Maggie Gallagher wrote a rather defeated-feeling post on her blog, recognizing that their “classical marriage” fight has been defeated. And it feels good to see it. But it’s still full of eye-rolls and areyoufuckingkiddingmes, because of course evolution isn’t something her kind really believes in.
Here’s what she said, and as always, my own comments in red letters… but also, let’s count how many language-flip-flopping tricks they have to use in order to support their faulty logic, shall we? Those will be counted in [brackets].
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A friend asked me, after reading my last interview with HuffPo, “So are you really stepping down from the marriage and religious liberty fight?[1]” You have friends?
No, I told him. You have male friends? Sorry if it sounded like that. Who can actually hear? Like, they can hear you and they still call you a friend? What I am advocating doing is three very big, and very hard things: uh huh… huh-huh huh… a) accepting where we are and b) learning from what we did not succeed in so that we can get to [realizing you were wrong?] c) how do we build anew? By realizing you were wrong? Of course not.
Right now most people who believe in the classic understanding of marriage [2] are in shock, they are awed by the powers now shutting down the debate and by our ineffectualness at responding to these developments[3]. I am in shock that someone as widely known as you uses run-on sentences. No wait, I am not.
The temptation to shout and yell and stamp our feet in ineffectual ridiculousness is understandable, but it is to be resisted. Even though it’s all you’ve been doing for years now.
The version of America we were born into is no more. You mean the one where colored people had to enter through the back, atheists were shunned, and Elvis couldn’t be shown from the waist down because his hips were too much for some stupid people? For the first time in American history being a faithful Christian (or Jew or Muslim)[4] now calls into question in the public square in a new way one’s good citizenship[5]. Never mind the horrible grammar here, but for the FIRST TIME? Are you sure? Let’s see, you mean this predates the moment when 
clergymen, Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas resisted Christopher Columbus’ horrendous treatment of natives because it went against their Christian teachings of how to treat others, and in so doing, they were resisted by the Spanish government? You mean it predates the founding fathers’ desire that there be a separation between church and state, to the outrage of pretty much all of you who insist this is a Christian nation? You mean it predates when religion’s fight against the teaching of evolution and the Scopes Monkey trial when Tennessee insisted religion had the right to push itself and deny sciences? You really are being a bit melodramatic.
Well, yes. Now what? I don’t know, maybe realize you were wrong?
I headlined this essay “Cooper, Mozilla, and Arizona” because each of these recent public news events highlights one feature of the challenge before us, and what we need to build to respond. You mean it highlights where you have been declared wrong, right?
The rapid collapse of opposition to gay marriage we are witnessing did not just happen, and it was not inevitable. But it is. It’s a collapse of opposition, rather than people realizing they were wrong, actually. And it was inevitable. Because as courts keep having to inform you, it is NOT constitutional. Your religion’s idea of marriage cannot be forced onto everyone else. That’s the point.
The question now on the table is: will orthodox Christianity (and other traditional faiths by which I’m sure you don’t mean neopaganism, faiths that aren’t Abrahamic, or Christianity that disagree with you, because there’s absolutely no way they can have real traditions, right?), be stigmatized and marginalized because of its unconstitutional attempts to stigmatize and marginalize others as the equivalent of racism [6] in the American public square? Yeah. The equivalent. Because what blacks suffered was being told they couldn’t beat up gays anymore. Forget that slavery/lynching/Jim Crow stuff they suffered, because your suffering is worse or something. Will Biblical morality be wiped out as an acceptable public position in America? [7] Yes. Because it was never a position to be forced onto the public thanks to the motherfucking separation of motherfucking church and state, that YOU KEEP FORGETTING ABOUT.
Or will we regroup, rebuild as a subculture bigotry is not a subculture, and survive to become the possibility of a new foundation in the future? No, you’re missing the point. You belong in the past, not the future.
Hiding or pretending is not going to help us, now. Oh, but it will. Please hide somewhere and pretend your life away. We promise to miss you and stuff. We have to face the truth. That you were wrong? And we have to find the Love at its heart. The love that makes you realize you were wrong?
And we will have to do new things, not simply do what failed, over and over again, harder. Like not being wrong and unconstitutional, over and over? And huh-huh… you said harder.
Let me begin with Charles Cooper. Cooper gave an interview to Jo Becker, a New York Times reporter who authored a new book, Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality. The book is basically an insider account of Ted Olson’s and David Boies’s legal battle to dismantle Prop 8, and in the course of it naturally Jo Becker interviewed Chuck Cooper.
Unbeknownst to any of us, Cooper was at the time in the middle of the turmoil of the political becoming the personal. In 2013, before he attempted to argue the Prop 8 case before the Supreme Court, he learned his wife’s daughter (his stepdaughter) was gay and would be married to a woman in Massachusetts. He and his wife are co-hosting the same-sex wedding ceremony. And, well, he learned that it affected him personally, so he suddenly started to care. You know, because it’s stupid to care about something until it affects you personally. That’s not what Jesus would do or anything.
