The Consumerist has a post up warning about a new rash of ATM Card Skimming devices being installed into the wild. Apparently the devices are getting smaller and easier for just about anyone to use. Placed over the real ATM card reader slot, they are often used in conjunction with fake mirrors or brochure holders that have hidden cameras in them to record your fingers entering your PIN number…
Pay a little extra attention next time you use an ATM. That would also include gasoline pump card readers too I imagine. Photos of what the devices look like on The Consumerist website.
I read online today that Amazon has stopped ranking gay themed titles. This is having the effect, intended or not, of pushing a whole genre of publishing off your lists, and into the closet. Even the children’s book "Heather Has Two Mommies" has been de-ranked and thereby de-listed. Or, put another way, closeted. Only Kindle editions are listed now when you search Gay and Lesbian bestsellers, because the print editions have had their rankings stripped.
What were you thinking when you did this? As a gay man, and a frequent customer here, I am more unhappy to read about this then I can express. It’s one thing to keep sexually graphic content out of sight of minors, but another thing entirely to push anything having to do with the lives of gay people into the closet. That, simply put, is bigotry. A kind of bigotry I thought Amazon wasn’t really interested in trading in.
And here I was, just about to purchase another lawn and garden tool…something I need and can’t seem to find locally. Like the lawn mower blade I bought some time ago. Oh…and all the mp3s I’ve been buying lately…I have some more titles I was going to search for. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t buy a song, or a book, or some other product, from Amazon. But not now. You need to seriously re-think this policy, and quickly, or I will not be buying a single thing more from Amazon. And considering the stink I’m seeing about this online already…I doubt I’ll be the only customer you loose over this. Get a little more common sense into your ranking policy, and the prejudice out of it. My thanks in advance.
Meta Writers has posted a list of the books that have been stripped which includes almost all novels in a user’s Top 100 Gay Novels List including James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance.
Our theatre critic Kevin Sessums reports that the hardback edition of his memoir Mississippi Sissy retains a sales ranking while the ranking for the paperback edition has been stripped. Michelangelo Signorile reports that his books have all lost their rankings.
Our research shows that these books have lost their ranking: "Running with Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs; "Rubyfruit Jungle" by Rita Mae Brown, "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel, "The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1" by Michel Foucault, "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison (2005 Plume edition), "Little Birds: Erotica" by Anais Nin, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominque Bauby (1997 Knopf edition), "Maurice" by E.M. Forster (2005 W.W. Norton edition) and "Becoming a Man" by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award.
[Update…] Andrew Sullivan discovers that as far as Amazon is concerned, he’s a writer of pornography…
This has to be one of the weirdest and least defensible policy changes imaginable. Mein Kampf is fine. Jackie Collins is fine. But books about gay subjects are now "adult" on Amazon and so not included on best seller lists or rankings. Sure enough, "Virtually Normal" and "Love Undetectable" have been de-listed and stripped of customer sales rankings. Jackie Collins’ "Married Lovers" hasn’t. My books contain discussions of Aquinas and Freud and Foucault and Burke. I’m puzzled as to why those authors are more "adult" than Collins’ adulterous couplings.
Seems someone at Amazon has had a homosexual panic moment. Well…the electric pole saw I was going to order from them tonight (I have a tree I need to prune a tad…) is available on the ACE Hardware website too, which claims to ship for free to my local ACE store.
"A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy."
Well that certainly explains this…
"Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening. As I am a publisher and have an Amazon Advantage account through which I supply Amazon with my books, I had a special way to contact them. 24 hours later I had a response:
"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
"Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
"Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage"
And how suddenly every book with a gay theme or content in it was wiped off hundreds of Amazon book lists as if they’d never existed…but not other books with similar heterosexual themes. As I said previously, I think someone in Amazon HQ had a homosexual panic moment and made a really bad decision they thought, whilst in the grip of their homosexual panic, that it wouldn’t be noticed or much disapproved of. "Glitch" goes a long way toward explaining what happened…not. How the hell does Virtually Normal, Brokeback Mountain, and Maurice suddenly get treated like they’re pornography if this wasn’t some jackass attempt to push gay books into the closet because somebody got all upset that Amazon was treating gay folk like just another customer demographic?
Now a new theory is starting to circulate, that in fact, there was a glitch in the system, and that glitch was abused by people wanting to hurt Amazon. Here is the theory:
On each book is a feature allowing customers to tag a book with words to help people search. Someone might tag a book about Britney Spears with the words "popstar" or "meltdown", words potentially related to the book. If a book was tagged "adult" enough times, it is possible that Amazon had a system in place to remove the sales rank and remove it from the search engine, perhaps until a live person could double check it. This would fit with the statement from a customer service representative over the weekend that this was a new policy about "adult" content.
Now, a group of people makes a concerted effort to tag books they don’t like with the "adult" tag, knowing the automated system will remove them from the search. Reports have surfaced that authors have been discovering their books removed from search as early as February of this year. At that time, they complained and Amazon put the books back in the search.
This weekend is when many people became aware of the fact that so many books were disappearing, hence the firestorm. Some on the internet find it odd that the cat would be let out of the bag on Easter weekend, a religious holiday when few staff would be on hand at Amazon to deal with the fallout.
I’m generally not a conspiracy theory fan, but this has a certain ring of truth to me. Trusting the crowd to rate content is pretty common across the internet, so for Amazon to have instituted an automated feature like this would not be surprising. In fact, as I noted in my previous report, one of the books that did not disappear from search is "For The Bible Tells Me So", a positive look at homosexuality with a biblical perspective. This actually supports this theory- someone trying to eradicate books that support homosexuality might easily think this one was opposed based on the title.
Given that I’ve seen wingers doing crap like this elsewhere, it’s not at all beyond the realm of possibility.
I wrote previously that the fight for gay equality isn’t over simply when common, decent heterosexuals stop seeing their gay neighbors through the prism of every anti-gay stereotype the hatemongers have been pushing for generations, and start seeing us for the human beings we really are. That’s an important step, but not the final one. The last step comes when they finally start seeing the hatemongers for…well…the hatemongers they are.
The saving grace of it is that it gets easier the closer gay folk get to the equality prize. The masks of civility and decency just start dropping like crazy and for a moment, the homophobes seem to have suddenly become completely unhinged. But your gay and lesbian neighbors know that they have always been unhinged. They’ve just never talked that way in front of the rest of the nation before. Case in point, Peter LaBarbera. Or as he’s affectionately known over at Pam’s House Blend…The Peter.
LaBarbera’s signature act is to go "undercover" into the gay S&M scene and report back on all the unsavory things going on in the backrooms, sex parties and dungeons. Never mind that S&M isn’t a particularly gay phenomina. Never mind that you could wander through the heterosexual side of any adult bookstore anywhere in this country and find grown heterosexual adults engaging in the very same acts. LaBarbera seeks out the most exotic, the most extreme, the most unsavory things he can find in the gay community, and then presents it to his flock as what it is to be homosexual. This is how hatemongers have operated since the dawn of human history. Via Pam’s House Blend, here’s a typical example of how LaBarbera preferrs to operate…
Man, oh man…after he wrote me a letter to chastise me for making fun of his excursions to leather clubs to do undercover work for Jeezus, Illinois Family Institute’s Peter LaBarbera just lets it all hang out in an article on Salon (registration required) by Michelle Goldberg, "Sinners in the hands of an angry GOP." It’s an inside look at the goings-on at the War on Christians and the Values Voters conference.
Because Petey’s efforts to demonize the entire gay community are failing miserably (the Gay Games are going on in Chicago with Walgreen’s sponsorship; his marriage amendment initiative can’t get the signatures it needs) he must now escalate the homo-hate wars with a little spice — by trolling on gay boards for research on how to scare youth away from the gay agenda.
Perhaps worrying that anti-gay rhetoric hasn’t been sufficiently inflammatory lately, some speakers urged listeners to start using more scatological and stigmatizing language. Peter LaBarbera, who heads the Illinois Family Institute and is known for his obsession with gay men’s most outré sexual practices, told the audience, "My greatest frustration has been our side’s inability to make homosexual behavior an issue in the public’s mind." In order to inspire the kind of revulsion he wants to see more of, he read from a posting on a gay message board: "Hey guys, I know this is kind of gross and all, but I was wondering if I’m the only one. I’m usually the bottom in my relationship with my boyfriend. After having been the receptive partner in anal sex it’s only a few hours before I start to experience diarrhea … it really stinks, because I really like sex, duh, but it takes the fun out of it when I know I’ll be tied to the bathroom for the next day."
