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On fire! |
Registered: March 2012
Messages: 2344
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Here is a story about an appeals court ruling in Kansas. The sodomy laws on the books are still being used against gays.
http://www.planetout.com/pno/news/
Richard
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This is exactly why I try and step up to the plate every time the age of informed consent and medieval sodomy laws are talked about. Despite the fact that I sometimes end up getting bashed by the rigidly political correct and conservative element elsewhere.
This makes me furious that soo few people will allow themselves any serious thinking about the real reasons for these type laws. Willful ignorance sickens me.
Thanks Tim for providing a place where such awful things as this can be aired, learned about, discussed, and perhaps in our small way to make some change happen...sometime...someplace...
Thnks Richard for bringing it to our attention.
"Always forgive your enemies...nothing annoys them quite so much." Oscar Wilde
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Guest
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On fire! |
Registered: March 2012
Messages: 2344
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It seems to me that there is definite anti-gay sentiment involved in this issue. I find myself wondering if that contingent of gay men who take the position that the law must be obeyed would hold that it should in this situation.
Richard (Dorothy NOT in Kansas)
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Yeah "...and yer little dog, too!"
Lap dog of the too strictly law-abiding lap-dogs of the establishment.
Jeez, I must be tired right now, too. Yapping at their heels...
"Always forgive your enemies...nothing annoys them quite so much." Oscar Wilde
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As infinitely sad and infuriating as this situation is, I think we should still consider the source.
Geographically, Kansas is right in the middle of the continental United States, and therefore forms the very buckle of the "Bible Belt". It would therefore stand to reason that the laws of the state would reflect the bigoted and hateful nature of the state's predominantly "Bible-thumping" population, who are in reality the most a-Christian lot of all.
Consider what happened in Kansas last summer. A local public library knuckled under to pressure from a "Christian" group by abruptly cancelling a summer reading program for children that included in its reading list the "Harry Potter" books. According to the "Christians", the problem with "Harry Potter" is that it teaches children such evil things as wizardry and witchcraft. Now, perhaps I lack perception; but having both read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and seen the movie, I just don't get it. To me, the book and the movie are not really about wizardry and witchcraft, but rather about such things as love, friendship, loyalty, bravery, self-sacrifice (you know, truly evil things like that). It's the same mindset that got Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" banned in places like that, because it had the temerity to question the teachings of the church (even though those teachings told Huck he would burn and rot in Hell if he helped Jim escape to freedom: a most noble act of love that they would punish with a most disgusting act of hate).
It seems to me that the same sort of thing is happening to this poor young man: what was in all likelihood an innocent act of love is being punished by hate. I wonder what would have happened if this young man had killed that boy simply because he thought that boy was gay. I have these visions of him getting off not with a slap on the wrist, but with a pat on the back for doing God's work (remember the protestors outside the church at Matthew Shepard's funeral, who, right to his parents' faces, praised his murderers and said that their son was now burning in Hell where he belongs?). My heart really goes out to him, as he now faces the possibility of spending just as much time in jail as he has already lived, all because of an arbitrary and capricious law based on ignorance, bigotry and hatred.
They tell us that love is at the core of Christianity. If that's so, then these "still-borns" can't really be Christians: they hate too much to ever be capable of love.
I do hope the appeals process acquits this young man with all possible expedience and keeps him out of jail. If these stories that we hear about the conditions in some of these prisons are in any way true, then I truly fear for this young man should he have to spend any time there. I suppose, though, that if he went to prison alive and came out dead, the "still-borns" would call that "the will of God" as well.
It is all so very, very sad!
We do not remember days...we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese
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Guest
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On fire! |
Registered: March 2012
Messages: 2344
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His chances with the state and federal courts do not look promising. While it is not surprising that this would happen in the mid West or South it is a matter that the courts have refused to extend the concept of equal protection to gays. Warren Berger's opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick reads like something out of the statutes of Henry VIII.
Richard
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My curiosity got the better of me, and so I did a Google search on this case. One sentence in particular from Justice Berger's concurring opinion really caught my eye:
"To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching."
Even if that moral teaching is itself immoral? I refer again to that comment about Huckleberry Finn I made in my previous posting. "Henry VIII" indeed, Richard! You are so right! I suppose, according to Justice Berger's "logic", it would therefore follow that Henry VIII had every moral right in the world to have his wives murdered for failing to produce a suitable male heir.
It is so typical that those who support laws such as these which allow for the civil authorities to spy on people's bedrooms are the same lot who scream that there should be less government intrusion into the lives of the people.
Richard, I fear your pessimism concerning this young man's plight is all too well-founded, especially when such primitive thinking as this forms the basis of law and civil discourse.
Again, my heart goes out to that young man, and to anybody else facing similar persecution (as persecution is really what it all boils down to, isn't it?).
We do not remember days...we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese
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