“The crowd just moved onto the intersection , blocking traffic at Santa Monica and San Vicente,” reports Slog Tipper Keith.
As long as nobody gets hurt…good.
I would suggest two things. First…document all the support that Proposition 8 got…from its inception to passage. Everyone who gave it money…everyone who gave it time. Individuals and businesses. And put that information online somewhere it can be accessed. Not to harass anyone, but to boycott the companies that helped cut our ring fingers off, and to know who our friends are, and who they are not. Trust me…I’ll be keeping up on who supported Proposition 8 in my own state, although I’m glad to say that nearly all the money coming from Maryland was in opposition.
Second: Never Forget. Never forget our friends. Never forget our enemies. Raving homophobes like Dobson and company will naturally take pains to make sure we never forget how much they hate us. But in the coming weeks and months there will be a ton of poltroons coming forward, like Rod Dreher, whining that they had nothing against us Personally…they just think same-sex marriage is too radical…
Don’t gloat over this. While I would have supported Prop 8 had I been a Californian, because I do not think there exists a right to same-sex marriage and I fear for the religious liberty implications of constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, I recognize that this is a tremendous blow to good men and women who disagree. It seems to me to be unseemly, even cruel, to rub salt in their wounds.
…But by appealing to the courts to impose something as radical as same-sex marriage, something that has never in the history of human society existed, they invited this backlash.
Juan and Leroy lived together in Long Beach for eight years. One day, Juan came home from the grocery store and found Leroy, who had fallen off a ladder, lying on the concrete patio. Leroy was rushed to the hospital where he stayed in a coma for several days. Although Leroy regained consciousness, he remained hospitalized for nine months. Juan visited Leroy once or twice each day, feeding him and encouraging him to recuperate.
Leroy’s estranged brother, who lived in Maine, filed a lawsuit seeking to have himself appointed as Leroy’s conservator.
When Juan accidentally found out, he showed up at court in Long Beach. Although Juan, who was not represented by counsel, stood up and protested, the judge refused to consider Juan’s plea because he was a stranger to Leroy in the eyes of the law.
The brother subsequently had Leroy transferred from the hospital to an undisclosed location. When Juan finally discovered that Leroy was being housed in a nursing home about 50 miles from Long Beach, he attempted to visit Leroy there. The staff stopped Juan in the lobby, advising him that the brother had given them a photo of Juan with strict orders not to allow him to visit Leroy. Unfortunately, no one else ever visited Leroy there.
It took Juan about two weeks to find an attorney who would take the case without charge. The attorney filed a lawsuit seeking visitation rights.
A few hours before the hearing was scheduled to occur, the brother’s attorney called Juan’s attorney, informing him that Leroy had died three days before.
Since the body had already been flown back to Maine where it was cremated, Juan never had an opportunity to pay his last respects.
Fuck you Dreher.
Gregory Anderson and Michael Connolly lived together for nine years. They jointly owned a condominium in New York where the couple lived. Michael was murdered by a stranger when he was visiting Los Angeles. After police investigated the case, a key suspect admitted that he was guilty.
When Gregory heard that the man had been sentenced, he contacted the detective assigned to the case to determine the defendant’s name, the terms of his sentence, or the place of his imprisonment.
The detective refused to disclose this information because Gregory was not a spouse or blood relative of the victim.
Fuck you Dreher.
Terry Taylor worked for the City of Los Angeles and belonged to the Los Angeles City Employees Federal Credit Union. Taylor was living with her fiancé, Roger Naas. Terry wanted to buy a new car but did not make enough money to qualify for credit on her own. She and Roger therefore sought to apply for a joint loan from the credit union.
They were turned down. Not because of bad credit or lack of joint resources. The loan was rejected solely because the credit union would not give joint loans to unmarried couples.
The problem was that credit unions can only issue loans to members. Members can be city employees or their immediate family members.
Terry and Roger discovered that the board of directors of the credit union had voted to define "immediate family" as being limited to spouses or blood relatives of employees.
Although Terry and Roger never got a loan, the problem was later corrected after it was exposed by the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Consumer Task Force on Marital Status Discrimination.
The credit union board finally changed its by-laws to define "family" in a more expansive manner, so that spouses, blood relatives, or other household members such as domestic partners may now join.
Fuck you Dreher.
Ken Phillips and Gail Randall were looking for an apartment to rent in Chico. They found the perfect place, filled out an application, and handed the landlady a deposit. There was one last minute inquiry: "You are married, aren’t you?" When the landlady found out that Ken and Gail were unmarried partners, she flatly refused to rent to them. Never mind the fact that they had lived together for years, had good jobs, and could give wonderful references from prior landlords.
