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Last week, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing report condemning the Bush Administration’s practice of buying news in which prominent reporters and journalists were paid tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands, of taxpayer dollars to spread pro-Bush propaganda. The report focused on Armstrong Williams, an arch-conservative commentator, who was paid by the Department of Education to spread propaganda favorable to the “No Child Left Behind” program, which has left millions behind because it mandates certain standards, but provides no money to schools to meet those standards. In other cases, TV commercials were produced by various agencies that purport to show great progress being made by the Admnistration in a variety of areas. However, the commercials were made to resemble news reports and were sent to hundreds of TV stations, many of which showed them as news reports without proper identification as government PR creations. Bush’s people can’t do this anymore.

Scooter Libby, Vice-President Dick’s chief of staff, was revealed to be a source in the Valerie Plame case this week when he released New York Times reporter Judith Miller from her confidentiality pledge. The coward allowed a reporter who was protecting his identity to languish for nearly three months in jail before he finally released her. What was he hiding and if he had nothing to hide, why did he force her to sit in jail for more than eighty days to protect him? Both he and Karl Rove, the other source in the leak, which may have violated national security laws for mear political retribution against Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, should face jail time.

Tom DeLay has finally been indicted for something. For years, he has used every dirty trick in the book to claw his way to power and to cower and intimidate those under him in the House Republican Caucus to follow his demands. In 2002, he formed TRMPac, Texans for a Republican Majority, to raise money for a Republican campaign to take over the Texas Legislature so that they could, among many things, gerrymander Congressional district lines in Texas so that the Republicans could pick up five seats. It worked. However, corporate donations, which are illegal in Texas for legislative races, were funneled and laundered through the Republican National Committee and several have been indicted on this. DeLay has been indicted on charges of criminal conspiracy in the scam. It is blatant and he is defiant.

And, now BOTH Republican Congressional leaders are suspect. Senator Bill Frist is under investigation for insider trading. First, he sold stock held for him in a private trust which he isn’t supposed to have influence over. Secondly, the stock he sold is in HCA, Hospital Corporation of America, a company controlled by his family. His family was selling their stock just weeks before poor earnings reports were to come out that sent the stock plummetting. Trading by insiders on private information that outsiders are not privy to is illegal. Frist says it is just a coincidence that he sold his stock at the same time his family was dumping theirs, just weeks before the stock tanked. Just a coincidence. Yeah, right.

I know there are egregious cases of corruption among the Democrats, but these four examples of a myriad of Republican illegalities and unethical behaviors are just so blatant and so “in-your-face” that it is mind-boggling. And, the continued support of right-wing lemmings is amazing. They don’t care how many mistakes the President and his people make. They don’t care how many no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq and the Gulf Coast go to the President’s contributors and friends. They don’t care how many laws are broken, how the Bill of Rights is ignored, how many lies are told, how many billions of dollars are built up in debt to China and the Saudis to bail-out the Administration’s wasteful and insane spending, how many young Americans die in an illegal war.

People get the politicians they deserve.

Gay teen suicide is one of the great tragedies of our time and one that is almost wholly preventable. These kids are not killing themselves because they feel they are perverted or that their “lifestyle” is empty and meaningless. They are killing themselves because they are told they are perverted; they are told their lifestyle is meaningless. They are beaten at school, attacked at home, ridiculed by family, and condemned from the pulpit. They listen to a message of hatred and intolerance disguised as love and when it is delivered over and over, when they are told enough times that they are worthless, they come to believe it.

Everytime a religious figure condenms homosexuality as unnatural and perverse, everytime a religious figure declares that gay people will burn in Hell for eternity, everytime a religious figure claims that any abuse suffered by a gay person is deserved, they have given the bashers the justification they desire to beat and often kill. They give the victims of their tyrades the message that suicide is the only answer because, for most of them, they know that heterosexuality is not the answer for them.

