About the GAG
I got an email this week from somebody who objected to my use of the acronym PFOX-GAG for Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays. The organization likes to call itself PFOX, but that never made sense to me. That's like if the Federal Bureau of Investigation called itself the FB.
There is a certain common convention of using the letter "X" for the word "Ex," just as we use "X" for "Cross" in "Pedestrian Xing," and I'm fine with that. But then, PFOX would stand for Parents and Friends of Ex, and that's not right. It doesn't even mean anything. Ex?
They want to be able to point to their name and say, "See, we're friends of gay people, too, not just ex-gays," but they can't bring themselves to use it in the acronym that identifies them. It's not Parents and Friends of Ex, it's Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays. If you want to add the "Gays And Gays" to the acronym, as you ought to, I'm sorry, but it's "GAG." If they don't like that, they should've thought of it sooner. When you start up a new team or office or business, you think about that, what are people going to call you, really? I heard of a funny example a couple of years ago where an office changed its name to ... never mind ... for two days, and changed it back. It was expensive, they should have thought about it ahead of time.
Of course, PFOX-GAG was formed as a reaction to PFLAG -- Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, which is a group that really is friendly to gay people, it's a group that helps families stay together and love one another as they are. When you first get involved in this stuff, it is easy to accidentally say the wrong name, which of course was the point, they formed to muddy the waters. In reality, PFOX-GAG is no friend to gay people, as a glance at their web site or any of their published material will show you. They exist to teach gay people that there's something wrong with them.
There is a certain ironic thing you hear sometimes, where a certain kind of person says "homosexuals are shoving their lifestyle down our throat." Like, for instance, HERE or HERE or HERE. The image is, I don't know, there is something Freudian about it or something, but it may be that adding the rest of the acronym, GAG, to the first part makes people uncomfortable. I'm trying to be polite here, I really am.
Anyway, I just wanted to explain,I don't see how they get away with saying their name is Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, and then leave the whole "Gays and Gays" part off the acronym that identifies them. And I don't know why anybody else would play along with it.
There is a certain common convention of using the letter "X" for the word "Ex," just as we use "X" for "Cross" in "Pedestrian Xing," and I'm fine with that. But then, PFOX would stand for Parents and Friends of Ex, and that's not right. It doesn't even mean anything. Ex?
They want to be able to point to their name and say, "See, we're friends of gay people, too, not just ex-gays," but they can't bring themselves to use it in the acronym that identifies them. It's not Parents and Friends of Ex, it's Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays. If you want to add the "Gays And Gays" to the acronym, as you ought to, I'm sorry, but it's "GAG." If they don't like that, they should've thought of it sooner. When you start up a new team or office or business, you think about that, what are people going to call you, really? I heard of a funny example a couple of years ago where an office changed its name to ... never mind ... for two days, and changed it back. It was expensive, they should have thought about it ahead of time.
Of course, PFOX-GAG was formed as a reaction to PFLAG -- Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, which is a group that really is friendly to gay people, it's a group that helps families stay together and love one another as they are. When you first get involved in this stuff, it is easy to accidentally say the wrong name, which of course was the point, they formed to muddy the waters. In reality, PFOX-GAG is no friend to gay people, as a glance at their web site or any of their published material will show you. They exist to teach gay people that there's something wrong with them.
There is a certain ironic thing you hear sometimes, where a certain kind of person says "homosexuals are shoving their lifestyle down our throat." Like, for instance, HERE or HERE or HERE. The image is, I don't know, there is something Freudian about it or something, but it may be that adding the rest of the acronym, GAG, to the first part makes people uncomfortable. I'm trying to be polite here, I really am.
Anyway, I just wanted to explain,I don't see how they get away with saying their name is Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, and then leave the whole "Gays and Gays" part off the acronym that identifies them. And I don't know why anybody else would play along with it.
posted by JimK at 12:28 PM
8 Comments:
"If your toilet is stopped up by something really big and smells really bad, you'll probably need a plumber. Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, diagnosed the trouble, and yesterday we learned what it was. It smells really bad.
The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan.
The interview explains a lot, beginning with the attempt, abetted by a mainstream media that no longer tries to hide its slavish obeisance to the Democratic campaign, to destroy Joe the Plumber and shut down discussion of the implications of what the candidate said.
