On White Supremacists and Naked Violinists

Full confession: I have spent half an hour watching Mr. Bean, because there’s nothing for it, there’s no sandbox deep enough to bury my head, the truth is as blinding as it is numbing. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” and what can I do about it? Precious little.

Again, a kid had too much time on his hands, too little to do, began brooding about the soon-to-be-disappeared white race, and got it into his head to grab a gun, go and sit for an hour in a Bible study group, and then kill nine people.

As always, it’s the details. That hour that he spent—what was he thinking? Was he studying the group? Was he identifying which people he would kill first? Which he would spare? Was he wrestling with his conscience? Or was he gathering up the “courage” to act?

As always, it’s the reaction. An Episcopal bishop writes that the attack wrote that the attack was “unimaginable.” Was it? Wasn’t it almost predictable, since insane attacks have now happened in movie theaters, elementary schools, and now Bible study groups in churches. Oh, and pretty much anybody in the black community can tell you: There’s a long history of attacking and often torching the black churches. The liberals are saying that this is terrorism, as much as a Muslim planting bombs at the marathon in Boston was terrorism. The gun-loving crazies are…well, I don’t know what they are saying because, guess what? So polarized have we become that neither side is listening to the other, which means that nothing will ever get done, because the money is with the guns, and anyway, they’re out there, and so how do you lure the genie back into the bottle?

As, always, it’s not the individual. Although it will be painted that way—this “terrible tragedy” had nothing to do with systemic racism, failed educational systems, fractured society, warped values, and lax gun laws. No—it was an isolated incident, regrettable but not indicative of anything that need be done, except perhaps to be more vigilant.

And does anyone really think that our police departments are not waging a war against black people? Because, in 2006, the FBI published a paper entitled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Who knew? And by the way, even I could be a white supremacist, since I could be cloaked in what I now know is a “ghost skin,” a term referring to a white supremacist passing as a liberal, or at least not as a crazy.

Then, of course, there’s the rest of the world to consider, since absolutely everybody is the developed world is convinced that we are bloodthirsty savages, and who’s to say they’re not right? Consider the case of Stefan Arzberger, the first violinist of the Leipzig Quartet, who went out after a concert, met and took a transsexual prostitute to his hotel in New York City, got rolled, and, according to him, was drugged. So what happened? At 8 in the morning, he was naked and roaming the halls of the hotel, pounding on doors. An older woman opened the door, and the violinist nearly killed her. So she is suing him, he is claiming that he was the victim of a drugging and a robbery, and the entire classical music world is scratching its head. Oh, and making comments like this:

The problem of “drugging” other people at a bar in order to rape, rob or murder them is, fortunately for the rest of the world, a rather unique and peculiar American reality, more or less unknown and unheard of in Europe, Japan and in other developed countries.

See more at: http://slippedisc.com/2015/06/new-york-times-awakes-to-a-crime-on-its-doorstep/#sthash.Jq5ofyJn.dpuf   

Well, it’s all familiar ground: People who are not classical musicians or lovers of classical music are questioning why no one can believe that a violinist would be roaming the halls naked at 8 AM attacking older ladies unless drugged. Just because he plays the violin, does he get a free pass? Evidently not, since he is still in New York, facing huge legal bills—he may have to sell one of his violins to get out from under them—and his string quartet has been scrambling to find other violinists to replace him. Oh, and they got into a nasty scrap when they substituted Arzberger but neglected to tell Wigmore Hall.

So we have just a nice normal 21-year old who shot nine black people, and we have a drug-maybe-crazed violinist running very amok through the halls of his hotel, very much seeking “whom he may devour,” and why do I feel it’s my job to do anything about it? Although I now know, thanks to the comments section of the article sited above, that most likely it wasn’t a date rape drug, but rather a bath salts drug which apparently acts as a stimulant, and which anway would be self-induced, and not slipped into Arzberger’s drink.

And that means I should Google it, since it’s vital to tell you all, my legions of readers, exactly what it is, the dangers of it, and precisely why you shouldn’t experiment with it. And in fact, I have done just that, and can tell you not to bother running to your bathroom to dispose of the offending item, since the ordinary bath salts are just bath salts. But since they were sold at times as real bath salts, the name stuck. Anyway, they are apparently the fourth most consumed drugs in the nightclubs. Oh—and they can’t be detected in urine tests.

