How To Learn To Love Sodomy
This just in: GOP atremble, love & sex rejoice,
revolution imminent. Can you feel it?
SFGate.com
(San Francisco), July 2, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2003/07/02/notes070203.DTL
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
And now here we are, at a shimmeringly historic moment
where we cannot help but note the delicious irony, the divine karmic genius of
it all.
When we cannot help but notice how millions of
progressive love-minded Gay Pride folks across America, from S.F. to N.Y.,
from Atlanta to Seattle to Chicago, were actually cheering on the Supreme
Court last week—the same crusty bunch that snuck BushCo into office in the
first place—for slapping the tragically heartless GOP right across its wan
butt with a leather whip and a shocking 6-3 decision, stunning the Christian
right into disbelief and abject terror.
Not to mention Canada’s gay marriage, and maybe even
how the United Kingdom, too, is one step away from legalizing gay marriage,
and the poor GOP is feeling the slope toward calm debauchery and delicious
godlessness getting slippery indeed. Can I get a hell yeah.
And these days, amidst BushCo’s insane deficit and more
tax cuts for the rich and 150,000 U.S. troops still stuck in Iraq, amidst a
warmongering ethos and $135 mil set aside for “abstinence only” programs
for America’s disgusted youth, you take the joyous and the celebratory and
the progressive and the pro-sexual and the positive where and when you can,
honey.
Truly, it will indeed be years before the Lawrence sodomy
case has its full impact, as state by state, lawsuit by lawsuit, homophobic
senator by homophobic senator, the walls break down and the prejudices
evaporate and the hatred is squelched like a hissing cockroach.
The war is far from over, but one of the most important
battles in the history of gay—nay, human—rights has been won. Decisively.
This case is, as many analysts have pointed out, Roe v. Wade for the new
millennium, Brown v. the Board of Education for the next generation. It is
seminal, landmark, a sea change. Go get yourself all wet with it.
You simply have to note it. It cannot be denied. When not
even this sometimes nasty Rehnquist court, saddled with Scalia’s snide claim
of a rampant “homosexual agenda,” could turn back the tide, could find
sufficient fault with consensual love and sex and fleshy exploration among
open-minded adult humans of any gender and any orientation, well, you know
something larger and more potent is going on.
Here comes the radical notion. Here is where hard-core
anti-lib conservatives snicker and roll their eyes and point and scowl about
“goddamn liberals” and their “new-age tree-hugging commie-tofu crapola”
and clutch their military portfolios and crank up the Toby Keith to numb the
pain.
Because this ruling isn’t just a victory for gays. It
isn’t merely a victory for those seeking to advance the idea of gay
marriage, or gay adoption, or “deviant” sexual activity (read: anything
other than two minutes in the missionary position with a DustBuster and a copy
of “Left Behind,” per the Christian right), or even a victory for basic
human rights for all sexual orientations in this nation.
It is, quite simply, a stunning and rather unexpected
victory for the spirit, for the heart, for the body, for the very notion that
we as a humble and chaotic and distressed species can actually progress almost
despite ourselves, despite a famously oppressive and uptight leadership,
despite reams of deceit and war and John Ashcroft’s sad nipple fetish.
This is a crazed wildflower bursting through a concrete
sidewalk. This is a breath of fresh air after smoking four packs of toxic
disinformation a day for the past three years. This is the unexpected royal
flush when all you’ve been dealt to date are jokers and suicide kings.
And, for proof, we need only look to the Trent Lotts and
Rick Santorums and Bill Frists of the Right’s political oligarchy, the
sneering Republican apocalyptics who are right this minute scrunched and
apoplectic and immediately proposing a major change to the U.S. Constitution
to block gay marriage forever, to try and protect the “sanctity” of
God-given man/woman missionary-position 50-percent-divorce-rate marriage in
this country.
To protect it from, well, they don’t know what,
exactly, but it’s something very, very icky and scary and it’s coming for
their sons and daughters right now and it reeks of lavender and honey and
butch haircuts and tattoos and it loves to wear glitter and Versace and to
sing.
They want to actually change the U.S. Constitution. This
is how terrified they are. This is how utterly embittered and out of touch and
absolutely determined they are to keep this nation under the callused thumb of
religious dogma and free of anything resembling orgasmic delight and karmic
evolution.
And this is how you know. When those whose sole agenda is
to promote the tyranny of fear and violently misinterpret the Bible for their
own acidic agenda are themselves horrified and running scared, there has been
a gorgeous breakthrough.
Maybe it’s this. Maybe this case signifies the deeper
acknowledgment of our purpose on the planet, the subtle realization that God,
that the divine, is not, in fact, separate from the flesh, is not something to
be dreaded and guilted by and wielded like a bloody sanctimonious sword by
born-again presidents and sexless attorney generals and snickering foreign
despots.
In other words, maybe this is not, as the GOP so
desperately wants everyone to believe, about icky “deviant” sex and unholy
gay marriage and blasphemous anal-sex toys at all. Maybe the change is about
the potency of love. About the natural explorations of love in nature, of
human relationships and the freedom to explore and let love penetrate our
lives and make the divine into something we can touch, taste, slide into and,
ultimately, incarnate.
Oh my heavens. No wonder the conservative Right is aghast
and atwitter. No wonder the Death Star is panicky and sweaty and flagellating
itself. Because the divine is winking in our general direction. And, this
time, it looks like we just might wink back.
-
Mark Morford’s Notes & Errata column appears
every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and
Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply
skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.
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