For the "Media Malpractice" File - Remember that speech where Pope Benedict told the world that gay marriage was one of the threats to humanity?

Alternative title - "Homosexuality, not everything is about you."

Dan Savage mentioned it in his diatribe in order to accuse the Pope of claiming that the only thing standing between himself and sodomy was a piece of paper.

Then there is the Huffington Post and Reuters:

VATICAN CITY, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict said on Monday that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined "the future of humanity itself".

The pope made some of his strongest comments against gay marriage in a new year address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican in which he touched on some economic and social issues facing the world today.

He told diplomats from nearly 180 countries that the education of children needed proper "settings" and that "pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman."

The funny thing is that the Pope didn't say any such thing, and nothing even close.

Andrew Brown at the Guardian points out:

On Monday, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican at which he didn't say a single word about gay marriage. You can read the whole thing here. So why is it news? Because Reuters and, following them, many other people reported that he had denounced gay marriage as a threat to western civilisation. Philip Pullella, who is one of the very best and most experienced Vatican correspondents, led his story: "Pope Benedict said Monday that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined 'the future of humanity itself'."

So far as I can see, Pope Benedict just didn't. He did speak in favour of the family "based on the marriage of a man and woman". He did say that "policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself". But there was no suggestion that gay marriage was the most important of these and he didn't mention it at all, whereas he did take up several other sexual issues.

He went out of his way to praise a recent European court ruling that outlawed patents based on human stem cells. He said that "legislative measures which not only permit but at times even promote abortion for reasons of convenience or for questionable medical motives compromise the education of young people and, as a result, the future of humanity". That may be right or wrong. But it's not an attack on gay marriage, or even on homosexuality.

Here's the speech. I've read it. Here's the only passage that could get Savage's knickers in a twist:

Education is a crucial theme for every generation, for it determines the healthy development of each person and the future of all society. It thus represents a task of primary importance in this difficult and demanding time. In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and States; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue. It is in the family that we become open to the world and to life and, as I pointed out during my visit to Croatia, “openness to life is a sign of openness to the future”.[3] In this context of openness to life, I note with satisfaction the recent sentence of the Court of Justice of the European Union forbidding patenting processes relative to human embryonic stem cells, as well as the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemning prenatal selection on the basis of sex.

Can you just feel the call for violence against cringing homosexuals in schoolyards across America?

Brown is right. There is not the slightest basis for the headlines that read "Pope Benedict XVI: Gay Marriage A Threat To 'Future Of Humanity."

So, where does this nonsense come from? Are we at the point of post-modernism that there is no longer a felt need to attach one's truth claims to reality.

It turns out that along with the Bible, and Christians, and people who won't sit through his diatribes, Dan Savage hates the Pope.




At the end of the video, although Savage attempts to link opposition to homosexual marriage to bulling kids in schools, he is entirely oblivious to how his comments are giving the green light to his supporters in the audience to engage in acts of "bullying" against Catholics, because that kind of thing happens far more frequently than schoolyard bullying of "gays" in schools. For example, this happened:

Catholic parish in Massachusetts has become the target of threats of violence, and vandalism because of a sign posted on church property supporting the traditional definition of marriage, according to The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts.

The sign on the billboard of Saint Francis Xavier Parish in the town of Acushnet displayed a message reading "Two men are friends, not spouses."

Insert firestorm here.

According to an interview by the local Fox affiliate, Steve Guillotte, the Director of Pastoral Services at the parish, said the church has received a number of menacing, obscenity laced phone calls, including one threatening to burn the church down.

Ah! Tolerance smells like burning churches. Somebody nailed the word "hate"
to the Church's fence along with other...how shall we say..."hostile" signs and rainbow balloons were attached to it.

The church took the sign down in a victory for free speech and freedom of conscience everywhere.

Why gay marriage matters to your marriage.

One of the arguments in favor of gay marriage is the argument from indifference - "what two other people do in their marriage doesn't affect me in my marriage."

The problem with this argument is that we collectively create social reality. Marriage is a natural reality, and as a natural reality, we cannot help but be aware of its true meaning and import on either a conscious or unconscious level. But marriage is also a social reality, and that social reality is always explicit and conventional; social realities are always formed as a common understanding communicated by social media, social convention and shared assumptions. Like money, which would have no value if people woke up one day and realized that it's all just colored paper, insofar as marriage departs from its natural reality, it's all just social convention.

