bisexual

Reproductive Sex Gets More Abnormal Every Day

Editor’s Note: Periodically we have fun delving into our archives to bring you still relevant items. This one was written in 2011 by our co-founder Dan Massey that puts reproductive sex in its place. Comments welcome, as always.

Last Wednesday night (8/3) we hosted a meet-the-author event for the launch of Gloria Brame’s new book, The Truth About Sex: Volume 1. More than 30 fans of kink and more showed up, many from the Alternative Sexualities conference the same day in DC. There was a lot of Q&A and raunchy banter leading to some observations of how “non-reproductive sex” had come to be widely accepted in the last 50 years as an important part of the total sexual experience.

Adam and Eve

When confronted by an assumption that does not seem warranted, I try reversing my perspective, looking through the opposite end of the telescope so to speak, and often find my altered viewpoint enlightening. In this case, I felt the discussion was overburdened with the millennially long uphill climb of humanity from the pit of obligatory reproduction. No sooner did we figure out what caused children than all the usual scolds came out of the woodwork to try to force us to do it anyway, even when we didn’t want to.

So I spoke up to say that I thought, when you considered all the possible varieties of sex, orientation, affinity, gender identity, and gender orientation, the so-called “normal” (i.e., cisnormative heteronormative) reproductive sex act becomes a mere footnote to this multidimensional space in which we can all freely express our joy in life.

By now it should be clear that reproductive sex (without any form of intentional fertilization control) is something to be avoided unless one is fully prepared to deal with the consequences, namely the birth of a child, with sufficient preparation and capability to safely oversee eir formative life period. No child should ever be born into a situation where they are not desired and respected as the highest good to their parents. No potentially fertile couple should ever consider (or even be allowed to consider) reproduction without having attained some maturity that qualifies them to raise and educate a child.

In short, there is nothing more unusual, abnormal, and potentially self-destructive in the entire domain of sexuality and eroticism than the actual act of breeding. How could anyone possibly have thought masturbation was dangerous relative to actual reproduction? Was nobody paying attention to anything real at all? Even if masturbation really did grow hair on your palms, wouldn’t that be obviously preferable to creating an unwanted child, a child that would suffer endless personal abuse and humiliation until one day he might take vengeance on his tormentors?

Sex is about joy, pleasure, happiness, and personal sanity. Breeding is not about any of these. It is a unique and different aspect of life that, while extremely important to many people, is just one tiny and extremely dangerous corner of the universe of sex. Reproduction is an act in and of itself, which has nothing to do with erotic sex, except for the physical association in the wiring of human body. But the wires that give joy and delight actually don’t have much to do with operating the plumbing that makes babies. For the beast, the erotic senses drive behavior towards reproductive sex; however, for observant and rational humans, they actually have nothing to do with reproduction.

We are not animals. We are human, even transhuman beings, able to orient ourselves in the world, to observe the events and activities of our environment, to decide on the most appropriate next action to take ourselves, and to take such condign action in a timely way. And when we thus become fully, rationally conscious of what is really happening and our role from moment to moment in making things happen, it is easy to see the optimal choice—to finally dispose of the delusion of reproduction as the whole of sex and raise our eyes to the vast opening sky of possibilities.

Planetary society is entering a new and fabulous age of sex and gender freedom, when the range and domain of such experience and exploration is no longer defined by the mechanics of reproduction. At last the challenges of uncontrolled reproduction can be addressed, as all are educated to a life of sexual experience beyond simple interhuman bestiality. The making of babies is separate and secondary to the desires and actions of the lover to do good to the beloved. Fulfill your lovers in every way from the sensory to the transcendent, according to each individual’s sensitivities, and put reproductive sex in its place.

