Don't Brainwash Our Children! We Want To Do It Ourselves!

One of the constant, in-our-face arguments against any progress in LGBT rights or recognition is inevitably some variant on "Think of the children!"  They really like the version that's about their children's delicate minds being "brainwashed" into tolerating queerness/gender variance by the mere presence of unashamed queers/transpeople.  I know - being brainwashed into tolerance?  Terrifying!  But it turns out the real problem with it isn't that they don't want their children being brainwashed.  They just want to have the chance to brainwash them first.


Enter Peter LaBarbera (aka Porno Pete, for his habit of "going undercover" to leather and lifestyle events to describe in graphic detail what those scary homos are really getting up to - seriously, it's a fucking obsession, he goes to Mr Leather EVERY YEAR pretty much) and his Homophobe-In-Training Camp, where students as young as 14 will listen to Porno Pete and his line-up of speakers, including Matt Barber, Ryan Sorba, and Greg Quinlan, for three days, teach them "how to answer the lies and myths that so readily emanate from the “GLBT” (“gay”) camp." 

So it's not that they don't want their kids exposed to depictions of homosexuality/transness.  It's just that they don't want them exposed to depictions of *actual* LGBTs.  Instead, they want to shield them until they're old enough - at 14, mind you - to be trained in the hateful rhetoric of the movement and learn the version of LGBTness that is useful for that cause.  Ahh, the all-too-common stink of conservative hypocrisy.

In all seriousness, snark aside, I am deeply disturbed and offended by the idea of taking high school freshmen and deliberately, systematically teaching them to hate like this.  LGBT bullying is already a serious issue in our schools, and these people want to make it worse by combining the volatility of youthful emotions with focused training in anti-LGBT hate?  That is a recipe for teenage hate crimes right there.  And it is Not. Okay.

Let's just hope nobody signs up and the whole thing is a terrible flop.

Will The Real Bryan Fischer, Please Shut Up?

Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association - for which, of course, "family" only means straight, Christian, two-parent, would-never-consider-abortion, etc. - is not exactly known for his moderate or temperate rhetoric.  He's advocated for deporting Muslim Americans, refusing to allow Muslims in the military, recriminalizing homosexuality, killing sexually immoral people with spears (the Biblical story of Phinehas, which he approvingly cited a couple weeks ago on his radio show; he claims he was just holding up Phinehas' courage, but since that courage was expressed by killing a fornicating couple...), and my favorite on the sheer WTF??? scale, stoning to death a whale that attacked its trainers under Old Testament Law.  But today...he's just about reached Glenn Beck levels of bwuh?.

He describes a supposed tactic of insurgency fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is to bury hepatitis- and HIV-contaminated needles point-up in the ground around roadside bombs, in the hopes that U.S. military personnel will, while digging up the bomb, prick themselves and become infected.  No idea whether or not this is true, but it's the line AFTER that paragraph that has me reeling with bwuh?.

If we connect the dots here, the inescapable conclusion is that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism.

Um.  It is?  Inescapably?  He must be playing with a different set of dots than I am, because no matter how I shuffle those dots around and connect them in my head, there is no way I can ever get "domestic terrorism" and "gay sex" to connect.  But don't worry, he will be happy to mansplain his off-this-planet conclusion!

Every time an HIV-infected male person has [unprotected] sex with another male person, it's essentially the same as plunging an infected heroin needle into his arm.

There, I fixed that for you.  Of course, it's still not true (HIV transmission is not *guaranteed* if one has unprotected sex with someone who has it, it's more of a Russian Roulette sort of thing) but it's at least less wrong.

He's passing on a potential death sentence, just as the Taliban seeks to do on a foreign battlefield.

Ok, so we're trying to draw a parallel between the Taliban and gay DEATHSEX.  Is it sad that I can honestly say I've seen weirder parallels drawn?  

It is because of the risk of HIV transmission that the FDA will not allow a male homosexual to donate blood if he has had sex with another male even one single solitary time since 1977. The second riskiest behavior for HIV infection is injection drug use.

Hopefully not for much longer, what with the whole science-doesn't-support-that thing.  But you go ahead and uncritically accept the Government Knows Best attitude about it, since it's convenient for your argument.

Now if gays are allowed into the military, they will be inevitably be put in battlefield situations where donated blood from soldiers may be necessary to save the lives of wounded comrades. An HIV-infected American soldier whose blood is used in those circumstances may very well condemn his fellow soldier to death rather than save his life.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the military screens entrants, including a medical exam, and I'd imagine HIV is on the list of disqualifiers for military service.  A quick google confirms my suspicions in all of 3 clicks and 20 seconds, so the score for fact-checking stands at Bryan Fischer: 0, Random Blogger: 1.  Also, my military-medical knowledge is fairly limited, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and speculate that the odds of needing an in-the-field, direct transfusion from one soldier to another are vanishingly small in this day and age.  Combine that with the odds of an active-duty soldier having HIV in the first place, and this scary scenario is laughably unlikely.

If open homosexuals are allowed into the United States military, the Taliban won't need to plant dirty needles to infect our soldiers with HIV. Our own soldiers will take care of that for them.

Oh, for the love of...I seem to recall saying this in my last post, and I know I said it on Twitter earlier, but it seems I need to say it again: THIS IS NOT ABOUT *ALLOWING* LGBs INTO THE MILITARY.  THEY ARE ALREADY THERE.  Kthx.

But I was right.  He's playing with a very different set of dots than I am, since his set apparently includes dots like GAY SEX IS DEATHSEX and THERE ARE NO GAYS IN THE MILITARY UNLESS WE LET THEM IN and ALL GAYS HAVE HIV BECAUSE THEY'RE HAVING GAY DEATHSEX.  Can we just send Fischer and Beck off to rave at each other in a dark corner somewhere away from the rest of us, please?