Comments

1
Keep it coming. People need to know what people really believe. The best way to fight Republicans is to expose them.

Whenever someone says "it's against nature" I hear "I don't understand why I'm so turned on by this".
2
Sex with Poison Ivy of Batman?? Yes, please!
3
Gee, and hardcore bigots like SB wonder why we don't believe him when he says he hates.
4
Shit! When he says he doesn't hate, I mean. I would believe him 100% if he admitted he hates gays.
5
Wow. Those are impressively stupid people. It sounds like especially ignorant middle school students discussing sexuality. Ugh.
6
Well, OF COURSE there would be an epidemic of marrying your sister if that was legal! Isn't every kid's dream to grow up and tie the knot with that booger-launcher from the next bedroom?
7
Fascinating. The political analysis is very interesting to hear. Choosing her position based on what her staffers tell her will get the most political points. It's not anti-gay, it's pro-family. Keep telling yourself that. It's also interesting that they come up with several biological explanations for gayness and conclude that it's against nature.

Also, they say the people who care the most about this issue are the social conservatives... only because of some weird obsession.
8
I couldn't make it more than a minute in. Holy fuck. That is some really nuanced analysis that they are performing there.
9
I can't believe she didn't blink once during that meeting.
10
"It's not anti-gay, it's pro family." They keep trotting this canard out year after year, and don't realize that it has never been a winning argument.

The LDS Church went so far as to manufacture a political talking points document (the Proclamation On The Family) and then wrapped it up in the mystery of godly revelation, asked all their members to post it on the walls of their homes, and tried to wrap themselves in the "we're just FOR the family!" argument.

Meanwhile, their position on the family tore my family apart.
11
@ 10, I know a woman who was brought up faithfully LDS, but came out as a lesbian. Her family was shunned when they refused to shun her. "Pro family" my ass.
12
@11, exactly. I have two gay brothers; the "family is forever" mantra certainly didn't work for us when my father disowned my brothers and when the Church excommunicated them.
13
Idiot 1: I never bought that people were born that way
Idiot 2: They always ask if you were born straight, that is their argument
Idiot 1: Absolutely, you are born with your sexuality - I think homosexuality is a behavioral choice.

WOW, no cognitive dissonance there...
14
I facepalmed so many times, I think I broke my nose.
15
Who's the loud man with the Santorum-themed claims?
16
@15 I believe that is Jeff Bazan - her ex-chief of policy who now works for another Councilman.
17
This is a city nearly twice as big as Seattle.

The sad thing I think about it is how crassly they discuss scoring points with the base by making disparaging comments about a minority. Politics as usual, but sickening to hear. "Can we throw some questionable confusion?" How can they be anti-gay for the base without actually looking hateful?

They discuss a study about identifying gay people based on their photos alone which is apparently real, though I can't find the text of the study to see if it seems credible at all.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl…
18
An aide suggests that homosexuality could be linked to biology: “Americans can, with almost a 90 percent success rate, identify gay people by their face alone,” he says.


So that's where Dwight Schrute works now.
19
Shorter blockquote @18 "MERIKANS! FUCK YEAH!"

'Cause the residents of other countries don't have this superpower, natch.

I'm too lazy to look it up, but weren't the results of that study a lot closer to "barely statistically significant" than to 90%?
20
Gotta love that debating technique of just saying "Yes" over and over again when someone disagrees with a (stupid, meritless) argument you're making.
21
@8, yeah, I got tired of that schmuck saying 'yes, yes,' as if he's perversely excited over the prospect of 'the coming destruction.' Reminds me in LOTR, where the orcs are arguing w/ each other, "...shivering and licking his lips, as if the word had a foul taste that he savored painfully."

