Tiger Beatdown

Behold Dan Savage: the Ur-Douche. Unlike these flash-in-the-pan douches, Dan Savage has been saying embarrasing shit for years and years and years. Behold! As he insists that bisexuals do not or should not exist!

Bud, a gay man dating a married bisexual man, was frustrated about having to share his “soulmate” with his soulmate’s wife… Under the circumstances, telling Bud to rule out bi guys and married men was sensible advice. Sorry, but avoiding bi guys is a good rule of thumb for gay men looking for long-term relationships.

Yes, Dan, and it is a little-known fact that all bisexual men are married to women. They come out of the womb that way! Crazy, huh? Here, Savage reflects sensitively on heteronormative prejudice:

Bi guys who want opposite sex partners are under tremendous pressure to stay closeted. And when a guy is closeted — as most bi guys are — he can’t really be there for his boyfriend, can he?

You know what encourages people to come out of the closet, Dan? Telling them that, if they do, no one will ever – or should ever – want to have sex with them again. It is just really, really, really, really helpful.

Here’s Dan admonishing a woman for saying the word “what” when her boyfriend brought up an extremely rare kink!

There the guy was, boned for you, and he was brave enough to put his desires out there, to make himself vulnerable (which is what the ladies are always saying they want, right?), and you lobbed the ol’ “What?!?” bomb at him and made him feel like a freak. Is it any wonder that he quickly moved on to “other things” and, one would hope, better sex partners?

The kink, in case you were interested, was inserting his nutsack into her vagina. I’ve been a sex educator. I’ve talked to people about sex – lots and lots of people, actually – and I’ve heard some pretty unusual stuff. I’ve never heard of that. In this particular case, a “what” is pretty much merited, if only so that you can figure out how that particular arrangement might work. Anyway, in the same column, Dan addresses a guy who might have gotten some poop on himself during anal sex with a lady (it would have to be imaginary poop, since this is the most obvious fakeout I’ve ever read, but whatever):

You did all the right things after that Spanish tramp shit on you… [she] owes [you] the courtesy of being appropriately mortified… I’d say she was blind drunk, utterly clueless, into shit, or all of the above. Whatever her major malfunction, SSBB, wipe her number from your phone’s memory.

So, for the record, straight ladies (and bisexual ladies, if you exist), the answers are (a) do what your male partner is into, or you are a terrible lay and a bad person, and (b) do what your male partner is into, or you are a terrible lay and a bad person. Oh, and for the record – dudes who want things their ladies don’t like are poor sad vulnerable flowers, whereas ladies who want things their dudes don’t like are tramps who should be ashamed of themselves.
Okay, so Dan Savage has issues with bisexuals and ladies. How about trans people? Here, he addresses a cisgender mom whose son refuses to speak to his other mom, a trans lady in the process of transition:

Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives. Perhaps I’m a transphobic bigot, but I honestly think waiting a measly 36 months to cut your dick is a sacrifice any father should be willing to make for his 15-year-old son. Call me old-fashioned.

Unfortunately, your ex wasn’t willing to make that sacrifice (selfish tranny!), or it never occurred to him to make that sacrifice (stupid tranny!)…. If your son can’t deal with having his dad/mom/whatever around right now, support him and tell his dad/mom/whatever to leave the two of you alone for the time being.

Wow. Male pronouns? Insisting that a trans person should just put off resolving her gender dysphoria, which routinely causes severe depression? Calling a trans person a “whatever”? Encouraging people to cut off contact with trans family members? I think we’ve hit the bottom of the barrel. I think this is as low as Dan Savage can possibly go.

But wait: have you seen what he writes to rape survivors?

I’m extremely sorry that you were raped, DRARS, although your baseless accusations of rape make me doubt you when you claim to be a survivor of rape. The feminist bloggers are going to accuse me of thought crimes: If a woman says she was raped then, by God, she was raped. (Tell it to the lacrosse team.) But if my reaction to your letter is a thought crime, I can only plead entrapment: I wouldn’t have had these illegal thoughts if you hadn’t sent me such a stupid letter in the first place… Finally, DRARS, I hereby withdraw my consent for you to read Savage Love. If you continue to read my column against my will, well, we all know what word to apply to your actions.

Oh. Well. OK, then.

So, maybe it’s foolish to have any expectations of Dan Savage. I certainly try not to! For example, when he posted his charming little screed about Prop 8 and black homophobia (which, apparently, is much more of a problem than queer white racism, because they couldn’t possibly be equally important problems, could they, we couldn’t possibly live in a country where most people are simultaneously privileged by some aspects of their identity and marginalized by others, leading to counter-productive and ugly divisions between communities) and it became one of the focal points in a trend of blaming the Prop 8 verdict on increased turnout by voters of color, like, of all the problems with homophobia and black voter disenfranchisement in this country, the real problem is that black people are voting, and this in turn offered social conservatives a further chance to spread homophobia by saying that all gay people were racist, and Dan Savage, who was in a unique position to object to this, given his huge and admiring readership and the fact that he was one of the first people to get major attention for these sentiments, refused to admit that there was anything wrong with what he’d written, well, I was… not surprised.