Every year, more and more scientific evidence points to the fact that homosexuality is NOT “curable,” that homosexuality itself, (not the behavior, but the orientation- at least among gay men) is not a choice. Research shows significant differences in the hypothalamae of gay men as opposed to straight men, that there is a correlation between orientation and the presence of the q28 gene in men, that gay men react to male phermones in the same way as straight women, that identical male twins raised in seperate environments will, in at least 95% of the time, both be gay if at least one is.

But, science is never an answer to those who seek in the Bible justification for bigotry and hatred. The Old Testament declares that adultery is a capital offence- why do those who condemn homosexuality not demand the death penalty for all those evangelists such as Richard Roberts who are divorced? Paul says in the New Testament that women should sit seperate from men in church, should never express religious opinions, and should always be subservient to their husbands. In even the most hardcore Baptist household, is this common?

We must stand up for those who are the most vulnerable and the least able to defend themselves from religious hypocrisy and cultural bigotry. We must stand up for the gay youth of America who are being beaten and murdered and driven to suicide by the ignorance and hatred of the deliberately blind.

I nearly killed myself when I was fourteen because of the verbal abuse of my stepfather. I know what our gay youth are going through. Stand up for them. Help them. Tell them they are beautiful and that the bigots and hate-mongers are wrong.

This is an Associated Press copyrighted article:

‘Ex-Gay Ministry’ Ordered Closed
by The Associated Press

(Nashville, Tennessee) The Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities has ordered the closing of what it calls two unlicensed personal care facilities run by a Christian group that claims to counsel gays to give up homosexuality.

Love In Action’s work, particularly with teenagers, has drawn protests from gay rights advocates.

President Bush has announced that we will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the Gulf coast, (New Orleans), at a time when we are already running hundreds of billlions of dollars in the red financing his War on Iraq. We must be very careful before we send politicians down there with barrels full of cash to make certain that this is not simply flushing money down the toilet or enriching a few at the expense of the many.

New Orleans is notorious as one of the most corrupt cities in the nation. The New Orleans police department has long been known to be rife with corruption. And, the incompetence of Mayor Ray Nagin is beyond dispute. Good Heavens! Last summer, Nagin announced to the city’s poor that if they were ever faced with evacuation, they were on their own as the city would not be able to evacuate them. Then, when the real thing hit, he sent bus drivers home the day of the hurricane to save money and told off-duty police not to show up until the day AFTER the hurricane! This is the kind of municipal administration to which we want to hand over billions of dollars?

Louisiana has a long and sordid history of corrupt politics. This is the state that continued to re-elect Edwin Edwards when he was under indictment, the man who said he would never lose an election unless he was found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. He was eventually convicted of corruption, but it took years to do so.

However, let’s not focus our fears of corruption and incompetence just on New Orleans and Louisiana. Friends of the Bush Administration are already lining up at the trough. Joe Allbaugh ran George W’s 2000 election campaign, for which experience it was deamed he was qualified to run FEMA. After leaving FEMA and suggesting a political crony from Oklahoma to be his successor, (the infamous and incompetent Mike Brown), he became a lobbyist and, guess what? After the first major disaster, two companies he represents, Shaw Group and Halliburton, (yes, the same Halliburton Dick Cheney ran and which received billions in no-bid contracts in Iraq), have received no-bid contracts for initial relief work. People connected to both companies were also significant contributors to the Bush campaigns.

The record defecits we are now running, after years of surpluses under President Clinton, are primarily being financed by Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Communist China. We are spending tens of billions of dollars in interest on those loans. Do the American people want to give away billions of dollars to China every year?

The rebuilding of the Gulf Coast is going to be a financial quagmire and if someone isn’t careful, it’s mostly going to be wasted.

I’m sorry, but I detest the term.

I am not queer. I am gay, I am homosexual, and not straight. But, I am not queer and I don’t like anyone, “queer” or not, calling me “queer.”

I find the term offensive and a reminder of the descrimination and violence we have suffered for too long. I have written of my stepfather calling me queer when I was a boy. I was beaten almost every day during junior high school. A young man was murdered in my city when I was a teen and the word “queer” written with his blood on the wall beside him.

