Warning…the site I’m linking to here has a really obnoxious streaming video ad that comes up right over the news story after a couple seconds, and may bog down your computer severely. Turn off Javascript before clicking on the link below.
It comes to this: If the victim was killed because his killer wanted to rob him, it’s first degree murder and the killer gets life in prison. But if the victim was gay and made a pass at his killer, then it’s manslaughter and a slap on the wrist…
Gonzalez says back in 2003, he met Trevino on the street and went to his Central Fresno apartment to drink beer. But, he says he was shocked when Trevino made a pass at him and reacted by stabbing Trevino to death.
Michael Idiart, Defense Attorney, said "If you believe that pass, that sexual advance was made then I believe it’s going to come down to two choices– murder-two or voluntary manslaughter." Idiart says both men were drunk and his client killed Trevino in the heat of the moment.
The prosecution says Gonzalez only wanted to Rob Trevino, a factor that would make him guilty of first degree murder…
Dig it. The robbery makes it first degree murder. But the victim’s sexuality makes it voluntary manslaughter. And drooling morons like Richard Cohen wonder why we’re fighting for hate crime laws.
A hard-fought football battle between Melrose and Malden high schools was marred by post-game events Friday night, when an altercation near the field left two Malden students in the hospital.
Following the game, the Malden cheerleading squad exited through the crowd towards the team bus, according to Pat Ruggiero, Melrose director of health, physical education and athletics. According to police reports, a 17-year-old, male cheerleader from Malden alleged that an unidentified female teen from Melrose began harassing him with homosexual slurs.
When the cheerleader ignored the taunts, a male teen accompanying the female, described as a 17-year-old, white male with a lip piercing and wearing a black hat, allegedly punched the cheerleader in the face and several times in the chest.
…
The cheerleader was taken to Melrose-Wakefield Hospital. Another 17-year-old from Malden began hyperventilating during the incident, and was also transported to the hospital.
Pretty obvious what happened…right? Hahahahaha! You must be living on another planet then…
Administrators from both schools conducted an investigation of the incident and had a meeting Wednesday morning to discuss how to proceed. Following the meeting, administrators released the following statement: "It was mutually decided that this is an opportunity for a teachable moment," a press release states. "A diversity rally is being planned for Friday, Sept. 28 to take place concurrently at both schools to speak out against ignorance and promote diversity."
Melrose Superintendent Joe Casey said that five students were interviewed during investigations, and only three or four teens were involved in the actual altercation. He said the students would be disciplined, but no punishment had been determined as of press time Wednesday.
"Neither school feels this rises to the level of being a hate crime," Casey said. "I think what took place was a lot of bad judgment, with a scuffle that followed."
[Emphasis mine] Okay…what the fuck?! A student, perceived to be gay, was beaten badly enough to be taken to the hospital after being repeatedly fag baited by the girl friend of his attacker. Another student who witnessed the attack also had to be taken to the hospital. And this isn’t a hate crime? Ah…no. It’s a Teachable Moment. Right. Let’s teach the gay students of both our schools that we don’t think beating the living crap out of them amounts to a crime. Just…bad judgment.
It’s been decades now since I saw that "For Sale" sign on your house. I can measure the years that have passed in all the little messages I’ve stuck in this or that random bottle, and tossed out into this ocean of time ever since. Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?
If only I hadn’t been such a nerdy little geek. If only I’d had a little more courage to just be myself instead of hiding behind my cameras all the time. And my cartoons. There’s more I wanted to say. But mostly this: You opened up the world for me.
Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?
These little messages in a bottle are the only way I have of waving to you now. But I reckon I’ll keep tossing them in…because I can still hope one of them will find you one day. Because I just want to wave at you one more time. Because I just want to see one more smile. Because I have to know. I tossed another one in yesterday. If it finds you, please wave back. Please.
You know it’s a bad time for America, when the survivors of the Soviet gulags start sharing their jokes with us. Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and ersatz psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, shares us this one in Sunday’s Post …
One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."