Cooper said two things that upset many people on our side (although to be fair, that’s not hard to do, since just hearing someone saying “Jesus fucking Christ!” makes us want to clutch our security blankets and suck our thumbs): “My views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, only caring when it affects me personally, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it ten years ago or how I viewed it when I was experimenting in college,” he said to Jo Becker some months ago. And when the book became public and the news of his stepdaughter’s wedding came out he told AP: “My daughter Ashley’s path in life has led her to happiness with a lovely young woman named Casey, and our family and Casey’s family are looking forward to celebrating their marriage in just a few weeks. And then we’ll focus our efforts instead against the rights of midgets, because we don’t have any of those in our family yet.”
I received many emails from people who were angry and upset by his comments, because he forgot to include, ‘GOD HATES LESBIANS!!!’ in his speech. but if he were here in front of me (and I hope he reads this) this is what I would say to Charles Cooper:
“Thank you for your hard work, and your service. You could’ve been doing some of that other absurd stuff Christians are supposed to do. You know, like feeding the hungry or healing the sick, but you didn’t. I had no idea you were working this hard, for so little benefit to yourself and your career, while simultaneously managing a family crisis [8] like this. And yes, by crisis, I mean enduring a lesbian wedding, because I know there’s only so much Lillithfair music one can withstand before they start scissoring anything just to get Sarah McLaughlin to shut up. Thank you for being faithful to the end to your client and our cause. And I wish God’s blessings on you and your family. Except the gay ones, of course. God’s going to burn them forever and stuff. But you know, those others.”
I would say this, even though I do not see how someone faithful to the Biblical or the natural law [9] underlying it, can host a gay wedding. (More on this in another letter where I will also finally divulge why I purposely dress like a Russian doll that finally digested all the other dolls inside of her. Hint: it’s to keep lesbians from thinking I’m hot so I can avoid temptation).
Nonetheless, we cannot let the “system” overwhelm the human person. And by “system,” I of course mean Obama and the Muslim brotherhood of Satan. And by “human person” I mean as opposed to the lizard people.
Not just Charles Cooper, we are all struggling with how to respond to the new moral order implied and reified by gay marriage[10]. Because not condemning people who are different than us is a completely new moral order. I mean I know it was the whole point to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, but that had a really gay elf in it who wanted to be a dentist, so we just ignored that lesson. He wasn’t Republican after all. Yes, that’s also why we do apply that lesson to Lindsey Graham.
And here is the thing I take away, and what I want you to take away, from the Charles Cooper story: Whatever we do, and whatever we say, we have to be willing to say it, as if to a beloved child of our own family, coming to us with a loving gay marriage. But don’t say mean things about fat people, because that would affect me personally, so I do care about that.
There is no line we can draw that pushes gay people “outside” and leaves us free “inside” to be angry, foot-stomping, and morally “pure.” That’ll come later when they’re burning and hell and we’re laughing at them. But for now, be nice.
We are all tangled up in Love with sin, our own and that of those we love. Especially you, Lindsey. I know what you were doing in Bangkok, you pervert you!
I faced this personally, in the sense I was often asked “What if my child was gay?” and I was also often asked, “Did you have a gay child and eat them?” I was asked it by people who believed I probably had a gay child and didn’t know it. Or ate it because it was gay. That’s not nice. I wouldn’t eat a gay child. Gays aren’t high enough in carbs for my taste.
But I accepted that the facts are irrelevant. Because in our fight, facts are always irrelevant. That’s the only way we can keep up this stance. I could have a gay child. Anyone could have a gay child. Except Lindsey Graham, because he keeps sticking it in weird no-no places that can’t bear kids. Other people I know have gay children. Our children are beloved and yet do not necessarily put together the world the way we would have them. Like, they spend their time doing charity work and helping others, like stupid people. We don’t bother with that. We’d have to put down our pitchforks. We have to love them anyway, across all the gaps. Although we just don’t condone what they like to stick in their gaps, because it upsets the baby Jesus.
A movement able to withstand what is coming will have to face the Love problem first [11]. The fact I just referred to love as a “problem” isn’t a symptom of anything wrong with my Christianity, by the way. Anything we say, anything we believe, we are going to have to be willing to say it not only with a generic gay person in the room, but as if to a beloved gay child. So remember to tell that gay child you love that Satan will devour their naughty bits for eternity if they use them wrong, and then stroke them gently with love. Or no wait, love’s a problem. Just stroke them. Wait, they might enjoy that. Throw food in at them every now and then and remind them they’ll go blind.
Try it before you judge Charles Cooper. Even though all this time we’ve been merely judging everyone, but now I want you to stop because…… well, I don’t know why. Just do it.
There is a lot of hard cultural, intellectual, moral, and spiritual work [12] to be done on how to combine Love and Truth [13]. It’s not as easy as simply loving people and admitting the truth that we were wrong about this issue all along. It has to be more complicated than that, because otherwise we’d have to admit we were stupid as well as wrong. And that’s what Satan wants you to think.