“Queer” is symbolic of all the pain and degradation we have endured. I find it as offensive as “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” or “wop.” No university would institute a “Nigger Studies” program or offer classes in “Kike-history.” Why should “queer” be acceptable to us?

For that matter, why should a program such as “Queer Eye,” regardless of the title, be acceptable? “Queer Eye” is nothing more than the gay 21st-Century equivalent of “Amos and Andy.”

I know that some say that by embracing “queer,” we take the pain and hate from the word. No we don’t. Ask any African-American if they would tolerate ‘nigger” or if they embraced “niggger, would it take away the pain of centuries of slavery, lynchings, and descrimination. Ask a Jew if they would embrace “kike” as a way of alleviating the pain of the Holocaust and the Dyaspora.

For some, it is an “in-your-face,” “fuck-you” way of declaring independence from the descrimination and hate and I can understand the anger behind such feelings. Like every other middle-aged gay man, I have my copy of La Cage aux Folles and know all the words to “I Am What I Am.” But, I think there is a bit of exhibitionism in it, as well; a bit of wanting to shock. It’s similar to the tacky and tasteless exhibitionism often seen in Pride parades that negate any positive image that may be created. Wagging your penis at shocked straight people along the parade route is not going to influence them to be more receptive to gay marraige. All it does is declare that you care not for their feeings. If that’s all you want, then fine. However, some of us want more.

I am who I am and I am comfortable with who I am. I don’t need to walk up to a complete stranger on the street, slap his face, and scream, “I’m a cocksucker!” And, it’s not internalized homophobia to say so.

When you allow one aspect of your character or life to be the definition of who you are, you are pathetically mono-dimensional. And, the use of the word “queer” is an insulting and demeaning way of defining a group and often embraced by those for whom being gay is the over-riding quality of their being.

I am not queer, but I am proud that I have loved men and I was proud to march around the White House in protest against anti-gay descrimination. I was proud to work in the HIV community. I was proud to volunteer with The Quilt. I am proud to drive a car with a rainbow flag sticker. I am proud to write gay love stories. I am proud to speak to legislators and politicians about gay issues. I am proud to write letters to the newspaper regarding gay issues. I am proud to march in the Pride parade and to publicly declare my homosexuality.

But, I am not queer and don’t presume to call me queer.

The next Presidential election in the US will not occur for more than three years, but speculation is already growing on whom the parties will choose for their nominees. Organization for all the prospective candidates is well underway and each has already been making the obligatory trips to Iowa and New Hampshire to guarantee consideration in the first of the caucuses and primaries. Pundits and bloggers are already wasting airtime and bandwidth on their ideas and theories and so, not to be left behind, am I.

I would like to throw out a name that is not getting the attention and thought I believe it deserves: Albert Gore, Jr.

Several months ago, I was watching a speech on C-SPAN that the former Vice-President delivered to Move-On. For over an hour and a half, Al Gore spoke eloquently and knowledgably on a myriad of subjects without once looking at notes. Can anyone, anyone imagine the current defiler of the Oval Office speaking eloquently and knowledgably about ANYTHING for more than a few seconds, even with notes and pictures before him?

Gore won the popular vote in 2000. I do not refer to Florida. Even giving Mr. Bush the vote count he claims in Florida, Gore STILL won the popular vote, with more than 51 million votes to just over 50 million for Bush. More Americans voted for Al Gore in 2000 than George Bush, a fact that even Republican defenders of Bush admit.

It is not unthinkable that a defeated candidate for President should come back eight years later and win the prize. In 1960, Vice-President Richard Nixon narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy, some would say because of vote-rigging in Chicago. He then lost the Governor’s race in California two years later. Yet, in the middle of a divisive and deeply unpopular war, he came back in 1968 to take the White House. Are the situations in this election, that different?