Ken and Gail fought back. They filed a complaint with the state fair housing agency. The tribunal ruled that the landlady had violated a state law against marital status discrimination in housing.
But the landlady appealed and won the first round in court. The Court of Appeal agreed that discrimination against unmarried couples in housing is illegal. But the court sided with the landlady anyway, on the theory that a business owner with religious objections to unmarried cohabitation does not have to obey the state’s civil rights laws.
Dreher would say the lady had a right to her religious objection. And according to him we invited a backlash. And we invited it, simply for not wanting to live anymore, as second class citizens in our own country. Yes Dreher, you gutter crawling bigot…it’s our country too. We live here. And we’re not asking politely anymore, for your kind to get the fuck off our backs.
So same-sex marriage is Radical is it? Sure it is. And here’s why: because homosexuals are perverts. Seriously. Homosexuals are disgusting disease spreading, child molesting, sex addicts who can no more know and understand what normal human relationships are then an ape can do calculus. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. That’s why same-sex marriage is radical. To call what homosexuals do marriage, defiles the decent loving relationships of every normal heterosexual couple on earth. It spits in their faces. Homosexuals prowl the toilets for sex. They lurk in bushes and behind schools. They drink urine and eat shit. Picture a pair of homosexual sex partners walking down the isle and you have pictured the end of western civilization. You can’t whitewash perversion by calling it something it isn’t. Homosexual relationships are no more marriage, then feces is food. That’s why same-sex marriage is radical, isn’t it Dreher? But you won’t come out and say so, because you want people to think you’re better then this man…
…and you’re not Dreher. You’re actually deeper in the human gutter then he is. Fred’s a bigot like you, but at least he’s an honest one and you can’t even be that. Afraid for religious liberties are you? Bullshit you’re afraid. There’s already a constitutional protection for religious liberty Dreher…it’s called the first amendment you motherfucking bigot. You know it. I know you know it. Everybody knows you know it. You’re not afraid for your religious liberties. You’re afraid of the day that gay people don’t have to wear the shame you feel every time you look in a mirror and glimpse the slippery cheat inside.
You don’t want to live with us as your neighbors? Fine. We’re not your neighbors. We’re the people who get up every day and get to work getting you motherfuckers off our backs, and then go to bed that night vowing to work harder at it the next day. We’re the people who are in your face today, tomorrow, and the day after and the day after that. And it never stops Dreher…It Never Stops…until your kind are off our backs.
Welcome to the morning after. I’ll be your server today. My name is Fuck You.
I rarely sketch out my cartoon ideas before I begin work on them. Nearly always, I picture it in my mind. I have a good imagination. Maybe too good. I can disappear into it for hours at a time. My political cartoons begin as imagery that just comes to mind as I read about, or think about current events. Occasionally I’ll grab one as it passes by, and work on it, entirely inside my brain. When I actually start to draw something, I almost always approach the paper seeing what I want to draw clearly and exactly in my mind. This is pretty much how I draw and paint everything, the only difference being when I paint I will do a quick color study first.
As the fight over California Proposition 8 approached voting day, I had two cartoons already done inside my head, one of which I hoped I wouldn’t have to draw. Had the vote gone the other way, I might have just waited until the weekend to do the other, more light-hearted one. It might even have stayed on the drawing board, like so many other half-finished cartoons have this past year. But this pretty much expresses how I feel right now, and I just had to get it out now. I have nearly two months of vacation time stored up at work, and I took the day off (mostly…I still had things I had to do from home) so I could get this out of my system…
It’s horrible to say it…but I have a new-found interest in doing these now. And…more spare time to do them since I’m not visiting people I know down in Washington every Friday-Saturday now. But that’s another spill-my-guts-out story for another time…
I voted here in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood about two hours ago. It took about an hour to get through the line, and while standing there I was chatting with the 75-year-old retired cop in front of me, and the young 30-something gay couple in front of him, who had their two little girls in tow.
Everyone was in good spirits as the conversation moved from the Obama-McCain contest to the farce that is Sarah Palin, and then on to non-political matters, like the road work being done on the next block. The conversation between the cop and the couple started to get animated toward the end of our hour in line as the three men began to discuss the current football season, wagering bets for this weekend’s games and making predictions for the Super Bowl.
And then, as we entered the firehouse that doubled as our polling place, as the couple and their daughters stepped out of line and up to the table to receive their ballots, I observed the cop in front of me. He opened his sample ballot, took out his pen, scribbled out his "yes" vote on Proposition 8, and filled in the ballot line for "no."
