Pride parades are a bit more fabulous than usual this Pride Weekend, on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage legal across the United States.
A Voice for Men “CEO” Paul Elam is using the occasion as an opportunity to “warn” unwary gay marriers that they may be embarking on “a trip to the gallows.”
Elam, you see, considers himself a bit of an expert on marriages — possibly because he’s had so many of them himself — and wants gays to know that marriage is terrible and that their celebrations this weekend will ring hollow once they end up in divorce court.
After acknowledging that, sure, laws should apply equally to gays and non-gays alike, he offers up this disconcerting toast to all the potential new marriers:
I will say congratulations to the gay community.
And welcome to the governmental tyranny over your lives with the rest of us.
NOTE TO ALL POTENTIAL BRIDES AND GROOMS: Whether you are gay or straight or something else, don’t invite Paul Elam to your wedding.
Elam delivers up a patronizing lecture to “the gay community,” complete with a nasty little aside suggesting that adopted children are all “damaged.”
Instead of less government intrusion in their private lives, the gay community has just seen the floodgates open. They will start figuring it out when the divorces start rolling in, especially for couples with adopted children and one crazy spouse. It will be even worse for gay parents. Adopted children are already damaged from some form of abandonment. A follow-up of dose parental alientation is hardly what they need.
It is exactly what many of them will get.
Elam predicts that gay men — he seems to have forgotten about lesbians — will end up joining him in his “foxhole” once they realize just how right he is and how thoughtless “their cause” has been.
I support the right of every gay man to be treated no differently by society or under the law than anyone else. So in a system that sucks, and laws that suck, and the beatings they and their children will take I will be happy to make room in the foxhole right alongside the rest of us.
Perhaps a generation or two in the trenches of family law will convince them a little more thought should be put into their cause.
Somehow I doubt it. After all, more than a few in the Men’s Rights movement have trouble understanding just why gay people get together at all. In their minds, after all, most relationships between men and women are all about “privileged females” extracting resources from their own private “disposable males.”
But what if both of them are dudes?
In the comments to Elam’s article, regular AVFM contributor Tom Golden — described in his bio on the site as “a psychotherapist specializing in men and boys’ issues [and] a member of Warren Farrell’s proposed White House Council on Boys and Men” — asks a classic ignorant question:
So who will play the role of the male? How will the family court hyenas decide who will get the shaft? Maybe money will be the factor? The lawyers will favor he who has more wampum? Then again maybe since they are both males they will both get the shaft?
Someone calling himself Clear Thinker offered up a wall of text, which I’ve taken the liberty of breaking into paragraphs, with especially, er, “clear” thinking bolded.
The only solution to Gay Marriage IS Gay Divorce.
In Ontario it has been a bit of a(trigger alert) sniggering disgrace, the activities of the Gay community, but now they are finding out what it is to be truly miserable. No longer will they be able to trade one boy toy for another, once they put a ring on his finger, or other appendage.
The rich old Queen’s of Toronto will now face what heterosexual men have known for 30 years in our Province … You will pay alimony to your husband or wife or whatever it is you call it. If you have adopted children, which is all the rage these days, the courts will hand over the children to the mentally ill partner, as this is what they do today and yesterday to the men of real marriage.
Now you will have real marriage, and you will be toast.
Imagine our jails filled with gay deadbeat dads who wont pay the court ordered baksheesh demanded by the boy toy. Guys you have been warned, Lesbian women, no one cares, you don’t have any money, and if a judge can figure out which one of you is the most crazy, then that one will win.
Welcome to the real world of family law, and if you are in a fight, YOU WILL DO all that you can, to crush the one you said you loved. Call me in 5 years and tell me how right I was/am. America, read, learn, then laugh. This disaster for gay men is on its’ way to them right now.
Yeah, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before gay men flock to you guys for answers.
@weirwoodtreehugger
Is weirwoodtreehugger3 your handle on gawker?
Men’s Human Rights Activists, everybody.
Spacelawn,
Yes it is.
Elam so badly wants everyone else to suffer the loneliness he has to endure as a consequence of his abusive behavior. I’m sorry your marriages didn’t work out dude, but don’t take it out on us.