Mr. Obama doesn't think much of the Constitution, or even of the Supreme Court justices who have rewritten it over the years to accommodate notions of "social justice." The Warren Court, which wrote finis to public-school segregation with its unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, has been decried since as radical, but it wasn't radical enough. Earl Warren only pretended to be a soldier of the revolution.
One of the "tragedies of the civil-rights movement," Mr. Obama says, is that the Supreme Court did not address redistribution of wealth, probably because of the inherent difficulty of achieving such goals through the courts. The Supreme Court did not break from the restraints of the Constitution and "we still suffer from that." Mr. Obama is not "optimistic" that the Supreme Court can achieve redistribution of wealth - of taking from the workers to give to the deadbeats - but he obviously thinks he knows how to do it. A president with a compliant Congress, which he expects to be in January, can do it through legislation and "administration."
The Barack Obama of this interview clearly does not think much of what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us: "The Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on to this day. The framers had that same blind spot ... the fundamental flaw of this country."
Mr. Obama is a gifted politician, with the smarts to understand that this could be the "game-changer" that leaves his campaign, almost picture-perfect until now, in ruins. He understands that he has to fly under the radar for now. That's why his campaign apparatus moves swiftly to dismiss questions about the Obama paper trail, such as it is, and to crush anyone bold and foolish enough to inquire into the real Barack Obama.
Joe the Plumber learned the hard way what happens to such questioners, and when a television reporter in Florida asked Joe Biden whether his running mate is a Marxist economist, good old Joe, usually eager to talk about everything, acted as if the interviewer had accused him of serial killing or child molesting. Some things just aren't to be talked about, not now. Not Barack Obama's radical notions about redistributing the wealth - which is, after all, the essence of Marxism. Not about how he intends to replace fundamental American values with values that most Americans, if they knew about them, would regard as alien and hostile.
If John McCain wants to change the game over the next seven days, he'll have to break through the media screen to spell out, clearly, often and in detail, the implications of what Barack Obama actually means when he talks about how to redistribute the wealth. To redistribute wealth, you first have to confiscate it from those who earned it with hard work, and the way to do that is with confiscatory taxes. Then you give it to those who didn't earn it. Such explanations, made with cool detachment, once would have been the work of the newspapers and even the television networks. But not this year. Mr. McCain can expect real grief from the media when the polls tighten.
There's nothing ambiguous about Mr. Obama's radical views, as revealed in this interview. He clearly thinks the Constitution was a "tragedy," that the men who wrote it were not the revolutionary heroes plain Americans regard them to be, and their work must be corrected by the surviving radicals of the '60s and their progeny. Anyone who listens to this interview, available on YouTube.com, understands why Michelle Obama was never proud of her country until she thought the opportunity was at hand to destroy the country to save it, and why Barack Obama could spend 20 years comfortably listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright exhort God to damn America."
GAG.
Wow, Jim, you found a link to someone saying being gay was like eating liver. Is there anything about that in Leviticus?
It is, of course, a form of mild ridicule or rebuke to refer to PFOX as PFOX-GAG. It's an easy jibe.
I don't have sympathy for them, however. PFOX describes itself as an organization for parents and friends of lgbt people (or, as they say, same-sex-attracted people) who do not accept their children's sexual orientation or gender-identity (PFOX, as an element in the religious right, sometimes denies the existence of such concepts as gender-identity and sexual orientation). While I have, and will always have, family members who do not accept me, I do not have any such people that I call friends.
So can PFOX call themselves "Parents and Friends of Ex-gays and Gays?" Certainly. Can they do that with the expectation that we not resent them for it? Of course not. When you criticize people for things that aren't there fault, or even aren't worthy of criticism, you kind of have to expect that they not thank you for it.
I think it's funny that you call them PFOX-GAG. It's a little bit of mild ribbing, and if they're grown people, they can handle it.
It's not like you called them little bald monkeys, or perverts, or said they were trying to dismantle the family, harm children, murder children, spread disease, cause harm to the fabric of American Society, or any of the other things commenters, (i.e. Anonymous and Theresa) have said on this blog, or tried to cause them problems in their employment, as CRW/G and PFOX have done to TTF supporters on their website.
It's kind of like the kettle calling the marshmallow black.
I think it's funny.
Breaking news:
The stock market shot up 900 points today om news that john McCain is gaining in the polls.