—Dan Massey

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Op-Ed: Culturally Inept Policing Schools Criminals

Photo by Adam Fagen Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Adam Fagen
Flickr/creative commons

In our grassroots work in Washington, DC, 3 years ago, we discovered a sad reality that persists. Police training and code, cultural competency training, with additional Special Orders pertaining to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people, and the country’s most long-standing and extensive human rights protections for the LGBT community were not enough to rid the police force of homophobes and transphobes. While there are many good policemen, this substantial group cannot not be persuaded to put their personal feelings second to enforcing the law, actually doing their jobs. In fact, some are perpetrators of crimes against the communities they were assigned to protect. Only in the most egregious criminal cases is it possible to overcome police unions to get certain police officers permanently removed from the force.

The worst part of these bad practices is that they allow bigotry to cast a pall across an entire community, creating an atmosphere at odds with serving and protecting the community, the whole community. And, it is in this atmosphere, where LGBT people are not valued, that all the rest of the criminals model their behavior.

In 2011, after a rash of anti-trans violence and murders in just as many months, VenusPlusX helped organize a coalition of a dozen mostly local LGBT organizations under the banner of the DC TLGB Police Watch (T being our priority). We went to work listening to victims of police bias and anti-LGBT violence, especially anti-trans violence, as well as other concerns of the TLGB community and the community-at-large. We turned those concerns into goals and objectives and developed the city’s first-ever Transgender Day of Action with targets, written demands, and built-in accountability.

We were, at least temporarily successful, not only because the murders stopped for a almost 2 years, but because new channels of communication were opened in a way they had not been before among and between the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), the Mayor’s Office, the City Council, and, especially the US Attorney for Washington, DC. Within 48 hours, our phones were ringing, cold cases were being re-opened, and the US Attorney championed our position that the city’s feckless Prostitution Free Zones (enacted temporarily wherever there was a pocket of citizen complaints, supposedly) were unconstitutional in that they unfairly targeted people of color, the poor, and sex workers, especially trans sex workers forced to the streets when they had no other choice.

This coalition seeded the trans community with a new activists and allies and went on to bring about positive change such as a birth certificate bill, and better access to health care, employment, and housing. Police anti-trans bias was somewhat quelled a few years ago, but has gradually emerged again putting this latest spate of senseless anti-trans violence and murders in sharp relief.

Walking while trans is a real thing. It can often be a matter of life and death.

A young trans woman of color leaves here downtown office after sunset, heading for her bus stop. She spent years trying to get employment, and she was feeling good about her new job.

Her route takes her near, but not in, a city park. She sees two patrolman heading towards her and she holds steady on her path.

One of these patrolman grew up hating lesbian, gay, bisexual, and, especially, trans people. He still hates them, despite his training, the special orders re LGBT people, and the human rights laws in the city. He suspects the woman walking towards him is trans, believing she is probably a prostitute. The hairs on the back of his head stand up, his sternum stiffens. Why do these freaks think they can just walk around, these dudes in a dress, he asks his partner. By the time they are face to face with the innocent woman, they are primed to give her a hard time. They want to arrest her. They ask for ID, and then permission to dig deep through her belongings. They find 3 packaged condoms and arrest her for prostitution based on no other evidence. She will go to jail and probably stay there, losing her really nice job.

More has to be done to weed out the underlying problem of police bias and misconduct, setting the poorest examples for would-be criminals. Activists and advocates must redouble their efforts to put pressure on public officials, demanding leadership to forge better police recruitment and training standards, and helping good police officers transform their unions to have zero-tolerance for bad actors.

The Department of Justice has at last launched a program “to train local police departments to better respond to transgender individuals.” This is not a reason to go lightly. It’s all hands on deck, including yours, the more local the better.

 

Getting Untied Is A Mistake

Some recent memes have left me wondering: Are certain leaders consciously uncoupling from some of our core beliefs that motivate our activism in the first place?

For example, it seems to me that it would be much better if the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) community fights for all of the objectives of the immigration movement, as we have done in the past. However clear it is that LGBT people suffer disproportionally in all matters of immigration, our advocacy must be inclusive of the suffering of all people, LGBT and straight conjoined, in order to attack directly the underlying causes of immigration problems in the first place, such as racism and radical nationalism. This is not a suggestion that our message regarding LGBT immigration issues disappear or be subsumed by the larger message of human rights but that the latter, larger message is always a preface to to our special plea for our LGBT-specific issues.

