"Just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder"

Here’s yet another frightened heterosexual, scared of the gay community. Actually, it’s the same frightened heterosexual as I mentioned in this post, Peter LaBarbera. This time he’s up in arms about the Mr. International Rubber contest (which he incorrectly identifies as International Mr. Rubber)in Chicago. This guy is so clueless that he actually asks “Is ‘rubber’ just another ‘sexual orientation’…?” There’s an easy answer to that: of course it’s not. This man needs to look up the definition of “sexual orientation” in his dictionary. Like many other things, rubber is a fetish, regardless of a person’s sexual orientation. I’m curious: if being gay and having a rubber fetish is a sexual orientation, what about being straight and having a rubber fetish, like this Baptist minister who was a friend of Jerry Falwell’s? Do we have a name for that sexual orientation, or do we ignore it because he was a “good christian”?

Anyway, back to this “story”. It’s not much more than a rant about many things gay. LaBarbera is all over the place, but eventually ends by saying that even we heathens can be accepted by his god. At one point he manages to sneak in a comment about Paganism after referring to “once-reviled lifestyles”. Isn’t it funny how everyone other than straight christians are always presented by these people as having made lifestyle choices to be non-straight or non-christian? Apparently, according to them, we’re all born christian and straight and we choose at some point to not be one or both, thereby making those lifestyle choices. The problem I have with that point-of-view is that it sets them up to be “right” and the rest of us are portrayed as flawed in some way.

LaBarbera links to an article by Dinesh D’Souza about Paganism that so badly misses the point it’s not even funny. The main point he should have made is that, like homosexuality, Paganism is portrayed by christians as an evil “lifestyle choice” in order to marginalize members of that group. The author referenced in the article, Richard Dawkins, was merely equating the struggle for atheists to live open and honest lives with the similar struggle of the gay community. One person who commented on that article really nailed it: “By definition an atheist is someone who does not believe in God, not someone who is ‘opposed’ to God…”

Okay, so I’m now guilty of what LaBarbera did: I’m all over the place in this post. I’ll bring it all back together by saying that I just want to walk up to these types of people and say “I’m gay and non-christian…BOO!”