Okay anonymous, you wanna play the Joe The Plumber game, check out this link from Think Progress. Very funny when you have someone from Fox News not necessarily in your corner - http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/28/joe-plumber-israel/
AnonBigot said,
"Breaking news:
The stock market shot up 900 points today om news that john McCain is gaining in the polls."
Really? Is that another, "I just pulled it out of my a$$" source?
"Peep, peep, peep, peeeep"-- What is that? Why, it's the sound of all 2008 chickens hatching!!
The USA is going blue again!!
Phew!!
That only took two HUGE Bush mistakes.
"Did you see that amazing video obtained by the Los Angeles Times of Sen. Barack Obama toasting a prominent former PLO member at an Arab American Action Network meeting in 2003? The video in which Obama gives Yasser Arafat’s frontman a warm embrace, as Bill Ayers look on?
You haven’t seen it? Me, neither. The Los Angeles Times refuses to release it.
And so an incriminating video of Obama literally “palling around” with PLO supporters becomes one more nail in the coffin of “objective journalism.”
Alas, the obit for objective reporting has been buried - along with the stories about Obama’s 2001 support for court-imposed “redistribution of wealth” and Joe Biden’s latest gaffe.
For the record (that’s J-school talk for “I actually know what I’m talking about for a change”), I am not a journalist. I’m an opinion writer and talk show host. But I admire reporters tremendously. I married one. My oldest son is named for the great H. L. Mencken.
So it is particularly heartbreaking for me to see the death of objective journalism. And believe me - it is stone cold dead. Sacrificed on the altar of service to Barack Obama.
Former New York Times [NYT] columnist and veteran newspaperman Michael Malone knows it.
“I’ve begun - for the first time in my adult life - to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living,” he said.
Malone is disturbed by the “shameless support” journalists have been giving the Obama campaign. Where’s the hardball coverage for Obama they give McCain? Instead, journalists are “actively serving as attack dogs for the [Obama/Biden] ticket.”
“That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault,” Malone points out. He blames the media, whose job it is to give Obama a thorough vetting “and has systematically refused to do so.”
This is hardly news to regular readers of the Boston Globe-Democrat, or viewers of MS-We-Hate-Bush. But when the Associated Press starts adding Kool-Aid at the water cooler, we readers are in real trouble.
Jay Newton-Small, a longtime AP reporter, points out in a column in the Washington Post that her old employer has begun practicing “accountability journalism,” which is a media euphemism for “picking the good guys and the bad guys.”
“Some of the most eyebrow-raising stories this presidential-election cycle have come from a surprising source: the stodgy old AP,” Newton-Small wrote.
The AP, once the gold standard of unbiased “hard news,” is now just another voice in the Spin Room.
Newton-Small asks:
“When the news organization entrusted with calling elections sets off down the slippery slope of news analysis, it’s hard not to wonder: Is the journalism world losing its North Star, the one source that could be relied upon to provide ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ ?”
Facts? Who needs ’em, when we’ve got Obama’s magic tax plan to promote and an uppity Alaska governor to trash?
At the risk of violating union rules, allow me to do a bit of reporting: A new study by the Pew Research Center found that, while 71 percent of Obama’s recent media coverage has been “positive” or “neutral,” almost 60 percent of McCain’s coverage over the same period has been “decidedly negative.”
And how much positive coverage did the media give McCain? Fourteen percent.
The American people have figured this out.
“By a margin of 70 percent to 9 percent,” another Pew study reported, “Americans say most journalists want to see Obama, not John McCain, win on Nov. 4.”
The percentage of Americans who rate reporters as objective and not favoring either candidate? Eight percent.
My friends in the Partisan Press, your reputation has now fallen lower than both President Bush (25 percent) and the Democratic Congress (18 percent). Journalistic integrity now ranks along side communicable diseases and nuclear mishaps.
Obama will likely be the next president. He will use that power to do things both good and bad. But when Americans look for tough, honest journalists to challenge him, where will we find them?"
JimK is up to his usual paranoid self. We first receive narcissistic pontification for the benefit of those less enlightened on the proper use of "X" and the quite trivial matter that PFOX really should be PFOX-GAG.
But then it totally escapes him that his own example of PFLAG should actually be PFAFLAG since it stands for Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
Without missing a beat,he then cites a news story about someone getting death threats for criticizing homosexual activism--believing this supports his idea of "irony" that people just say the 'gay agenda' is being forced on others.
You can't make this stuff up. LOL
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