"Luminarium" Sculpture by Alan Parkinson, UN Geneva, Switzerland Flickr/creative commons

“Luminarium” Sculpture by Alan Parkinson, UN Geneva, Switzerland
Flickr/creative commons

Just as LGBT advances have followed gains in women’s rights, we should pause to consider that we are a part of a larger fabric of social and economic justice and global human rights. Segmentation of any issue weakens the voice of all.

There are several reasons to be as inclusive as possible, the least of which is that we uncover our best allies when working in coalition, people who will support us when we need it. We can point out the special circumstances causing LGBT folks more trouble but not so loudly that all people hear is that we care more about our own. We can’t forget that everybody is suffering. We risk our own progress when we sound like we are pitting something like uniting same sex spouses over the needs of motherless children on the southern border.

Those of us who lived through the 60s, 70s, and 80s know that identification with the whole of any issue reliably enhances our credulity. When we rally shoulder-to-shoulder with activists dedicated to their causes across the social and economic spectrum (immigration, environment, economic, education, race, politics, religion, etc.), we are speaking to the broadest constituency. All of these issues, including sexual and gender freedom, are a matter of human rights. We can get our issues heard by more people if we set them in a reliable context, so there needn’t ever be a disconnect in our objectives.

The underlying cause of all injustice is enslavement of the many by the few. Peace, prosperity, everything, is inhibited because civilization has gradually surrendered the power of the group, giving away to someone else the power of the people that resides within us. For centuries, organized religion modeled human behavior through the opportunistic entrepreneurs who declared the necessity of their intercession between you and your direct line to the power of love. Whether you call this power god or something else, we all feel it flowing through our senses, continually recycled among those we love. Priests, ministers, pastors, imams, and rabbis, having recognized this universal power of love, found a way to exploit it for their own gains (getting shelter, food, currency, and other societal benefits) by warning that bad luck is sure to come to you if you didn’t follow their particular doctrine. Organized religions were the first corporations, and they are thriving, especially now that the Surpreme Court has declared the persons who can legally discriminate against others based on a false interpretation of both personhood and religious freedom.

As we have said before, the new age of sexual freedom is synonymous with the end of racism (at its root sexual oppression) and the end of nationalism (at its root racism). Sexual freedom is the bedrock of all freedoms because it fully expresses our bodily guarantee of plurality, global equality, and world peace.

Working arm-and-arm at the intersections of all issues pertaining human rights is the most direct path towards reaching our goals, common and specific.

 

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Barney Frank: Elder Statesman Or Just a Grouch?

Barney Frank Sharply Criticizes Gay Rights Groups’ Flip on ENDA by Amanda Terkel for The Huffington Post

A handful of groups said last month that they no longer back the Senate-passed version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because of its sweeping religious exemption, which would allow religiously affiliated businesses to fire someone for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The provision’s language goes far beyond religious exemptions afforded under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion or national origin.

 

Former Rep. Barney Frank’s latest sound-off criticizing the thinking of several leading gay rights organization’s rejection of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (EDNA) followed his public rebuke just last week of President Obama for having “lied” to the American people when he said people would be able to keep their existing health insurance after implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Calling the President a liar was such overreach, I remember thinking at the time that Frank just wanted to get people talking about him now that he has become a private citizen following his retirement from Congress last year. Obama absolutely misspoke as he tried to gloss over this specific criticism. In fact, this applied to only a small percentage of people who had existing plans plans were below the new standards and safety net set by the ACA meant to the improve health of all Americans, prevention being key to lowering future healthcare costs overall. They didnt lose their insurance, but they were forced to upgrade their coverage. It was a failure of Obama in not figuring this out before he made blanket statements, but Frank made no room for nuance, adding nothing to the debate but fueling the right flank and getting his name in the media stream. It was a disappointing display to many people.

