We’ve lost a fighter.  Steve Gilliard was someone I admired immensely and read daily, and when he fell ill this time, and I read about the difficulty he was having in the hospital, I was afraid it would come to this.  I am going to miss his passionate, angry, righteous voice more then I want to think about right now.

He began as a frequent commenter on Daily Kos…

When reporters ask me when I first started thinking Daily Kos would become something more important, I tell them about the Dean campaign, or about the traffic explosion during the run-up and start of the Iraq War.

But that’s pretty much bullshit. Because the reality is much more mundane, much less sexy —

It was the arrival on the site’s comment boards of two people — Meteor Blades and Steve Gilliard.

They were a real revelation to me — I couldn’t believe that people like them, so brilliant, so insightful, so talented, would spend time at my little corner of the world. They inspired me to keep writing, keep building this place. Because if nothing else, I needed to make sure they had a platform upon which to speak.

So they ended up being two of the first contributing editors on Daily Kos. Steve, in fact, was the first person I ever approached with the "guest blogger" offer. And he didn’t waste time getting started, drawing on history of the region and the British occupation of Iraq in the late 1910s to set the stage for what the US would soon face in Iraq. He was frighteningly prescient on Iraq, and it wasn’t the only topic he would consistently nail. He was a credit to the progressive blogosphere.

Steve was a big personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage. And he got it with the News Blog, which he soon built into a full-time gig, still a rarity among bloggers. It was one of three sites I religiously checked more than three times a day.

If you knew Steve only from his blog, you’d think he was a pit bull. He was blunt, loud, aggressive, unafraid, and took no prisoners.

But you’d meet him in life, and he was the exact opposite. He was soft-spoken, shy, modest, calm, friendly, and — this was the most surprising to me — gentle.

I never would’ve gotten that from his writings. But that’s what he was.

I’d known Steve five years — just about my entire blogging existence. I don’t know of a blogging life without him. He has been a friend, a confidant, a sounding board, a reality check, a loyal ally, a mentor. He was family.

And while that all came to an end Saturday morning, I’m still not ready to let it go.

We were blessed to have Steve as long we did. But I’m selfish. I wanted much, much more.

Me too.  Pam at Pam’s House Blend has this…

I went a couple of rounds with Steve a few years back, mostly ribbing during one of the earlier rounds of blogger wars (the "pie fight" drama). More often than not though, over the last two years, we agreed on quite a bit, including our disdain for the religious right and the outlandish transparent efforts by the GOP to promote the candidacies of sell-out, fundie kissing house negroes like Ken Blackwell as proof of the party’s "outreach" to the black community.

We corresponded every once in a while, mostly  of the "can you believe this sh*t?" nature regarding the above. Steve enthusiastically came to my defense  back in February when The Peter and CWA launched their email disinformation campaign to discredit me (and attempt jeopardize my day job) by calling me "anti-Christian." Steve emailed and said:

You need to call these people out as racists and homophobes.

They think you’re going to care what they think. Tell them that you don’t need a bunch of racists lecturing you on the black church or anything else. That their rampant homophobia also disqualifies them. And then add in that they have no respect for lesbians or blacks anyway, besides hiring tokens.

As far as anti-Christian, unless you grew up in a far different family than mine, you know about the church and the one you grew up in was not filled with hateful screeds like this.

Steve was a fighter.  He knew that when the gutter takes a swing at you, you have to swing back, and hard and keep on swinging until they crawl back to wherever they came from.  None of this, faux civility crap when it came to dealing with the gutter.  Steve told it like it was, said it like it needed to be said, and never, Never conceded so much as an inch of the moral high ground to posturing republican thugs.  He knew his history…God how he knew his history…and he could relate the past to the present with breathtaking precision and insight.  Kos is right about how prescient he was on Iraq.  He saw with clarity how the imperialist impulse, and that relentless blindness to the lives and humanity of non-westerners, the arrogance and conceit of white superiority, still lives on and moves the hard right.  He understood it.  He understood how it informs the history we are living today.  And he never shrank from calling it for what it was, just as he never thought twice about calling out democratic party sell-outs, or those black leaders and ministers who think they can make a deal with the right for their own personal glory.  He always called it for what it was, no matter how impolitic.

We need more like him nowadays, not less.  And now he’s gone.  Damn.  Damn! 

You were an honest, righteous, decent voice.  You fought the good fight.  You’re going to be missed.   I’m not sure I’m going to be able to bear taking your link down.

If you’re feeling brave today, perhaps you’d like to take a walk up to the edge of the Pit and peer in. I promise you’ll see something worth knowing.

Hate. Ever wonder what it’s like, to look it right in the face and behold? Hate. Hate. Not to ask it why, or wherefore, but just to look and observe and then walk back away from it…always, always, walk away from it…and remember. Remember what you saw. Remember. I’m not talking Fred Phelps’ circus o’ hate. Fred’s been in it for the shock value longer then he can remember why he hates. He just wants to be the center of attention now. Same with all those poor weak little white power Nazi wannabes you see, gamely giving the stiff arm salute for the cameras, while surrounded by a ring of police protection. Himmler would have considered them little more then useful idiots. No…I’m talking the good stuff. Pure. Uncut. Hate. Hate. I have a hit of it right here for you.

Just be careful. Remember what Nietzsche said…repeat it like a prayer before you look… If you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you… When you are done looking, you are going to walk away. You must. It will be hard.