Hahahaha…Get it?
This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.
Kinda makes you wonder why we fought the cold war anyway, if only to eventually become what the Soviet Union was, if not in principle then in practice. You can call a nation whose single party rule decrees that anyone, even its own citizens can be arrested, imprisoned and tortured on the sole say-so of the party leader a lot of things, but a civilized nation isn’t one of them.
But behold George Bush’s America. Remember when republicans were always bellyaching about liberals and "big brother" government? Well…it all turned out to be just a lot of empty rhetoric didn’t it? Look at what they’ve turned America into in just six short years of total control of the federal government.
Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist’s handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?
Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.
Vladimir Bukovsky speaks from first hand experience here. Listen to him. This is our future if the republicans can get away with this.
In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.
And…You know what…I’m laughing in the faces of everyone who is surprised, let alone shocked at what things have come to now. We all knew who George Bush was long before he dragged America into this sewer. Never mind the gaming of the vote in Florida. Tucker Carlson give us the telling glimpse of the man behind the folksy mask in the premiere issue of the now defunct Talk Magazine, back in the summer of 1999…
In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn’t meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions like, "What would you say to Governor Bush?" "What was her answer?" I wonder.
"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don’t kill me."
I must have look shocked – ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush – because he immediately stops smirking.
If that’s not stomach churning enough, Carlson also says that the exchange between Tucker and King that Bush mimicked never took place. It’s not the big lies Bush tells that you need to pay attention to…it’s the little needless ones like that. They say it all. This is the man the republicans put into the highest office in our land. This is the man they’ve all been marching in lock step with ever since. Now the republican congress of the United States of America is debating…as though a civilized nation considered such things even debatable…the use of torture, while the whole world watches. Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free…rooms are still available at Guantanamo Bay, and many other fine locations throughout the American Gulag Archipelago… There isn’t a gutter crawling despot in the world who can’t laugh at us now.
Is there anyone who read Carlson’s article, and who later watched Bush taking the oath of office, who didn’t see this moment coming?
Murder trial set for wife and lover, who allegedly lived in closet before killing husband
Almost 16 hours after Martha Freeman’s husband was strangled and beaten to death in the couple’s upscale south Nashville home, she finally reported his death to police.
If her decision to wait was puzzling, so was the explanation she gave police: She claimed her lover, an illegal Mexican immigrant who was living in her closet, killed Jeffrey Freeman after Freeman discovered him snoring in his makeshift abode.
But prosecutors deny Martha Freeman’s version of events that led to the April 10, 2005, murder, and are expected to outline their theory during opening statements next week in the 41-year-old widow’s murder trial.
Freeman and her former lover, 36-year-old Rahael Rocha-Perez, are each charged with first-degree murder in the violent bludgeoning of Jeffrey Freeman. If convicted, they face life in prison.
When police responded to the 911 call that Freeman asked a neighbor to make, they found the body of Jeffrey Freeman, 44, lying face-down in the master bathroom.
His head, which had sustained multiple blunt-force trauma injuries, was wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag and the rest of his body in a sleeping bag. A medical examiner’s preliminary examination also detected possible signs of ligature marks around his neck.
Let it be said Freeman had provided for her boyfriend…
Metro Nashville Police Department detectives also found the closet that Martha Freeman claimed her lover lived in for about a month before her husband’s death.
The 2-by-8-foot storage space contained a foam pad, pillows, blankets, three loaves of bread and several objects of diversion, including a Nintendo GameBoy, a radio, and several adult magazines.
Investigators also found an "overnight bag," which contained lingerie and pictures of Martha Freeman in various states of undress.
Swear to god if I hear One More Jackass yap at me about how same sex relationships are unstable I am going to punch them in the face…
1. Who were your best friends in school?
Bob…Glenn…Mike…my art class pals…most of the stage crew…
2.What sports did you play?
I was a 105 pound five-foot, eight wirey gangly adolescent…what do you think? I avoided sports like the plague.