Frank has always seen himself as the best spokesman for gay rights, the grand poobah expressing assessments that every lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) person should listen to. He may have had the highest profile platform after he finally came out the closet in 1987, but he has been unforgiving of others with positions that differ from his own.

2011 National Equality March, Washington, DC Flickr/creative commons

2011 National Equality March, Washington, DC
Flickr/creative commons

In 2010, when Dan and I were involved in planning the October 2011 Equality March in Washington, DC, Frank was a vocal critic, saying we were wasting a lot of time and energy that will have no real results, just “ruining the grass.” But our hearts swelled as we witnessed hundreds of thousands crest Capitol Hill that day and knew everything was about to change, radically. History proved him wrong very quickly as the march yielded the greatest expansion and upstep in national organizing for equality rights to date.

Now Frank is thoughtlessly disparaging our movement once again by calling LGBT groups “ridiculous” for rejecting this session’s version of the bill just because of its broad religious exemptions, now super-charged in the era of Supreme Court-approved corporate personhood and religious right to discriminate. Again, he argues for the incremental approach, the hoped-for future fix. The rest of us understand there will be no future fix whatsoever, and in fact the successful passage of this bill would formally institutionalize broader discrimination in the work place.

“Having weaker protections for LGBT people sends the message that anti-LGBT discrimination is more acceptable than other forms of workplace discrimination,” said Ilona Turner, legal director of the Transgender Law Center. “

Remember 2007 when you clung to your faith in an incremental approach a few short years ago when pushing for an ENDA that excluded rights for trans people? You thought that version was good enough, too, but at the urging of trans leaders at the time, one in particular, Dr. Dana Beyer, you began your re-education by expanding your congressional staff with the very capable Diego Sanchez (now the national political director for PFLAG, Parents, Families, and Allies United with LGBT People). Only then were you able to see the infinite wisdom of including trans people in any version of ENDA.

Frankly, Mr. Frank, it is your grouchiness that you are revealing when you criticize our current leaders who reject ENDA altogether as “not being for anything that could pass” so we can consider ourselves “cutting edge.” Rather it is your total rejection of more evolved thinking, again, being reactionary instead of trying to educate yourself on all the antecedents, that can be considered “ridiculous.” While you have had a remarkable and admirable public career, these recent comments to the press make you look foolish and thoughtless.

More far-seeing is the work of activists on an all-inclusive American Equality Bill, legislation fashioned after or through current civil rights legislation. Just add SO+GI (sexual orientation and gender identification) has been the rallying cry to add these designations to existing civil rights legislation (right along side 50-year-old protections from discrimination based on gender, religion, national origin, or race) or through a new bill. The organizations rejecting ENDA because of senseless religious exemptions also have in mind the urgency to protect LGBT people everywhere (and every when), not just in employment but housing and healthcare and all other areas of human endeavor.

ENDA, with or without religious exemptions, is too inadequate in its exclusive focus on employment. Support for a singular, inclusive equality bill would also protect LGBT people’s religious freedom by not forcing them to abide by the religion of another person or corporation.

So, Mr. Frank, we ask you to step off. The purpose of all privilege can only be to give it away to the voiceless, not to try and silence those around you. It’s time to expand your horizon again, Mr. Frank, and recognize that the drive for full equality need not, and should not, compromise.

by Jorge Elias Flickr/creative commons

by Jorge Elias
Flickr/creative commons

 

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Adam Lambert’s Post-Gay World

Adam Lambert Is a ‘Killer’ Queen by Daniel Reynolds for The Advocate

Dan Massey and I had a somewhat secret passion for Adam Lambert ever since he sang Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen for his audition on American Idol in 2009. (Can you even remember who came in first to his second place finish?) We once spent a weekend in Baltimore and Washington, DC, attending two of Lambert’s early concerts coinciding with his first album. They were medium-sized venues, and at the last one I got lost finding the restroom only to run in to Lambert, face to face, as he was going out on stage.

