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I picked up this book at Barnes and Noble. Being a Christian, I was curious about its claim, which is partly that Christians are being jailed for railing publicly about homosexuality. It was written by Donald Wildmon, who now joins the hate brigade led by the likes of James Dobson, Phyllis Schaffley, and Anne Coulter, to name the few.

I was a spiritual child of the 80s, and having been in Christian radio during that time, was no stranger to Wildmon. Both as a volunteer and financially, I supported his attempts to help abused children. I have not really heard his name since then though and am not surprised to see him wind up on the hate bandwagon.

Is there bigotry against Christians? Of course there is. There is bigotry against every cultural sect. Is the media partly responsible? Of course they are. So are Christians to join the fear crowd in spotting a new but old enemy, that of the Big H and holding it responsible for the Christian’s current censorship woes? Well, apart from the obvious ludicrousness, are we not tired of beating this dead Homo horse into the ground…? This constant contention that gay people are the problem is warped, twisted and out of focus, and being undone today with the steady coming out of Christians who are also gay.
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I presently look for — but do not expect to recoup after this fruitless search so far — a small USB drive by PATRIOT that I carry in my pocket. I last saw it on the table next to me in a coffee shop Tuesday night. It is 16GB and has a black rubber exterior with red print on it. I am still waiting for the $35 rebate from Patriot through NewEgg. Of course, the USB drive has files on it which identify me so I am sure that if someone finds it s/he will notify me accordingly….

The problem is, I may be possessing things. Or I may be forgetting things. In defense of the latter argument, I offer the following list. In January I had eight boxes sent to me Media Mail through the USPS. They were labeled on the outside, and inside four of them were around 525 music CDs. When the packages arrived they were damaged beyond belief. So far I have replaced over 150 jewel cases, will never see some CDs of which several were just pieces, and regret that I am now daily reminded — as each new missing disk comes to mind — of the evil world in which we truly live.

Yes, it is a world of terrorists, but it is also a world of greedy, desperate, uncaring, selfish, violators. This particular activity appears to be a big business, and if we could get the FBI out of their stupid DVD copyright warning state to actually catch criminals, they might want to look at these operations which are stealing from citizens through federal offense by opening their mail and then profiting wildly from their booty, and some of them are seemingly networked across the country, making it look like multiple companies even though they are a single group of thieves.

At present I am in the process of replacing some of these CDs (by buying them back from some of the online thieves?) — look at some of the names on Amazon, while not all are questionable even though they actually are called buyback*** meaning they buy back but in reality it is you and I who are buying back — I certainly cannot afford to replace all, especially the collectibles which are a total loss, which at least half of these were. So far I have replaced around five and hope to replace at least 10. The entire process is just way too expensive and has left me at times faint of heart since these are some of the best pieces of music I owned.

If I did anything with my CD collection, I cherished it and took exquisite care of its contents as if they were my children, as I do with my DVD collection. But my valuable CD collection arrived at my door trashed, obviously rifled, and several boxes retaped. They looked like they were dropped from an airplane and just handling them gave me a sensation of worthlessness.

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Interesting battle here in the South. Georgia lawmakers deny value to courses and instructors connected to glaring societal issues in exchange for students keeping classes where they can crunch numbers but — as these blind lawmakers — remain ill-equipped and blissfully ignorant about understanding the rest of the world outside their little hegemony which excludes the rest of the people with whom they must share this planet. Their action implies that those connected with queer theory must be amoral since queer theory does not line up with their own so-called morality.

Steamy sex classes need to go? Is that the real issue or is this outcry by Republican politicians now against this sort of teaching identified in this Queering the Disciplines chapter in Interdisciplinarity by Jon Moran:

“Queer theory feeds into and extends the interdisciplinary concerns of feminism, by developing feminist theory’s concerns with gender codes and differences into an exploration of the cultural construction of sexuality. The text that it has drawn on most productively in this regard is the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), which examines how language and culture construct ‘dominant’ and ‘deviant’ forms of sexuality. Foucault argues that sexuality became prominent in the modern era precisely ‘because relations of power had established it as a possible object,’ and that the ‘discursive explosion’ about sex over the last few centuries has evolved ‘the very production of sexuality’ itself (Foucault 1981: 35, 17, 105). This notion of sexuality as a cultural construct bound up with questions of power and knowledge, rather than as a natural given, is what makes queer theory interdisciplinary. If it were solely concerned with the study of homosexuality, the representation and self-representation of gay people and the questioning of heterosexist laws and attitudes, it would be a specialism with fairly definite concerns. In fact, queer theory draws on poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory to problematize the construction of homosexuality as a unified, foundational category of individual and collective identity. It is therefore far more broadly concerned with the range of discourses and knowledges that organize sexuality as a whole, and with the cultural work that is undertaken to police or subvert those sexual boundaries.” pp. 107-108.

You now know more about the kind of educational imperative queer theory puts forth than these legislators know. Whether you understand every word or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you recognize the theory exists to discourage the power structures that in this case want it dismissed, despite the obvious commentary above exposing its need to be. Notice that in removing inquiry such as queer theory from an institution the institution gives in to the powers that queer theory seeks to expose and keep at bay, powers that are interested in stealing the important identity associated with those persons who make up a community that these legislators would seek to destroy since it runs contrary to their motives.

Removing queer theory renders all of the people connected with it faceless and less than human. It is not “the Christian thing to do” as Christ rendered every life worth dying for and did. He seeks to redeem individuals in these communities that these threatened legislators — and the so-called Christian Coalition they are working with — under the permissible guise and hype of a failing economy — want to erase from our everyday thought and discussion.