I was, however, impressed by the fact that directly before Savage went on Steven Colbert’s show, that piece magically disappeared! Yep: you can only find it on Google Cache now. His petulant rants and links to similarly race-blaming articles are still available on the Slog, however. Enjoy the piece that opens with “black and Latino voters drawn to the polls in California because they were excited about voting for Barack Obama boosted the ‘yes’ vote on Prop 8” and then explicitly denies that he’s placing blame on anyone! I know I won’t.

Anyway, I was impressed, because it occurs to me that this is the closest Dan Savage will ever get to an apology: denying that he’s said anything wrong in the first place. I mean, damn. This is a man who will call a rape survivor a rapist for daring to question his work. Being an utter coward and deleting his blog right before he’s in a position to be called out on it is actually kind of a step up.

I don’t know how to speak about Prop 8 yet. (Maybe I shouldn’t try? Ha, what are the chances of that?) It is not an unfamiliar thing to me, this vote, nor is the thinking behind it. If you want a really ugly look at the place where I grew up, check this out:

A crucial electoral battleground state, Ohio hasn’t done well during the Bush era. In the last four years, it’s lost a quarter million jobs. A report from the U.S. Census Bureau recently rated Cleveland the poorest big city in the country. Young people are leaving the state in droves. In August, Brent Larkin, editorial page director of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote about Ohio’s “raging brain drain.”

But even as the state’s economy decays, its big evangelical churches are thriving, and, with the tacit support of the national Republican Party, they have mobilized behind Issue 1. Preachers are exhorting flocks of thousands to vote their values in an election said to pit light against darkness. Ohio’s gay citizens, a minority courted by no one, have been blindsided by the campaign against them.

If passed, Issue 1 will force Ohio’s cities and universities to stop offering domestic partner benefits, including health insurance. Right now, such benefits are offered by the city of Columbus, Ohio’s Miami University, Ohio University and Ohio State University, the largest university in America. Cleveland Heights has a domestic partnership registry, and some Ohio public schools give gay employees family leave to care for ailing partners. Issue 1 would probably mean they could no longer do so.

It passed. These things happened.

The amendment’s impact won’t stop there. “Because the state can’t create any legal status for unmarried couples, it’s very possible that domestic-violence protection orders could no longer be used if there’s a domestic violence situation with an unmarried couple,” says Alan Melamed, an attorney and chairman of the anti-Issue 1 group Ohioans Protecting the Constitution. Private companies can continue to offer domestic partner benefits, he adds, but “if the employee feels that those benefits were being improperly denied, an employee won’t be able to go to court and enforce those benefits.”

It passed. These things happened. Twice, actually, abused straight women were denied justice in domestic violence cases – not because they hadn’t been abused (they definitely had been) but because they weren’t married to the partners who had abused them. The cases were eventually overturned (which I do not imagine would have happened had the couples in question not been straight), but imagine being those women – imagine being told that you’d have to marry your abuser in order to successfully press charges against him.

Without compromising the centrality of rights for GLBTIQ people, or reducing GLBTIQ rights to a subset of feminism, it is important to note that this actually demonstrates a key aspect of the anti-gay-marriage agenda – not simply the blatant denial of rights to queers (as if that weren’t enough) but the delegitimization of any partnership that is not heterosexual marriage. Just as anti-abortion activists don’t want to stop with outlawing late-term abortions or abortions in general, but set an agenda that restricts access to emergency contraception and birth control – thereby seeking to make sure that women can only have sex in relationships where giving birth to and raising a child would be a viable possibility – anti-gay-marriage activists seek not only to restrict the rights of queers, but to enforce traditional gender roles, making sure that women know their only real value to society lies in their capacity to marry straight men and bear their children. The term “traditional marriage” – which calls to mind, for many people, a pre-feminist past – is not lightly chosen.

Of course, most Ohio voters weren’t briefed on the actual legal and civil consequences of Issue 1. Instead, they were subjected to an organized campaign of disinformation from the evangelical culture, and were told that God would hate them and Satan would triumph if they voted against it, in a campaign that was explicitly political, explicitly in violation of the separation of church and state, and entirely aware of that fact.

USA Today reports that Rod Parsley, pastor of Ohio’s 12,000-member World Harvest Church, has “assembled a list of 100,000 Ohio acolytes, all of whom will be called by the World Harvest Church on the eve of the election, reminding them to vote.” The newspaper pointed out that Parsley held a September meeting of 200 Ohio ministers to explain that they could advocate for the supposedly nonpartisan Issue 1 without losing their nonprofit tax status.

