Ghost at the Wedding Eventually every family will have one if they wait long enough: a member who embraces one of the letters in the LGBT+ lineup. In the case of ur-homophobe Anita Bryant, it took only two generations for one of her grandchildren to come out as a lesbian. Indeed Sarah Green is getting married to a woman, exercising a right that could scarcely have been contemplated back in 1977 when Bryant launched her infamous “Save the Children” campaign to roll back LGBT protections in Dade County, Florida. There’s a special irony in this case due to Ms. Bryant’s initial reaction when her granddaughter came out to the family on her 21st birthday. “Homosexuality doesn’t exist!” blurted Bryant, predicting that Sarah would soon be married to a man. And yet, here we are. Now the biggest dilemma facing Sarah is whether to invite her 81-year-old grandmother to the wedding: “It’s very hard to argue with someone who thinks that an integral part of your identity is just an evil delusion. She wants a relationship with a person who doesn’t exist.” Indeed, what would it even mean for Bryant to attend a wedding the very possibility of which she denies metaphysically?
Now We’re Pissed Early in the pandemic we featured a brief cavalcade of preachers and radio hosts who railed against Covid restrictions and openly defied them—when they weren’t railing against LGBT rights—and who ended up contracting and usually succumbing to the virus. These were presented as cautionary tales about the folly of putting ideology over safety. Well, they’re back, and this time it’s pure schadenfreude on our part. The dangers are understood, the vaccines are free, and yet they persist in downplaying or denying the pandemic and actively discouraging vaccination and masking. So they’re not just crazy; they’re dangerous. A couple of examples will suffice:
I. If Keith Olbermann were still doing his nightly “Worst Person in the World” gag on msnbc, pastor Bob Enyart of Denver Bible Church would have been a serial winner. His campaign against mask-wearing and his call for a boycott of the vaccines are only his most recent crimes. On his radio show back in the 1990s he would gleefully read the obituaries of gay men who had died of AIDS followed by Queen’s song “Another One Bites the Dust.” Typical of his views on women was his belief that those who had an abortion should receive the death penalty. He’s also been convicted of actual crimes, such as beating his wife’s son to a pulp with a belt (sixty days in the slammer) and trespassing while protesting against Focus on the Family for not being anti-abortion enough. On the subject of Covid he was a particular sweetheart. He sued the state of Colorado to allow his parishioners to attend church without wearing masks—and won—and led a boycott against Pfizer and Moderna for being not only vaccine producers but “child killers.” Needless to say, he and his wife decided not to be vaccinated, and then the Delta variant hit. The 62-year-old pastor died just two weeks after testing positive for Covid, apparently leaving no word on whether he regretted this decision.
II. In contrast, another right-wing radio host, Phil Valentine, who broadcast from Tennessee, expressed “deep regrets” over his public opposition to Covid vaccination upon finding himself hospitalized with the virus. Predictably anti-gay on his show, he leapt onto the anti-masking and anti-vaxxing bandwagon, calling Covid a “scam-demic.” As he lay dying, he asked his listeners to pray for him and urged them to “Please go out and get vaccinated.” Whether they heeded his Covid advice is not known, but apparently their prayers went unheard: Valentine died after a month-long battle with Covid-19.
Holy Hookup The New York Times headline read: “Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr.” Any time The Times notices what goes on at Grindr, the gay hook-up app, we’re listening; and when the Catholic Church is part of the mix, we’re all ears. The Church’s alarm is based on three reports released by a conservative media organization called The Pillar, which used a proprietary program to “de-anonymize” data coming from cellphones connected to Grindr. The first report named Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, the general secretary of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, as a Grindr user—and before you could say “Sup?” the monseigneur had resigned. The second report claimed that residents of certain Catholic rectories in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, had been fingered as Grindr users. The third claimed that at least 32 mobile devices emitted dating app data signals from private areas in Vatican City. The Church is “on edge” for obvious reasons (another PR disaster), but apparently the biggest cause for alarm is the possibility that this is part of an internal war within the Church and an attempt by conservatives to undermine Pope Francis. For example, the singling out of Newark is suspect because it’s where Cardinal Tobin, one of the Pope’s closest allies, presides. So this could just be Vatican politics as usual. Still, there is something alarming about all this: the ease with which The Pillar was able to obtain so much personal data, which raises all kinds of questions about security at Grindr—but that’s a topic for another day.
War Heroes Another episode in the annals of people rising up in defense of minority rights: the residents of a town in Oregon banded together to put up a giant gay pride flag after the Newberg School Board voted to ban all “political speech” from its schools, including such “divisive symbols” as gay pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs. The protest flag was financed by donations from hundreds of parents and was installed on a hillside to be visible from the very high school at which such symbols are forbidden. Whether or not it constitutes “political speech” (the banning of which at an educational institution is a chilling prospect indeed), the flag went up just as statues of Confederate generals were coming down—emblems of an epochal shift that’s at the core of today’s culture wars.