"I don’t think so-called GLBT teens are told anything like this" by their school counselors, LaBarbera said. "We need to find ways to bring shame back to those who are practicing and advocating homosexual behavior."
Take note of two things: firstly, that this is being discussed openly as a matter of tactics. It’s not about what the facts are, it’s about what creates the maximum effect. Secondly, this is the kook pews talking among themselves. This is being discussed at the War on Christians and the Values Voters Conference. In the mainstream news, they would never say they are choosing what to say about homosexuality mostly for effect. Yet note also, the rote bemoaning of their inability to get the message out. Time and again you hear them saying among themselves, that if they could only get their message out Teh Gays wouldn’t be winning the culture war. Note that, and note along with it that they are nonetheless careful to moderate their rhetoric in public.
At least, up until now. Triumphant after last November, once again they see themselves loosing ground to an enemy they can’t seem to get an edge up on no matter how much they do, no matter how many political victories they score. When all you have are lies to win the war with, then the war is lost. But you go into battle with what you have. And as I said, the saving grace of all this is that the more they loose, the more vehement they become. And then people start to notice something.
People like Glenn Sacks. Sacks, a columnist whose focus is on men’s and fathers’ issues, specifically on the father’s rights movement, but also on men’s rights in general, took issue recently with Christian Newswire’s giving LaBarbera a forum to dump his poison into the political dialogue…
Mercifully, most opponents of gay marriage are not anti-gay bigots like LaBarbera. I have no problem with gay marriage and gay rights, but however one feels about gay marriage, it has nothing to do with the decline of the American family. The real threat to American families is not gay marriage but instead divorce and a family law system which separates millions of children from the fathers they love and need.
Sacks provided his readers with a handy link they could use to tell Christian Newswire what they thought of LaBarbera’s bigotry. Naturally, LaBarbera couldn’t take that laying down. As Sacks reported in a follow up post, LaBarbera responded in his own characteristically measured and thoughtful way…
Are you a homosexual, Glenn?
More of that exchange Here. Here’s where it get’s interesting. LaBarbera sent an alarm out to dozens of religious right groups, calling Sack’s post arrogant and harmful to the movement. You get the sense from Sacks’ follow-up post that he expected better from the movement’s leaders then he got. But almost any gay American citizen could have told him what to expect…
In a letter to me cc’d to dozens of Christian leaders, LaBarbera called my post "arrogant and harmful" and sent a follow-up letter asking "Are you a homosexual, Glenn?" A lively debate ensued, in which many Christian leaders wrote to me.
What I expected was that many of them would say something along the lines of "We agree that Peter LaBarbera’s views are extreme and we don’t support them, but we do believe that gay marriage is harmful." While I don’t believe that gay marriage is harmful, I do not now nor have I ever believed that all who oppose gay marriage are anti-gay.
I taught in Christian high-schools for several years and the religious leaders always told me that the Christian teaching on gays is to "Love the sinner, hate the sin." If Christians want to have credibility on opposing gay marriage, they must also oppose anti-gay bigotry, and I expected that many of them would.
Instead, I’ve been disappointed and at times floored by the unreserved support some have shown LaBarbera, including many letters with the subject line "I Stand with Peter."
Many of these are major figures. For example, Janet M. LaRue, Chief Counsel for Concerned for America, wrote:
"Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!"…I know Pete LaBarbera. Pete LaBarbera is a friend of mine.
Christian radio host/author Janet Folger Porter wrote:
Peter LaBarbera is the best example of what Christians should be doing…Peter’s comments have been nothing but honest, loving, and courageous.
Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel and Scott Lively, president of Defend the Family, signed on to the "I Stand with Peter" letter. Lively, apparently referring to me, wrote:
Who is this uncircumcised Philistine who challenges the army of the Living God?
Lively adds
You obviously don’t have a clue about the role of the homosexual movement in the disintegration of the natural family model in America. Without the "gays’" largely hidden but relentless anti-family social-engineering campaign since the 1940s, there wouldn’t be a fathers’ rights crisis in our land.
Hetersoexual divorce and out-of-wedlock births are the fault of gays? Lively is right–I certainly missed that one.
Townhall columnist Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries writes:
Peter LaBarbera is a courageous, talented and honest advocate for the truth who will not back down in the face of vicious attacks or smear campaigns. He has said nothing that is not backed by voluminous evidence…
He has exposed the relentless and reckless promotion of behavior that is documentably dangerous and soul-destroying. That’s the face of real compassion, not the ersatz concern of people who pat homosexuals on the head, watch them go off a cliff into disease, drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and then blame others for not going along with the fictions that homosexuality is harmless and inevitable.
Ingrid Schlueter of the VCY America Radio Network writes:
Peter, unlike most evangelicals today, has the testosterone to challenge those who pervert Scripture, pervert sexuality, and insist that everyone accept it as normal. He has my absolute support…
Phil Burress, Chairman of Equal Rights not Special Rights, writes:
Peter LaBarbera is my friend and I want to be named alongside him the next time you attack him for telling the truth.
It goes on and on…with Sacks just staring dumbfounded…
Peter Sprigg, Senior Director of Culture Studies of the Family Research Council, did give an answer to my question "If Peter LaBarbera’s statement isn’t bigoted, what is?", writing:
Fred Phelps, who says "God hates f-gs," is bigoted. Peter LaBarbera is not.
Both Phelps and LaBarbera are bigoted, but I would agree with Sprigg that Phelps is far worse.
Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International and author of Leaving Homosexuality, defended LaBarbera, writing:
Peter may not always say the right thing, but who one of us does? As Christians I think we ought to go to our brother or sister when we think they have missed the mark before we do a blog post on it…
I’m fully aware that people sometimes don’t always express themselves the way they would like to, and I’ve certainly said things on TV and the radio that I could have phrased better. But Peter’s views that I criticized are ones that he has written on many occasions–it’s fair to characterize them as his views and criticize them.
Chambers also states that he is "unalterably convinced that Peter indeed loves sinners and cares about their eternities more than the policies he fights for." All I can say is that if this is true, Peter is uncharacteristically shy about letting the public know about it.
That Chambers would be quick to come to LaBarbera’s defense is interesting for the controversy that’s been actively reported on over at Box Turtle Bulletin, concerning Exodus participation in a Ugandian conference on homosexuality. Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively was a speaker and once again ginned up anti-gay passions in a land torn by genocide, by claiming that genocide is the work of homosexuals, while Exodus board member Don Schmierer sat and smiled. Jim Burroway and Timothy Kincaid have been asking Exodus to repudiate board member Don Schmierer’s participation in the conference, which included calls for wholesale witchhunting and imprisoning of gay people in Uganda. To date, other then a squalid bit of both-sides-of-the-mouth boilerplate PR, Exodus has remained silent. Gay people are killed time and again in the venomous hostility created by hatemongers like LaBarbera and Lively, and Exodus, which laughably claims to be a non-political faith group that only seeks to heal unwanted "same sex attractions" acknowledges with President Alan Chamber’s defense of LaBarbera, that the blood of all those innocents is on its hands too. As Christians Alan, you ought to consider whether your words bring peace to the world, or inflame passions. But then, your Christianity is as thin as your ersatz love for those gay poeple who had more courage and stronger inner resources of character then you could ever muster in your own life, isn’t it Alan?
Sacks ends the exchange with this…
In conclusion, I’m surprised and rather disappointed. Is Peter LaBarbera really representative of modern Christian thought? I don’t believe that–I believe Christians are much better than that. I have a very hard time imagining the many hard-working, devoted religious faculties I once worked with holding LaBarbera’s views. But in general this recent exchange doesn’t do much to support my optimism.
LaBarbera isn’t representative of modern Christian thought. He’s merely and utterly representative of a certain kind of American culture warrior…the kook pews…the ones who are still arguing that giving women and non-property owners the vote is what ruined America. And no doubt the darkies too. There is a good deal more to Christianity then this little corner of the human gutter. You thought they were better then this. A lot of people do. Welcome to the other side of the public face…the side that has been spitting in the faces of your gay and lesbian neighbors for decades now.
Yes…it’s pretty awful. But you needed to see this. Just remember what Nietzsche said about staring into an abyss. You have to keep reminding yourself that there is more to humanity, let alone to Christianity, then this.