So it’s a melancholy business—and who can tell when it will finish? But here’s a start: Beware of the white dude in your black Bible group, and think really hard before you open your door to naked violinists! 

Montalvo Dances with the Grim Reaper

“6:30,” I told him, since my phone had told me it was Montalvo, and he tends to dislike formalities.

“No,” he replied.

A twenty-two year old refusing dinner?

“I’m having surgery! They’re transferring me to Centro Médico right now.”

So I went back home to take a shower, and to inquire if Mr. Fernández, my fellow parent, wanted to accompany me to Centro Médico. This he declined to do, citing the urgent necessity of getting a haircut.

Right, so it was only I stuck between the completely disparate worlds of extended and extreme adolescence and what was, at times, healthcare in name only.

“I cut my fuckin’ hand opening a goddamn bottle of wine at 10:30 this morning,” explained Montalvo to me via his brother in Spain, who had called to wish him well.

“And was there a corkscrew in the house?” I asked

There are times I sound just like my father.

Montalvo peered intently at the television, and completely disregarded me.

There are times he acts just like me.

So there I was with the two of them, since Montalvo’s roommate Alexis—a somewhat bland gay pre-med student, currently more interested in marijuana than school—were both sitting / lying around wondering if the ambulance would show up to take them from one hospital to Centro Médico. Both stared happily at me….

“Who’s your nurse?”

“How the fuck should I know! Shiiit, they sent so many damn people in here, I don’t know nothin’ from nobody! Damn.”

He’s in pain, but he also in a teaching moment, so I point out to him—learning someone’s name and being nice can get you places, such as Centro Médico in an ambulance.     

“That’s their JOB, man!”

Right—so now it’s my job to go find the nurse, identify her and call her “Ivette,” and learn that the ambulance is en camino, or “on the way.”

“From where, Mayagüez?”

That was Montalvo, and Mayagüez is on the other side of the island.

So the ambulance arrives, and we go the place I had been dreading: Emergencia, alias The Anteroom to Hell. Remember that famous Russian Medicine? Well, we do it worse.

It started with the nurse, who successfully did an intake on the patient without actually seeing him: The nurse was at his desk, shouting questions at Montalvo, lying on the stretcher. Then we got the doctor, who spent even less time, but who did drop the news that nothing could be done today—Saturday—but perhaps Saturday? Or maybe, Monday—who knows?

“Motherfuhhh—that dude just blew in and dropped that shit on me and blew out? Fuhhhh!”

“Listen, Montalvo, it’s Saturday afternoon, and in a couple of hours the gun shot wounds and the stabbings are going to start rolling in, and do you think anybody wants to have an operating room being filled with a kid who cut his thumb?”

“Man, I sliced my tendons! You could see ‘em wiggling around in there, when they cleaned it up!” Actually, everybody could see them, since Montalvo had taken a video on his cell phone, and was sharing it in person as well as social-medially.

Right, so we went to “overflow 4,” since there were no curtained-off areas in the ER available, so that meant that Montalvo was lying in a cart in the hall. Actually, it wasn’t a bad place to be, since it was a bit like being in a really bad reality show: A woman was sobbing at the nurse’s station, the nurses were completely oblivious to anything going around them though they were vigorously chatting, the doctors were walking through the unit with unseeing eyes. There was, however, one gentleman interacting with patients, whom I had noticed while filling in the intake questionnaire with Montalvo.

“Religion,” I asked him.

He gave me a long look.

“Look, why the hell does that even matter? Dammit—just leave that question blank! I mean, how is that gonna help heal my thumb?”

So I returned to the “business office,” which featured a worker as spectacularly indifferent as she was inefficient—though not so inefficient that she refused to admit Montalvo into the system, since she didn’t have his insurance information, located on a card located in the pocket located in the wallet located…

…at Montalvo’s house.

“Well, he can’t be here,” she told me.

“Yes, he can, and where is he going to go? Are you going to put him out on the curb?”

“I need the insurance card.”

Right, so I call Alexis, who is sounding vaguer than ever and has sought relief—I begin to suspect—with the help of a substance perfectly legal in Colorado. But he has the wallet, and would be perfectly happy to bring it to the hospital, if only Montalvo hadn’t smashed up and wrecked his car, some three months ago.

“Look, can I just give you the numbers and stuff?” I ask the lady.

“I have to examine the card myself….”

