s rights and human sexuality. Our understanding of these things has changed radically — is still changing. What we know now renders the attitude of nomads in 3,000 BCE to be, well, inconsequential.
But Enough about Me
So let’s talk about you for a moment, dear reader. You may be thinking, “He’s just tap dancing around the issue to excuse his immoral lifestyle choice. I’m not gay so I’m going to be fine.”
Sorry. Even if you are as “completely heterosexual” as Rev. Ted Haggard, you are not off the hook, abominations-wise.
Sadly, dear reader, you have undoubtedly committed abomination-class sins in your life — maybe as recently as at lunchtime. Maybe even at this very moment. In fact, you could be committing an abomination-class sin as you are reading these words — without even knowing it.
Worse news: ignorance is no excuse. You have committed sins that are equally as bad, equivalently as offensive to the Lord, as anything any gay person has ever done. And you are going to hell in the very same handbasket.
So before you judge me and deny me the right to marry the man I love and have lived with for 28 years, let’s examine your sins more closely.
There have been two exciting developments recently in the campaign to protect marriage. In Ohio and Michigan wingnuts are pushing adultery laws with life-sentence penalties. In Washington state, liberals have proposed a law that prohibits infertile couples from marrying and annuls marriages that have not produced children after three years.
Count me in. I’m strongly in favor of both these efforts, and believe they warrant serious debate.
Criminalizing Adultery
Rightwing anti-marriage activists say that allowing same-sex couples to wed would destroy the institution of marriage.
But any rational observer would say that it isn’t homos who are wrecking marriage, it’s adulterers who cause most marriages to fail. And since about half of marriages end in divorce, we can surmise that there is a whole lot of adultery going on.
If conservatives feel as strongly as they say they do, why not make adultery punishable by death?
I have long been an advocate of taking the anti-marriage right at its word and criminalizing adultery — after all, it’s in the Bible. One of the Big Ten: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.
Conversely, nowhere in the Ten Commandments does it say Thou shalt not be gay. In fact, there is nothing of any consequence about gay sex in either Testament.
I was surprised to learn last week that several states already (or, rather, still) have laws on the books against adultery. In Michigan, the penalty for sexual misconduct is a life sentence.
Here is good news for unhappy homos and homo-hating Christians alike. Rev. Ted Haggard has completed his therapy and apparently has forsworn consorting with male prostitutes forever. After only three weeks of therapy, he has been judged to be “completely heterosexual” now:
Evangelicals believe science has a liberal bias.
“He is completely heterosexual,” [said Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur, Colorado, one of four ministers who oversaw Haggard’s re-education therapy.] “That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.”
Ralph said the board spoke with people close to Haggard while investigating his claim that his only extramarital sexual contact happened with Mike Jones. The board found no evidence to the contrary.
“If we’re going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward, and that usually happens really quickly,” he said. “We’re into this thing over 90 days and it hasn’t happened.”
Science, of course, says that sexual identity is engrained and immutable, and that no amount of guilt, recrimination or praying away the gay can change it. Of course, Evangelicals like Rev. Haggard believe science has a liberal bias, as Stephen Colbert put it.
No word on whether Haggard addressed the issues behind his and his wife’s admitted use of crystal methadrine.
Listen up, men. WorldNetDaily columnist Jim Rutz has a warning for you: If you consume soybean products such as tofu or soy milk, you will become gay and, worse, your penis will get smaller:
Rutz says homosexuality is a choice — and yet it is still caused by consuming soy products. Doh! I can’t win.
Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.
While it is true that soy products contain estrogen, there is nothing to support that it causes homosexuality or “feminizing” of men who eat them.
Rutz notably fails to quote from a medical source to support his argument, merely referring to generalizations that he spins to his own ends. In searching for any medical reasons for his arguments, I found the opposite.
The official stance of the American Psychological Society [APS] is that there is no defineable single cause for homosexuality, and that it is likely a combination of biological, genetic, and environmental factors….
[The] APS states that there is no evidence for a rise in homosexuality. Rather, there is a rise in people willing to admit they are homosexual.
Talk about having it both ways. Rutz says homosexuality is a choice — and yet it is still caused by consuming soy products. Doh! I can’t win.
Even funnier is the idea that research exists on human males that correlates soy intake with genital size.
The heat is off: A guy named Frosty in Federal Way, Wash., is trying to ice Al Gore’s movie about global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” because it does not present an alternative to science as an explanation of why the world is getting measurably hotter. Frosty Hardison supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education — SURPRISE!
There is no opposing view to science, which is fact, and the facts are clear that global warming is here, now.
When he heard that his daughter was going to be exposed to Gore’s PowerPoint presentation, Frosty complained about the film and the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it is calling a “moratorium” on teachers showing the film in class. Frosty explained why he wants to cool Gore’s jets to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
“Condoms don’t belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He’s not a schoolteacher,” said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. “The information that’s being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. … The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD.”