Nice how the OP assumes every serious relationship decision gay people make is frivolous, impulsive, and driven by the whims of fashion…
Kids are the new black!
I’ve noticed that with most (if not all) of the anti-SSM people. It’s like they can’t bear the thought of other people that they’ll never meet or come into contact with being happy in a way they don’t personally approve of. And then they claim “Religious freedom!” like the people they’re discriminating against don’t also have the same fucking right.
Someone said once that being against SSM because of your religion is like being angry that someone, somewhere is having a doughnut while you’re on a diet.
If you don’t like the idea of gay marriage, don’t fucking have one. Let us queer folk who are happy that we now have the opportunity be happy and go do our own thing. It has no bearing on your life at all.
And yet, these are the same people who complain when “the government” come in and “tell them what to do”. Pot, meet Kettle. Kettle, meet a hypocritical bag of snot and spite.
SOP for right-wingers.
Harassing women? Freedom of speech! Speaking out against harassment? Tiananmen Square all over again!
Boycotting pro-LGBT+ companies? Invisible hand of the free market! Boycotting anti-LGBT+ companies? Big Daddy Government regulations!
Etc.
> In Ontario it has been a bit of a(trigger alert) sniggering disgrace, the activities of the Gay community
What, because we don’t welcome you shitheads to our parades?
Sounds like Clear Thinker should have been a little more careful in choosing a spouse.
Yeah, Paul really does want to share his misery with everyone. And boy that comment about who is the ‘man’ cracked me up.
But I will say this: My blood sugar started going up a few weeks ago, so now I’m doing the low-carb vegetarian thing (I already was a vegetarian). I AM angry at the thought someone might be eating a doughnut! But you know, I’ll get over it.
@Peaches Have you seen the new diet donuts? They just cut a hole out in the center.
“Clear Thinker” (lol) probably thinks lesbians have no money because they don’t have a man to mooch off of.
So, I come here sometime and can’t even. Then my only reply to a topic that depresses me is an awful pun. I don’t mean to make light of the issue, but I am all odds by that point.
Off topic: John Oliver had a pretty good segment, I think, on transgender issues.
(Also, opium, I snerked.)
I noticed how Clear Thinker used “boy toy” twice. Apparently he believes that marriages between gay men follow the pattern he imagines straight couples follow, with one adult (the Man) and one cunning parasite (the Not Man). That’s more repulsive than I would have expected; most of the couples I know – including mine – are far more egalitarian than that. Not that that would be difficult.
David Futrelle,
Paul Elam only thinks that gay men made a mistake by fighting for marriage equality because he’s a pathetic loser. The religious right loves to talk about how gays and their quest for equality under the law are supposedly anti marriage, but in reality, its losers like Elam who are really anti marriage.
“So which of you is the “man” and which one of you is the “woman”?
This question makes no sense and is absolutely annoying Its like having chopsticks and asking someone which one is the fork or looking at two washing machines and asking which one is the dryer.
@opium4themasses -Heee, cute.
Does anybody have a full-length version of that John Oliver piece that works outside of America? Panda’s is US-only and I can only find half-length and sound-only versions.
@SFHC
I’m sorry about that. See if maybe this works?
https://vid.me/ayyw
@Panda
Ah, thanks! ^^; No worries, there’s no way to know which videos are US-only beforehand, ugh. (Note to the YouTube admins who definitely read WHTM [/sarcasm], country-locking is why Hulu is basically dead.)
As always, John Oliver is both hilarious and so fucking correct.
@SFHC
I’ll make sure to get links from that site when I post YouTube vids from John Oliver’s channel. I’m guessing it’s US only because of HBO.
However, here’s a tip. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see pull down bar that says Country: [Your Country]. If you change it to “Worldwide”, it should let you see more videos.
However, the first video of (MY) IMMORTAL: THE WEBSERIES is blocked by country somehow?
And, yes, it is a webseries based on the infamous Harry Potter fanfic.
It’s considered an international human rights violation.
http://cdn5.raywenderlich.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/What_Meme.jpg
@katz
All the other videos aren’t though?