Yes, he glowed.

Adam Lambert Flickr/creative commons

Adam Lambert
Flickr/creative commons

For several years, Dan not-so-secretly finished each of his emails by attaching some of Lambert’s lyrics we were especially fond of, ones like these that captured VenusPlusX’s campaign for a better world.

Welcome to the Master Plan
Don’t care if you understand
Don’t care if you understand
Welcome to the Master Plan.
(“Master Plan”)

And . . .

I was born with glitter on my face
My baby clothes made of leather and lace
And all the girls in the club wanna know
Where did all their pretty boys go?
(“Sure Fire Winners”) 

Lambert set out to answer that question, Where did all their pretty boys go? Something we are explaining to each other in our joint search for equality rights.

Lambert has become the personalization of gay is good, slowly emerging as one our most articulate gay icons in the entertainment industry.

[Like last year, Lambert is continuing] “as spokesperson for AT&T’s “Live Proud” campaign. The initiative encourages all people – regardless of sexual orientation – to share memes illustrating their pride through social media channels. Five lucky participants in the campaign, which ends August 10, will have the chance to attend a private event with Lambert in New York. The goal, he says, is ’empowerment,’ and to give others ‘a voice to be what and who they are.'”

Through the AT&T campaign and in practically all of his public statements, Lambert is showing youth what it’s like to just be yourself, no matter who that is, and to not only be proud but to be exceedingly happy that you are you. After all, there is no one in the greater universe that can be that person.

Right now Lambert is finishing up a well-reviewed tour with the band QueenHe inhabits the lead spot formerly held by Freddie Mercury, who happened to have been an openly bisexual artist who died of AIDs in 1991. Mercury lived through some bitter years when being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans (LGBT), especially in the public eye, was a grim affair with mostly everyone else in the closet. The AIDs epidemic changed all of that because it has become a matter of life and death to acknowledge LGBT people. 

“I feel like it’s one of the things that I respect about him a lot. He never really made any apologies for anything,” Lambert says of Freddie Mercury. “He just was who he was. And if there’s something I can take from that, it’s that sometimes, especially in today’s world, where we’re at, there’s such a strong statement in just boldly being what and who you are.”

Lambert’s builds on our shared history by heralding the coming ordinariness of being openly gay, a world where we all can live in a post-gay and post-gender, a new age of sexual freedom unimaginable just a couple of decades ago.

Even as the industry continues to close doors on many out musicians, Lambert attests to a noticeable shift to what he terms a “post-gay place.” He maintains that younger generations do not share the stigmas that were more prevalent in Mercury’s day and they refuse to be pigeonholed with labels on their identities.

“This next generation coming up is like, ‘Hey, it doesn’t fucking matter… My sexuality, doesn’t [determine that] this is the type of music I listen to, or this is the type of activities I’m into, or these are the type of people I hang out with. It’s getting to the point now where we’re more mainstream, and we’re allowed to do anything we want, and we’re allowed to be with anybody we want,’” Lambert says. “So there’s not as much segregation… and I think that’s really exciting, because I don’t think it should matter.”

Daniel Reynold’s article today is well worth a full reading.

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Park your formulaic sex at the door

Like a lot of people, I took note a couple of weeks ago when Cosmo, Cosmopolitan Magazine, the fun girl’s bible, ran a story with pictures laying out 28 Mind-blowing Lesbian Sex Positions.

Flicker/creative commons

Flicker/creative commons

The modern Cosmo was the brainchild of its brilliant editor and author Helen Gurly Brown in 1965, who started dialogs on topics unheard of in print at the time, skillfully merging sexuality with a commercially available mainstream magazine. Long considered a sexual freedom advocate, she told women they could “have it all.”

With this article on lesbian sex, and few others on gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects during the last year or so, Cosmo can be commended for branching out and acknowledging lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, appearing to be more inclusive while trying to tap into that lucrative market they’ve ignored for decades. They are trying even while acknowledging that many or most feminists and lesbians have shunned Cosmo, put off by so much editorial about how the average woman, once objectified, can make herself sassy and attractive to their male partner/s.