Here, via a Latvian group calling itself Defend The Family, is Scott Lively. He’s delivering a lecture to this group on the dangers of the homosexual menace. Lively may already be known to some of you, as the holocaust-revisionist author of The Pink Swastika. As Jim Burroway says…

Lively goes beyond the small cadre of anti-gay extremists who deny that gays were victims of the holocaust. He claims that ‘homosexualism’ itself was responsible for the rise of the Nazi party and led directly to the Holocaust. He writes that “homosexuality is primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it.”

Despite the crackpot theories manufactured largely from rumor, conjecture and the recycling of popular myths, Lively’s book has become something of a best seller. It’s now in its fourth edition. While it has been dismissed by historians, it has gained a significant following among anti-gay activists, particularly among European neo-Nazi groups who have been responsible for several anti-gay assaults in recent years.

Lively has been active in Latvia recently. On March 21st, he was invited to speak at a Kaunas Police Academy about “the effects of sexual ‘freedom’ that is promoted by the homosexual movement.”

Here is a video of Lively giving his talk during a workshop at the New Generations church in Riga, Latvia last March. This isn’t the Fred Phelps family chanting their obscene slogans, waving their signs at hundreds of angry protesters. This isn’t a group of faux Nazi milk babies strutting around in uniforms they think make them somebody. This is an intelligent man calmly, and methodically demonizing one group of people to another group of people who he knows are ready to accept anything he says to them, and have utterly no way of measuring the truth of anything he’s telling them.

They are people who have been taught since childhood to believe whatever the authorities tell them to believe. Once it was their Soviet masters. Now it’s their church leaders. Those leaders have told them that Lively is a great American author who traveled around the world just to speak to them, to warn them of a danger to everything they have ever known. Watch now, as Lively, calmly, deliberately, methodically, teaches them to hate and fear and loath their homosexual neighbors more then they ever, ever hated the Soviets.  Watch his face.

Last year’s Pride Day in Latvia…

As a compromise, Riga Pride organisers held a private indoor rally at the Berg hotel, following an Anglican church service. The church was surrounded by a group of religious extremists, old women and skinheads. "We tried to leave by the back door but they had put guards there. We tried to move through them but groups of people started to run at us shouting, ‘You deserve to die,’ and ‘Leave our land.’ They were carrying bags, which could have had anything in them," remembers Jolanta Chianovica, a half-French, half-Latvian activist.

The bags were full of human excrement, which was hurled at the mostly female congregation. Meanwhile, more counterdemonstrators had swarmed to the Berg hotel, where they were refusing to let Pride supporters in or out. "I saw two girls trying to leave and people spat in their faces directly in front of the police but they did nothing. When they saw the police weren’t interfering to stop the violence, they felt they could do whatever they liked. That was really frightening," says Chianovica.

This is the situation Lively walked into, this is the situation he knew he was walking into, as he told his audience that the gay rights movement has "destroyed the family structure in a large part of the United States", when he said of homosexuals that "they have no place in a society that protects marriage and family."

Now…walk away.  Go find a friend and make them smile.  Find a small uncared for corner of your world and make it beautiful.  Go.  Leave this place.  Later, you can remember what you saw…

There are those who say that race is an invented social construct.  There is color of skin, among other things, that serve as racial markers.  And often, people bearing those markers are persecutied if their particular marker is expressed by a minority of people in their part of the world.  But it’s not enough that a person has a certain skin color either.  Racist governments throughout history have taken great pains to measure the bloodlines of citizens, to insure racial purity.  If an ancestor of yours had black skin, your degree of blackness was carefully measured in your bloodline, not the actual tone of your pelt. 

But for some odd reason, not everything works that way.  Blond hair for instance, is uncommon and yet it’s almost always well favored in communities of mostly dark haired people.  Looked at, as merely one genetic variation out of many, it seems ridiculous that we treat color of skin one way and color of hair another.  How is it that human prejudice suddenly fixates on one thing?  The poet A. E. Housman mocked it in his poem, The Color of His Hair…

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after, that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

The poem is a brilliant, and bitterly angry laugh aimed at prejudice by a gay man who knew the sting of it himself.  So rediculous to persecute someone for the color of their hair. Right?

Well…apparently not…

Red-haired family forced to move

Kevin and Barbara Chapman say they and their four children, aged between 10 and 13, have endured years of taunts, smashed windows and violence.

They said they moved from Walker to Newbiggin Hall to try to escape the bullying, and then again to Kenton Bar.

Son Kevin, 11, said he was recently punched in a street attack. Newcastle Council is "discussing the situation".

Mr Chapman, 49, said his 10-year-old daughter Ryelle and sons Daniel, 10, and Jordan, 13, have also been badly affected.

He said each time the family received abuse they moved home.

They’ve been punched and kicked and thrown over a hedge

The family also say they have endured their homes being daubed in graffiti.

Mr Chapman said: "The abuse we get is unbelievable. It started more than three years ago, when the kids started getting bullied by lads over the colour of their hair.

"They’ve been punched and kicked and thrown over a hedge. Every time they go out these gangs get to them."

He added that the family now wanted to move again.

Community police officer Sergeant Colin Murray, of Northumbria Police, said there had been a number of incidents all of which had been fully investigated.

Commenting on the matter, a Newcastle City Council spokesman said: "We are currently discussing their situation."

The first headlines I saw on this story, read that the family had "Ginger Hair", and I thought the poor family had some sort of unfortunate genetic defect that they were being mocked and tormented over.  I’d never heard the term before.  So I did what any computer geek will do: I did a Google image search on "ginger hair" and right away I got a page full of various red heads, many of which were actually quite beautiful.  I could feel my jaw dropping.  Jesus Fucking H. Christ…they’re talking about redheads…

Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,
And the quarry-gang on portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the god that made him for the colour of his hair.

Never underestimate the human capacity to hate people for any stupid shit reason they can dream up…