So we go down a road that ends up in a place called Compromise, which is that Alexis will photograph the card, front and back, and send me the photo by text message. Which he does, and which, of course, arrives as a thumbnail which I have no idea how to magnify or open. So I hand the phone over to the woman—so young that it was her grandmother who taught her modern telephony, and she pinches and expands the photo—success!

So I had passed the only interactive person on the Emergency Unit, and then I had noticed that he had had his thumb on the patient’s forehead. OK, as I was chatting with Montalvo, I monitored the man’s progress through the unit—and whatever he was doing, he was doing a lot of it. At last he was at “Overflow 3.”

“En el nombre del padre, hijo, y espírito santo…”

Could it be?

Well, he came, announced himself as the chaplain, and then placed his thumb—anointed with sacred oil!—smack dab on Montalvo’ forehead, and started to give him, as he had the rest of the Emergency Room…

…Last Rites!

At least, that’s what I presume he did, comprehension being difficult, since his mouth hosted only one tooth.

“Listen, Montalvo, are you good with this?” I asked, in Half Rite. Montalvo, however, believes in good energy, however toothlessly delivered, so he closed his eyes and nodded.

So then it was time to get some food into Montalvo, since yes—there is a cafeteria, and presumably even a meal coming on a tray, but the reviews coming  from Nico, Lady’s husband and visitant after her operation in the same hospital two months ago, were hardly stellar.

“The cafeteria is down this long, dark corridor in the basement. It’s on the left, on the right is the morgue…”

“I won’t be eating that,” said Montalvo, who anyway is a vegetarian. But fortunately, the problem is instantly solved, since there is also a food court, and absolutely all of the health care personnel—since it had now turned five—were carrying little sacks of Burger King and KFC and super-sized drinks, some of which were in super-sized containers, some of which had settled onto the thighs and bellies of their occupants. Oh, and did I mention that virtually all of them were smoking cigarettes as they made their way to the fast food?

Well, he got lucky, my son, and was transferred to a room in the middle of the night. Then the pain got bad, so he got on his call light, and guess what?

“Those bitches were takin’ care of the guy in the next room all night, and did they ever take care of me?”

So his solution?

“I started makin’ these crazy-ass noises…”

He produced something like an Indian war whoop produced by an amplified Canada Goose, and did that attract attention? Certainly, in the form of Security.

“So the security guard says I can’t be makin’ all this noise, and I’m goin’ well, what else am I gonna do it they don’t bring me my pills! So he says I can’t make noise, and I tell him to get some pills, ‘cause the pain is really intense, and that’s when the doctor arrives and tells me the surgery is today, and tells the nurse to get the pills.”

Well, he had his surgery in one corner of the operating room, since the other corner was with a guy who had been in a bar the night before and had been hit in the right eye by a ricocheting bullet.

“So the doctor is telling him, ‘I gotta remove your eye,’ and the guy just loses it and starting wailin’ and all…”

So I’m glad it worked out, though I was well-prepared for any outcome, since what was being advertised on those many signs peppering the campus of Centro Médico?

Cremations--$550!

     

Two Bostons, One Man

A travel agent could make quick work of it, or anybody looking at the itinerary of Expedia.com: Mr. Fernández and I would travel to Boston on a Friday, stay and take the train down to New York on Tuesday to attend my nephew’s graduation from Columbia University. So we would travel to two cities over ten days—easy, right?

In fact, it was several cities that I was visiting, since the 58-year old unfolding of myself also incorporates the 18-year old, quivering, version of myself that I was back then trying out on the world. Or rather, the façade I would show if anyone noticed me, poked me out of my shell, and made me present myself. Which is to say that I was young, had just had my first sexual experience with a man, had grown up sheltered and with none of the wiles needed for a big city, and—as if all that weren’t enough—I had only one shot at being a professional musician, and this was it.

It was something that had worried my parents, and my father in particular. My two elder brothers had gone to the University of Wisconsin, and lived at home, where, however often it might be evaded, there was still that watchful eye. But what would Marc do, in Boston? In particular, my father obsessed about what I would do, the first minute I got off the plane. Did he assume that if I could figure that out, the momentum of whatever I chose to do would carry me along for the rest of my life? It may be: We thought that way in those days. One choice would inevitably lead to the next, and next would be the avalanche that would bury your future, your character, your honor. So what would I do, in that first moment in the airport? The question troubled him as well as me.