So, what if everyone else's definition of marriage departed from your definition? Why, then, you would be "wrong" because the social reality of marriage is what everyone else agreed to. In which case, you would lose a tremendous social good, namely the way in which social convention reinforces individual norms.

So, how does that work out concretely in gay marriage? Well, it seems that "gay marriage" which would be nothing less than marriage itself, does not accept the norm of fidelity. No one less than self-proclaimed ethicist Dan Savage explains:

That, anyway, is what Dan Savage, America’s leading sex-advice columnist, would say. Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.

“I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me, “when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.”

The view that we need a little less fidelity in marriages is dangerous for a gay-marriage advocate to hold. It feeds into the stereotype of gay men as compulsively promiscuous, and it gives ammunition to all the forces, religious and otherwise, who say that gay families will never be real families and that we had better stop them before they ruin what is left of marriage. But Savage says a more flexible attitude within marriage may be just what the straight community needs. Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys more families than it saves.

Yes, it is dangerous for a gay marriage advocate to hold this view. But Savage would explain that it is the truth. Whether it is the truth or not, Savage's redefinition of marriage certainly does not reinfoce the social good of fidelity; rather, it redefines marriage as a social reality.Obstinate and eccentric individuals
can claim to so hold to their their own definition, and they are, but they will cearly be shoveling against the tide if Savage gets his way.

Mark Judge asks, "Who is truly counter-cultural? Who is authentically transgressive and threatening?...

Dawn Eden or Dan Savage?"

When the story broke, I was at the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., seeing my old friend Dawn Eden. Dawn is a genuine countercultural figure. She grew up Jewish in New York, became a journalist and rock music writer (she wrote liner notes to a lot of great records), and then converted to Catholicism. She is the author of the books “The Thrill of the Chaste” and her new one, “My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints.” It is a magnificent and moving work of great spiritual power and grace.

At this point I could offer a comparison between the enslaved and enraged Savage (who is a wonderful advocate for marriage; he’s only cheated on his partner nine times) and the free and joyful Dawn. But I actually feel sorry for Savage — and for the gay community, which has to suffer him as a representative. Because the truth is, gay kids do get bullied in school, and the change in consciousness and seriousness about the issue that, yes, Savage and others have initiated is valuable and worth encouraging. Somewhere out there is a kid who won’t take his life tonight, and Savage may be responsible for that.

Yet the same righteous fuel that made Savage launch his anti-bullying campaign seems to also work as a poisonous toxin. It’s like that episode of “Seinfeld” where a woman dislikes George Costanza and he simply can’t stay away from her. He chases her down, carries her bags, flags a taxi for her. He even dumps his own girlfriend to pursue her. Dan Savage cannot stand the idea that there is one person in this world who disagrees with him about homosexuality. Even people who think that homosexuality is innate and have no problem with civil unions but maintain that there is a difference between the male body and the female body are haters, outcasts, intolerant. He won’t rest until the last holdout is showered in condoms.

Savage’s insecurity runs so deep that any dissenter from his free love orthodoxy automatically becomes a hater, a bully, a Nazi. But beneath all of his rage may be an attraction to those same people — thus his declaration that he wanted to have sex with Rick Santorum. This hate-love dynamic seems to be common on the left. Liberals can’t deny the attraction of purity even as they attack it. When conservatives express desire for liberal women, it’s usually the actors — Jennifer Anniston, Angelina Jolie — and not the politicians.

When I saw the video of Savage attacking the Bible and bullying his audience, I immediately thought of Big Brother. Savage’s image, broadcast on what looked like a JumboTron, was cold, harsh, punitive. It was the book “1984” and he was our dictator announcing time for Two Minutes Hate. And the subject was the Christian. Contrast his granite visage with the smiling, almost carefree faces of the kids who were walking out.

Indeed, their faces were like Dawn Eden’s. They didn’t seem outraged or offended as much as bemused and bored. They’ve heard it before. It is the unchanging, utopian-demanding screed of the liberal in desperate need of therapy. Perhaps he needs to read Dawn Eden’s books.

Jimmy Akin responds to Dan Savage's rant.

Akin responds in his usual low key, reasonable way.



