Quote of the Day

A lot of straight people move through life following a script that others wrote for them.  And many straight people only realize that they didn't want to settle down or have kids or marry the kind of person they married until it's too late (i.e., until after they've married and had kids with someone their parents like a lot more than they do).

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 126

Quote of the Day

Straight people don't have to come out, as heterosexuality is assumed.  And while that's good in many ways -- less stress during adolescence is certainly good -- it's not so good in other ways.  Young straight people are less likely to question choices that their families and societies are attempting to make for them.  Even worse, the culture has a way of convincing young straight people that they're somehow freely making choices that have actually been foisted on them.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 126

Quote of the Day

NOM's other big lie: You can be for traditional marriage or you can be for gay marriage but you can't be for both.  I'm a big supporter of "traditional" marriage, in the sense that I love and support my friends and family members who are in opposite-sex marriages.  There's nothing [my husband] Terry and I wouldn't do for [our neighbors] John and Mishy, for example, or our married siblings.  If they were in trouble -- if their marriages were in trouble -- and there was anything we could do to help, we would do it.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 263

Quote of the Day

You anti-gay bigots will have to adjust, just as anti-Semites, sexists, and racists have had to adjust before you.  But, again, you will still be free -- completely free -- to be privately bigoted.  You won't have to welcome us into your homes or your hearts.  But you can no longer demand that the government persecute us and warp our lives to pander to your bigotry, soothe your insecurities, or give your religious beliefs preference over others.  Your biases should not, and one day soon they will not, have the force of law.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 275-276

Quote of the Day

A viewer of The 700 Club recently put this question to Pat Robertson: "If America was founded as a Christian nation, why did we allow slavery?"

"Like it or not, if you read the Bible, in the Old Testament, slavery was permitted," Robertson responded.  "We have moved in our conception of the value of human beings until we realized that slavery was terribly wrong."  (Pat was half-right: Slavery was permitted -- slavery was endorsed -- in the Old Testament and the New Testament.)

LGBT Americans aren't asking Christians to do anything that Christians haven't done before.  Christians are simply being asked to, once again, "move in [their] conception of the value of human beings" -- in this instance, human beings who happen to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 274-275

Quote of the Day

The Bible got slavery wrong.  It got other things right -- the Golden Rule, the Greatest Commandment -- and yes, some people were inspired to combat what the Bible got wrong ("slaves, obey your earthly masters") with what the Bible managed to get right.  (Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.")  The Bible is a sprawling and contradictory text and bad people have used the Bible to justify bigotry and oppression and good people have used the Bible to fight bigotry and oppression.  That only shows that the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 269

Quote of the Day

The debate topic implicitly endorsed one of the two big lies pushed by (the National Organization for Marriage): There are Christians over here and the gays over there, they are two warring tribes, and a victory for the Gays is a defeat for the Christians and vice versa.  In reality most LGBT Americans are Christians, many Christians are gay (Episcopalian Bishop Eugene Robinson comes immediately to mind), and not all straight Christians are anti-gay.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 262-263

Quote of the Day

Christians -- America's loudest, if not America's best -- are up in arms about the new law that makes health insurance available to millions of previously uninsured Americans.  Somehow more people with access to health care is an affront to Jesus and everything he stood for.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 223

Quote of the Day

The existence of gay Christians and progressive and tolerant Christians, however, demonstrates that being anti-gay is a choice.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 263

Bookin' It in 2013

I set another personal best this year -- reading the following 24 books in '13. The titles in bold were particularly influential, inspiring or intriguing.

1.    Amy, My Daughter by Mitch Winehouse

2.    The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

3.    Seriously...I'm Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres

4.    Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel

5.    Who Farted Wrong?: Illustrated Weight Loss for the Mind by Syd Butler

6.    Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

7.    Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

8.    Society's Child by Janis Ian

9.    Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

10. Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son by Anne Lamott

11. Spit and Passion by Cristy C. Road

12. What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell

13. You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness by Heather Sellers

14. Blue Is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh

15. American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics by Dan Savage

16. Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins

17. Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes

18. nakedpastor101: Cartoons by David Hayward

19. Six Years With God: Life Inside Rev. Jim Jones's Peoples Temple by Jeannie Mills

20. One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry

21.  The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux

22.  A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master" by Rachel Held Evans

23. The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin 

24. Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair by Anne Lamott

Quote of the Day

Jesus commanded his followers to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and care for the sick.  Making health care available to all seems like a no-brainer, Jesus-wise, among the most Christian projects a president, or a nation, could possibly undertake.  Speaking as someone who was raised in a Christian home and who has actually read the Gospels (and recently, at that), I have to say that such fierce opposition to Obamacare by conservative Christian activists and politicians doesn't make sense.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 203-204

Quote of the Day

Votes for women, ending segregation, allowing gays to marry -- conservatives invoke doomsday scenarios whenever people organize to demand justice or freedom.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 183

Quote of the Day

But you can't know how far you've come if you don't know where you started.  Adult gay men and lesbians don't raise the next generation of gays and lesbians; our history isn't passed from parent to child.  That's why it's critically important for gay men and lesbians, for bisexual and transgender people, to learn their history.  Straight people with LGBT family members, friends, and coworkers should know the history of the LGBT rights movement too.  All straight people should know the story of the gay liberation movement, because it is also the story of straight liberation.  The LGBT rights movement liberated straight people from their prejudices and their fears; it helped straight people see through the goddamn, demeaning bullshit; the movement for LGBT equality helped straight people rebuild relationships with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender family members and friends that their prejudice had estranged them from.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 170-171

Quote of the Day

That exchange -- that anger -- led [Merle] Miller to write "What It Means to Be a Homosexual" and to come out in the most public possible way.  The social change we've witnessed over the last forty years was never a given.  Change began when people like Merle Miller decided that they had finally had enough.  Change began when LGBT people began to stand up for themselves and their friends. 

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 167

Quote of the Day

Being gay isn't a choice.  Remaining closeted all your adult life is.  And it's not a tragedy; it's a moral failing.  It's cowardice.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 140

Quote of the Day

When gay people come out, we shrug off the pressure to conform about something so enormous -- sexual orientation -- that the shrugging off of other, lesser pressures to conform comes easy.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 126

Quote of the Day

Religious belief is clearly a choice.  It may be a choice your parents made for you, or a choice your grandparents made for you, but it is a choice.  (What are all those Mormon missionaries doing out there?  They're trying to get you to choose their religion.)  Discriminating against people based on their choice of religious belief is illegal and should be illegal.  Arguing that gay people shouldn't complain about discrimination because we can "choose to be straight" is like arguing that Jewish people shouldn't complain about anti-Semitism because they can "choose to be baptized."

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 69

Quote of the Day

The failure to provide young people with comprehensive sex education drives up the abortion rates in blue states and the rates of single parenthood in red states.  A conservative who claims to oppose abortion and single parenthood shouldn't support abstinence-only sex ed, as it only seems to drive up the rates of both.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 45

Quote of the Day

While the teen pregnancy rate in the United States has been dropping for years (hitting a six-decade low in 2010, according to the research done by the Centers for Disease Control), the United States still has far and away the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world, and states with abstinence-only sex education have the highest rates of teen pregnancy.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 44

Quote of the Day

And studies consistently show that young people who've had abstinence-only sex educations are far likelier to accidentally reproduce than young people who've had comprehensive sex educations.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 44