I don’t think he knew that I observed him. And since it was such a private moment I held back my tears of joy and my overwhelming desire to pat him on the back and say "thank you, sir." Instead, I left the polling place muttering to myself those two words you have repeated over and over during this election cycle, Andrew:
Four years ago my husband and I adopted a nine-year-old boy. He’d been taken from his biological family when he was three and shuttled through six different foster homes in six years. The three of us have worked very hard to create our family. Our son has added to our lives in ways we could never have imagined. We love him very much.
This year our son, who is now thirteen, came out to us. Our son is gay. We are fine with this.
The amazing thing about our boy is that he goes to school every day and lives his life true to himself. He’s a happy child. He writes poetry. He skips. He’s a track star. He excels at algebra. He loves the Stylistics. He has a blinding smile. Most of the kids at his school love him. But some of the boys call him “faggot.” Yesterday our usually sunny boy, all five-feet-four inches of him, came home staring at the ground, visibly upset. Some of the boys at school were taunting him with cries of Yes on 8, the California proposition aimed at eliminating the right to marry for those who want to marry another of the same gender. The boys were punished by the school, but the damage was done.
Who are these followers of Jesus Christ who would tell my son, taken from his family at three, and homeless until he was nine, that he cannot marry and have a family of his own?
Today my thirteen-year-old son joined me in the voting booth. As I voted for Obama my son put his hand on top of mine. He did the same thing when I voted no on Proposition 8. He was late for school, but I can’t think of a better reason.
It would be so nice to have someone to come home to here at Casa del Garrett on any night, but especially tonight. I might not get myself tied up in knots waiting for the outcome in California. But then…hey…I’ve been single for nearly all my life and I should be expert at handling stress all by myself.
If only.
I don’t expect my friends to go to any great lengths to find me dates. But when something that looks like a good match just drops in their fucking laps and they just let it sail off into the sunset with little more then a shrug of the shoulders it’s hard not to feel betrayed. No…strike that…I’d be in denial not to see that for what it is.
Hopefully there are enough good-hearted people in California that come tomorrow morning their gay and lesbian neighbors won’t have to wonder if their hearts ever really had a home there among them. But if not…whatever doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger…
Not sure if that applies to all the Tequila I’ll be drinking tonight though…
My polling place is a little elementary school a couple blocks from Casa del Garrett. They were calling for occasional rain this morning and rain this afternoon and evening, so I took an umbrella. And my iPod and a book to read because of all the news stories I was hearing about long lines in the states that did early voting.
My polling place was busy, but not horribly so. I was able to just walk right up to a vacant voting machine. But all the others were being used, and a steady stream of people were coming in and out.
I’m at work now…seeing a bunch of co-workers here all with their "I Voted" stickers on.
I’m one of a first generation of 18-year-old voters. 18 year olds got the vote during the last years of Vietnam, largely on the argument that if we could be drafted and sent off to war at that age we should at least be able to cast a vote.
I’d been taken on the bus to an involuntary pre-induction physical that summer, and escaped being drafted only because I was found to be 11 pounds underweight. I suppose I could have simply told the examiners that I was a homosexual, but back in those days that could have easily meant having your name placed on a registry of sexual deviants.
I voted that year for McGovern, mostly out of disgust with Nixon and his prolonging of the war…
As I Was Saying Four Years Ago
…but also because I thought McGovern a decent man who really did believe in liberty and justice for all. After Kent State, I knew what Nixon and Agnew and their gang thought of all that liberty and justice stuff.
And while Nixon didn’t actually start his war, he began the deliberate rending of the American fabric that we are living with today. I’ve voted in every election I could since. And as best as I could judge it, for the person who could make a decent start at putting back together, what the Nixon republicans tore asunder. But after Nixon came Reagan. And then…Bush The Junior. The hatred with which the republican grass roots views the rest of us is deeper, more venomous then ever. It didn’t have to be that way. But the party leadership are republicans first, and Americans second, and they have stoked the hate in ways even Nixon might have found appalling, to keep their grip on power.
I don’t expect to see healing in my lifetime. But it would be nice to live long enough to see a start on it.
I see Faux News is reporting this morning that the total raised for the fight over Proposition 8 in California is something like 74 million dollars. Let me repeat that: 74 Million Dollars.
There’s your fall of western civilization right there. Not same sex marriage, but that it’s a knife fight, just to let loving, devoted couples tie the knot.