When we look at the alternatives, Al Gore stands head and shoulders above all others. Among the Democrats, the front-runner seems to be Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has masterfully moved herself to the center, as her husband did fourteen years ago. Yet, if there is anyone in the Democratic Party beside Ted Kennedy who could get Republican testosterone flowing more freely than Hillary Clinton, I can’t imagine who it might be. The Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks on John Kerry would be child’s play compared to the venom that would be spewed by Headrush Limbaugh and the GOP Chairman, “Larry Bud” Mehlman and their ilk. Kerry’s inept campaign in 2004 cannot be overcome and there are only dwarfs among the many others who covet the Democratic nomination.

Among the Republicans, neither John McCain nor Rudy Guilliani, the only candidates of gravitas that people in the center could consider, can realistic expect the theocratic right that controls the GOP to allow them the nomination. For one, Guilliani is pro-choice and pro-gay. McCain is one of the “Gang of 14” who have thrarted the venomous right’s plans for all-out war in the Senate over judicial nominations. No. The Republican nomination will go to Bill Frist, George Allen, Rick Santorum, Condi Rice, or, in the absence of an early consensus, Dick Cheney. Frist, Allen, and Santorum are fundamentalist theocrats. Rice is one of the architects of the failed wars on terror and Iraq, and Dick Cheney will have already had eight years as President, with the disastrous results we now see.

Let us look at Al Gore and see a man of vision and courage who could be a President we would actually be proud of. How often have you watched The West Wing and asked yourself, why can’t Josiah Bartlet be the real President? Wouldn’t it be nice to have an intelligent President for a change, one who has principles, one who has vision, one who has integrity?

Please consider Al Gore. He’s won once. He can win again.

After Ted Koppel’s scathing interview with FEMA Director Mike Brown, however, I have come to see that the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina is just as incompetent and medacious as is it’s approach to the illusory War on Terror, the illegal War on Iraq, its loyalty to the energy industry, and it’s head-in-the-sand approach to Global Warming.

I do not come to these positions with the demogogic self-promotion of an opportunistic Jesse Jackson. Indeed, I am a recovering Republican. In 2000, George W. Bush was the first Republican for President for whom I did NOT vote, and I daily see reasons that justify my vote, first for Gore, and, then, for Kerry. Energy policy in the White House is written by former lobbyists for the oil industry. FDA drug approvals are decided by administrators who are former employees of the pharmaceutical companies which they now regulate. The President who once declared that man did not “evolute” now endorses teaching religious doctrine in Biology class. The Administration entered office in 2001, eight months before the 9/11 attacks, devising plans and strategy for a war in Iraq and only after 9/11 began to imply non-existent connections between the admittedly evil Saddam and the attackers. Paul Wolfowitz, then Assistant Secretary of Defense ADMITTED that WMD was the only excuse they could sell to the American people for going to war. Colin Powell was quoted by Newsweek as stating that the evidence of WMD he was asked by the President to present to the UN was, (his word), “bullshit.” A memo by the alleged felon and traitor Karl Rove, who is believed responsible for the leaking of Valery Plame’s identity to punish her husband, Joseph Wilson, for pointing out the errors in the Pesident’s speech declaring that Iraq had sought nuclear material from Niger, a memo by Rove in August 2002 discussed the political advantages to the Republican Party in the the 2002 and 2004 election campaigns. And, the President continues to lie to us as President Johnson did in 1968 about Vietnam, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that things are working out in Iraq, (tell that to the women of Iraq who will now be relagated to a status below farm animals under the rather strange and perverse form of Islamic law that is about to be imposed on them). I am not at all certain the parents of those brave and courageous American soldiers who have sacrificed their lives are proud that the result of their sacrifice is that a good portion of Iraq is about to become a suburb of Iran.

The current example of the Bush Administration’s incompetence is the evidence of Mike Brown, the FEMA Director whom the President declared, during one of his many “take-charge” photo-ops, was doing a “helluva” job.

