Isn't young U. of Iowa engineering student Zach Wahls the embodiment of REAL family values?

"The sense of family comes from the commitment we make to each other, to work through the hard times so that we can enjoy the good ones. It comes from the love that binds us. That's what makes a family."

-- 19-year-old U. of Iowa engineering student Zach Wahls, in
February, at an Iowa House of Representatives public forum

by Ken

This clip dates back to February, but I've only just seen it, and if you haven't seen it before, I have a feeling you too are going to enjoy making the acquaintance of "fifth-generation Iowan" Zach Wahls, and are going to feel just a tad more hopeful about the future. Zach was speaking, as noted above this past February, at a public forum on Iowa House Joint Resolution 6, talking about the experience of being raised by two women.

It's a point I've made repeatedly, but it can't be made often enough: The American crusade for "family values" is a travesty, a grotesque mockery, commandeered by miscreants who are perhaps less qualified than any group in the history of the human race to defend actual "family values."

Oh, I don't doubt that we've got "family problems," but nobody has done more to make them fester, to make the family a breeding ground for social and moral degeneracy, than the social and moral defectives of the American Religious Right. Their "values" are little more than reflexively passed-on orthodoxies designed to maintain authoritarian control at the behest of, and often in the interest of, the authoritarian controllers. The building block of that authoritarian structure, of course, is the "father" figure to whom women and children are rendered mere appendages, including all those men of the cloth whom we discover with dreary regularity and predictability are beating up on the wife and children, or engaged in the very extramarital sexual shenanigans their "values" supposedly prohibit, often in (again predictably) abusive circumstances.

Let me point out again that currently notorious child abuser Jerry Sandusky's whole life appears to qualify him as a poster boy for Crap Christian "family values," just like the deservedly infamous Pastor Ted Haggart, not to mention the whole grimy grubby throng of right-wing Crap Christian phonies like that lying sack of crap former SC Gov. Mark Sanford who preach holier-than-thou rectitude but aren't holier than anyone or anything.

Let me stress that this isn't a "gay" or "LGBT" issue. It's an issue of immoral heaps of garbage who don't have an ounce of morality in their toxic carcasses; all they give a damn about is getting their jollies, and punishing everyone who has a scrap of human honesty. Those of them who have physical attractions to men -- well, that's maybe the one thing about them you could describe as normal. The lying, cheating, betrayal, this is what they really are. It's just that the hypocrisy becomes most visible, most blatant, when these raging closet cases screech hatred against people who both have actual moral principles and deal honestly with their sexuality.

I can't do better at this juncture than to resurrect this sublime rant from (straight) comic Jamie Kilstein which I passed on early last month.

Jamie Kilstein delivers his inspired and inspiring rant on The Green Room with Paul Provenza. We've got a transcript below, and boy, is it worth reading! But believe me, it's worth experiencing both ways.

"I know that America thinks every time a gay couple adopts a child, it forces otherwise straight and homophobic pastor Ted Haggart to hire a gay male prostitute and engage in a weeklong meth-induced fuck spree. I know. He didn't want to do it, you guys, but then a gay couple adopted and it forced him to take an injection of another male prostitute cock. I know, I get it. . . .

"You give me one valid argument beside: 'But God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.' Really? Because by the looks of it, Adam and Eve fucked up big-time, and maybe Adam should have explored other options."

So on one side we've got a stand-up kid like Zach Wahls sticking up for his family. And then there are all those lying scumbag Crap Christians, who if they actually had a shred of decency would do something about their irredeemable existences.


UPDATE: PATV'S APRIL INTERVIEW WITH ZACH

Sorry, I should have kept up with the comments to notice sooner that the folks from Iowa City's PATV left us this link for an interview that Yale Cohn did with Zach back in April when his Iowa House speech went viral the first time. Definitely worth a look.

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