While wondering if any lesbians were consulted in the making of that article I came across some criticism by real lesbians who posit that this entire concept seemed to have been the product of frat boys based on their porn fantasies (pretty much the style of most of the magazine’s stories). That may well be true but I think it was overreach — when making fun of the positions, these critics called them “stupid” saying they were either undoable or useless, dismissing them entirely.

It was impossible to hold up one’s own body weight, let alone the body weight of the other person in half of them. We had to balance on our tip toes and contort our bodies in the most insane ways. And, most importantly, there was nothing arousing about any of it.

What I think is being missed here by all parties is that touching bodies in unusual or unexpected ways can be rewarding, bringing you to heights you might at first have overlooked. It seems that, once liberated from the constraints of men, feminists and lesbians have gradually become more like men in how they approach satisfying their own desires.

We have sex. We fuck. We use our fingers and our bodies and our mouths and our toys and we get ourselves and each other off. Just like straight people do. There’s stimulation and penetration and vibration. There’s licking and sucking and smacking and grabbing. 

Instead of exploring erotic encounters that expose oneself to unexpected delights found all over the body, not rushing so much and staying curious to couple all parts of the body in surprising ways, men, and now it seems many straight women and lesbians, tend to recreate a slalom with specific goals to be met at every turn, usually in a certain order to get to their orgasm in as straight a line as possible.

But that is so, so boring.

Even the critics include a paragraph with two contradicting statements, aptly portraying the push and pull between anxiety about reaching the goal of orgasm and the desire for sex to be more than just that.

But there is not, I repeat, there is not anyone rubbing foreheads on each others’ belly buttons or rubbing bottoms against anyone’s sternum, not in the name of having an orgasm any way. By making sex all about an orgasm we miss the erotic excitation of our minds as well as our bodies.

Sex is an erotic encounter that stimulates physical, psychological, and, some agree, spiritual growth. If you focus less on scoring the goal you will play a more artful and nuanced game that is rewarded of surprises and new stimulation.

Slow down, set aside your usual formula for a week and see what happens.

 

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 2)

flickr/creative commons

flickr/creative commons

Yesterday, in Part 1, I told my personal family’s jewish history in an attempt to put the existence of Israel into a broader context. Earlier enough, I had dispensed with the myth of my youth, that Israel was simply the world’s and Palestine’s gift to the jewish culture, a safe harbor for Jews following the atrocities of WWII. In fact, Israel was conceived by a militant zionist movement begun in the late 1800s, so it is motive that has to be understood for anything to change.

(We use the word, zionists, as we use the word, christianists, to denote fundamentalists who purport to believe in their respective religious traditions but display none of the characteristics, quite the opposite.)

The early zionists set on their quest to establish a religious state, with eyes on the grand prize: the occupation of the geographical, historical, and religious epicenter of the Middle East. Its big mistake, and the mistake of the US and other countries that helped bring about the 1948 establishment of the state Israel, was that two other major world religions, Christianity and Islam, also lay claim on the same pile of sand, sharing reverence to the same Abraham.

Zionists, however, proceeded and proceed today according to their belief that they are the superior race and religion which has suffered injustices for centuries (more and worse than any other) making them singularly deserving of a special berth in the world, a completely new class of world citizen with complete dominion over their tribal enemies. For starters, that’s just a galling affront to all people and all religions. Logically, adherents to any theoretical superior religion would perforce never resort to violence, and never deny the beliefs or non-beliefs of their neighbors.

Upon arrival in the region, the zionists saw no wisdom in becoming the local peaceniks or diplomatic leaders to bring about world peace (in which case they might today be considered one of the most respected countries in the region and the world). Instead they began an unending and bloody campaign to expand, encroach, invade, disenfranchise, and discriminate against all non-jews in the way, in any way they could. Rather than justifying war as their need to secure their borders, they would do better to ask themselves what they have done to draw the ire of their sequestered and suffering neighbors.