The list of Mr. Brown’s mistakes are well documented by many news sources, with the notable exceptions of Fox News Channel and the Republican Washington Times, owned by the “Rev.” Sun-Myung Moon. What, however, should have been the tip-off that Brown had no business running the nation’s emergency response agency is that he was a crony of Joe Allbaugh, an Oklahoman who ran President Bush’s 2000 campaign. Brown was a friend of Allbaugh when he, Brown, was a minor city official in a small suburb of Oklahoma City. That seems to have been the his principal qualification for talking over the emergency operations of the entire United States of America, a minor official in a suburb of Oklahoma City; oh, and friendship with the President’s campaign manager.

Welcome to America in the 21st Century.

As Rehnquist was a conservative and his replacement will, most likely, reflect his conservative temperment, the Supreme Court is unlikely to change its balance due to his absence. However, as Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Conner was often a swing vote between the conservatives and the moderates and liberals, her replacement will matter a great deal. Judge John Roberts has been nominated to replace her and I believe that many liberal groups have rushed to judgment on him and prematurely announced opposition to his nomination. I don’t believe Roberts will be as dangerous to gay people and other minorities as some fear, primarily because of his strong respect for the concept of stare decisis, of legal precedent, (see this article on Stare Decisis in Wikipedia). Roberts strongly believes in upholding legal precedents and if the court has ruled, as it did in Lawrence v Texas that anti-sodomy laws are a violation of the right of privacy, he is unlikely to reverse that. He is unlikely to reverse Roe v Wade, either. Much as I dislike George W. Bush, and my dislike of the man is immense and intense, I believe the early opposition to the Roberts nomination is simply knee-jerk and opportunistic. It is my hope, actually, as some have suggested on the Sunday morning talk-shows, that Bush switches Roberts’ nomination to fill Rehnquist’s seat and chooses someone else for O’Connor’s.

All of this, however, must be viewed in the light of what I believe is the great issue facing America during the next few decades. Eloquently stated during an episode of The West Wing a few years ago, an aide to the character of President Bartlet states that the great issue facing America in the Twenty-first Century will be privacy. It is true. As surveillance of computers and communications becomes not only easier but more common, as legislation such as the “Patriot” Act becomes more acceptable, as the people of the United States become ever more compliant and less concerned about the growing encroachments on their civil liberties and place the illusion of security before the right of freedom, privacy will be the great issue before the Supreme Court during the upcoming decades. And, it is this issue on which Judge Roberts and any other Court nominees should be questioned in the most intense and direct of terms.

Privacy is a right and we should demand it.

It is hard to believe that the scenes of chaos, crime, and devastation emerging from what was once New Orleans are originating in the United States. How can something like this happen in America?

However, there are far more important questions to ask. For decades, indeed, for centuries, the authorities have known that, eventually, the Big Hurricane was going to hit New Orleans, just as the authorities in Los Angeles and San Francisco know that, eventually, the Big Earthquake is going to hit their cities, and the authorities of Washington and New York city know that, eventually, the Big Terrorist Attack is going to hit their cities. Everytime a hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico, there is talk of what might happen if New Orleans is hit, or sideswiped. What happens if the storm-surge flows over the dikes and levees? What happens if one or more of the levees should rupture? Every single time there is a hurricane in the Gulf, these questions are discussed in the media.

It was known when Katrina hit Miami as a Category One hurricane that it was going into the Gulf. This was a week before it hit New Orleans, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Mobile. It was known the Tuesday before it hit that New Orleans would be, at the very least, on the western side of the storm. It was suspected Wednesday and Thursday that New Orleans would receive a direct hit. It was understood Saturday night that IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.

Were there no contingency plans in place for this kind of disaster? Did the authorities know that a mandatory evacuation would not result in the entire city leaving? Was there no thought to the hundred thousand or so people who were simple too poor, too infirm, to leave? Was there no consideration given to the possibility that the levees might actually break?

When it became certain late last week that New Orleans WOULD suffer some kind of hit, why wasn’t the National Guard mobilized BEFORE the storm hit? Why wasn’t the Army mobilized to bring trucks, buses, supplies, food, and medicine in anticipation of the human misery that THEY KNEW was about to occur?