The anti-gay crowd are orcs, committed to hate. If they can't find someone around them to hate, they turn on themselves. A Russian, a Saudi, an American Fundie all are suspicious w/ a seething hatred of each other, but immediately join together when a 'pro-gay liberal' walks into the room.
22
You can all spout on about this woman, but don't forget that one of her aides stood up and took action, and even though he lost his job (that won't last long, though), his exposure has pretty much ensured the passage of San Antonio's non-discrimination ordinance. (Another councilman has affirmed support out of this, reportedly passing the threshold for passage.)

Well done, James Stevens.
23
@18: But then Chan responds: “No, that's because they shave,” Chan said. “And I also think they could take hormone shots.”

What.

The.

Fuck?
24
@16

If we weren't told this was a staff meeting, I'd have thought she was attending a Focus on the Family seminar.
25
@9: Beat me to it.
26
The ignorant leading the stupid.
27
I'm glad to know that conservatives like this are so concerned about what is natural and what is not. I presume that after they take care of the gay problem they'll move on to regulating GMO food?
28
@21

Ummm

Your paranoid bigotry is leading you astray, junior.

There is no "anti gay crowd". There are a lot of folks genuinely confused that anyone could be attracted to the same sex. That's only anti gay to a bigot like you. There are a lot of decent people concerned about being asked to publicly support perversion and deviancy with the name of marriage, but that's just good sense. There are folks who think that while what you do in your bedroom is tour choice it lays not a scintilla of obligation on others. Again, no rational person would dispute that.

No, the propagation of hate, intolerance and bigotry is the province of the Gays should have more rights than others brigade. You know, people like you.
29
Jesus, the stupid is incredibly powerful here. "That's because of the muscles in the face" (that makes you able to identify gay people). Chan just sounds utterly clueless generally, not just on gay rights in particular. You know, people like you, @28.
30
Not unusual for a minority (in this case Chinese) to kick the ladder out from other minorities/or perceived minorities as they ascend the ladder. See it all the time at work as well as other places.
31
Is Elisa Chan the person who sounds like a REALLY dumb twelve year old girl? Jesus Christ. How is this person electable for any office anywhere? Oh right. Texas.
32
Email: district9@sanantonio.gov
33
Yes, in every state and country where gay marriage has been legalized, it has led to incest marriage and human-animal marriage. Except that it has not happened at all. In fact, nobody EVER mentions incest or polygamy or bestiality except to hatefully link those things to gay rights. Sorry, the connection just isn't there.

And @28, gay people getting married does not equal "more rights than others" and you know it. That argument just doesn't hold water. Try again.
34
@ 28, one can't be bigoted against the hateful and ignorant (ie., bigots. Like you.)
35
@33

Actually I know nothing of the kind. Insisting on codifying the ridiculous definition of marriage involving same sex couples for the convenience of a tiny self selected minority? Yeah, sounds like legally codified inequality to me. .
36
In case you get too worked up over this, you have to realize that morons like Chan represent an increasingly minor viewpoint.

"This debate has gone from a debate between nonreligious and religious Americans to a debate dividing religious Americans", says Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute. MOST religious people in America support gay marriage: 81 percent of Jews, 57 percent of Catholics, 55 percent of mainline Protestants, even 24 percent of white evangelical Protestants, more than double the percentage just a decade ago -- and 51 percent of white evangelicals aged 18-34! Even black evangelicals are coming around: Delman Coates leads a flock of 8,000 in in Maryland, and he says "The people in the pew are further along on this issue than those of us in the pulpit".

This war is over. We won. Seattleblues lost. We all gain, though, even him.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arch…
37
@ 35, if you respected facts, you would produce them. You never do, because they prove us right and you wrong.
39
Fucking Christ on a cracker, blueballs. You have finally made an argument more stupid than your "pot is illegal, ergo all people who smoke pot are addicts" thesis.
As Bob Dylan wrote, "You're an idiot, babe, its a wonder that you still know how to breath".
@37- blueballs wouldn't know a fact if one were to introduce himself while penetrating him in a public restroom.
40
@35: What right would gay people get that straights wouldn't? Everyone could get gay married, not just the queers.
I keep making this argument and you keep running away from it. According to you, when anyone can marry someone of the opposite gender, it's just and equitable, but when anyone can marry someone of either gender, it's giving gays special favors. WTF man.
42
Depressing.
43
"An aide suggests that homosexuality could be linked to biology: “Americans can, with almost a 90 percent success rate, identify gay people by their face alone,” he says."