The World Harvest Church is located in my home town of Columbus, by the way. Go. Fucking. Buckeyes.

So, if you went to church in my hometown of Columbus, in my home state of Ohio, this is what you heard from the evangelical culture which has been seeking (and attaining, in many cases) complete ideological control of that state’s voters:

Nearly an hour and a half passes before Parsley starts preaching in earnest to a crowd that is by then happily worn out and receptive. Christianity is under siege, he tells his audience. Interlopers from out of state have come to Ohio, “going door to door, knocking on doors so we can continue to murder babies and further strip the church of its First Amendment rights through hate crimes legislation.” Gay marriage, he says, heralds “the annihilation of a civilization.”

“Everybody shout yes on Issue 1!” he yells. “Yes on Issue 1!”

Let’s chew on that sentence for a while, shall we? Strip the church of its First Amendment rights through hate crimes legislation. Strip the church of its First Amendment rights through hate crimes legislation. Strip the church of its First Amendment rights. Through hate crimes legislation.

In the town where I grew up, in the state where I grew up, the people who actively seek to control the ideological and moral discourse (“reject the Christian ethic and you have no basis for making moral judgments,” says another man quoted in the article, just before endorsing capital punishment for homosexuality) tell their parishioners that it is within their “rights” to commit hate crimes.

I tell you all of this – I tell you about Ohio – because, in the past week, I’ve heard people talk about Prop 8 as if it were the only anti-gay piece of legislation that had been passed in this country. It wasn’t; in this election alone, gay marriage bans were passed in Arizona and Florida, and Arkansas passed a law which prohibits “unmarried couples” from adopting. In each case, they were backed by substantial organization and campaigning by that evangelical culture. The evangelical culture speaks the language of “states’ rights” when it suits them, but it is a movement which pursues its goals on a national level; plenty of out-of-state evangelical resources were poured into the Prop 8 campaign. If we speak entirely in terms of California without addressing the anti-gay legislation passed elsewhere, or if we leave California to the Californians, then we play directly into their hands. These people stick together. These people work on a national level. So should we.

Of course, it’s harder to stick together when we can’t stop attacking each other. I’ve heard, over and over, that Prop 8 passed due to the homophobia of black voters. Yes, black voters did vote for Prop 8 by the widest margin, but Disgrasian points out that their votes alone were not enough to guarantee Prop 8’s passing, and it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that they were solely responsible for it.

[You could] say, since the margin between for and against came down to 500,000 votes out of 10 million, If only we had gotten 100% of the African-American vote against 8, we would have had this in the bag. How dare They. But what if we had gotten 100% of the Asian and “Other” vote against Prop 8, which would have been an increase of 450,000 votes, and, like, 1% percent more of the white vote? What if we had gotten 75% of the Latino vote, instead of 47%? Or what if we had gotten 59% of the white vote against Prop 8 instead of 51%, the most achievable statistical increase? What if we didn’t put the outcome of gay marriage all on one group, and if we had gotten 6.5% more of the white vote (+409,500), 3% more of the Latino vote (+54,000), 2% more of the black vote (+20,000), and 2% more of the Asian and Other vote (+18,000)? Or any combination therein?

That kind of analysis has been sorely lacking in progressive discussion, however. Instead, what I’ve heard (from white, pro-queer voters) has mostly been along the lines of, how could They – and after we voted Obama in for Them and everything! First of all, a minority of white voters went for Obama. Most voted for the white guy. Second, it is disgusting to pull the patronizing white liberal shit – after all we’ve done for You People! – and to suggest that your vote for a man of color was some sort of favor done for the black community, as if you in no way stood to benefit from it. Third, shaming and raging against a racially marginalized group is not only racist but stupid, because the passing of Prop 8 can be directly traced to an organized group with a clear agenda who poured money and organizing time into it in massive amounts. I would bet my entire next paycheck that evangelical voters went for Prop 8 by a higher margin than black voters, Latino voters, Asian voters, white voters, female voters, male voters, or any other demographic assembled on the basis of race or gender.

Again: these people are sticking together. No matter how racist certain white evangelicals are (and a lot of them really, really are) they have no problem with reaching out to communities of color if it will help them to achieve something they want. It says something if pro-queer white liberals are more willing to spout divisive rhetoric against the black community than racist white evangelicals who think that birth control pills and gay weddings will bring about the End of Days. Dividing ourselves and engaging in racial blaming now, after we’ve finally gained a mandate to govern from the left, is so self-destructive that it is unthinkable.

Yes, Prop 8 – and Issue 1, and all of the anti-gay legislation passed throughout this country – is wrong, and we need to overturn it. It is going to be very hard to do that, and it is going to take a very long time. Also, for the first time in eight years, we have the institutional power necessary to make some actual progress, if we can make sure that our elected officials are held accountable to their progressive base. So: everybody. Stop yelling. Get to work.