To this day, why hasn’t the Federal Government comandeered every Greyhound bus it can find and move these people out of the city? Why aren’t there fifty thousand troops patrolling the streets of New Orleans? Why is this happening in the greatest nation on earth?

Perhaps, the planning for this was left to those in the Pentagon who planned for Iraq AFTER the “end of major combat operations.”

It is telling that the Swiss newspaper Le Temps reports that funds had been appropriated to strengthen the levees around New Orleans, but the funds were deverted to help fund Bush’s War on Iraq. Why?

More questions:

Why is the primary port for oil tankers bringing petroleum into the United States located in the most hurricane prone port in America?

Why are refineries located in the most hurricane prone part of the country? Why is the unrefined petroleum not sent to more reliable areas of the nation?

And, finally…

If this is what we can expect after a hurricane hits New Orleans, what will happen when Al-Quaeda releases Ebola in Washington or explodes a dirty bomb in the port of Long Beach or sabotages a chemical plant outside Philadelphia or a nuclear plant in Illinois?

I certainly feel confident. I’m sure glad that the President decided to cut short his vacation two days AFTER the devastation.

Welcome to America in the Twenty-first Century.

I am profoundly confused and disturbed by such comments. Before I go further, I must say that I have great respect for those who are sincere in their faith and I mean no disrespect to them. A number of my friends are people of faith and I certainly do not mean anything insulting to them or to their brothers and sisters in faith when I ask, Why?

In every great moment of trauma, whether it is a natural disaster, a crime, an act of war, personal illness, or financial difficulty, one often hears comments to the effect that were it not for God, it could have been worse. However, my question is this. If God is all-powerful and all-merciful, if one thanks God for not allowing the disaster, illness, crime, etc., from becoming worse, why show gratitude? If God had the power to show mercy and spare some, why did he permit it in the first place?

Did God cause the disaster, illness, crime, etc.? If not, did he, indeed, have the power to make it less severe? If God had the power to make it less severe, why did he permit it at all? What kind of God permits the Holocaust? What kind of God allows a mother to watch the BTK killer disembowel her son? What kind of God permits horrors, agonies, the unspeakable to occur? And, why ask him in his infinite mercy to spare some or to give strength to survive the catastrophe he has either caused or allowed to occur?

And, why should I want to worship and venerate such a God? Why should I honor a God who would throw me into the pits of Hell for not believing in him, a God so egotistical that he would punish for eternity someone who chooses not to believe or to follow?

Why would anyone want to believe in such a foul power?

I shake my head in wonder when I hear the emotional and pseudo-intellectual gymnastics believers endure as they attempt to explain the inexplicable. God works in mysterious ways. We must just accept and have faith. Why?

Can someone please tell me why?

The act is a gross over-reaction to the threat of terror and gives the terrorists exactly what they want, an over-reaction and a sense of fear among the people and their “leaders.” The restrictions on civil liberties are completely unnecessary. The report of the 9/11 Commission showed that the FBI and various other Federal and state law enforcement and intelligence agencies had all the information they needed to stop the 9/11 attacks. The only problem was a lack of communication between and within agencies and field offices; that and childish competition and turf-protection between agencies and field offices. Remedy that and the country has all the tools necessary to defeat terrorism with out running the Bill of Rights through the shredder.

We were promised in 2001 that the restrictions on privacy and personal freedom imposed by the mis-named Patriot Act would be temporary and would come up for periodic review. At the time, opponents of the act who warned that this was not true were attacked as disloyal and emotional. We now see they were correct. The bill will be permanent.

We can only hope the President’s new nominee to the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is the traditional kind of libertarian conservative who opposes government intrusion on personal freedom and not one of the new conservatives who seem to love expanding government power over the individual. We hope that he also understands that a society which values security more than freedom gets neither.

And, deserves neither.

Until my step-father’s outburst of loathing and disgust.

Two hours later, I was seated on the toilet in the bathroom holding my Boy Scout knife to my wrist, desperately trying to work up the courage to end the pain and the “perversion.” Were it not for the insistent knocking on the door by my younger brother, I might very well have done so.