If your grasp of biology doesn't extend beyond phrenology, it's time to take your self out of public service and back to school.
44
@9 FTW

@36

Increasingly 'minor' viewpoint? Do you ever get out of your tiny little bubble?
45
@44: When the military and pro wrestling have come over to our side, that's kind of the writing on the wall don't you think?
Because really, everyone knows, as the WWF goes, so goes the nation.
47
@44: Our tiny little bubble contains the President of the United States of America making an It Gets Better video. Yours contains...this video. Good luck with that.
48
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-…

Whatever makes you feel better, you guys, but this is the reality when you leave your white, liberal, coastal American bubble.
49
@48: I'm a gay black man and my family is from rural Louisiana. I don't need a reality check; I do not live my life in a bubble. However, being black has put me in the interesting position of having seen what happens- what it looks like in the world- as ignorance breaks down and tolerance builds up for a minority. Is the work ever done? Of course not. But I have indeed seen it get better for me, as a black man and as a gay man, and that momentum is manifest in things like gay WWE wrestlers, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the president making a IGB video, the president being black etc. etc. This is a good thing. Your inability to stop shitting on it means you're either on the wrong side of history or just a naysaying dick. It's pointless and irritating, either way. Just sayin'.
51
@48: Ah now I know you're pulling our leg Confluence! You just linked to the onion, so either you're just kidding around to get a rise out of people, or you are an idiot.
Your call!
52
@40

Well, by that reasoning polygamy and close relative marriage should be made law too. Normal people could avail themselves of these things as well. And they have at least historical support having been forms of marriage at some point, which gay so called marriage can't.

I mean over time and cultures marriage has been bases on love or money or political advantage but always heterosexual. It's the Gays Are Privileged Citizens brigade that wants the defining element of marriage changed, ask your buddies why they hate marriage and family so vehemently. Frankly it puzzles me.
53
@52: Oh babyblues, you have to just stop. It's over. You've lost. Your children will go to gay weddings, serve in an integrated armed services, watch gay story lines on professional wrestling, performed by gay wrestlers, work with openly gay people and get into vicious bake sale battles with gay parents for supremacy within their PTA.
In short, normal life.
Your grandchildren will wonder what the hell is wrong with you.
54
Women as chattel has historical support as a form of marriage. Actually, there is more historical support for marriage as property exchange than romantic union, which according to you further seals its legitimacy. And here you are, loving your wife like some kind of privileged citizen. Why do you hate marriage and family so vehemently? Frankly, it puzzles me.
55
@53

Perhaps the destruction of marriage by gays is a fait accompli. For my children's and grandchildren's sake I hope not. And for their sakes I have an ethical duty to defend the decent and honorable and sacred against attacks from things like Dan Savage.

If marriage is, as you claim, dead then with Edna St Vincent Millay I say "I do not approve and I am not resigned.
56
@55: Millay was a bisexual feminist who enjoyed a successful open marriage for 26 years i.e. not your kind of chick. The poem you quote is "Dirge Without Music" and what the narrator does not approve of and is not resigned to is death, for the narrator and for those the narrator has loved. It's about vitality of spirit, not potency of self-righteousness. It's kind of perfect that you would misinterpret it as such. It's kind of perfect that you would misquote a poet who died twenty years before you were born and yet was decades ahead of you in terms of social progress. You have warmed my lit major heart this day, Seattleblues.
57
@56

That Millay was a pervert with a mockery of a marriage has nothing to do with anything. Frankly that bit at the end of that poem is about the only thing I like from her writing.

What apparently you didn't learn as a lit major is this- I don't have to like the artist or even most of their work to find something of value in it. Les Miserable was awe inspiring, and the mediocrity of "Hunchback" or Hugo's personal foibles diminish my enjoyment of that masterwork not one tiny bit.

