BY ED SIKOV | Duh!
Have you ever come up with a brilliant and revelatory idea or discovery that, on reflection, made so much sense you were suddenly baffled as to why you thought it was so brilliant in the first place?
I do it all the time.
The latest example of my unwavering drive to patent the obvious occurred the other day as I was amusing myself searching online for anti-gay horror stories (a perverse pleasure, I know, but I can’t help myself). On this occasion, I began by entering my usual inquiry word in the Google News search bar: anti-gay. I found some fairly sour stuff, but nothing exceptional — nothing that satisfied my deep-seated craving for proof of the world’s essential hostility.
Suddenly an ecologically responsible compact fluorescent bulb flipped on in my head: I was searching the wrong term! Searches for anti-gay lead to websites and publications like the Huffington Post and Slate, the New York Daily News and the Advocate — in other words, news sources without a homophobic agenda. To find truly vile stories about gay people, I realized, you should never use the word we use to identify ourselves. No, that’s entirely self-defeating. Search instead for homosexual and the nuts come flying off the trees.
Sure, you get some of the same positive, boring stories you get with anti-gay. But you also get gems from sites like Patheos.com, which claims to be Hosting the Conversation on Faith. “Homosexual Interests Trump the Poor’s,” one recent Patheos headline stated. The piece made the warped and paranoid assertion that gay — excuse me, homosexual — people’s vast and frightening power comes at the expense of the world’s impoverished. I must remember to tell my husband that our marriage is the cause of famine in South Sudan.
Or Charisma News, which offered “9 Prophetic Keys for Binding the Homosexual Spirit.” I knew I was in for a good time when I saw that the illustration for the article was a rendering of the Tower of Babel. “Today’s homosexual movement is possibly the most unified on the Earth. They have one language and one purpose. Everybody is in agreement,” the author, John Burton, writes. Obviously Burton has never been to a Tony Awards party.
“This simultaneous horizontal and vertical advance of the homosexual movement is brilliant, though not original,” Burton continues, adding a surprising geometric twist to his insane rant. “We saw it at Babel, and we’ll see it again at the end of the age. The Antichrist’s strategy includes horizontal world domination and a vertical one-world religion. At the end of that strategy, after a great battle, God wins.”
So what’s the trouble, Toots? As Vince Lombardi (or maybe Red Sanders) once said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” So to quote Bugs Bunny, “Unlax!” You’ll be in heaven, we’ll be in hell, and you can gloat all you want.
The highly entertaining OneNewsNow’s quote of the week needs no comment from the likes of me: “Five years after publicly denouncing the Bible’s teaching of wives submitting to their husbands, former President Jimmy Carter is stepping it up a notch by stating that Jesus wouldn’t judge or condemn homosexual behavior.”
So the next time you’d like to take an armchair tour of cuckoo-
land, just fire up Google News and search for homosexual. It’ll take you places you’ve never dreamed of.
Those Who Lie Down With Dogs What’s the deal with anti-gay crackpots and their compulsive fantasizing about bestiality? Years would go by without the subject of man-on-dog sex entering my head if it weren’t for the wackjobs on the religious and/ or politically crank right who can’t get their minds off of it. It’s downright disgusting, and I wish they’d seek professional help for what is clearly a severe and seemingly a contagious mental illness.
The latest nutcase to spew the filthy topic into public discourse is the bishop of the Mexican Diocese of Aguascalientes, José María de la Torre Martín, who found himself in hot water (get it?; Àcomprende?) when he spoke out against proposal there to legalize same-sex marriage. The perverted cleric opined that allowing gay couples to marry will lead to “allowing a man to marry a dog, and they can inherit the puppies.”
Returning to Bugs Bunny for the right response, I can only say: “Whadda maroon!” If a gay guy wanted to marry a dog, the dog would be almost certainly be similarly male, so there wouldn’t be any puppies no matter how many times the cross-species lovers did the nastiest nasty. And if by some Bible-like miracle a litter would result from this improbable union, the happy couple wouldn’t be inheriting the puppies; they’d be birthing them. Jeez, doesn’t this clown know anything?
I Confess No, I’m not referring to the second-tier Alfred Hitchcock film starring Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest. (Despite the brilliant casting of a closeted gay man as a priest, “I Confess” just isn’t on the same masterpiece level as “Rear Window,” “Vertigo,” and “Psycho.”) I’m actually confessing to being mistaken in my last column — probably. Embarrassingly, I was making fun of Bill Kristol for always spouting predictions that prove to be wrong, when I — yes, I — predicted the Supreme Court would take up the issue of same-sex marriage during this court session. But, last week, the Supremes stopped in the name of love by declining to hear the appeals of a five states fighting lower court rulings declaring their anti-gay marriage laws unconstitutional. Many SCOTUS watchers were surprised by the court’s refusal to hear the appeals, but widespread shock doesn’t let me off the hook for being wrong in a column ridiculing a guy who’s always wrong. Should another appeals court rule against marriage equality, there’s a chance I might yet get a reprieve from my errorhood. But I am going to preemptively apologize — not to the worthless Kristol, but to you. I’m also willing to predict that I’ll be wrong again some time soon.
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