Here, in Puerto Rico, after decades of planing and deplaning, the question seems absurd. It didn’t then, since I could read the subtext of the question: I would arrive in Boston and be stunned by the enormity of what I had set out to do, instantly realize the complete impossibility of it, and stand in horror and frozen as swirling crowds of sophisticated Bostonians swept past me. They all, knowing utterly well what they were to do, were spinning off to their glorious destinies.

I told my father at last that I would go to baggage, and pick up my bags, which in some way assured him, though of course it didn’t take care of the subtext. But it was important to have an answer, and so I went off to Boston.

I can see it now—it was doomed before it began. Consider the teacher: A famous pedagogue who told me, before hearing me play, that everything I did was wrong. So that meant that for an entire week, I was not to play the cello, but rather to hold the bow at the frog (yes, that’s what it’s called) and then wiggle my way to the other end of the bow, called the tip. Why such foolishness? If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten, and the point was that I had to do it until I could keep the bow completely still in the air. Then—of course—I had to go back from tip to frog. Then I had to do it….

I relieve you, with those three dots of ellipsis, of the tedium I endured, because there was nothing else for me to do, that first week in Boston. I had gone with the intention of spending eight or nine hours a day practicing, so enrolling in school was pointless. I came to this idea through my cello teacher in Madison, who had adopted the same strategy, and look where he had landed! He is now an emeritus professor of the University of Wisconsin, and has only a high diploma behind his name.

So there I was, knowing nothing about how to play the cello, and having nothing to do except brood and wonder—had it been a fluke, that sex with a man? Or would I have to do what I knew, or rather face what I knew, which was that if I had been able to have sex with a man in a public park while lying down on the sharpest rocks in Southwestern Wisconsin and slapping without effect the mosquitoes off me on that July night…. Well, shouldn’t that tell me something? Especially since when I tried to have sex with a girl in the comfort of my own bed, and….

I tell myself now: I did what was quite difficult then, and is still hard for many men and women today. Did I do it well? Of course not, since I had put myself in a place where I had no friends, and no structure to make friends. In fact, I was playing spectacularly to my greatest weakness—I was tempted to make that “my smallest weakness,” which seems more logical, somehow—which was to be shy to the point of social phobia. I give you an example: For much of that year, just getting to the store for food was a victory.   

Well, I also forced myself to go to the library, since a Newhouse without a library card is sort of like a person with a below the knee amputation: We can get along, and even go places, but it’s never quite right. So I was reading books on homosexuality, to the point where I detected a passage in one (famous) book that strongly resembled a passage in another (obscure) book. So I check that out, and sure enough: Blatant plagiarism!

Only now does the though occur to me: I should have exposed the (famous) author. But that was unthinkable, since those books that I was checking out? Well, I could only get them by doing two things: squeezing the gay books between a top and bottom regular book. Then, I had to study the librarians: Who was the youngest, the most indifferent,  the least noticing? Because what if she said to me, “excuse me, young man, but I’ve noticed that you’ve checked out Growing Up Gay several times in the last few weeks. Do you need to see a professional?”

I’m sitting in a café frequented by two gay guys at two separate tables; they are young and free and of a type once called “flagrant,” which tells you what the times were like. Because if I could have done what these two kids are doing? Been as out and free and what-they-are with no thought of the consequences….wait. Put it this way—incapable of imagining that there might or could be consequences.

Oh, and consequences? Well, they were mostly internal, though there was a time when a couple of guys tossed a bottle at me on Beacon Street, after calling me a fag. Right—but a fag with nicely long legs, which worked well enough in those days, especially when powered with adrenalin.

No, the real consequences were internal, since I was not going to do anything that would lead to the inevitable. And that was the look on my father’s face, seconds after he had found out that I had been arrested in a gay bar—or even seen going into one—and seconds before he clutched his chest, gasped, staggered to his feet, croaked “I can’t breath,” and then fell to the floor, dying at once from the massive heart attack.

OK—one of the gay guys has left the café. But there’s still an opportunity: Do I go ask a complete stranger, though very much on my team, if he had ever worried about this?

Marc: Sorry, you don’t know me, but we’re both gay, though I am decades older. But I was just wondering—did you have a hard time coming out to your parents?

Complete Gay Stranger (CGS): Fuck off, Gramps!