Let’s get to it.
Next, Brendan Eich and Mozilla. Here we face the fist within the velvet glove—one of the few public instances of what is happening all over America. People are afraid to say this: “marriage is the union of husband and wife, because kids need a mother and a father.” They are afraid and they are falling silent. Yes, their failure isn’t that they can’t back it up with any real evidence, or that trying to push such unsubstantiated beliefs onto others into a nation of church/state separation is wrong. No, it’s that they don’t say it anyway and ignore the overwhelming evidence that they are absolutely wrong.
Brendan Eich is a brilliant and rich man and he will personally be okay, no matter what happens. But if he, the Mozart of Mozilla, cannot survive opposing gay marriage, who can? Well okay, Chick-fil-a survives while JCPenny took a huge hit from us for daring to put a lesbian in their ads, but that’s to be ignored because it’s horribly inconvenient to the waahhh wahhhh we’re so persecuted case I’m trying to make.
A week after Brendan Eich resigned we learned from Angela McGaskill’s case, that Gaulladet University, a university for the deaf chartered by the federal government, can in fact demote her for nothing more than [14] putting her name to a petition putting the gay marriage question before the voters of Maryland. Because actually trying to hurt peoples rights and put their inalienable equality to a vote before other bigots is such a small thing, but Neil DeGrasse Tyson saying the earth isn’t 6,000 years old on television is OMG SUCH A HORRIBLE THING!!!!!
This is not news to me. In fact we made up a lot of these kinds of cases in order to fill the space of a scary storm commercial, because I know many cases public and private of people facing job loss for opposing gay marriage that I couldn’t come up with enough authentic cases to fill the spot of an ad. Heck, we couldn’t even get real people to read these fake cases on the ad. We had to use actors! Because none of those people would come on… and I know the threat of this is shutting down even more good people [15] from trying to shut down other good people who we don’t like. This is not because they are cowards. It’s because they were cowardly assholes with no leg to stand on.
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It goes on for several more tl;dr paragraphs before you just want to scream at her, LOOK, WOMAN, IT’S SIMPLE… YOU’RE WRONG. JUST STOP JUDGING, STOP STRUGGLING, REALIZE YOU’RE WRONG AND SHUT THE HELL UP! But they just can’t do that. Backed into a thousand logic traps, they still just can’t reach the obvious conclusion. You’re. Absolutely. Wrong. And as you can see, in just the part covered I counted 15 language flips before I just couldn’t take anymore of her crap. I was told to keep reading to the end, but I just couldn’t. I will later, but I needed a yack break.
She goes on and on and, even if you think she sounds like she’s learning a lesson, she proves, with all of her language tricks, that she is still refusing to really learn anything at all. She’s not saying to stop being a bigot. She’s saying don’t lose anything because of your bigotry. In Maggie’s oh-so-convicted version of Christianity, which believes that one day an Antichrist will bring about the tribulation, she would be telling people not to lose their family’s belongings by refusing the mark of the beast, because it’s a losing battle.
But then, that’ll never happen, because her faith, and her convictions, and all those stories in the Bible, are fake. But what is happening is that her regime hurt real people, while pretending to be the ones really hurt, so they can feel justified in abuse and pretend to be the real victim.
She makes a case that I actually made about Mozilla, that people shouldn’t be fired just for holding beliefs, and she shares the words of pro-LGBT people that made that case as well:
The signatories including Jonathan Rauch, Will Saletan, David Blankenhorn and James Kirchick, all of whom emphatically support gay marriage but say: “the consequence of holding a wrong opinion should not be the loss of a job. Inflicting such consequences on others is sadly ironic in light of our movement’s hard-won victory over a social order in which LGBT people were fired, harassed, and socially marginalized for holding unorthodox opinions.”
I actually felt there was no reason a bigot shouldn’t hold a job, and I stand by that. But then I learned that it wasn’t from outside the company that Eich was let go, but from people within who refused to work for someone like him, and that there was more than just merely holding such a view.
So you can see, he wasn’t let go just for being a bigot, but for having been an out and loud bigot who would’ve affected their bottom line. Just as A&E had the right to let go Phil Robinson. You can’t cry when the people want you gone for being a belligerent asshole to people different than you. After all, you choose to be that bigot. And it’s a far cry better that bigotry is being punished rather than difference.
Our love for each other doesn’t hurt you, but your hate has hurt people for centuries. And it’s been wrong. Your religion belongs in your church and not in my Constitution or in my courthouse or as a blockage to my rights. You are just plain wrong. And if bigots have to keep their bigotry in the closet, that’s not a reason for you to pretend to be the victim that you used to make of us. That’s called justice. Because the real defect is in you. We didn’t start this fight. We’re fighting back. And we’re winning.
That’s okay, Maggie. You don’t have to admit you’re wrong. Go off to your subcommunity and keep your wrongness and your woe-is-me act there. We don’t give a shit.
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