A question: Savage was clearly engaging in theology - he was providing his own idiosyncratic, one-sided interpretation of text. Would it have been permissible for someone to have provided the other view at this gathering? Such as that provided by Akin Would that have violated the First Amendment? (Obviously, I don't know if this was a state-sponsored gathering.) Has that been done before? I suspect not.

Or are we at a point where the First Amendment permits anti-religious speech, but not pro-religious speech?

Dan Savage wins this year’s Son of Ernst Rohm Award for Most Repellent Representative of Gay Community

Yes, Rohm was both a Nazi and a homosexual. 

Oops, there goes a victim card.

Mark Shea explains why the coveted "Son of Ernst Rohm Award" (the "Rohmy") goes to Dan Savage.

Ernst Rohm: Proof That Just Because You’ve Been a Victim Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Be a Jerk Too.

Shea points to this gay-orchestrated mini-Kristalnacht:

A homosexual activist group calling itself “Angry Queers” claimed responsibility for smashing nine windows in a church known for teaching traditional sexual morality early Tuesday morning.

“Upon arriving at the church, we discovered nine separate windows had been smashed in with rocks, including two beautiful 100-year-old stained glass windows,” wrote Tim Smith, pastor of the Portland campus of Mars Hill Church. “We estimate the damage to be several thousand dollars.”

The vandals sent an e-mail to local television station KOIN-TV stating they took the action, because “Mars Hill is notoriously anti-gay and anti-woman.”

Anti-Gay Bullying Leader bullies Christian Students.

Dan Savage demonstrates the "inner brownshirt" of the pro-homosexual project:

As many as 100 high school students walked out of a national journalism conference after an anti-bullying speaker began cursing, attacked the Bible and reportedly called those who refused to listen to his rant “pansy asses.”

The speaker was Dan Savage, founder of the “It Gets Better” project, an anti-bullying campaign that has reached more than 40 million viewers with contributors ranging from President Obama to Hollywood stars. Savage also writes a sex advice column called “Savage Love.”

Savage, and his husband, were also guests at the White House for President Obama’s 2011 LGBT Pride Month reception. He was also invited to a White House anti-bullying conference.

Savage was supposed to be delivering a speech about anti-bullying at the National High School Journalism Conference sponsored by the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. But it turned into an episode of Christian-bashing.

Rick Tuttle, the journalism advisor for Sutter Union High School in California, was among several thousand people in the audience. He said they thought the speech was one thing – but it turned into something else.

“I thought this would be about anti-bullying,” Tuttle told Fox news. “It turned into a pointed attack on Christian beliefs.”

Tuttle said a number of his students were offended by Savage’s remarks – and some decided to leave the auditorium.

“It became hostile,” he said. “It felt hostile as we were sitting in the audience – especially towards Christians who espouse beliefs that he was literally taking on.”

Tuttle said the speech was laced with vulgarities and “sexual innuendo not appropriate for this age group.” At one point, he said Savage told the teenagers about how good his partner looked in a speedo.

The conservative website CitizenLink was the first to report about the controversy. They interviewed a 17-year-old girl who was one of students who walked out of the auditorium.

“The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control,’” she told CitizenLink. “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the (expletive deleted) in the Bible.”

As the teenagers were walking out, Tuttle said that Savage heckled them and called them “pansy asses.”

Is this immature and offensive spewing of hate surprising?

Not if you know Dan Savage.

Savage is an "ethicist" and his ethics consist of doing what feels good so long as the one doing it is honest - it is an ethical system for psychopaths.

On "gay bullying" and that thing called "projection."

Kathy Shaidle catches an interesting insight into homosexual ethicist Dan Savage's recent public pronouncement on Michelle Bachman, or, more specifically, Michelle Bachman's husband, from Slate Magazine:

This week, though, the [Dan Savage] podcast started with an attack on Marcus Bachmann’s masculinity. After a short preamble about the accuracy of gaydar (with a scientific citation, no less), Savage—whom I respect tremendously—played a tape of Michelle’s husband’s speaking voice. Bachmann has a tiny bit of a lisp—though it’s barely perceptible—and he slurs his words slightly. To Savage’s ears, it was a gay accent. Savage played the tape over and over, and reprised it several times throughout the podcast. He even did his own Bachmann impression, exaggerating the lisp and camping it up.