Israel was founded on the basis of religious extremism and discrimination, and has rendered itself indefensible. Just yesterday, Navi’ Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for an investigation into Israeli war crimes.

Israel’s failure to fully enfranchise the Palestinian people from the start, its commitment to stand in the way of any two-state solution, and their institutional religious discrimination set the course for failure. We are now living through the results of these failures, waiting for new, younger, progressive, and humane leaders to take the reins of the Israeli government, and waiting for America to wake up.

The zionists have steadily expanded their movement, now known as today’s Israel Lobby (greater than AIPAC), monolithic in scope, hiding in plain sight, and controlling practically every aspect throughout modern American life. It’s not just the $3 billion a year and technical/military assistance our tax dollars pay for. The Israel Lobby controls the election of congressmen and every presidential election, and, sadly, all media. Unquestioned loyalty to Israel has, unfortunately, always been viewed as being in America’s interests by guaranteeing a permanent base in the region to spread our own nationalistic, capitalistic religion. And, in case we forget, because the existence of Israel happens to coincide with christianist belief that it is necessary for Jesus Christ’s someday return.

The Israel Lobby reminds me of another group: the secretive christianist organization known as The Family (also as The Fellowship) with its 10,000 cells world wide that is also working for religious dominion over its perceived enemies.

So, today, I’m asking some starting questions. We’d like to hear what you think.

1. Why are activists, who are no longer hypnotized by the Israel Lobby rhetoric and working to solve the humanitarian crises underway, so roundly criticized, even from their left flank?

2. Why are so many vocal members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement still blinded by the Israel Lobby’s talking points, failing to recognize our innate solidarity with Israel’s victims?

3. When will America take down the veil and reveal to the world that today’s Israel has no intention of seeking a two-state solution under any circumstance and that’s why it is so ready to resort to untold violence that stifles more moderate Palestinan voices?

Israel has forgotten that diplomacy is a table from which you never get up and leave. No matter what you think about the inferiority of your neighbor, nothing, no thing, justifies violence. There is always a way. You simply need to keep talking until you get to the last word: peace.

I remember my daughter one day when she was 7 years of age exclaiming, “Mommy, mommy, I know what the opposite of war is! It’s creativity!”

It’s not too late to heed the prophetic wisdom of some of our greatest statesmen, such as Dean Acheson in 1947 warning that creating land already occupied by Palestinians would “imperil not just American but all Western interests in the Middle East.”

Also see: AIPAC Is the Only Explanation for America’s Morally Bankrupt Israel Policy

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 1) here.

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As you may have seen in VenusPlusX’s Manifesto and all over this site, we are dedicated to the end of nationalism (racist by nature) and the end of racism (the chief expression of sexual oppression) by fostering progress (universal human rights, global peace). We align with all others who see progress as the the elimination of useless, coercive, inhumane systems of governments, corporations, and religious hierarchy, salvaging parts of our human legacy worthy of respect, and adding new and human and largely voluntary associations.

The Sexual Freedom Project: Still Learning

 (También en Español)

What were your sex education experiences at home, school, or elsewhere? Let us know. What were the benefits or how did if fall short? How did you sex education influence how your dealt with your own personal sexuality?

Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.

Video by Tiye Massey.

The Sexual Freedom Project: Fitting in Everywhere

(También en Español)

What does fluidity mean to you? Why does it sometimes prompt rejection, and a feeling of being out of place within the LGBT community? Or, conversely, does it lead to wider acceptance of different kinds of sexuality?

Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.

Video by Tiye Massey.

What is the Word of God?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español In my recent post What is the Name of God? I explained that one must recognize two concepts of deity. One is the absolutely perfect omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent deity (the omni-cubed god), whose acts in infinite space and eternal time are necessarily uniform and invisible, who putatively makes possible and upholds everything that is or can ever be. We recognize that Love is the best descriptive name we have for this deity. Though no physical image can embody all this represents, an image of Aphrodite/Venus, the classical god of Love, provides a convenient symbol.