Just pretend I’m not talking about you. No…not you. You! Just pretend. You know…like you could just pretend that I didn’t have any human need for companionship and love. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
"Last June, a "500-year flood" ushered millions of gallons of water through eastern Iowa. In Cedar Rapids alone, more than 25,000 individuals were displaced in one day. Hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage was done. The Flood of 2008 is arguably the most destructive disaster that the state of Iowa has seen — at least, that is, until last Friday… Flood waters erode the soil. "Gay marriage" erodes the soul. A flood impacts for a decade. "Same-sex marriage" destroys generations. A flood draws a community together. "Homosexual marriage" tears the family apart. Communities recover from floods. The promotion of un-natural unions has an eternal consequence," – pastor Eric Schumacker, Baptist Press.
I’m 55, and single, and it’s looking now as though that is how my life will always be. And I blame hatemongers like Schumacker for that. The ones for whom hating gay people just isn’t enough. The ones whose cheap bar stool hatreds have to be shared by everyone for them to feel good about themselves. The ones who teach gay kid like the one I was once upon a time to hate themselves, just as much as their haters do, driving their knives deep into hearts only just learning what it is to feel desire, and glimpse a world of romance, trust, and tender joyful companionship. The ones that drive a knife deep into a kid’s capacity to love themselves, let alone anyone else, and who do it, with a smile in the name of God, and once again in the name of Jesus, and then one more time in name of love. I might have found a love of my own by now, were it not for gutter crawling human hating maggots like pastor Schumacker, who had to make me, and other human beings like me who mate to our own sex instead of the opposite, into their scapegoats for all the cheap failures of character within themselves. We had to be monsters, so he could be righteous…and monsters aren’t allowed to love.
It isn’t that I reject the theology, although I do. Somehow, all the little rules and regulations that come along with being a Christian as the kook pews percieve Christianity to be, don’t translate into loving your neighbor. Or rather…love consists of sticking a little dagger with Jesus’ name engraved on it into your neighbor’s heart and praising God. The earth was not created in six days…the rocks in the ground say different, and if God is that which created all that is, all that was, and all that will ever be, then the rock, not the word, is the testament of God, the original manuscript, God’s own handwriting. But even the word means only what the reader says it means, and it seems, especially so when it’s telling you to love your neighbor. Ah yes…love… Feel the love for their gay neighbors in this life here: "Gay marriage" erodes the soul. No. Hate does. And I have fought so very hard to keep it from eroding mine all my life, and especially whenever someone tries to put their Jesus dagger into my heart in the name of love.
We love you…stab stab stab…Can you feel our love? Stab Stab Stab… You may never know how hard that personal inner battle has been for me, or the cost. I get angry. Livid. And I am all alone with it, with no companion of the heart to talk to, no smile to look for whenever I need reminding that life is good, and that the haters, the bigots, the human vampires who suck the love out of everything they look at aren’t important. No hand to put into mine. No companion of the soul to put my arms around for a little while, and feel that life is good and the world makes sense after all. I put my head down on the pillow every night it seems, just a little bit angrier then the night before, just a little bit angrier then I thought it was humanly possible to be angry. And I am all alone with it. Alone with it, and the memories of all the near misses I’ve had in my life, when love seemed like it might just be possible after all, only to have that chance snatched away from me once again, in the name of love.
The promotion of un-natural unions has an eternal consequence… But murdering another person’s ability to love, and accept love from another, apparently does not in his bible. I would give up everything I have to have had the love of my life beside me. I would wash dishes for the rest of my life, dig ditches, clean pigsties, live without anything but the clothes on my back to have had his smile to look at, and his hand to hold every now and then. I would spend forever in Hell, knowing that even an eternity of pain could not touch the love I had shared once. I could survive in Hell forever with that smile to remember, those moments spent in the arms of the one I loved. If you don’t know what I am talking about then you have never loved and I feel sorry for you.
Homosexual marriage" tears the family apart… All the gay children who were thrown out the door like they were so much human garbage. All the gay sons and daughters who will go to their grave remembering the sound of their parent’s voices as they told them to burn in hell. All the grieving parents who will go to their graves remembering how they drove their own children to suicide for the glory of God. All the lonely people, bearing the wounds on their hearts that keep them from reaching out to another in trust, and then in love. I dated one of these once and naively thought that if I loved him wholeheartedly I could heal that wound. But even love can’t heal a wound that someone blames their own existence for.
Un-natural unions… I know what Jesus would want me to do. I have to forgive him. I understand it. I understand the necessity of it. Jesus, whatever you think he was, was absolutely right about this one thing: we must love one another. This poor world tears itself apart a little more every day with hate. He would tell me I have to forgive this man, and all the others like him, who put all those knife marks on my heart. And I can’t. This world is so much poorer, and meaner, and smaller for the likes of him, and all for nothing more then so Schumacker can imagine the monster he sees every morning in the bathroom mirror is some other person, some other convenient scapegoat. So many broken hearts, turned into someone else’s angel wings. So many lost dreams of love and peace and joy, turned into other people’s stepping stones to heaven. They say God never gives us a greater burden then we can bear, and some days I think that what I am being spared is that I will never know how, I will never know why, some folks can walk to heaven on the broken hopes and dreams of their neighbors with little tears of joy in their eyes. It’s not that I reject the theology, it’s that I can’t forgive. I just…can’t. And that is why I am not a Christian.
Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.
-Edgar Watson Howe
Natale Davis over at All Facts points me to a post over at the Christian Science Monitor "Patchwork Nation" blog about recent events on the same-sex marriage front. Patchwork Nation is an interesting project…
About the Patchwork Nation project
The United States is a vast, diverse place – more than 300 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles. Yet our understanding of its complexities is limited. We think of demographic slices or broad regions, or we fall back on the overused, oversimplified ideas of red and blue America.
Patchwork Nation, funded by the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization based in Miami, is designed to help us get past those views and understand how different communities and cultures within the US experience different realities – and shape the whole.
So the blog post in question grabs snapshots of opinions from each of their representative communities thusly…
In Los Alamos, N.M., our wealthy and educated “Monied ’Burb,” there doesn’t seem to be much of a gay marriage “issue.”
“Our legislature introduced a bill allowing gay marriage. It died in committee,” says Bill Enloe, chairman and CEO of Los Alamos National Bank, in an e-mail. But he also writes, “The majority of individuals in the state are in favor of allowing gay marriage. It might pass next year.”
Kevin Holsapple, executive director of the Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce, e-mailed that he had “never perceived it to be an issue” in the city.
In Lincoln City, Ore., our small-town “Service Worker Center,” some in the community are focused on the topic, according to Patchwork Nation blogger Kip Ward, who runs a local hotel. However, “For most of us, we have bigger fish to fry,” he says in an e-mail. “We just don’t bother with it one way or the other.”
In Ann Arbor, Mich., our liberal “Campus and Careers” community, one correspondent succinctly e-mailed, “Gay marriage should be a nonissue.”
And in Nixa, Mo., our socially conservative “Evangelical Epicenter,” local retiree Betty Ann Rogers wrote that she hadn’t really heard about the issue or read about it in the newspaper.
…but what gets my attention is a comment left by a reader from Massachusetts:
Here in Massachusetts, so little is different that you’d not know that we were the first state to legalize gay marriage, if you didn’t make an effort to ‘turn the rocks over’ or ‘kick the logs’ a bit. Those gay and lesbian couples who wanted to marry have done so…and settled down into quiet, integrated parts of the communities in which they live. They pay taxes, support churches, do community service work, and just generally help their areas be better places. You’d never know that there had been a ‘country-shaking’, ‘ground-breaking’ event here by the quietness of it all. My marriage fell apart not because some of my gay and lesbian friends married their partners, but because of my own failings (or those of my ex). I think that as things march forward, people will come to see that that their own relationships are not, in any way, controlled or affected by those around them, gay or straight, and that tolerance and quiet, friendly support for happy couples is much, much better for our society overall than is angry divisiveness.
Emphasis mine. This is why Every Single Battle in this fight has been to the death. Because once people see they’ve been lied to about the Homosexual Menace, the whole house of cards falls apart. It isn’t society sliding into sexual anarchy the homophobes have been afraid of. It’s the see-it-with-your-own-two-eyes realization that bringing same sex couples into the fold actually strengthens communities that they never, at any cost, wanted people to behold.