This summer, a teenage boy in Tennessee named Zack Stark caused a great stir when he wrote in his blog of his homosexuality and his parents’ determination to “cure” it by sending him to a Christian “ex-gay” re-education camp called Refuge, run by a ministry called “Love in Action.” There was outrage at the techniques used by the group and protests both on the Internet and in front of the group’s headquarters. The State of Tennessee even invistigated the camp over allegations of abuse and practicing therapy without proper certification. Zack has now returned home from the re-education camp and his latest blog entry, as quoted by The Washington Blade, indicates that there has been some “progress” made by the re-programmers at Love in Action. It is understandable. The boy is sixteen and under great stress caused by parents who cannot accept a son who is not what they want.

I understand the feelings of shame, the sense of alienation at not being what your family wants. An older family-member had occasionally touched me inappropriately when I was young and later, seeing the turmoil and emotional violence in my family after my mother’s remarriage, had asked that I live with him and his wife. My mother refused and told me that, had she agreed to it, I would have been “ruined.” I wasn’t completely certain what she meant by the term “ruined,” but had a fairly good idea that it had something to do with being “queer,” which I knew I was. So, I endured the rest of my adolescence knowing that, in my mother’s eyes, I was ruined.

Larry Evans was the founder of “Love in Action” in 1973. However, after seeing the wreckage “reparative therapy” leaves in its wake, the destroyed lives, the self-hatred, the suicides, he has now denounced it and declared it to be dangerous and wrong.

More than a third of teenage suicides are by gay youth. Do they kill themselves because of their homosexuality or because of the alienation, the rejection, the abuse they endure at the hands of unaccepting families and closed-minded bigots? There is little evidence to suggest much of a success rate in programs such as “Love in Action,” which some of their organizers admit, even as they use fear of the “homosexual agenda” in their fund-raising; but there is voluminous evidence to show the harm such programs do in creating feelings of shame and failure in the victims they target.

I have only the greatest respect and sympathy for Zach, a beautiful young man, as you can see from the picture above, who deserves all the peace and joy life can give. I hope he finds love and self-acceptance, no matter what path he chooses once he is of age to make decisions for himself. And, I hope that advocates either for “reparative therapy” or against leave the boy alone and let him deal with his life. He’s been under terrible stress and deserves support and love.

The problem was, Shiaparelli never said there were canals on Mars.

The astronomer wrote that he had observed canali, an Italian word that could be translated into English as “canals,” but which is more properly translated as “channels,” something completely different and which sheds an entirely new light on the subject.

Of course, since the first photographs from the Mariner 4 space probe in 1965, we have known that Mars is not the lush world of oceans and channels that once it had been thought to be. Instead, it is a cold and barren, dusty and windblown world of Moon-like craters and vast plains, occasionally marred by a few huge, deep canyons that once had served as conduits of water, though not for billions of years.

The point is that, even in contemporary times, a simple mistranslation of one word, led generations of scientists and writers to believe, indeed to base their life’s work on, the premise that Mars had canals and, thus, evidence of advanced intelligent life. The mistranslation of one word.

I am a freethinker and, thus, probably not the best person to discuss issues of faith. However, I find it amazing that fundamentalist Christians are so eager to believe the Bible is the inspired word of God and factually and dogmatically infallible when one must consider that many of the events described in both the Old and New Testaments were written of decades or even centuries after they allegedly took place. Many of the documents that Christians now call the Bible were gathered together and debated in various councils and conventions during the early centuries of the church. Some gospels were dismissed, others were accepted, based on the political conditions existing in the Roman Empire and the church at the time. And, the translations of some documents from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, into later forms of those languages or into Latin could contain misinterpretations of words and phrases with far greater consequences than those of the astronomers who relied on the erroneous translations of Shiaparelli’s work.

John Shelby Spong, the former Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey, writes in his book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991), that part of the popular interpretation of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is based on the translation of one word which could be translated in seven different ways. (More on this in a later post).