I report—to be fair—that this dialogue is entirely imaginary, since who knows? Maybe he would be fascinated by a complete relic, since the time in which I was living—about 1976—was not long after Stonewall. OK—it was seven years after Stonewall, but the years back then were slower then. News came by your local paper, which if you were lucky had AP / UPI feeds. But was anybody writing about  what the American Psychological Association, until 1973, still called an illness?

So yes, Boston had a nascent gay community, but would I ever get near it, or even into it? Not likely, since I had no social skills, had never opened up to another person, and was in fact trapped in a pattern of reading from midafternoon to dawn, getting up at noon, experimenting for twenty minutes with the stupid bow trick, and then settling down for more…reading.

How isolated was I, in that year I spent in Boston? Well, perhaps my closest friend from high school was living a mile or so away from me at the time, and how often did I see him? Perhaps twice.  And he, of course, was coming out as well, which meant that he didn’t have the energy to pick up the phone and call me, as I didn’t have the energy to call him.

Because the closet? It has a door, and that door has to be kept closed, closed—nobody, absolutely NOBODY can get in, or peep in, or suspect, in fact, that there may even BE a door. So it’s really not a closet, unless it’s the closet of the secret chamber in your basement, the chamber you have dug alone late at night, when none of the neighbors can hear the chink of pickax against rock, and nobody can see you as you carry the bags of good, solid earth from a place which you will fill with your noxious dreams, your horrible lusts, your sickness awaiting your death.

So it takes energy, all this, since by day you have to go along worrying that someone will have seen you, in all senses of the word. Because they do, you know—and especially the ones who, like you, have built a closet, or dug a dungeon, or perhaps not. Who knows? Maybe they have no need for a dungeon, having chosen offense as the better strategy than defense. Because forget the jocks, it’s the “regular” guys who really can’t face themselves who will out you, call you a fag and a fudge packer, and laugh while you writhe.

And so, in a sense I was lucky. I didn’t have it as bad as some. Because there were a whole lot of gay men who had been there before me, and if the 70s were Wisconsin-cold, the 50s were Siberia. Which was metaphorically where many gay musicians and composers were, unless, of course, you managed to get to Paris, study with Nadia Boulanger—who taught everybody, practically—of any note—and dwell among civilized people. That’s what Ned Rorem did, and his song below, Early in the Morning, evokes so much that wonder that a young man, early in love and life, must feel. It tells you what there is—the café au lait, the croissants, the hosing down of the sidewalks of Rue François Premier, but it neglects to tell you the other, more salient, facts. Because Rorem saved those for his memoirs, when he would spill the beans about the celebrities he had bedded, the youths he had pursued, the debauches that preceded the early mornings, with their croissants and café au lait. Then it was home to bed.

I listen to this song, now, and remember a youth that was more imagined than lived. Because my own experience—then—was much more that of a somewhat lesser-known composer, Richard Hundley, whose Wikipedia page including the dead give-away for all of us homosexuals of the 70s: A complete lack of information about his personal life. OK—there’s this:

Throughout his life, Hundley has had close relationships with many of America's great composers. In the 1950's and 1960's, in addition to his teachers Thomson, Citkowitz, and Flanigan, he was in contact with Noel Farrand, Stanley Hollingsworth, John Brodkin Kelly, Lee Hoiby, David del Tredici, and John Corigliano. He also met and socialized with Marc Blitzstien, Henry Cowell, Gian Carlo Menotti, Leonard Bernstein, Alec Wilder, and Samuel Barber.  

Girlfriend, as we used to say, this ain’t no list, it’s the town’s most popular gay bar after The American Society of Composers closed their convention. And he’s skillful, this Hundley, he evokes mood just as much as Rorem. And ever since I heard the song, Come Ready and See Me, in high school, I loved it. In fact, the song  haunted me for years, with its plaintive refrain, “I can’t wait forever, for the years are running out….”

What was I waiting for? What wasn’t I waiting for, since every kid starts out with the curse of having to figure everything out and the blessing of having enough energy—for the most part—to do it. There was the cello, since I had used it to wage four or five psychic battles. There was my sexuality. And there was my depression, which may or may not have been related to all-of-the-above.

That year in Boston. Doomed, I now know, to failure. But then? I crawled out of the city after a year, went to the University of Wisconsin, buried my dream of being a musician, and clung hard to the improbable wish that I wouldn’t go through my life alone, and unseen.