For generations they have put knives into our hearts so they could feel righteous. For generations they have taken what should be one of this life’s most perfect joys…falling in love, and being loved in return…and turned it into a nightmare for this one small portion of the human family. They did it so they wouldn’t have to look at the barren wasteland they’d made of their own stone cold hearts. They did it so they could have scapegoats for every cheapshit character flaw of their own. They turned their gay neighbors into monsters, so they wouldn’t have to confront the monsters staring back at them in the bathroom mirror. Andrew Sullivan and Damon Linker have been staring in wonder at the depth of the fear in Rod Dreher’s writing on the subject of same-sex marriage. But they have it all wrong. It isn’t change Dreher is afraid of. It isn’t the fear that civilization may slide into sexual anarchy that grips him. It’s being held responsible for all those thousands upon thousands of broken hearts and murdered hopes and dreams. Why did they do it? Why? Why was it necessary to put a knife into the hearts of so many innocent people? Ultimately, we may never know precisely why. Why do people hate? Why does hate have such power over some of us, and not others? Can we ever really answer that question? But you need to understand what Dreher and his kind fear isn’t the Homosexual Menace, or Sexual Anarchy or The Fall Of Western Civilization, but that common, decent people will stop seeing monsters when they look at their gay neighbors, and instead see who the real monsters were in this unmitigated human tragedy.
There’s the fear. There’s the bottomless fear. Right there.
The process of constitutional referendum in Iowa takes more time then in California, apparently. Before an anti same-sex marriage amendment can be sent to the voters, it has to be approved by the legislature in two consecutive sessions. The republicans in Iowa are complaining that democrats are being obstructionist for not taking up the matter Right Now, instead of next year. The Senate majority leader fired back…
One of my daughters was in the workplace one day, and her particular workplace at that moment in time, there were a whole bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage. They were talking about discussions going on across the country. And my daughter Kate, after listening for about 20 minutes, said to them: ‘You guys don’t understand. You’ve already lost. My generation doesn’t care.’ I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And I’ve talked with other people about it and that’s what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that. Is that so wrong? I don’t think that’s so wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know I’ve been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other. No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.
I don’t think this is simply a matter of people now reading the tea leaves and deciding it’s safe to support gay Americans in their desire to get married, settle down and make lives together. It’s people, slowly, one-by-one, getting sick and tired at long last of all the venom and hate. People are getting tired of the culture war. They just want to live with their neighbors in peace and good will. Newsweek has an article up titled, The End Of Christian America, which argues thusly…
While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world." As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.
Emphasis mine. You could argue that the religious right’s notion of a Christian America is about as authentic as its notion of Christianity. But this is not the twilight of American Christianity. If anything is coming to an end now, and I am not yet convinced it is, it’s the culture war. Maybe. Hopefully. This is not a Christian nation. It is a nation where Christians are free to worship according to their conscience. But that is only because everyone else is too. President Kennedy in 1960, when it was being asked openly whether or not a Catholic could be president of the United States, said "For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist… Today I may be the victim – but tomorrow it may be you – until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped."
Divide the nation, and we’ll have the bigger half, said Nixon’s aid Pat Buchannan, signaling the start of the culture war that has gone on to this day. So the southern strategy was put into motion, to divide northern from southern democrats and working people from the democratic party. So the Southern Baptist Convention began tearing their more liberal brothers and sisters from the fabric of the faith. So the Episcopalians began to schism, rather then treat their gay neighbors as fellow human beings. So the more liberal and diverse cities and states of the nation were told they weren’t the true America after all. So gay people were made into demons and scapegoats for every social ill that the culture warriors brought down upon themselves. For the glory of God the fabric of America was torn asunder and the glory that was America, its promise to all the peoples of the world of liberty and justice, was condemned as evil. Only the righteous could have rights. Only the elect could be full citizens. The American Dream isn’t yours heathen…
No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you…
What’s happening is that people are sick of it now. We want to be Americans again.
Back Home From The Happiest Place On Earth To…Earth…I Guess…
First time I left Disney World and walked back into the real one it was to headlines screaming at me that over 170 people had been killed in coordinated terrorist attacks in India. This time:
An ambush that resulted in the shooting deaths of three Pittsburgh policemen was precipitated by an emergency call from the gunman’s mother over a dog urinating in the house.
…later identified as Richard “Pop” Poplawski, 22. A dishonorably charged Marine, he adhered to a number of right-wing conspiracy theories and expressed fears of a “Zionist nation” revoking his right to own guns.
He jumped in a car with oldest daughter Maxine, 16, who tracked her mother through a cellphone global-positioning system.
They homed in on a convenience store 20 miles away in Auburn, north of the Muckleshoot Casino. James confronted his wife, who was with another man. He wanted her home. She said she wasn’t coming back.
He stormed home, consulted relatives and calmed down. Maxine went to bed about 11 p.m. with her four younger siblings. She sent a classmate a text message from her cellphone: “I’m tired of crying. I’m going to bed.”
Within hours, James Harrison, 34, grabbed a rifle and shot each child multiple times. Four were found in bed. One of the girls died in the bathroom after a violent struggle.
Armed with a second rifle, he returned to Auburn on Saturday morning, perhaps in hopes of finding his wife. Perhaps to kill again. Instead, sitting inside his running SUV, he turned the rifle on himself. His body was discovered about 8 a.m. by children playing in the area.
Welcome back to Realityland Bruce…
Oh…and the Iowa Supreme Court Unanimously decided that not letting same sex couples marry was an unconstitutional denial of equal protection. I should be happy about that and I am, but I dread reading the news accounts because inevitably they have to give the gutter a chance to spit on gay people, happy couples, and all their hopes and dreams. But more and more I’m seeing words like these, finally…
There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible to imagine, however inaccurately, that gay sex was in and of itself a self-destructive pathology, something no happy, healthy person would willingly engage in. That time is past. The evidence of stable, loving relationships between well-adjusted, successful people is all around us. Indeed, this abundant evidence–and not the tides of the sexual revolution, which peaked more than three decades ago and have since receded–is the reason that gay rights, and in particular the question of gay marriage, have moved so quickly in recent years.
That time is past… Yes, for the people willing to let reality speak for itself. I am of a generation of Americans who were taught all kinds of horrible, filthy lies about gay people, and not simply in school, but in church, in the movies, in magazines and newspapers, and on TV. Where we were not dangerous sexual psychopaths we were contemptible faggots. When I was 17, and just beginning to grasp that I was gay myself, I got the message about how people felt about homosexuals from just about every direction I looked…
Mad #145, Sept ‘71, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”
At the beginning of James Burke’s PBS series The Day The Universe Changed, he tells a story of some students of philosophy, bragging to the teacher about how ignorant people were to think that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun orbited around the earth rather then the other way around. How ignorant, said the students, when all they had to do was just look up and observe the sun rising as the earth turned. Yes, said the teacher, but I wonder how it would have looked to them had the sun actually been orbiting the earth? The point being that it would have looked the same. Sometimes what we see is what our knowledge tells us we’re seeing. And for generation upon generation, people have been taught to see gay people as monsters…sick, perverted, disgusting, pathological monsters.
Which was how we saw ourselves for so very long. That time is past. And years of living openly and proudly are having their effect on anyone open to the evidence. But there’s one more movement to go in this civil rights dance…
A 62-year-old man assaulted in an alleged hate crime in a Vancouver gay bar remains in hospital care.
In the wake of the attack, the local GLBT community has mounted protests against the attack, as well as a string of earlier incidents that may also have been anti-gay hate crimes.
On March 17, Xtra.ca reported that a witness described how the suspect, 35-year-old Shawn Woodward, declared, “He’s a faggot. He deserved it” after allegedly striking Richie Dowrey in the face, knocking him down.
The suspect also reportedly declared, “I’m not a fag. The faggot touched me. He deserved it.”
The alleged bashing took place at a gay bar, The Fountainhead Pub, in Vancouver’s West End.
Said the witness, Dowrey’s friend Lindsay Wincherauk, “[Dowrey] fell like a board to the ground so hard that a hollow thud could be heard throughout the bar.”
Dowrey reportedly suffered severe brain damage.
Said Wincherauk, “There’s a chance if he survives he won’t walk again.”
The sun doesn’t just suddenly rise on a day when we are an equal and respected part of our communities. What happens is gradually, step by step, the chains that hate put on our lives slowly loose their power over us, and we walk free. But we are not free yet. The simple, elegant, beautiful gesture of couples simply holding hands as they walk together, is still enough to get us beaten to death. What happens is that as we walk out of the shadow of hate our heterosexual neighbors begin to see us, finally, as the people we really are. What happens is that hate, greedy, envious, hungry, follows us out of the shadows also, and into the light, where it can be seen by everyone too…
The two men charged in the gay bashing of two University of Cincinnati students near the Main Campus will each reappear before a judge within the next week.
