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Gay Rights Are Our Rights: From The Advocate
Savage Under Fire After Challenging Bible Talk
Republican LGBT group GOProud wants activist and journalist Dan Savage to apologize after he made a speech condemning hypocritical use of the Bible at a conference for high school journalists.
Gay activist and journalist Dan Savage caught the ire of right wing LGBT organization GOProud, which condemned a speech Savage gave at a conference for high school journalists earlier this month.
Savage devoted a few moments of his speech to his thoughts on how people and pundits use the Bible to condemn homosexuality at a conference titled, "Journalism on the Edge" for the Washington Journalism Education Association. Several students walked out on Savage, the founder of the It Gets Better Project.
"We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people," he said on April 13. "The same way, the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it."
After the students walked out in protest, Savage retorted, "It's funny, as someone who's on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back."
GOProud executive director Jimmy LaSalvia said in a statement Saturday, that Savage should apologize to the high school students in attendance.
“Dan Savage’s outrageous anti-Christian tirade hurts -- not helps -- the fight for gay rights in this country,” LaSalvia said. “There is nothing incompatible between being a Christian and believing that all people should be treated equally, and Dan Savage’s attacks on Christianity only fuel those on the extremist fringe who oppose gay rights.”
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Nerdlass on -
Hey, what they're saying matches up to what he's saying. He should just point at LaSalvia and say, "See what I mean?"
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Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on -
I caught that, too.
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Permalink Reply by Joshua Francom on -
I don't think he did anything wrong.
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Permalink Reply by Mark Schwab on -
I love to hear christians try to explain away the pro-slavery parts of the bible- It is fun to see them mince words and re-interpret what god was thinking back then.I read parts of a christian book recently where the author (who is a big time evangelist) excused the slavery portions because god specifically forbade the "man-stealing" type of slavery- as if that was any consolation to everyone else who was enslaved ("hey, I bought you and your sister fair and square- what are you complaining about?" -right god? So what is he (the guy upstairs) thinking these days ("well gee, not owning folks is also a pretty good idea, I guess.. gee, I never really thought about it that way...oh well, never mind what I said 3,000 years ago, I am not sure where I was going with that...")
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Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on
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When I read the first two lines of your post, I thought you've hit on something I have been trying to figure out for a long, long time. Atheists take the Bible for a man-made document written by humans, not a metaphysical entity. I added to that the notion that the proscriptions in Leviticus and elsewhere were things the tribal leader(s) frowned upon (-) or things they wanted their people to engage in (+). But this begs a question. In the case of pork, which could be "tricky" if not refrigerated, the proscription is rather obvious, but homosexuality (if that really was what it was -- and I take the position it was temple prostitution involving cross-dressing males) is another matter. I used to argue that the proscription against homosexuality was as practical as pork eating was impractical. That is, no male-female coupling, no new spear fodder to throw at the Philistines, the Midianites, and so forth.
But now, I am, after reading your post, considering another possibility so obvious I wonder it did not occur to me before: Now that we understand the concept of being genetically hard-wired, it makes perfect sense to see Leviticus as nothing but a power-reiteration, the chieftans seeing God as a tool to get the tribe doing what they have, by moral ("God") imperative, to do. Since homophobia is passed naturally and by nurture, God's proscription of same-sex dalliances would thus be seen as a component of the drive to species replication, the repugnance shown same-sex coupling acquired both coming and going, so to speak.
How useful is the queer = atheist equation? You may laugh but O'Reilly drops it into his rants now and then, and it makes some sense. Gay people are loathed about equally by certain segments of the population. But a lot of propositions make some sense, especially when they're coming from a bigoted clown like Bill the Bozo. Thankfully, when O'Reilly refers to atheism with condescending tossed away quips: "Oh?...That gay thing," he is preaching to a relatively small audience. He is a dinosaur and his audience a passle of no-nothing evangelicatholic conservatives who claim affiliation with Christianity yet behave as if their souls were pledged to the Big Bubaboo Himself, His Satanic Majesty. As Crowley observed the Devil is the God of a people one personally dislikes.
The attached photo is a caption contest. My own is:
"And Victoria was sooooo surprised when I took my pants off, it was THIS BIG!"
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Permalink Reply by Jerry Wesner on
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Mr. LaSalvia makes a mistake common in America today. He mistakes Christianity for the vicious far right wing Christian extremists. They're what I call Old Testament Christians -- they selectively uphold the ancient violent cruelty of parts of the Old Testament while ignoring both the rest of that same sentence and the different outlook found in much of the New Testament. Savage's language was, to me, offensive (though not unfamiliar) to a high school audience, but his message was right on.
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Permalink Reply by Sentient Biped on -
The bible, including Jesus, is pro slavery. There are many verses promoting slavery, and defining how severely you can beat a slave, who you can enslave, and exhorting slaves to obey. We seem to have a thing these days in modern western society where people think the bible is this great ethical document. So it forbids, in a few verses, certain same (male) gender sexual activity (I'm not sure it forbids oral sex, just anal, probably). Bible scholars, please correct me! For that matter, there isn't a single verse forbidding Lesbianism. Nuns of the world rejoice! I haven't counted, but I think there are more verses promoting slavery, than condemning same gender sex (not same gender relationships). Also, verses promoting genocide to clear lands for the chosen people. Also forbidding women from speaking in church, criticizing prayer in public, and a host of other sins. The christians of modern times are not followers of either Yahweh or Jesus, but of some other mythical gods they have made in their own fantasies. As for GOProud, they are a bunch of self hating clowns.
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Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on
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The KKK didn't wear crosses for nothing. For a whille, I took to using the name Jebus Crust to distinguish between the deity worshipped by today's so-called Christians, and Jesus Christ as the real thing (you should pardon the expression). People like the Osteens are such obvious frauds it is amazing their cult has prospered.
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