It’s officially spring outside my kitchen! The crocus are blooming, the daffodils are coming up and I saw a robin for the first time this year last Monday. Of all the seasons, Spring gives me the most joy with it’s resurgence of life and the beauty of nature waking up. I’ve started to clean up the flower beds outside and started some seeds – rosemary and parsley – to augment my existing herb garden. Gotta have good stuff to cook in the kitchen!

Of course, in our generally bipolar world there’s ugliness too. A recent example: a hateful and untruthful screed written by another extremist Catholic (if only Paul McHugh were the only one!) Dale O’Leary, on the PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays) blogsite. She writes about the “deception” that trans people perform on society and how the non discrimination laws that protect us should not be passed because of that. She goes on to list discredited and vile “research” from the National Association for Research and Therapy for Homosexuality (NARTH) and the hateful Blanchard/Bailey/Lawrence “theory” of autogynephilia. She then expands her vicious attack on trans identified people by accusing them – only some, she says but then continues to generalize about the whole population – of being susceptible to narcissistic rage, defined as the,

…need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims… There is utter disregard for reasonable limitations and a boundless wish to redress an injury and to obtain revenge… The fanaticism of the need for revenge and the unending compulsion of having to square the account after an offense…The narcissistically injured… cannot rest until he has blotted out [the] … offender who dared to oppose him, to disagree with him.

This venomous work has it all. It’s a primer on how the “religious” right anti-gay establishment propagandizes against trans people. Bogus, one sided and biased “scientific” evidence, dehumanization, pathologization, fear mongering and calls for reparative therapy all designed to make trans people look like mentally deranged sub-humans who need to be eliminated from social, cultural and legal acceptance via “treatment” (which is code for mental institutions, electroshock and torturous aversion therapy). The kind of rhetoric that practically screams at the simple minded and violence prone portion of her audience to go out and commit hate crimes, to “cleanse” society of this dangerous and unstable population. Ms O’Leary seems to be made of the same cloth as Dr Paul McHugh. Old, rigid and blindly prejudiced against any variation from the gender binary promoted by the Catholic Church, she can’t help, apparently, but write lies and distortions designed to support her prejudicial animosity against those who violate her sense of what men, women and sex ought to be. The fact that she is supporting bad science and misinformation doesn’t seem to be a problem for her. The fact that her rhetoric promotes oppression and harmful discrimination - even violence - is ignored. I think she needs to go away and follow in the tracks of all the other dinosaurs that have preceded her.