3. What kind of car did you drive?
Didn’t get my first car until a year after High School. I rode my bike.
4. Friday nights where were you at?
A friend’s house usually.
5. Were you a party animal?
Not really. The parties really didn’t start until college, and even then I only went with a few select friends. I was never really a party animal. I just liked hanging out with my friends.
6. Were you considered a flirt?
Hahahahahah! I was so shy it was painful to watch. It’s sure painful to remember.
7. Ever skip school?
Only Junior High…because of the bullying. I loved High School. It was like night and day from Jr. High. The teachers were good to me and actually took an interest…my classmates were all great people…those were some of the best years of my life.
8. Were you a nerd?
Yeah. An art nerd. A science nerd. A photography nerd. I was somewhat politically wonkish (those were the Vietnam/Johnson/Nixon years after all…) Hence my fondness for political cartooning…
10. Did you get suspended/expelled?
Never. I was never that kind of trouble maker.
11. can you sing the fight song?
We didn’t have one. Our class motto was Apathy,
12. Who was your favorite teacher?
Frank Moran, my art teacher all through High School. Best teacher I ever had.
13.Favorite Class?
Art. Of course.
14. What was your school’s name?
Charles W. Woodward.
15. School mascot?
The Wildcat.
16. Did you go to Prom?
Gay kids couldn’t take their sweethearts to the prom back in 1971.
17. If you could go back and do it over, would you?
If I could do a few things differently. Particularly regards a certain someone…
18. What do you remember most about graduation?
Graduating. There were those in mom’s side of the family who said I never would (having all that wicked Garrett blood in me and all…)
19. Favorite memory of your Senior Year?
A certain someone. His nickname was…
20. Were you ever posted up on the senior wall?
Not sure what that means. I had my photographs and political cartoons plastered all over the school. I did them both for the student newspaper (ironically enough named The Advocate…so I can honestly say I’ve been published in The Advocate…) and had about fifty of my photos printed in my senior yearbook.
21. Did you have a job your senior year?
No. During the previous summer I worked at a fast food joint…the now defunct Burger Chef.
22. Where did you go most often for lunch?
My pals would sneak off campus to Gino’s. You weren’t supposed to do that and I was too much of a wuss to follow.
23. Have you gained weight since then?
Not much until I turned 38. Then some random bit in my profile flipped and now I have to work hard at keeping it off.
24. What did you do after graduation?
Worked for Industrial Photo for a while and tried to make it as a professional photographer. Then I went back to college.
25. When did you graduate?
1972
26. Where are most of your classmates?
Here and there all over the country. Most of them have moved out of the central Maryland area.
27. Are you going to your ten year reunion?
Er…I’m 53 now. I went to the 20. There was no 30 year reunion. Remember, our motto was Apathy.
28. Who was your home room teacher?
Ummm…. Trying from memory here….Frank Moran for sophomore year…Mr. Gooden for Junior…and I think Mr. Ochie again for senior.
29. Are you with your High School Sweetheart?
Gay kids weren’t allowed to have sweethearts back in 1971.
In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he’d been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.
At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters.
The best bit is this:
When NOAA press officer Laborde was contacted to discuss the e-mails, he denied that interviews were subject to approval from White House officials. Confronted with his own e-mails, however, he said, "If you already knew the answer, why did you ask the question?"
Maybe he wanted to see if your nose grows when you repeat the white house storyline Kent.
Another FRC Protest…At GW University This Saturday
Looks like this is going to be a protesting weekend… This comes from another MySpace friend. Please pass it around if you know anyone in the area. I’ll be there.
Protest Against Conversion Therapy In Palm Springs
This is a friend’s MySpace bulletin. Daniel writes for Ex-Gay Watch which you should be reading regularly if you aren’t already. If you live in the Southern California area please consider adding your support to this protest on Saturday September 23rd in Palm Springs from 7-9am.
For those of you who don’t live in So Cal please pass this along to your friends in the area who may be interested.
