#56719: Martin Wagner — 01/06  at  05:12 PM
That must be some of that "Christian love" we keep hearing about!

#56732: — 01/06  at  06:28 PM
I don't know.

"he isn't gay. and he has been struggling with
this all his life"

That's so sad.

#56797: Andrew Brown — 01/07  at  03:36 AM
Forget the sex for a moment. She sees a friend caught in something shameful -- and we're all agreed it's shameful to caught like that -- and sees also that his enemies are rejoicing. How do you expect her to react? This is just chimpanzee politics.

#56805: — 01/07  at  05:10 AM
I just feel sorry for Lonnie. With 'friends' like that, he'll never come to terms with himself, never be properly happy. He'll just spend his life bouncing between Extreme Guilt and Cheap, Meaningless Sex. If she truly knew him and was his friend, she'd help him come to terms with who he really is.

#56813: Jeremy Henty — 01/07  at  06:19 AM
@#56797
"... we're all agreed it's shameful to caught like that" - Whoah, Andrew! Way to *totally* miss the point! We *don't* agree that at all. What's shameful is that his religion and so-called friends appear to have forced this guy into self-loathing and hypocrisy. And in the name of love! *That* is shameful. (The worst you could say about his situation when arrested is that is was kind of sleazy.)

"... his enemies are rejoicing." - Yeesh, I don't see anyone rejoicing (even if Ed Brayton admitted he found it hard not to laugh his ass off). If Emma had reacted to this by thinking "Gee, maybe this means that teh gay is not utterly evil" then I *would* rejoice. No kidding. But it's clear she won't. Which is, as #56732 points out, terribly sad.

(CAPCHA word: atheist. W00t! And correctly spelled too!)

#56818: — 01/07  at  09:14 AM
What I found sad was her formatting. I initially thought she was going to present her defense in the form of a poem. I feel cheated.

#56820: Buridan — 01/07  at  09:53 AM
I'm rejoicing...

#56821: jason — 01/07  at  10:48 AM
Hallelujah! I can feel God's love already.

Sadly, that's so typically Christian (and more generally, religious). As Friedrich Nietzsche once said and Emma has demonstrated, "A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute."

She missed the point. It isn't to rejoice in the shameful humiliation of a spiritual leader simply because he got caught; it's to point out the continuing hypocrisy of religion and the flawed assumption that its leaders might somehow be moral compasses and examples. Nothing could be more untrue.

And shame on Emma for being everything Christians claim to abhor: a vicious, vindictive, vile hater of the truth. Her only defense was to accuse all of us of the same fault she sees in this preacher. Do as we say, not as we do... (I still can't find that commandment in the Bible, but I know it must be there somewhere.)

#56823: PZ Myers — 01/07  at  10:52 AM
Except that she doesn't see this fault in the preacher. It's very confusing.

#56825: — 01/07  at  11:13 AM
That really does read like some kind of bizarre poetry. Note how aside from the Tourette-influenced closer, every line is about 3-4 letters longer than the previous one. Makes for a quite aesthetically pleasing physical appearance.

There's something gong on here. This isn't just the work of some ordinary cranky Baptist from Tulsa. Some weird conceptual artist/poet?

#56831: — 01/07  at  11:31 AM
Jeezuz,PZ, you nearly gave me a heart attack! I'm not so used to running into other Emmas in liberal weblogs and I find my name BOLDED for God's sake... take deep breaths, take deep breaths.
T'weren't me.
I'm not that crazy-inspired.
It is, you know. The visual poetry of that entry is wonderful.
Even the rage is...so Eminem.

#56843: Jeremy Henty — 01/07  at  01:01 PM
PZ (#56823):

Except that she doesn't see this fault in the preacher. It's very confusing.

It's crystal clear once you have the knack of Thinking Fundamentalist. To wit, GAY is EVIL, this person is not EVIL, ergo he is not GAY. QED. We, however think GAY is not EVIL, ergo we are DIFFERENT, which is the same as EVIL, so we are GAY. QED.

I wish I was joking, sadly it looks like Emma's mind really does work like this.

#56851: — 01/07  at  01:50 PM
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33540

More seriously, often a gay|straight dichotomy conceals more than it reveals. Check out
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226354717/102-2566597-7657712?v=glance&n;=283155
a nicely-written book on Southern queerness, for a more nuanced exploration.

#56864: BronzeDog — 01/07  at  03:29 PM
So, the preacher's not gay, but we are?

Reminds me of a T-shirt I once saw on TV: "I'm not a lesbian, but my girlfriend is."

#56887: — 01/07  at  08:54 PM
That's only funny if a woman's wearing it. If a guy's wearing it, it's bragging.

#56918: Andrew Brown — 01/08  at  05:01 AM
Returning very late -- we may have different reasons from Emma for thinking what he did was disgraceful, but to be caught and exposed doing something illegal that you have preached against is shameful and humiliating, whether or not preaching against it was the right thing to do in the first place.

And it's ludicrous to pretend that we're not enjoying his discomfiture. It's very enjoyable. No wonder Emma-the-fundie was upset.

#56925: Jeremy Henty — 01/08  at  07:36 AM
@#56918, quoth Andrew Brown:

No wonder Emma-the-fundie was upset.

D'oh, you missed the point *again*! Of course it's not surprising she's upset by the heathen snickering on the sideline. What's bizarre is her reaction. She insists that a man who has spent years fighting the urge to have sex with men is not gay, then signs off with a "j00 are teh gay, suX0rs" rant. Deluded and pathetic.

#56926: jason — 01/08  at  08:44 AM
I don't think her reaction is all that surprising. It's called denial and projection. When you're caught with your britches down, the first thing you want to do is find someone else to point at so attention is drawn away from your own shortcomings. This is especially true with religious folk. They're never wrong because their god is on their side, so any perceived evil surely is a problem with the observer and not the observed. They don't see it for the hypocrisy it is. That makes it some of the best entertainment and most frustrating ignorance to be found on the planet.

#56978: Jeremy Henty — 01/08  at  06:00 PM
jason (#56926}:

I don't think her reaction is all that surprising. It's called denial and projection.

I agree. It was "bizarre" in the sense of being over-the-top and wildly inappropriate, but once you know how the fundamentalist mind works it's easy to understand why they act that way.

#56980: — 01/08  at  06:19 PM

I agree. It was "bizarre" in the sense of being over-the-top and wildly inappropriate, but once you know how the fundamentalist mind works it's easy to understand why they act that way.

Indeed, just go to the letters section of religioustolerance.org if you want to see how crazy and violent fundies can act when they get 'offended'.

#56981: — 01/08  at  06:27 PM
I'm not enjoying it, Andrew. PZ's initial reaction was right -- what kind of world is it where you can get arrested for asking for sex?

As some commentators on the original thread suggested, it's not unusual for men with Latham's tastes to be overtly, and in a certain way sincerely, anti-gay -- they're just drawing a different line, between being a top or a bottom, or between receiving and giving.

Sexuality does not map onto just two statuses, despite what "Emma" and a number of commenters think. But in some places the police seem very busy enforcing boundaries.