This post isn’t for everyone.  This one’s for…uhm…to whom it may concern…

News Item: Congress Moves To Except Religious Schools From Gay Rights Laws

(Washington) Private Christian colleges would be excepted from local and state non-discrimination laws under a proposed amendment to the Higher Education Act – a move that would allow the schools to legally reject LGBT students.

The amendment, proposed by Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), would prevent accrediting boards from making adherence to non-discrimination laws a requirement.

Now…you’d think nullifying local discrimination laws for private christian schools would mean congress was givng them the green light to discriminate on the basis of race, religion and a host of other things too.  But…well…not.  This isn’t about opposition to anti discrimination laws.  This bill’s target is a tad more specific then that.  It’s a bullet aimed at one particular group of students…

The committee also inserted language in the bill stating that it is not meant to allow an institution to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age or disability. The provision does not include sexuality.

News Item: GOP Bid To Shore Up Conservative Support With New  Effort To Pass Anti-Gay Amendment 

Between now and the November elections, Republicans are penciling in plans to take action on social issues important to religious conservatives, the foundation of the GOP base, as they defend their congressional majority.

In a year where an unpopular war in Iraq has helped drive President Bush’s approval ratings below 40%, core conservatives whose turnout in November is vital to the party want assurances that they are not being taken for granted.

So what’s a good way to get votes in this country?  Well…crap like this for instance:

News Item: Police Investigate Gay Beatings In Fort Lauderdale

News Item: Montana Prof Threatened After Speaking Out Against Homophobia

News Item:  Hate on a Michigan campus

What the gay students of Michigan Tech are seeing on campus these days…

News Item: Pope Uses Easter To Attack Gay Families

(Vatican City) In marking the Stations of the Cross during Good Friday observances in Rome Pope Benedict XVI called for the "filth" that surrounds society to be cleansed and said the world is in the grip of "a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family".

Diabolical pride.  Diabolical pride.  Diabolical pride.  Aimed at eliminating the family.  Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!

News Item: Students Sue Georgia Tech Over Gay Tolerant Policy

(Atlanta, Georgia) A conservative law practice has filed a federal lawsuit accusing Georgia Tech of violating the constitutional rights of religious students over the school’s non-discrimination policy that protects gays and lesbians on campus.

The suit, filed by the Alliance Defense Fund on behalf of two students, names President Wayne Clough and other administrators. ADF is involved in fighting LGBT issues across the country.

The lawsuit alleges that the school policy discriminates against Christian and Jewish students by barring them from speaking out against homosexuality and other issues.

Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!

News Item: Anger Over Gay Bullying Speech At Vermont School

(Burlington, Vermont) Several parents are blasting the Burlington, Vermont school board for inviting a state-wide LGBT advocacy group to make a presentation on gay bullying at a local middle school this week.

A teenage member of Outright Vermont told the sixth graders about the bullying he faced and the difficulty he had in coping.  The presentation at Lyman Hunt Middle School was part of Wellness Week".  Other presentations covered topics such as tobacco, alcohol and drugs abuse, eating disorders, suicide prevention and violence against women and girls.

Parent Kristy DeGuise said parents should have been notified in advance that a gay person would be speaking.

"School is a place to learn. I don’t personally believe that learning about not bashing gays is going to get them a better job in life," she told the Burlington Free Press.

Mary Rouille, a parent who said she is Catholic but enrolls her children in the public system said the speech should never have been allowed.

"If we can’t bring our religion into the school, they shouldn’t bring their beliefs in," she said.

Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!

Welcome to my world.  Maybe you can understand why gay politics preoccupies my time and my throughts a lot these days.  Maybe you can understand why I seem so goddamn angry and pissed off sometimes.  Maybe you can understand why I take a little…erm…Pride…in my activism, artistic and otherwise…pissing in the wind though it all sometimes seems to me. It takes a certain amount of courage to stand up to this kind of vitriolic hate, look it in the face and tell it ‘No’.  Do you understand that?  I’m Proud of what I’ve done to fight this cancer on our lives, this profound insult to the human identity, this all out war on that deepest most intmate part of ourSelves where we can love and trust and hope and dream.  Maybe you can understand why I think it’s so important to be out, and to push back against prejudice and hate.  Or…not.  Maybe I’m just irritating you more by waving all this in your face again.

Here…let me show you what gets waved in mine, on a regular basis:

It’s not just that I’m single…it’s not just that at 52 I see one of life’s great dreams receding into the distance…vanishing over the horizon…it’s not the triumphalism of all the gutter crawling bigots of this poor world whenever they get another chance to twist that knife in our hearts, and murder that dream in yet another gay soul, and then dance in its ashes.  Oh it’s all that…but I could endure it all, and maybe be a little less angry, and a little more balanced and secure, but for the indifference, the motherfucking indifference, of a few people in my life, a few people I once held dear. 

You should have cared.  You should have given a good goddamn.  Never mind my desolate love life, you should have cared about my physical safety, about my status as a free and equal citizen, it should have bothered you, just a tad, how bad the threat to your friend was getting.  But it never did.  Here…look at it again…

See a connection there yet?  And you’re pissed off at me because I’m fighting back…because I’m standing up to it, because I’m proud of what I’ve done in the fight?  So where the hell were you during the great great American Kultar Kampf?  One of this life’s most magical, most wonderful moments, that time when you discover love, and sex, and falling in love for the first time, and being loved in return, is systematically turned into a desolate nightmare for some of us and I’ve asked myself why so many nights until my head is going in circles that I can’t count them anymore.  But I’ll tell you what: I’ve stopped asking why some of the people in my life never really seemed to care. After the last election, when the republican national committee proudly took credit for that Bible Ban ad, I reckoned there was just no fucking point in it any more.  Someone who has gay friends and isn’t completely pissed off at how their friend’s lives are under constant, relentless attack these days, is simply faking it. 

I am not the some in some of my best friends are.  In a better time, I could treat my sexual orientation like it’s just another part of me…like my blue eyes and brown hair, and the fact that I’m right handed and like to paint and draw and take pictures and go on long road trips.  In a better time we all could. You have no fucking idea how much I’ve wanted to just live my goddamned life as if my sexual orientation was no big deal.  

But when I have to read about one attack on my person after another nearly every fucking day in the newspapers, when they’re calling for an amendment to our constitution declaring me in essence a second class citizen, and religious passions toward people like me are being thumped on pulpits from one end of the country to the other,  then I can’t afford to ignore it any more then I could afford to sit on my porch and sip ice tea while a tornado is bearing down on me.  As William Lloyd Garrison once said, Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm. 

I stood on a protest line last summer while a sixteen year old gay kid was involuntarily put through an ex-gay therapy program.  I have to tell you it crossed my mind more then once during that protest, to wonder what my own friends would have done for me had I been placed into that kind of nightmare when I was that age.  Picture me standing in a protest line, staring at this run down church they’d converted into an ex-gay ministry, not knowing the answer to that.  

Hate cannot take our lives away from us, it cannot devastate our hopes and dreams, without the help of indifference.

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

–Elie Wiesel

Yeah.  I’m angry.  So fucking what?  Where the hell were you while I was in Memphis?  I know…I know…the same place you were while I was marching in Washington for equal rights…in 1979…in 1987…in 1993…in 2000.   You were somewhere else.  You were always somewhere else.

[Edited a tad…]