Ethan Kirkwood, 20, of Meadow Creek Drive in Anderson Township, and Matthew Kafagolis, 20, of Ramundo Court in Anderson Township, were arrested on two counts of felonious assault and released on bond. Since the arrest, the charges have been dropped to two counts of misdemeanor assault, according to the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Web site. The charges were lowered on March 20 and March 19, respectively.
The maximum penalty for a misdemeanor assault charge is less than one year in jail.
…The two men are being charged with allegedly assaulting two men – both are UC students – after the men found out one of the victims was gay, around 4 a.m., Friday, March 6, in the 2500 block of Clifton Avenue.
The gay man was knocked to the ground, kicked and punched after the assailants found out he was gay, according to court records. The other victim was attempting to defend his friend when he was also beaten.
That our neighbors see us for the fellow human beings we are is good, but it is not the end of it. They must also see the hate for what it is too. That will be the end of it, finally. But it is going to destroy more lives before this thing is over.
My iPhone keypad started behaving strangely yesterday afternoon. It would randomly stop responding to key hits and I assumed that was because the touch screen had become a tad smeared with many, many finger prints. So I cleaned it off with a wipe cloth. That fixed the random key miss issue, but then the bottom row of the keypad stopped working correctly. It would respond to touch, but only as if I’d pressed a key in the row above.
Maddeningly, applications such as my third party notepad app that have a landscape keyboard are immune to this. But the Facebook app doesn’t do a landscape keyboard. At least the version I have. As if to torment me, the App Store icon notified me while I was fussing with the problem, that there is a new version of the Facebook app out there. But I can’t get it because the app store asks for a password and mine is, in good practice, both alpha and numeric and the keyboard problem prevents me from accessing the numeric keyboard.
I’m reading online that the problem is not fixable via a reset or anything else you can do. It has to go back to the Apple Store. Rather then spend my time here finding and going to an Apple Store here in Orlando I’m just going to save my replies for when I get back to the hotel and my laptop computer.
Because the spacebar row on the keyboard isn’t working, I can’t do anything with most iPhone apps that use the keyboard. This includes mail, Facebook, Notepad and Notebook, Calender, SMS Text Messaging (the send row at the bottom won’t even open up the keyboard), my third party ToDo app, the Contacts app. Oddly, the bottom row works just fine in the Photo Library. I can’t even update the apps I have because I can no longer enter a password.
So until I can get it fixed…my iPhone is just a phone now, mostly. I have a feeling since it’s almost two years old now, the fix will be to buy a new one and I was hoping to skip over generation 2 to generation 3. Unless they can give me a replacement first generation phone, which I doubt.
As I said on Facebook, it’s a good thing I grew up before most of this stuff even existed…cell phones, the Internet, email, personal computers, text messaging…in that I don’t completely loose my wits when it stops working. I’ve seen people get completely irrational when they loose their email service.
I was wandering through Disney-MGM Hollywood Studios yesterday when I saw him again for the first time in years. I almost didn’t recognize him. Then I knelt down and gave him a great big hug and told him it was all okay…
The Hollywood Studios park entrance way is playfully similar to the Main Street U.S.A. walkway everyone must pass though on entrance to the Magic Kingdom…only this is Main Street Hollywood, circa 1930s and it is as if you’d traveled back in time to when everything was art deco. For someone like me who adores the art deco style, in part I am sure because in my early childhood there were still a lot of buildings standing that were like that, it was like a kind of paradise. For like, the upteenth time here in Disney World, I could only just wander around with my jaw hanging open.
There’s a plaque in central park that explains what they were trying to accomplish with Hollywood Studios, but by the time I had walked up to it, I already knew…
This is similar in kind to the poster for Tomorrowland which reads: The Future That Never Was Has Finally Arrived.
I entered a replica of Gorman’s Chinese Theater and took a ride through the movies. You get on in a old sound stage set and a cast member dressed up as a 1940s stereotypical Hollywood talent scout hops on and informs you that you’ll not only be taking a tour through the great Hollywood films, but actually go inside them. And then you’re off…first through a Busby Berkeley dance film and then into Hollywood gangster land where the talent scout is chased off the ride by a gangster who informs you that he’s taking over the ride and oh by the way, please had over all your valuables. It goes on like that for a while and I won’t give it all away…there were the usual Disney animatronics, but of a better quality then the older Magic Kingdom rides…there was a trip through the Alien movie and for a moment you’re completely socked in a fog bank waiting for the beast to jump out at you. Eventually you end up back at the soundstage where a voice yells "Cut…that’s a wrap…" and you get off the ride and go back out into Disney Hollywood…which is not all that different from Disney Tomorrowland. It isn’t real. And yet, for the moment anyway…it is.
I am not one to be easily amused, and yet the whole time I am thoroughly enjoying myself…and I find my whole attitude is different here. I’m smiling at people. I’m patient with idiots. Small screaming children don’t irritate me. Morons who block the road as if they own it don’t bother me (When did America get so goddamned fat?) I just walk around them and the happy little smile never leaves my face. I’m living in a world that never was, that’s finally here. I can be a happy little nerdy kid here and It’s Okay. In fact, it’s Expected of you. All those relentlessly cheerful Disney cast members who are nowhere and everywhere with their perpetual smiles and earnest desire to make sure you "have a magical day" aren’t annoying me nearly as much as I was afraid they would. In fact they are a blessing. They’re my barrier between me and the world not two feet from the gates here, that voted last November to cut my ring finger off. They’re here to keep it off me for a little while. I wish I could give them all a great big hug.
And now the kid I used to be long ago, the one who smiled at everyone, the one with the big imagination, who wore his heart on his sleeve never thinking that people would take that as an invitation to cut it to ribbons, who trusted the world and in the goodness of people, has come back out of me. At least for a while. I thought he’d been beaten out of me in junior high school.
I’m in Orlando, visiting Disney World, and the damn Comfort Inn here charges for Internet which I refuse to pay (I’m posting this on my iPhone right now). So, expect very little posting here until I get back.
I’m already having a great time here in the park…but some journies are worth the trip, just to see someone smile.
[Update…] My bad… There seems to be no charge for the Internet after all. At any rate…I’m using the Motel wireless now and I didn’t have to plug in a credit card number like you usually do for Internet access when they’re charging. Just for kicks and grins I plugged in to see what the charge was, and instead of being taken to a buy it now page I got my Internet right away. Nice.
But posting will still be infrequent, because I am on vacation and I am trying to tune out the world for a while. Also, Motel Internet is seldom reliable.
It’s raining here in Charm City and I’m packing my car and heading for what would have been the Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow had Walt Disney not been a cigarette smoker. But what’s there now is still very nice, and so is the rest of it. Disney World is Huge, and the first time I went there last November I spent most of my time just gawking at the immensity of it. Now I have a better idea of what I want to do, and more time to do it. I also want to wave ‘hi’ to a certain someone, and maybe see him smile one more time.
I’m spending a week, but not in the park this time, which will make it harder to just tune out the entire world like I did last time. But the hotels inside the park are way too expensive…even the so-called "value" hotels. There are so many other nice hotels and motels crowding around the entrances to the park that it’s not hard to find something even nicer then the mid priced Disney hotels at, I kind you not, about a third of the cost. But then you are not in the park the entire time, and being wrapped completely inside that park almost makes it worthwhile. You really can just leave the world behind for a while, and live in a place where it really is a small world after all, and there’s a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day, and find yourself believing that dreams really do come true.
Once upon a time I viewed all that as nothing more then cheap escapism. But the world, and my life, just stresses me out too much now. I’m single, I’m desperately lonely, and I’m living in a world that never seems to let any chance go by to tell me it hates my guts. And there is still that sense in the land of Walt, of all those things I thought the world was, and the future would be. You can see it slowly fading as Disney’s handiwork is overlaid with newer things, some of which I doubt he would have liked, and some which just don’t hit the mark he would have. But even as it fades, it lifts the spirit. At least in someone of my generation.