Even if one does believe in a great and benevolent power guiding the universe, is it not too much to believe that human error in translating documents over centuries could occur, that stories passed down from one generation to the next by word-of-mouth could be changed and altered by the time they are placed on paper or papyrus? Even if one does believe in the basic foundations of Judaism and Christianity, is it not just a bit too much to believe that every single word of the Bible is absolutely and undeniably correct?

If not, may I offer you a deed to some canals I have for sale on Mars.

My recovery began with a spiritually-based program and fellowship, but my first steps were difficult and saw many setbacks. I tried to accept the concept of a Higher Power upon whom I could rely for my recovery, but my doubts about faith and religion repeatedly scuttled my early efforts. Following the program’s advice to “fake it ’till you make it,” I pretended for years to believe; yet I continued to relapse into my chemical abuse.

In college, I read a number of works by the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, including The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and two collections of essays on her philosphy of “rational self-interest,” For the New Intellectual, (New York: New American Library, 1964), and Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982). Though I have some problems with her philosophy and many of her followers, I re-read some of her work during my early recovery and, surprisingly, it was the third essay in that second book, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” which proved to be the key to opening my eyes and giving me the strength to begin a true and healthy recovery from chemical abuse.

Even as an adolescent considering the Episcopal ministry, I knew underneath my attempts at belief that there was no God and that people turn to the irrationality of religion because of their own weaknesses and fears. However, Rand explains why one of the foundations of spiritually-based recovery programs, the so-called “Serenity Prayer,” is, despite its form as a prayer, a rather rational tool to use in recovery. Written by Reinhold Neibuhr, an evangelical Congregationalist thinker and writer, it reads

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Reading this essay opened my eyes to the profoundly comforting idea that recovery could work without a belief in God and that I could achieve recovery on my own. When trapped in addiction, one often tries to change those things that are not within one’s power to change; one often lacks the courage to change those things that must be changed; and, often, one fails to understand the difference. It was after reading that essay, (which I have criminally simplified here), that I began to realize that I could not rely on superstition and wishful thinking to achieve recovery. It was my own effort and rationality that was going to do it; and it has.

My life is not perfect and I still have great difficulties and challenges. However, I remain clean and sober and I am seeing some success with my writing. Life is good, even when it isn’t.

There is an entry I found particularly moving, which the editor uses as an epigraph, from Saturday, 14 April 1923:

“It occured to me today with something of a shock how horrible it would be for this diary of mine to be pawed over and read unsympathetically after I am dead, by those incapable of understanding, who would be filled with disgust and astonishment and think of me as a poor demented wretch, a neurotic or a madman who was better off dead. And then the thought of the one thing even more dreadful and terrible than that- for my diary never to be read by the one person who would or could understand.

“For I do want it to be read- there is no use concealing the fact- by somebody who is like me, who would understand.”

I have attempted numerous journals in my life, begining with a diary in the fourth grade that lasted all of three days. I have numerous spiral notebooks filled with the whining and moaning of a self-pitying wastrel and since the advent of the computer, I have dozens of floppy disks chronicling my some sometimes confused and convoluted attempts at recovery and growth. Yet, I often wondered for whom I wrote. Was it only for me to read in my later years as I would look back on my self-destruction or my recovery? Perhaps, I wrote for friends or family, a thought I found comforting until I realized their only interest would be to see what dirty secrets I revealed or what nasty comments I might write about them. At one point, in the midst of my twenty-something alcoholic grandiosity, I considered the possibility that scholars in the future might find my life illuminating. Then, I read Jed Alexander’s diary and his moving entry wondering whether that certain someone who might understand and benefit from his diary would ever find it.

As I near the end of my forties, I have begun to build a life and find some success with my writing. The world of blogging has opened new possibilities for writers and non-writers to have their thoughts and their lives preserved and it is my hope that others who read this blog will find something with which they can agree, something to make them think, something to make them act, something to make them remember someone named Christopher who wanted to make a mark with his writing and leave something of himself behind.