Focus on the Family is having a one day workshop in a suburb of Palm Springs to promote their lies about "curing" gay people. The event is Saturday Sept 23rd and there’s a group of people from my website www.ExGayWatch.com who will be there protesting outside the host church from 7-9am which is when people arrive at the conference for check-in. Very few people who actually want to be "cured" attend, most tend to be parents who want to push their gay child into a conversion program. Signs I’m making up include:
exgay therapy is child abuse (most people attending the conference are parents of gay kids)
You are the parent of a gay christian
love needs no cure
caution junk science ahead
Don’t psychologically torture your child
Exodus deceives by omission
Focus: Stop antigay politics
don’t oppress us because you can’t reconcile your faith and sexuality
science and reality win out (the name of the exgay conferene is "love won out")
I reconciled my faith and sexuality
If you’re interested in joining us please email me at daniel@exgaywatch.com
Kinsey never said that ten percent of the male population is gay. What he did was construct a range from the behavior of his subjects, the Kinsey scale, which went from zero, which was exclusive heterosexuality, to six, which was exclusive homosexuality. It was only later, as gay people began to fight against oppression, that the data for 5s and 6s were combined to come up with a figure of ten percent. Kinsey never said it, but when you looked at it that way it was a figure that made sense to throw out there. Ten percent of the male population is exclusively homosexual, or nearly so.
It’s a figure that the kook pews have challenged ever since, because it is in their interest to claim that we are a tiny, insignificant, worthless part of the human family. Except when we’re the vast conspiracy of militant homosexuality that controls the news media, Hollywood, liberal churches and the democratic party. Then we’re a looming menace. But a looming menace mind you, that only amounts to 1, or maybe 2 percent of the human family at most.
Almost one in 10 straight men on the `down-low,’ study finds
PHILADELPHIA – Almost 10 percent of men who say they’re straight also happen to be having sex with men, according to a new study, one of the largest ever to specifically address "down-low" behavior.
The study, based out of New York City, found that most of the down-low men did not use condoms and that 70 percent were married. Researchers said they hoped their report would change the way doctors asked patients about their sexual behavior.
"Everyone talks about it, but it’s the first time I’ve seen data on this issue," said Thomas J. Coates, a psychologist who specializes in sexual behavior at the University of California at Los Angeles. Even so, he said the numbers were probably low estimates.
"It’s probably above this, because it’s hard to get people to admit to this kind of behavior."
What’s really interesting about Kinsey’s figures is how well they’ve withstood the test of time, considering what it was he actually looked at. All he studied was the behavior of his subjects over a three year period. But why three? Why not just one? Why not five? It’s like Mendel and his damn beans. Mendel was the monk who did that now famous experiment in which he showed how traits are inherited. For his subjects, he used a bean plant, and he tested for seven characteristics. And as it turns out, seven is the most you can cleanly test for, without getting some cross linkage on the genes, because the bean plant only has seven genes. But Mendel knew nothing of genes. As Jacob Bronowski once put it, you can be elected abbot of your monastery, you can even be elected pope, but you can’t have that luck. Mendel had obviously done some background work with his beans prior to his experiment, which told him which traits he could test for. Kinsey had to have done something similar, that told him three years of sexual history was all he needed to know about his subjects, to have a good idea of the whole.
Clearly, the stigma surrounding homosexuality is still strong here in America, and in particular in minority communities. While many of us are now able to live lives out and proud, many cannot. The religious right would like to bring the stigma back down on all of us in the name of righteousness and morality. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. Homosexuality they say, brings only disease and pain and suffering. No. Shame does. Here is what shame buys you.
"We found that those who identified as straight but had sex with men were also less likely to be HIV tested within the last year and less likely to use a condom," than men who said they were gay, said Preeti Pathela, a research scientist at the department.
Pride has the power to lift us out of the gutter of self abuse and self destructiveness. And that is why the religious right hates gay pride. In the relentless logic of knuckle dragging fundamentalism, if we’re not bleeding, they’re not righteous.