You have to experience the parks to realize, again if you’re my age and remember watching him on television, how wide Walt Disney’s imagination ranged. People think of Disneyland and they think of the part of the park called Fantasyland. But there was Tomorrowland and Frontierland and Adventureland. There was the little Main Street where everyone entered the park. There was the hall of presidents, and the river boat and the monorail and the people movers. There was the ground breaking animation, but also tons of live action film, and nature series and documentaries. Look a little deeper, beyond all the eye candy and the rides and the exhibits, and you see, astonished, a park infrastructure that is still held in awe by architects. This operation is Huge and yet it runs smoothly. And Disney World in Orlando is several orders of magnitude bigger, and it Still runs smoothly. Chuck Jones once told Disney he wanted his job (Disney told him that position was already filled), and Jones was himself an fantastically creative animator. But there was no city of tomorrow in Chuck Jones, let alone a World.
Last time I walked through the parks down in Disney World, it all came back to me…that it’s a small world after all…that the search for knowledge is a great adventure…that tomorrow was something to look forward to with a smile. People told me after I came back home last November, how much better I looked, how more at ease I seemed. One person insisted I must have gotten laid. I hadn’t of course…but it was almost like that in terms of how good life seemed again. For a little while…
So now I’m packing the Mercedes for another trip south. Before I leave I briefly scan the web. I see Andrew Sullivan reporting the Rod Dreher has replied to Damon Linker, who has in turn replied back. Linker, you may recall, asked Dreher if he had something, anything, besides The Bible Says So to justify his obsession with the Homosexual Menace. Dreher gives the expected answer back…
If homosexuality is legitimized — as distinct from being tolerated, which I generally support — then it represents the culmination of the sexual revolution, the goal of which was to make individual desire the sole legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth. It is to lock in, and, on a legal front, to codify, a purely contractual, nihilistic view of human sexuality. I believe this would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human. And I fully expect to lose this argument in the main, because even most conservatives today don’t fully grasp how the logic of what we’ve already conceded as a result of being modern leads to this end.
Note the hyperbole. The horror of individual desire being seen as more legitimate then his cheapshit barstool prejudices. The knee jerk slandering of that desire as essentially nihilistic. But what Dreher is afraid of here isn’t that the human heart is nothing, but that he is. In the end, the Homosexual Monster, like the Dangerous Black Man and The Greedy Jew represents nothing more then the abyss he stares into every morning in the bathroom mirror.
This is why I am going back to Disney World. I want to spend some more time in a place where I can have that vision of the world and tomorrow I had as a kid back again. Where it’s a small world after all. Where I can return a stranger’s smile and not wonder if they want to cut my ring finger off and stick a knife in my heart, so they can go to heaven.
BETHEL, Maine (AP) – Officials are investigating a fatal accident in western Maine in which a freight train crashed into a car that was parked on the tracks.
Ed Foley of the St. Lawrence & Atlantic Railroad said the westbound train came upon a car that was parked on the tracks at least 200 feet away from the nearest road in Bethel at about 2:35 a.m. Friday.
Bethel Police Chief Alan Carr identified the victim as 25-year-old Scott Libby of Raymond. He said Libby apparently turned onto the tracks and then turned off his lights.
Carr said the train was traveling the posted speed of 25 mph and hit the car with all its force from behind.
But little by little, more details have been emerging. What’s now being revealed shows a far too familiar story of robbery after alledgedly sexual advancements were made, but with a few twists.
In a nutshell: Libby had told his parents that he was going to see a man to get paid back for a loan he’d given in exchange for some of the man’s property as security. The man, Agostino Sampson, was living in a hostel near the tracks where Libby’s car was hit. As police medical examiners determined that Libby had been killed before the car was hit, they questioned Sampson and his story began to fall apart. Now it appears he beat Libby over the head with a cast iron pan handle, and as that seems not to have been enough, strangled him with a belt.
Surprise, surprise…Sampson is claiming Libby made a sexual advance…
A man found dead in his car on railroad tracks in Bethel last month may have been beaten with a cast-iron pan and strangled with a belt before a train hit his vehicle, according to a police affidavit.
Police believe Scott A. Libby, 25, of Raymond was beaten and strangled to death after making sexual advances to a former employee.
Libby’s body was found sprawled across the front seat of his 2007 Chevrolet Cobalt after it was hit by a slow-moving train on Feb. 20, police said.
The car was covered with blood inside and out and the bloodstained handle of a cast-iron pan was found in it, police said.
Libby and Samson had known each other for about seven years, and Samson had worked last summer for Libby, who had a landscaping business in Raymond.
Libby met Samson at the Bethel Hostel late on Feb. 19 to collect $400 he had loaned Samson more than a year ago and to return a watch and silver bracelet held as collateral, Maine State Police Detective Herbert Leighton wrote in an affidavit filed in Oxford County Superior Court.
Although Samson initially told police that the transfer of money and jewelry had been completed without incident, he later said Libby "made sexual advances toward him, placing his hand onto/in the area of his groin," Leighton wrote.
"Agostino said he punched Libby in the face two times, causing Libby’s nose to bleed," but Libby still persisted in his sexual advances and offered to pay him money."
The detective noted that the autopsy showed no injuries to Libby’s nose.
Dr. Marguerite Dewitt, deputy chief medical examiner for the state, said Libby died of "asphyxia due to strangulation and blunt-force trauma to the head."
The blood on the pan handle matched Libby’s, according to the detective, and the handle was consistent with two pans that were recently missing from the hostel, the affidavit said.
A woven leather belt that appeared to be damaged was seized from Samson’s room at the hostel, Leighton said. Red-brown stained business cards belonging to Libby and "several apparent bloodstain patterns" were found about a quarter-mile south of the hostel on Westwood Road, a private way that abuts the hostel.
Leighton also noted that when Libby’s body was found, his pants pockets were turned inside out and there was no money on him.
Police photographed contusions on Samson’s hands, which Samson said he received after a box fell on his hand at work; he later said the injuries were a result of punching a refrigerator at work.
Emphasis in the Pam’s House Blend article. You know what else I think is non-existent here? The sexual advance. The only word we have for that, is the word of Libby’s killer.
That’s the way it often is with the Gay Panic Defense. The only evidence that a sexual advance was made is the testimony of the murderer, which police seem eager to accept at face value, whenever the victim is gay. But in this particular case there is no evidence of that…at least not in the news stories. Sampson however, seems well aware of the effect of telling the police that he, and not the man he beat with a cast iron pan and then strangled with a belt, was the victim. He grabbed my dick and kept on trying to grab my dick even after I punched in twice in the nose…
Here’s what I think happened, based on the newspaper accounts: Libby went to collect the $400 he was owed by Sampson, a man living in a hostel near the railroad tracks…a man clearly without a lot of money to his name. Libby arrived at the meeting with Sampson’s jewelry, but Sampson either did not have Libby’s money, or was determined to get it back from him after Libby gave him his property back. Sampson arranged for them to meet outside the hostel in Libby’s car. Perhaps he told Libby that if his neighbors in the hostel saw them holding $400 and his jewelry they might rob them.
He armed himself with a cast iron pan handle that he’d somehow managed to cut off one of the hostel pans. There are two pans missing and my hunch is he botched it the first time. On the second try he managed to make himself a nice little cast iron blackjack he could stuff into his pocket and Libby wouldn’t see until it was too late. When Libby gave him back his property Sampson beat him unconscious with his makeshift blackjack, and then he strangled Libby with his belt just to make sure. Then he drives Libby’s car onto the railroad tracks with him still in it and walks away, figuring the next train to come along will take care of the evidence of murder and make it seem like an accident. Now he has the money, and his jewelry, and probably whatever else Libby had on him. Libby was found later, with his pants pockets turned inside out.
Then the police came knocking at his hostel door. First he tells them nothing happened. Then he tells them there was an argument, and yes he may have hit Libby a couple times over the head, but there might have been another guy in Libby’s car and maybe he did something to Libby afterwards.
The police aren’t buying it. But then Sampson reaches for his trump card. The trump card the lawyers for Matthew Shepard’s killers, and ABC News, gave him. The trump card the lawyer for Lawrence King’s killer, and Lawrence’s own father, gave him. The trump card the lawyer for Timothy Bailey-Woodson gave him. The trump card lawyers for murderer Raymond Carlisle, Amber Ladner and Cynthia Umstead, gave him. The trump card every judge, every lawyer, every jury who ever excused bloodshed on account of the victim’s sexual orientation gave him. He claimed Libby made a sexual advance.