So yes, in looking up that Millay quote on my bookshelves (it's been awhile since I'd given it much thought) I'm aware of who she was and which from which poem it comes.

Which changes my point not at all. If I thought that you and your fellow perverts had destroyed marriage and family with gay so called marriage, my duty to defend those institutions against you barbarians would be stronger, not diminished.

Something to consider? Change can be destructive as well as constructive. We can change away from good as well as towards it. And that destructive change is what's happening to my country right now, barbarian.
58
@57: Bitch bitch bitch. I note that your name-calling is creeping back up the hostility scale- "barbarian" and "pervert" are not too far from your beloved "fags" and "dykes", now are they? I'm not an essentialist, so I concede that you can interpret Millay's work any way you like and without taking her biography into account. But the context is still delicious.

Finally, though I'm sure this point has already been made, if your marriage is materially harmed by Bob and Ted getting hitched down the street from you, your marriage is untenably weak and was ill-advised to begin with. And that's nobody's fault but your own. Get righteous about that, bigot.
59
@57: Also, note my deliberate separation of author and narrator @56 and then repeat that condescending bullshit about what I didn't learn as a lit major.
60
@ 59, if it weren't for a deep-seated intellectual dishonesty, borne by SB's need to rationalized his hate (which in turn is prompted by his self-image that he is intelligent), SB would have no arguments to make at all.
61
Blueballs would have loved the dark ages. I suspect he fantasizes about breaking people on the wheel for "perversion" while he attempts to masterbate.
62
@58

Homosexual acts are by any rational definition perversions of healthy sexuality, hence pervert.

Someone who tries to destroy the social building blocks that help hold a culture together- well I ask you, what better term than barbarian could I apply?

Fag and dyke have only pejorative senses and can't express anything but hate. But using English terms accurately only offends those offended by reality.
63
@21 one zillion nerd points for extremely apt LOTR reference.
64
@62: I'll take deviant; it's not pejorative and is actually scientifically accurate ("pervert" denotes a willful transgression which, in this context, is in fact pejorative). Homosexuals are naturally occurring abnormalities, which is to say marginal by definition, so all the hand-wringing about the end of the human race should social acceptance arise is just pure stupidity. Nobody's destroying any social building blocks- there is no capacity for anarchy in gay marriage, JUST MORE MARRIAGE.

And given your history of using fag and dyke frequently and gratuitously, am I to believe that your personal feelings of hatred (by your own definition of the terms' capacity for expression) towards gays and lesbians have suddenly disappeared in last few months? Because, since we're being all rational and reality-based here, it seems far more likely that those feelings of hate still "linger" and may in fact affect your ability to objectively judge the issues at hand.
65
There are folks who think that while what you do in your bedroom is tour choice it lays not a scintilla of obligation on others.
What about the obligation of recognizing your relations, which we bore before current laws recognizing same-sex marriage were in place? What makes your relations more relevant to society at large than those of same-sex couples, that we should be compelled to recognize one and not the other?

Remember: Every question posed to you that you refuse to answer is a point in favor of your opponents.
No, the propagation of hate, intolerance and bigotry is the province of the Gays should have more rights than others brigade. You know, people like you.
What rights to gays have, or even want, that you do not currently enjoy? Please be specific. Or hell, be vague. But don't simply withhold reply and then continue to toss the same posit around as though it were an argument when you've clearly failed to acknowledge all bases on which your posit has been contested.
Well, by that reasoning polygamy and close relative marriage should be made law too.
Sure. Why not? I'm morally neutral on (and personally uninterested in) polygamy; I'm morally opposed to incest. But I do not believe that my moral preoccupations are any more appropriate a basis than yours for civic law.

