Compiled by Howard Israel
Chaz Bono
"I believe that gender is something between your ears and not between your legs. It was just a long process of being comfortable enough to do something about it. I was turning 40 and I thought it's now or never. I want to still feel vibrant and be able to enjoy my life in a male body and not wait until I am an old man. Finally, it came down to realizing that I've got to live my life for myself and life is short and life is precious. At this point, nothing scares me. I'm living the life that I've always wanted to live now, and that's amazing."
– Chaz Bono, in an interview on Good Morning America about his 40th birthday and his decision to undergo gender reassignment, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/, Nov. 18.
"Hate is everywhere, but the fundamental question of why one person can hate another has never been adequately studied. Our goal is to explain a condition that has plagued humanity since one caveman looked askance at another. "What makes hate tick?' 'How can we stop it?' There is no simple answer to why people hate. Hate can be sparked by greed, or fear, or a tribe bonding together in opposition to another. People looking to belong will hate others to fit into a group. With all the political conflict in the United States, it can seem that hate is on the rise. Some people seem to hate President Obama. Some hate Muslims. Some hate homosexuals."
– Jim Mohr, interim director of Gonzaga University's newly established Institute for Action Against Hate, on a developing a new academic field of hate studies, Associated Press, Nov. 18.
"Too many young people are not listening to what we are saying. Many young people are putting themselves at risk of AIDS by having unsafe sex. I'm afraid people do get a little complacent about the disease by going out and having unsafe sex. It's a cyclical thing. Every 10 years a new generation comes along and you have to re-educate them. It's easy to get forgotten about; it's not the new disease but it's still out there and it's not getting any better."
– Sir Elton John, speaking in New York City, at the annual Enduring Vision gala to raise money for the Elton John AIDS Foundation, http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/, Nov. 17.
"It may be waved away as a piffling error made by lawyers who are too highly paid to make such mistakes, but I hope it stirs up a hornets' nest of problems and that the people who voted for such childish, no-I-won't-share (legislation) end up with their 'sacred' unions treated as null and void, exactly as they'd like to do unto others. You seldom see morality … swiftly and compactly played out in real life, but when you do it's delicious."
– Liz Langley, on her blog titled "A Mess In Texas," about the 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages that erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state by banning the creation or recognition of "any legal status identical or similar to marriage," http://liz-langley.blogspot.com, Nov. 18.
"I'm not being puppeted around. I didn't want to jump onto a gay magazine as my first thing, because I feel like that's putting myself in a box and limiting myself. It was my desire to stay away from talking about certain political and civil rights issues because I'm not a politician. I'm an entertainer. That is not my area of expertise. I can talk about relationships and personal experiences because as an artist those things involve writing lyrics and that part of my process. But I didn't feel comfortable talking about the March on Washington. And I wish there was a little respect for that. Not every gay man is the same gay man. It's just sexuality. We're all very very different, just like all straight people are different."
– Adam Lambert, "American Idol" Season 8 runner-up, in an interview about his dispute with Aaron Hicklin, editor of OUT magazine, Entertainment Weekly http://www.ew.com, Nov. 19.
"As a Christian, I agree with the biblical condemnation of the homosexual lifestyle. However, we are living in a nation and world that increasingly rejects biblical norms. To defend traditional sexual morality against the encroaching threat of homosexuality and other aberrant forms of sexual expression, we need to be able to do more than cite Bible verses. Fortunately, there are plenty of economic reasons for being against this lifestyle and I think as conservatives we need to be able to articulate why our nation cannot afford the extremely high financial costs of this lifestyle at a time when we are confronting dangerously high budget deficits, national debt and personal debt. Our ongoing political debate over health care reform needs to factor in the economic costs of homosexual and other sexually deviant behaviors on our health care system in terms of pharmaceutical drugs, tainted blood supplies and requiring doctors and nurses to treat sexually transmitted diseases which would be less likely to occur if people practiced chastity outside of heterosexual marriage and monogamy within such marriage."
– Bert Chapman, who blogs as the "conservative librarian," Purdue University professor of Library Science, in his blog posting titled "An Economic Case Against Homosexuality," http://bertchapman.blogtownhall.com, Oct. 27.