If that’s not a get out of jail free card, it’s almost certain to be a reduced sentence card. Whatever crime he might have been convicted of had he not claimed to have been sexually assaulted, he will now almost certainly avoid, provided he sticks to it. In Spain recently, a nation with legal same-sex marriage, a jury excused the brutal slaying of a gay couple by a man who stabbed them multiple times, robbed them, then tried to burn their house down to hide the evidence, on the killer’s sole testimony that they had propositioned him. They let him go.
This is what decades of pulpit thumping about the homosexual threat has brought us. In the 1975 film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely, a corrupt policeman tells detective Philip Marlow that his client need not worry too much about being prosecuted for killing a man "…as long as he wasn’t white." But you can claim anyone is gay if you need an excuse for killing them.
Vis Slashdot… Google has been busy lately taking down all music related content from YouTube’s UK viewers. This is in response to the content organization, PRS For Music’s royalty demands. Google won’t pay the rates they’ve set for online music, and is simply taking down any music contant that PRS has rights to. So PRS is happy, right?
pregnantfridge writes "In the ongoing conflict between PRS for Music and YouTube over the takedown of all music related content in the UK, PRS for Music have created a new site, fairplayforcreators.com, exposing the views of the music writers impacted by the YouTube decision. I am not certain if these views have been editorially compromised, but by reading a few pages, it’s clear to me that Music writers represented by PRS for Music are largely clueless about what the Internet and YouTube means to the music industry. Kind of explains why the music industry is in such a decline — and also why so much litigation takes place on the music writers’ behalf."
Here’s what PRS has to say about the tiff between it and Google, from it’s website…
Fair Play for Creators is an online forum set up by PRS for Music so that creators everywhere can publicly demonstrate their concern over the way their work is treated by online businesses.
Fair Play for Creators was established after Internet-giant, Google, made the decision to remove some music content from YouTube.
Google’s decision was made because it didn’t want to pay the going rate for music, to the creators of that music, when it’s used on YouTube.
Music creators rely on receiving royalties whenever and wherever their work is used. Royalties are vital in nurturing creative music talent. They make sure music creators are rewarded for their creativity in the same way any other person would be in their work.
Fair Play for Creators believes that fans should have access to the music they love, and that the work of music creators should be paid for by the online businesses who benefit from its use.
So…I guess they see some value in their music being played on YouTube after all. That wouldn’t happen to be because sites like YouTube bring more new music to the attention of listeners these days…particularly Young listeners…then all the radio stations in the world combined would it…?
Never mind that some musicians actively despise PRS…I’ll get to that in a minute. There was a nugget of insight in the Slashdot comments that illuminated something I’d been puzzled by, ever since the music industrial complex went on the warpath against the Internet. Why the hell are they so bent on killing Internet Radio…???
I put it down to their fear of piracy. I put it down to greed. But there’s another aspect to this here that proves Heinlein was right when he said never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. See it here, in Pete Waterman’s pathetic whining that he isn’t being paid every time one of his magnificent works is played on YouTube…
YouTube is not alone in the online hall of shame where the worthy notion of greater consumer choice is used as a cloak to disguise the fact that copyright infringement happens on a grand scale.
I co-wrote ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, which Rick Astley performed in the eighties, and which must have been played more than 100 million times on YouTube – owner Google. My PRS for Music income in the year ended September 2008 was £11.
Music videos and music generally is at the very heart of User Generated Content sites. It is the hard work and creative endeavour of songwriters and musicians everywhere that has been the bedrock upon which many of these websites have been built, creating along the way huge value for their owners. As well as arguing with them over royalty rates, we should be fighting them to get proper recognition for the part we’ve played in building their businesses.
Pete Waterman, songwriter – 24 March 2009
Now, never mind that a lot of people think they’re owed compensation for having to listen to this song every time they’re Rick-Rolled. Look at it. Just look at it. Waterman really thinks that a single play on YouTube is the same as a single play on radio, for which he gets a PRS royalty. One Slashdot commenter put’s it in perspective…
Just to put this in perspective, if the song had been played 100m times on UK National Radio, he’d have been paid GBP2-5bn instead of GBP11. *That’s* how much Google are underpaying compared to market rate.
If he doesn’t want Google playing his music without paying him, then that’s fine: he’s got what he wants. Google are not playing his music. What’s his beef?
The going rate is whatever rate can be negotiated between the producer and the consumer. Google, as the consumer, has said ‘if that’s the rate, fine, we don’t need the product.’ Astley (and people like him) have to decide whether they want their music to reach an internet audience or not. If they don’t, that’s fine – Google not playing it works for them. But what they can’t reasonably do is complain that Google refuse to buy their product. If the supermarket in your high street tries to sell you chocolates at more than what you think they’re worth, you don’t buy them – no-one needs chocolate. If the PRS tries to sell Google music at more than Google thinks it’s worth, Google doesn’t buy it. So – where’s the beef?
Furthermore, your computation is wrong. When a tune is played in BBC Radio 1 or Radio 2, it’s heard by about 6 million people. When a tune is played on YouTube, it’s typically heard by one person. So 100 million plays on YouTube is not equivalent to 100 million plays on Radio 2, it’s equivalent to seventeen plays on Radio 2. Not seventeen million, seventeen.
So the equivalent payment is not £2-5Bn, it’s £340. Which is a lot more than £11, I’d agree – but is that because Google are offering too little, or because radio is paying too much?
Emphasis mine. Here is why the corporate music industry is trying to squeeze the life out of Internet radio…they really believe that YouTube serving a song to a single user is the same as a radio station playing it once and they want the same kind of compensation the radio station gives them, Every Time an Internet site sends a song down a connection. No…wait…Even More money then the radio station would have to pay .
(Best Syndication News) One of the coolest ideas in the radio business may die soon, not because of lack of listeners, but because fees charged by the music industry. The problem is that Internet Radio stations may soon charged more per song than their satellite or conventional radio counterparts.
A decision back in March 2007 by the by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board and SoundExchange (the money collector for the RIAA) that doubled the rates for music played on the Internet could kill the industry. Pardora.com, one of the market leaders, may shut down soon if the payment structure is not changed. Their royalty fees are expected to hit $17 million this year alone, and as we all know, internet advertising is in its infancy.
The decision to charge Internet radio more could backfire on the music industry. To battle music pirates, some have advised the same price structure or rates less than their traditional media counterparts.
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Pandora founder Tim Westergren, laid out his case. The is a potential "last stand for webcasting" before royalty fee increases begin to take hold, Westergren said.
The prices are expected to go from 8/100 of a cent per song per listener to 19/100 of a cent per song per listener by 2010, according to the Post report. Like the early days of Amazon, Pandora is losing money right now hoping to hold on to a market spot when the industry matures.
Emphasis mine. Thankfully they came to a deal before Pandora had to pull the plug. But this made a lot of listeners absolutely livid when this story broke, and their ire wasn’t at Pandora for not paying the musicians enough. Everyone could see this for the absolutely mind bogglingly self destructive greed that it was. I have personally bought more new music off Pandora (which makes it really easy to buy the tunes you are listening to via Amazon or iTunes) in one month then I bought in the previous five years. And that’s largely because the music industrial complex has utterly destroyed broadcast radio. I just don’t listen to it anymore. And if I’m not listening, I’m not buying.
Let me tell you about YouTube. I watched a charming little video someone had put together…a train cab ride through the English countryside, time sped and slowed, set to the perfect background music. Whatever music this user had set their video to, it was lovely and when I was finished watching I fired off a message asking them what it was. It was a piece from Moby called "Inside". I looked it up on Amazon and there it was. It’s on my iPod and I’m listening to it as I type this. Are you reading this PRS…I bought a fucking copy of something I heard on YouTube the other day. And that’s not the first time either. I have maybe a dozen or so songs on my iPod now that I first heard on YouTube.
Morons.
The short sighted greed here is staggering, but the complete ignorance of how the Internet works isn’t. These are mostly folks of my own generation, and older, running these corporate junk music operations now, and we are a generation that grew up listening to music on static-y car radios, pocket transistor radios, and scratchy vinyl records. Most of my generational peers, according to a recent Pew Institute study, have very little to do with personal computers in their private lives. Individuals like me…technology nerds (I built my first radio when I was 9), are the exception not the rule. To most of my generational peers, the Internet is a bunch of tubes. They don’t get it. They never will.
They really think that one play over the radio has the same value as one play on YouTube. Well…and they’re greedy bastards. One thing you need to know is that for all their posturing, they don’t really give a rat’s ass about musicians. This from another Slashdot commenter…
As a musician myself, I was compelled to comment there. They won’t put it up though.