Polygamy would, admittedly, change the essential shape of the marital contract more than same-sex or consanguineous marriage, but that's for the lawyers and accountants to work out.
It's the Gays Are Privileged Citizens brigade that wants the defining element of marriage changed, ask your buddies why they hate marriage and family so vehemently. Frankly it puzzles me.
I like marriage so much I've been engaging in it for 17 years. I love it so much that I've been bursting to share it with the many same-sex couples in my community who have shared comparable (indeed, nearly identical) commitments.
Perhaps the destruction of marriage by gays is a fait accompli.
Doesn't seem to have affected my marriage or that of my parents (43 years worth!). If it's had any effect on yours, I am truly sorry that you are party to so weak and sad a union.
66
@52: You miss my point entirely.
I'm talking about the double standard. When looking at the current situation, you claim that straights don't get special favors BECAUSE EVERYONE has the same opportunity to marry an unrelated adult consenting person of the opposite gender. But simply strike the last requirement and you get incredibly angry about the special favors queers get, EVEN THOUGH EVERYONE has the same opportunity to marry an unrelated adult consenting person.
If the argument is so flawed that it can be used to support polygamous or incestuous marriage, maybe you should stop using it to claim that the gays already have marriage equality.

And for the record, more American states allow you to marry your first cousin (which, genetically speaking, does leave you at risk for inbreeding) than marry someone of the same gender as you.

@62: Gay marriage isn't about tearing down society. We marriage equality supporters aren't those guys insisting that there shouldn't be any such legal concept as marriage. No sir, it's about adding onto society.
When the Founding Fathers wrote freedom of religion into the Constitution, they weren't getting rid of religious solidarity as a support to society, but rather allowing all religions to participate in it. When Italian and Russian and Chinese and Irish immigrants came to this country, they didn't destroy America's Anglo-Saxon heritage, but rather brought their own traditions to the table. (As opposed to the traditions of the Native Americans, which were forcibly stamped out until quite recently.) All this about the gays wanting to destroy our culture is really just xenophobia.

And like lolorhone said, "deviant" or (in my opinion) "atypical" is a better word to use than "perverted".
67
@ 62, see @ 60. You have ably demonstrated this character flaw of yours once again.
68
Confluence, let's pretend for a moment that you're actually interested in discourse, and take your bait. While your assumption that gay friendliness is a peculiarly Western phenomenon ignores that, according to the very map you posted when this came up in a discussion of Jamaica, Japan was every bit as progressive as Western Europe and the U.S. on the matter, let's say, for argument's sake, that this greater acceptance appears to be a function of industrial or post-industrial society.

Now, it's worth noting that homosexuality occurs at nearly identical rates in every culture regardless of whether it's "accepted" or punished by imprisonment, caning, or beheading; we're speaking only of the degree to which law and public opinion appear to embrace it as a valid mode of existence.

Given that, it seems to me that the places where it is least accepted are either pre-industrial (where tribal squabbles are more likely to produce breeding anxiety, and/or where monolothic religious organizations sit at the center of societies) or, in whole or in part, explicitly Marxist (where radical materialism has led the disciples of Lenin and Mao to dismiss nearly all sexual variation as bourgeois indulgence).

Of course, you're not interested in discussing any of this. You'd rather take any questioning of your assertions as an attack, dismissing any words you find objectionably long or obscure as ivory tower academia (even if they come from a self-taught actor/boxer/trainer with no college degree).

A word of advice; you don't even have to admit to taking it if doing so would wound your pride: You would be a lot more interesting if you were a bit more interested in the people you came in here to educate, convert, engage, or offend.
69
@53 Now you're scaring me. No bake offs! I've taken a dessert to a predominantly gay party, and it was a humiliating defeat.
70
What's shocking in San Antonio TX in private is gladly stated in public by a majority of the Porterville CA City Council, which held up the City for 4 meetings over 7 weeks in order to rescind our first-ever LGBT Pride Month Proclamation this July:

https://www.facebook.com/PortervilleEqua…
71
@69: I have a very simple cake recipe that I promise will win you all the adulation and power a PTA could grant!

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