So I’m strolling the main street of little middle of nowhere Hillsville Virginia late last night and I come across a small group of teens sitting in front of one of the main street shops with their friggin’ laptops out busy with something. So I walk over to them and ask if there is a hotspot nearby. Yes, says they. The city of Hillsville put one up in the office building next to the courthouse. Anyone can access it from anywhere along mainstreet.
Wow. Well that’s better then Baltimore can say. But this is good. Now kids who are growing up in the middle of nowhere, can get to everywhere whenever they want.
Oh…and the price of gasoline down here is two dollars and nineteen cents a gallon.
By late Sunday night, I was in so much pain I became delirious. Terry took me back to the hospital, where an emergency-room doctor took one look and admitted me. It wasn’t the flu after all—I had bacterial meningitis, a potentially life-threatening infection of the fluid in the spinal cord and the fluid that surrounds the brain. While I was curled up in a ball on the bed, the doctor tried to ask me questions. But I couldn’t answer, or consent to medical treatment; I didn’t know where I was or what was happening. So the doctor turned to Terry—who was standing across the room, DJ at his side—and asked if he could make medical decisions on my behalf.
This is the nightmare scenario for same sex couples. One is left incapacitated in the hospital, while the other is denied even the right to be by their bedside, let alone give direction to the hospital staff. It’s what happened to William Robert Flanigan Jr., and Robert Lee Danial at Maryland Shock Trauma back in March of 2002. Though Flanigan had legal power of attorney for his partner Daniel, officials at the Shock Trauma Center insisted he would not be allowed his partner’s bedside. Only when Daniel’s mother arrived from New Mexico, was Flanigan allowed into Daniel’s room. By that time, Daniel had lost consciousness. Because Flanigan was not present during Daniel’s final four hours of consciousness, Flanigan was unable to tell Shock Trauma that Daniel did not want breathing tubes or a respirator. When Daniel tried to rip the tubes out of his throat, staff members put his arms in restraints. He died two days later.
Things turned out better for Savage and his partner Terry…
Terry quickly okayed a morphine drip (the nicest thing he ever did for me); he okayed a spinal tap (the worst thing he ever did to me); and okayed a course of powerful antibiotics. The doctors and nurses treated Terry like my spouse, like my next of kin—not just allowing him to remain at my bedside, but also empowering him to make crucial medical decisions for me in a crisis.
The next day I was sitting up, still in a great deal of pain, when the doctor came by. He directed his comments and questions to Terry, not to me; Terry was still in charge, still making medical decisions for me. The only thing I was in charge of was the button in my hand that delivered drops of morphine into my veins.
I was sent home three days later with a catheter in my chest, a cooler full of antibiotics, and a warm feeling in my heart. Wasn’t I lucky to have a boyfriend who cared so much for me? And weren’t we lucky to live in a place where our relationship was respected? The medical personnel didn’t have to treat Terry like my spouse, but they did. Our experience at the hospital left me feeling uncharacteristically optimistic.
Then the painkillers wore off.
Right. Go read the whole thing. If anything the experience of having their relationship treated with dignity and respect made the couple even more worried. What if… It could have been a nightmare. It could have literally killed Savage because absent Terry, the doctors would have run aroung trying to contact someone who was "legally family" and the time they lost doing it could have been fatal. It’s one thing to understand this theoretically, and another to actually live it yourself. They were damn lucky, and they both know they were damn lucky.
The gay haters claim all we have to do to prevent the potential heartbreak here is fill out the proper forms. But they want to bring the nightmare and the heartbreak down on us, because they hate us, because if we aren’t in pain, they aren’t righteous. So if they say same sex couples can protect themselves in one round about way or another you know right then and there it isn’t true. In fact, Flanigan and Daniel had filled out the proper forms and the hospital ignored them anyway. Only having the same right to marry as heterosexuals do, will put our relationships on the same playing field as theirs. Only an equal right to marriage will give same sex couples the kind of legitimacy they need in the eyes of others, whose snap decisions can mean life or death.
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