I take the opposite view. I have one album up for sale on iTunes and Amazon and another being uploaded right now – http://tinyurl.com/cdx44l [tinyurl.com] I don’t actually want to be represented by the PRS, but I have no choice. There is no opt out. You will collect royalties on my behalf whether or not I want you to. If I wish my music to be available free for streaming on Internet radio, you will not let me. So who’s worse, Google for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or the PRS for extortion?
This was followed up by…
You can opt out of collecting your royalties from the PRS. You can’t stop the PRS collecting from the broadcaster.
Say I want to perform a set of my music in a pub, no covers, just stuff I wrote. The pub has to have a PRS performance license and has to pay the PRS for my performance even if I’m not registered with them.
It’s extortion, and as usual it’s the artists who get screwed – the number of places to play is dropping for the small local artist as landlords stop paying the PRS tax.
So if one of these days you find yourself wondering what happened to all the live music you used to hear…thank the record industry.
The Cluelessness Of Bigots, And The People Who Wonder What Makes Them Tick
Andrew Sullivan and Damon Linker wonder what makes Rod Dreher so fixated on gays…
Damon Linker challenges Dreher’s fixation with gays:
Why, given the myriad ways that our society and culture diverge from the long list of archaic norms, practices, and beliefs upheld in the Bible, does homosexuality inspire such anxiety, even panic? What are you afraid of?
It’s a good question.
Well here’s a simple answer: he’s a bigot. I know…I know…saying someone is a bigot is supposed to be nothing more then ad hominim name calling designed to shut down debate. Kinda like the way calling someone a Nazi invokes Goodwin’s Law and the argument is over. But the problem with Goodwin’s law is that it makes it impossible to identify facisim when its staring you in the face, and the same goes for this notion that ‘bigot’ is merely the equivalent of a grade school taunt. It isn’t. It’s a good old fashioned English word and it has a real meaning. People like Dreher fall into that meaning exactly. Why? Because his mindset when it comes to gay people springs from a deeply rooted animus that will not suffer examination or question. He cannot see the people for the homosexuals.
That animus will reliably outrank any higher consciousness the man has, assuming he still has any left. Case in point: his recent brouhaha about that family in East Texas who were killed in a violent home invasion. Dreher, you may recall, was shocked, shocked, not at the deaths, but at one offhanded statement by the grieving father, that bisexuality was ‘hip’ in his little East Texas town…
UPDATE: To clarify: I’m not saying that the teenage culture of bisexuality is worse morally than murder, for heaven’s sake. Obviously murder — and murder of one’s own family — is about the worst thing imaginable.. I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. Big difference.
He really believes there is a "big difference" there. He just doesn’t notice, is not capable of noticing, the wildly disproportionate response to the vicious murder of an entire family, verses one offhanded statement by a father probably crazy with grief that bisexuality is cool among the teenagers in his town. Dreher sees nothing unusual in his own shocked response to the idea of bisexuality in an East Texas town, verses his offhanded notice of the killings. Yes, yes…they were all killed…but OhMyGod bisexuality is becoming cool in East Texas!!!
He doesn’t see the problem here. He can’t. He’s a bigot. The homosexual will always loom larger in his consciousness, then any brutal crime of violence, because his animus sees nothing other then The Homosexual. The Homosexual is the burr under his saddle. The Homosexual is the devil in the darkness. The Homosexual is the monster knocking on the door. Never mind the man’s family was butchered, just look at what kids are saying about bisexuality in East Texas! This is how bigots think.
Linker, like a lot of people, simply cannot believe that is all there is to it…
I find this especially perplexing in Rod’s case because he denies so strenuously that his views flow from anti-gay animus. As he puts it in a recent post,
Gay-rights supporters typically believe people like me hold to our opposition to gay marriage and so forth because of some animosity towards gays. I know that it’s true for a lot of conservatives, but in my case — and in the case of most people I know who share my views — it’s not an emotional matter. We have gay friends, are comfortable around gay people, and simply don’t share that visceral reaction that used to be commonplace in American life, and (regrettably) still is in many quarters.
Yet the visceral reaction was there for all to see when he posted about the murders in East Texas…er…sorry…the Bisexuality in East Texas. And we know, and acknowledge in the law, that murder can be hot blooded or cold blooded. Yet cold blooded bigotry seems to completely baffle people. Why, some of my best friends are… after all. I quit one job I held years ago, when I overheard the owner state flatly that he’d hire a black man, but only if he shinned his shoes and called him Massah. And it wasn’t with any rage or passion he said it. He was simply stating a fact. Like the weather, or the time of day. If Dreher has any gay friends, it’s because they shine his shoes and call him Massah.
Linker asks Dreher a few questions in a desperate attempt to find something, anything, rational at the bottom of Dreher’s little corner of the human gutter…
Why, given the myriad ways that our society and culture diverge from the long list of archaic norms, practices, and beliefs upheld in the Bible, does homosexuality inspire such anxiety, even panic? What are you afraid of? Is it that you fear that if orthodox religious communities stop denouncing gay marriage (to the faces of married gays, which seems to be what you’d like them to do) the human race will stop reproducing itself? Or is it that you worry that if your children aren’t taught in church that homosexuality is an abomination they’ll shack up with same-sex partners when they grow up? But isn’t the decision to do something like that far more a product of nature than culture? I don’t know about you, but no amount of pro-gay propaganda could tempt me to sleep with a man — because I’m by nature sexually attracted to women. Some of what you write about homosexuality leads me to believe you worry that naturally straight men and women will be seduced into being gay by watching too many episodes of Project Runway. But you can’t seriously believe that. Can you?
Here’s the problem. For Dreher, and bigots like him, this isn’t about what they believe. It’s a knee that jerks first and justifies itself later. Any excuse will do, even if it is transparently self serving and utterly unconvincing. He doesn’t have to convince you of anything Linker, he just has to dig in his heels and not be moved. If you can’t make him admit that his prejudices are irrational he wins the argument. It really is that simple.
And not only can you not make a bigot admit their prejudices are irrational, you can’t make them take responsibility for them either. It’s not his fault that he has to go on the warpath against gay people…it’s the gay’s fault. They’re Making him do it, every time they Flaunt themselves in his face thereby provoking him to act. If we stop denouncing homosexuality then the entire human race will cease reproducing and become extinct. Yes, it’s a staggeringly irrational argument. But understand this if you understand nothing else about it: the point isn’t that it’s a good argument, the point is that it puts the blame on gay people for his hostile behavior toward them. Homosexuality is a threat to our very survival…I Have to do this to them…I am Forced to confront the Homosexual Menace…
Homosexuals molest children. Homosexuals spread disease. Homosexuals have caused the fall of every great civilization… The Homosexual is a threat we must confront… Homosexuals are tortured souls…sexually addicted…unable to function normally in society…desperate to be freed from the bondage of their homosexuality…We Must Help Them…We Must Save Them From Themselves… The Homosexual needs our salvation… These aren’t arguments that withstand the slightest critical glance. But they don’t have to be. They’re not offered as reasons…they’re excuses. Excuses to blame gay people, for the bigot’s hostile behavior toward them.
And if Dreher can’t blame gay people for his cheapshit bar stool prejudices, he has one other trump card he can play: he can blame God…
I suspect that Rod’s first instinct will be to respond that the issue isn’t really homosexuality at all. It’s "authority." Rod, after all, believes
that you simply can’t discard a teaching on which the Bible — in both testaments — and (for Catholics and Orthodox) authoritative church tradition could not be more clear, simply because it doesn’t suit contemporary mores.
And that’s all well and good until Linker comes to the obvious point that Dreher, like every other bigot making this argument, picks and chooses his religious beliefs to suit himself. God is not the reason. God is the excuse.
Does Rod have any non-question-begging answer to this question? An answer that doesn’t just amount to saying, "because the church says so"?
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YouTube is not alone in the online hall of shame where the worthy notion of greater consumer choice is used as a cloak to disguise the fact that copyright infringement happens on a grand scale.
I co-wrote ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, which Rick Astley performed in the eighties, and which must have been played more than 100 million times on YouTube – owner Google. My PRS for Music income in the year ended September 2008 was £11.
Music videos and music generally is at the very heart of User Generated Content sites. It is the hard work and creative endeavour of songwriters and musicians everywhere that has been the bedrock upon which many of these websites have been built, creating along the way huge value for their owners. As well as arguing with them over royalty rates, we should be fighting them to get proper recognition for the part we’ve played in building their businesses.