And so there we were, Mr., Fernández and I, and he was looking at the buildings and the boys, since Boston has as many colleges as your lawn has dandelions, but that was ok, since I? I was whispering down the decades to a person I had left behind but also had reclaimed, since I was murmuring, “you see? It worked out OK in the end, even the cello, though that took several decades longer than estimated, but that’s all right, since the journey, with all of its trudging and wrong turns and the mud splashed up against my face, well, it was worth it.”

Did he hear me, that person who is so much myself, and so little?

I hope so.

       

Tuesday Theology

Well, you know it must be true, since I got it from this website:

It’s not fair, really, to make fun of these people, since shouldn’t I be picking on people—intellectually—of somewhat similar size? There are, after all, a lot of intelligent, thinking Christians, who have to put up a lot of crazies purportedly of their ilk, and do they need me to join the fight? Of course not.

But I was driven to the Landover Baptist Church by a photo I had seen in Facebook:

Facebook is a tease, so once I had looked at that, I had to look at the other stuff, and thus learned that the Bible condemns left-handedness either four or twenty-five times, depending on whether you think that a prophet separating the saints from the sinners—and guess what side each was!—was specifically a condemnation of the left hand.

Right—so I had to occupy myself with that, since it seemed my work of this morning was to tell you all about the Duggars, which was a problem, since everyone but me knew who they were. Why? Because other people watch TV, and so could see the reality show, Nineteen Kids and Counting, which was all about Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the 19—and counting—kids. All of whom are being raised in a “Christian patriarchy” home, about which I didn’t know anything, except that I did, since the whole thing has been around forever. Basically, anything that goes in Saudi Arabia for women and men goes in “Christian patriarchy” as well. Oh, wait, women can work and run for office in Saudi Arabia—in Christian patriarchy, women can’t.

So the Duggars have for the last ten years been exhibiting themselves on television, and we’ve all been able to see that wonderful, wholesome family environment in which alcohol, holding hands, kissing, frontal hugs are banned, and even some sorts of learning as well, since of course these nineteen children can’t go to public schools—certainly a good thing, from the taxpaying point of view—but have to be specially homeschooled, using such worthy pedagogical devices as ACE, or Accelerated Christian Education. Well, it was a Tuesday morning chock-full of discoveries, of which this is the latest:

The ACE curriculum (in "Biology 1099") asserts the existence of the Loch Ness monster as fact, declaring it a plesiosaur, and uses this "fact" to disprove the theory of evolution.^[20] In July 2013, this reference was removed from new textbooks published in Europe.

OK, Wikipedia, tell me—does this mean that the kids in over 6,000 schools in the 145 countries, if not in Europe, are being taught that that the Loch Ness monster is real, but evolution is not?

Well, of course the Duggars would buy into the Accelerated Christian Education, especially since they must be of the belief, as the presenter is in the video below, that “these are exciting but challenging days in which to live and serve God!”

Yes, challenging, since it has just been revealed that Josh Duggar, the eldest of the 19 and counting, had “forcibly fondled”—and is it just me that wonders if that’s not an  oxymoron?—five of his sisters. Nobody, in fact denies it, and Josh has had to give up his job at the Family Research Council—one wonders if the research is on the same level as believing in the Loch Ness monster—and even take down his website. Oh, and TLC has suspended the show.

All is not lost, however, since Josh has the support of his family, and even Mike Huckabee—his longtime pal—since here’s the deal: Anyone can sin, and if he or she repents and turns to the Lord, then bam, we gotta forgive him. Because none of us are without sin. And by the way, Josh’s errancy was wonderfully beneficial in the end, since it forced everyone in the family to turn to Jesus, and their faith is all the stronger for it! Wow—great!

It’s distinctly screwy, somehow, though maybe not, since apparently there’s also a belief in Christian patriarchy that women have an innate evil that leads them to tempt otherwise pure men to do such dastardly things as fondle—forcibly—breasts. So Josh, was he really all that guilty? Oh course not—he’s just one more victim in that well-known crusade by the liberal gay agenda to…get ready, here…criminalize Christianity!

Well, I’m liberal and I’m gay, but I do draw the line at criminalizing Christianity. But I do have to wonder whether we still have truant officers, and if so, whether that can’t be told to go after children whose parents are teaching them that the Loch Ness monster….

Right—forget that.

Go after the parents!