social issues: Spam ... precious, tasty spam from the American Family Association

Once upon a time I went in search of the Memory Hole because they had a five-minute minute video showing Shrubby sitting in that Florida classroom, getting the news and sitting like a drooling idiot while desperate people were leaping to their deaths at the World Trade Center.

I'm not sure if it was there that I had to enter an e-mail address to sort of register, or if it was another Memory Hole (apparently it's a popular name for Web sites), but most of the time when I register for such sites, I make up an e-mail address at my domain so that I can track if my e-mail address is being sold for spam. Thus far, memoryhole@domain is just about the only of these e-mail addresses that has turned up spam. And I find it hard to believe it came from thememoryhole.org because of whose e-mail list I seem to be on now ... The American Family Association. Truly precious.

Apparently they're boycotting Procter & Gamble now. I'm sure they're quaking in their boots. While I'm no great fan of the multinational mega-corp in general, P&G definitely earns my sympathy for a number of reasons. First, it took them decades to shake off the baseless and silly rumors that they were satanists. And second, as Rev. Wildmon's hate group likes to point out, they're one of the most gay-friendly employers out there.

I'm still perplexed as to how it is that treating your gay and lesbian employees amounts to "promotion of the homosexual agenda," but I guess I have this unreasonable aversion to 'slippery slope' arguments. It must be my innate rationality.

And I have yet to find out what the homosexual agenda is, but I must just not have gotten the Outlook appointment notices, so ... my bad, I guess, I dunno.

But when you ask them what our agenda is, they come back with some of the most absurd things, like forcing public elementary schools to teach the mechanics of gay sex to young children, and 'recruiting' of pubescent teens. This recruiting thing is particularly galling, because they seem convinced that gay people have to have been 'enlisted' to the 'lifestyle' or something. But I can say with certainty that there's no straight person I've ever met who would turn gay, no matter what the inducement. Performing a homosexual act or two, sure, probably, but completely changing their sexual identity? The whole idea that gay people could just naturally be that way causes their entire case to crumble like a house on a bad foundation.

So here you go, folks. Like Andrew Tobias, I was never recruited. I didn't come from a broken home. I was never molested. I've never been involved in drugs. And yet I'm gay. Go figure.

Then there's the marriage thing, which inevitably turns into an assertion that the homosexual agenda involves bestiality and plural marriages. More of that slippery slope thing.

I have compassion for these people, really I do. I've felt my foundations shift more than once, and I know the discomfort and outright panic that can come when the rules change and you just want things to stay the way they are. And even when they lash out in nasty and unpleasant ways, I wish them peace and wholeness. I just wish they'd stay out of my bedroom.