Aphrodite, god of Love

The second deity is the agency of both cause and necessity in an evolving universe of space and time. This is the god that creates and shapes the development of finite reality. This is the ongoing expression of the fully integrated deity that in some Transhumanist visions of destiny (Frank Tipler‘s Omega Point or Martine Rothblatt‘s Terasem or the Supreme Being of The Urantia Book) stands at the end of time as a fully integrated mind encompassing all prior consciousnesses of supreme value in the universe, and reaching back through time to assure its own emergence. From the viewpoints of origin rather than destiny, this is the ongoing expression of the creative power that gives rise to all events and occasions that come into being and develop their destinies towards a final supreme culmination in evolved perfection.

John Zebedee was the youngest of Jesus’ inner circle of male disciples (the 12 apostles of Christian legend). He called himself “the disciple Jesus loved best” and much has been made over the exact meaning of this statement, especially in view of Jesus’ other close male associations (John the Baptist, Lazarus, and the youth John Mark, who came to play a major role in the spread of Jesus’ vision in both Rome and Egypt). In any case, of the four authors of the “canonical” legends of Jesus’ life, John Zebedee seems to have most fully grasped the transcendent nature of the divine power he believed incarnate in the human Jesus, as reflected in this opening of his biography of the Jesus he knew and recalled.:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (KJV John 1:1-3)

And that pretty well sums up the nature of the finite deity I have identified with the descriptive name Truth. Love is the desire to do good to others. Truth is the power of effective action that takes the inspiration of Love and accomplishes Good and makes Beauty. John identifies the Word as the aspect of total deity represented to earthborn humanity by the person of Jesus as he writes:

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, … full of grace and truth. (KJV John 1:14)

Though no physical image can embody all this represents, I have suggested that the meme of Hermaphroditus, the classical divine two-sexed child of Aphrodite/Venus and Hermes/Mercury, may provide another convenient symbol for the reality of cosmic Truth as the supreme finite deity, the coordinator of Goodness for the creation of Beauty. I submit that such an image more fairly symbolizes the physical cosmic Truth, the genuine Word of god than any conventional image of a cruelly murdered divine avatar.

Hermaphroditus, god of Truth

Most assume that Truth knows no gender. Nothing could be further from the truth, for Truth must encompass all genders, all sexes, and all possible actions, manifestations, and phenomena that are Good manifestations of Love, even objects of Beauty.

The classical deity Hermes/Mercury is the god of action. In Hermaphroditus, the powers of the god of Love are united with the god of action to embody an objectively androgyne deity able to shape action through will, through Word, to the service of Good. And this same Hermaphroditus is naturally portrayed as androgyne. I have explained in my rather long paper, Why We Are All Transgender, why the cosmic forces that govern our planet and commune with our persons are perceptible as intergender, transgender, or pan gender influences—that is, having the nature we recognize as androgyny—the combining of masculine and feminine forms of conventional gender expression.

Thus the meme of Hermaphroditus serves as an image of Truth, reminding us of the need to acknowledge the unification of all dual things, to transcend meaningless dichotomy, and to function both as a receiver and giver of True Love in all its forms. Furthermore, this meme represents a genuine cosmic reality that, even today, breaks out in the intergender impulses of people most sensitive to the intuitive appreciation of the full character of Truth and its potentials for expression in human lives. And that sensitivity is the great liberator that has always given us the true leaders of society, the Lesbian, the Gay, the Bisexual, and the Transgender, who seek to incarnate the nature of Truth.

Though Truth is a deity of action, finding expression of the desires of Love in doing Good and making Beauty, Truth is also the True Will of Love. Truth is the singular expression of the True Will, the Word, of God to our universe. Thus, Truth is the best descriptive name for the deity of finite time and space, and this deity is the Word of Love to our universe, the expression in time and space of the will of Love.