In other words, the man who launched the “It Gets Better Project,” an effort to stop the bullying of gay teens, was acting like a big bully.

As Savage always notes, the kind of smear-the-queer taunts that can cause so much pain to young people aren’t aimed only at kids who are gay, they’re often aimed at boys who don’t live up to some mythical standard of masculinity and girls who just aren’t girly enough.

I can only imagine how listeners who happen to have the kind of lisping, effeminate speech and affect that Savage was ridiculing felt upon hearing the attack.

Mark Shea adds this insight about Dan Savage's recent "joke" about raping a male conservative politician:

Don't believe it? Here is Savage, fresh from bullying Bachmann's husband about his lisp, fantasizing about inflicting rape (pardon me: "hate sex" which is totally different) on his political enemies to the applause of the sort of apes who populate the audience of "Real Time".


This is a militant crusading intolerant and deeply hypocritical faith that does not hesitate for a second to deploy against its perceived enemies everything it pretends to decry. Hate sex Rape is openly bruited and applauded. The most miserable schoolyard bullying is just part of the toolkit for these phony apostles of compassion. These guys are going to wear out their welcome damn fast once they use the force of law to try to hammer people into Goodthink. You can't beat people into loving your perversion.

Of course, Maher's audience laughed at the idea of raping someone they hated for having the wrong opinions.

I've been reading Timothy Snyder recite in his excellent book on the tragic situation of people living between Stalin and Hitler, Bloodlands, stories about how Nazis einsatzgruppen in Nazi-occupied Ukraine would drink and laugh and make Jewish women recite "I am a Jew and I don't deserve to live" before forcing them to strip and shooting them in the back of the head and tossing their bodies into a pit that their husbands and brothers had been forced to dig the day before with the taunts that they should dig carefully because their wives and mothers and sisters would be filling up the pit the next day. 

You read those stories and you wonder how any human being could possibly be that way.

There's more than a little bit of that old fashioned Nazi spirit in Maher's audience.

Here's hoping that the '70s will end in my lifetime.

Brad Wilcox writes a rebuttal to the New York Times Sunday Supplement's paen to open marriage and homosexual ethicist Dan Savage:

The Open Marriage, by Nena and George O’Neill, was published in 1972, as the sexual revolution gathered steam in America. The best-selling book encouraged spouses to “to strip marriage of its antiquated ideals” and, most famously in one chapter, to explore sexual partnerships outside their marriage, if they so desired.


Fortunately, the book has since come to be seen as an antiquated relic of the Me Decade, when all too many men and women put their own desires—in the sexual arena, as in so many other arenas—ahead of the needs of their spouse, their marriage, and their children. While swinging may have seemed reasonable to some at the height of the sexual revolution, many couples and the vast majority of Americans have since turned away from the idea.

In fact, notwithstanding the recent marital misbehavior of athletes, actors, and politicians, public tolerance for marital infidelity has fallen since the 1970s, with fully 79 percent of American adults now saying that infidelity is “always wrong.” Moreover, recent research from the National Marriage Project indicates that infidelity has also declined in recent years to the point where just 16 percent of married men and 10 percent of married women now report that they have been unfaithful. So, clearly, in contemporary America that vast majority of couples reject infidelity in theory and practice.

Unfortunately, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage and academic apologists for open marriage would like to turn back the clock to this dark chapter in American marital history. Savage, who got a big plug in a recent The New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story, argues for a more “realistic” marital ethic that makes a place for nonmonogamy for some couples (so long as both parties consent), and is more forgiving of the occasional affair. In his view, “we’re not wired for monogamy,” some spouses can actually enrich their marriage by spicing up their sex or emotional lives with an extramarital relationship, and a one-size-fits-all sexual ethic cannot begin to cover the variability of human sexual desire.

Savage-style love has also been getting a pass from some progressive family scholars. Family sociologist Judith Stacey signaled her basic agreement with Savage’s philosophy in the Times profile: “What integrity means for me is we shouldn’t impose a single vow of monogamy as a superior standard for all relationships.” And in a recent New York Press article, family historian Stephanie Coontz said “nonmonogamy” is “one of the ways that some people may handle the pressures of a world where people want partnerships but live long lives and have frequent opportunities.”


So, what is the problem with a little “nonmonogamy” in marriage, so long as everyone is open and honest about it? There are at least five problems with open marriage.

Read the rest.