Neither is the opposing view that the world will end in ice.
“Somebody could say you’re killing free speech, and my retort to them would be we’re encouraging free speech,” said school board member David Larson, a lawyer. “The beauty of our society is we allow debate.”
School Board members adopted a three-point policy that says teachers who want to show the movie must ensure that a “credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented,” that they must get the OK of the principal and the superintendent, and that any teachers who have shown the film must now present an “opposing view.”
That shouldn’t be hard to do, as the oil companies have been spending millions to disprove man-made global warming for years, using the same tactics as the tobacco companies used to convince people smoking is good for you. Chrysler has gone so far as to criticize European views of global warming, describing climate change as “way, way in the future, with a high degree of uncertainty.”
So there’s plenty of naysayers out there. You don’t have to be a knuckle-dragging creationist like Frosty to find alternative theories. Like Satan is doing it. But the Hardisons’ opposition is actually more, er, simple than that:
“From what I’ve seen (of the movie) and what my husband has expressed to me, if (the movie) is going to take the approach of ‘bad America, bad America,’ I don’t think it should be shown at all,” Gayle Hardison said. “If you’re going to come in and just say America is creating the rotten ruin of the world, I don’t think the video should be shown.”
You can’t argue with that kind of rhetoric, now can you?
Laurie David, a co-producer of the movie, said that this is the first incident of its kind relating to the film.
“I am shocked that a school district would come to this decision,” David said in a prepared statement. “There is no opposing view to science, which is fact, and the facts are clear that global warming is here, now.”
Sorry, Laurie, there is an opposing view to science. It’s called ignorance.
God knockers: I suppose it was bound to happen. There are a bunch of pissed-off atheists and nontheists out there who have finally had enough of George W. Bush and the Christian Coalition’s attempts to create an American theocracy. They are fighting back with overheated rhetoric that sounds a lot like the Bible thumpers who think Jesus is their co-pilot and anyone who thinks differently from them is a hell-bound sinner. Well, seems the hell-bound sinners are fed up with the Christian Right’s antics and are responding in a movement some say has morphed from “secular humanism” to “secular fundamentalism.”
Apparently, the athesists and nontheists are mad as heck and they are not going to take the babble from the Bible Belt anymore.
That’s the gist of an article that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday. Apparently, the athesists and nontheists are mad as heck and they are not going to take the babble from the Bible Belt anymore. They’ve formed a lobbying group.
Now I’m no believer in God or Jesus, heaven or hell. I don’t even believe in the Pope, though I admire his tailor. And I can sympathize with the other nonbelievers who are tired of those who feel they need to have a friend in Jesus or rest in the bosom of the Lord insinuating their beliefs into the political and social structure of America. From opposition to stem-cell research that could save millions of lives to promotion of the teaching of intelligent design in public schools to having the Ten Commandments displayed in public buildings, the religious right has hijacked what originally was conceived as a deistic, nonreligious country. It’s the intolerance of difference, stupid.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they would just believe what they believe, sing their hymns and tithe in their churches, but they insist on inflicting what I consider to be childish superstitions on the rest of us. If you want to believe that there’s a paternalistic white guy who made everything in the universe in six days sitting up there in the clouds, I’m fully prepared to allow you to believe that and not invoke the Baker Act (as it’s called in Florida) to commit you to an asylum where you can receive treatment for your delusions. I think that’s pretty Christian of me, don’t you?
Used to be, if you had folks claiming to be speaking directly to God, you’d either hail them as a prophet, burn them at the stake or send them to the loony bin. Today, you give them their own TV show and the mainstream media dutifully reports their absurd predictions, and not ironically, either.
But if you’re an unbeliever like me, you are treated as if there’s something wrong with you because you believe a woman should have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, people of the same gender should be allowed and encouraged to enter into long-term relationships under the rubric of marriage and that Muslims have as much right to fly on an airline as a knuckle-dragging snake-handling evangelical Christian.
So I’m joining the Secular Coalition for America today. You can join too, by going here and signing up. You don’t have to believe anything except that you should be able to not believe anything you don’t want to believe without having the sims and the pod people shoving their Christian tenets down your throat via the U.S. gubmint.
Meanwhile, I look forward to watching the secular fundamentalists kick some Christian butt.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
“If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.”
“We are done, Americans are done with endless conflict in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, American lives… this is insane and we have to call it for what it is.”
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”
Early last year, Rev. Lonnie Latham, a Baptist preacher who railed against the evils of homosexuality, was arrested for inviting a male undercover cop in a seedy part of Oklahoma City up to his motel room for oral sex. Latham’s trial is underway now, and his lawyer’s opening gambit is interesting in light of the fact that many of Latham’s co-religionists would make homosexuality illegal if they could:
