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View the initial Oh, Maureen
View Courage Campaign video
See second addendum at bottom
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Maureen,
Even though you responded to my personal e-mail with a defense of your specious ideas, I wasn't going to pursue a correspondence with you in a public forum. But those ideas are so antithetical to the good-thinking people in our (art) world, that I have to note some of them here. You have been drinking deeply from the Falwell fountain:
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" . . . it does not take a religious sensibility or hostility toward homosexuals to recognize a basic truth: When one component of the definition of marriage---one man, one woman---is declared arbitrary, the whole thing collapses. A man and his dog? Two women and one man? One man and six women? It is a route to social chaos.
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"Marriage is an institution that predates politics and any and all doctrinal considerations. Norms do exist.
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"What is being demanded is not a right but a privilege----the privilege of redefining a bedrock societal institution to justify one's own preferences. I pay homosexual persons the compliment of not treating them as a separate species who inhabit a parallel universe."
Oh, Maureen. Now you're just talking like a wingnut. Dogs? (I thought you were smarter than that.) Six women? (Actually that's heterosexual male privilege in the right-wing of Mormon society--you know, the religious group that supported Prop 8.) You talk about the "bedrock of marriage." Would that be the bedrock that had royal and political families, until fairly recently, consolidating their political power by marrying their eligible children? Would it be arranged marriages, which still exist? Would it be elderly men taking child brides in sanctioned ceremonies in various cultures around the world? Bedrock, all right. As in prehistoric. Marrying for love, don't you know, is a modern concept. (And even that has its wingnuts. In the news today: In India, a wealthy bride's family is arrested for killing eight members of the poor groom's family.)
As for "not a right but a privilege." No, you have it wrong. This is a civil rights issue. It is a right.
As for your making money from your paintings of drag queens, you say you haven't. I was pretty sure you hadn't sold many of them. But I'm happy to set the record, er, straight:
"The comedy in all of this is the fallacious assumption--which you blindly encourage--that I have made $$ on the gay community. Good God! Pure fantasy! That suite of paintings was a labor of love. Very few sold."
Addendum: My sister-in-law, Carol, a proud supporter of her gay friends and relatives, e-mailed me the Courage Campaign info--an emotional (and political) response to Ken Starr's egregious attempt to forcibly divorce 18,000 same-sex couples who were married in California last year. You need to see these folks, Maureen. If you are not moved, your heart is as cold as the stone in Ken Starr's chest.
How we can respond: The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on March 5, 2009, with a decision expected within the next 90 days. Let the Court know that you do not support hate and division. You can sign the petition here.
Update 2.14.09: Just in time for Valentine's Day, Eageageag has a post, Notes on Maureen Mullarkey in which he also mentions his two moms. A must read.
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