Who still believes in this day and age that gay people are twisted sub-human monsters? I don’t think half the people voting today to cut the ring fingers off their gay and lesbian neighbors think that. I doubt a tenth of them think that. But they are all of them, all of them, taking right now, right this moment, some kind of visceral self righteous pleasure in sucking the hopes and dreams from our lives.
So I Guess Giving Your Best Employees A Choice Between A Pay Cut Or Fired Wasn’t A Plan After All…
Circuit City…March 29, 2007…
Circuit City lays off 3400 employees because they make too much!
Circuit City Stores Inc. has a message for some of its best-paid employees: Work for less or work somewhere else.
The electronics retailer on Wednesday laid off 3,400 people who earned "well above" the local market rate for the sort of jobs they held at its stores.
In 11 weeks they’ll be able to apply for their old positions – which will come with lower hourly wages.
The move put Richmond, Va.-based Circuit City, which has more than 40,000 employees in the United States, at the forefront of a new way of controlling labor costs in the service industry. Employers determine the prevailing market wages for particular jobs in various geographic regions and then find ways to make sure that their workers’ salaries stay within that range.
…
Company spokesman Bill Cimino said Circuit City wanted to be honest with its sales associates so they would understand the reason for the layoffs.
"It had nothing to do with their skills or whether they were a good worker or not," Cimino said. "It was a function of their salary relative to the market."
Circuit City expects to reap $110 million in savings in the next year, partly as a result of the layoffs and other changes announced Wednesday, including the outsourcing of about 130 information technology jobs to IBM Corp.
Circuit City…Today…
Circuit City to Close 155 Stores, Lay Off Thousands
Electronic retailer Circuit City plans to shutter 20 percent of its U.S. stores by December 31 and evaluate other cost reduction initiatives, it announced today, citing waning consumer confidence and the struggling financial markets.
The move will close about 155 of its 700 stores, and result in layoffs of about 17 percent of its workforce. It will also reduce future store openings and renegotiate some leases.
“The weakened environment has resulted in a slowdown of consumer spending, further impacting our business as well as the business of our vendors. The combination of these trends has strained severely our working capital and liquidity, and so we are making a number of difficult, but necessary, decisions to address the company’s financial situation as quickly as possible,” said James A. Marcum, vice chairman and acting president and CEO.
It had nothing to do with their skills or whether they were a good worker or not… Jackass. Treat your people like shit and don’t be surprised to find one day that you’re the CEO of a company that isn’t worth shit.
In what the Washington Post called "perhaps the most ill-timed press release of the 2008 campaign," the California Republican Party announced that they’d filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Sen. Barack Obama had illegally funneled funds from his campaign account for his personal use.
The use? Visiting his dying grandmother, whose passing was announced this afternoon.
The GOP sent the release at 1:30 pm ET, a few hours before Obama’s grandmother’s death was announced.
"Obama for America violated federal law by converting its campaign funds to Senator Obama’s personal use," the release stated. "Senator Obama recently traveled to Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother. This was the right thing for any grandson to do — at his own expense — but it was not travel that his campaign may fund."
Federal law prohibits campaigns from using campaign funds for personal travel. Obama’s campaign said beforehand that they had reviewed the trips with their lawyers and believed it was allowable. Republicans, meanwhile, contend that because Obama did not campaign in Hawaii, it should not have been budgeted as a campaign expense.
We have our far right nutcases here in Maryland, but I rest easy at night knowing my brother can go about his day with absolutely batshit wingnuts like these babbling in his face constantly and still keep a mellow attitude.
I’ve only ever lived with one romantic partner in my life, but I’ve been married twice. Once in a big, celebratory ceremony on the beach in 1998, in front of almost a hundred friends and relations, in a ceremony that the Renaissance Woman and I wrote ourselves; and the second time, five years later to the day, on a different beach, in front of exactly eight guests (not counting the picnickers and rollerbladers all around us), with brief boilerplate state-issued vows, in front of a Marriage Commissioner we’d never met before.
The first ceremony, in legal terms, meant nothing. The second also meant nothing legally as soon as we got home to Seattle, but made us next of kin according to all authorities just a couple of hours’ drive to the North.
We used to joke about it, or sort of joke, whenever we drove up to Vancouver to visit friends. "We’re married now!" We’d cry, after crossing through Customs and handing over all our papers and the Mermaid Girl’s birth certificate with both our names on it. And then, on the way home, as we passed the Peace Arch: "Not married any more! Hey, girlfriend!"
It wasn’t that funny, though, to tell the truth.
One of RW’s relatives, older than us, an established doctor with a great house in the San Francisco Bay area, flew to Niagra Falls with her partner, a lawyer, to get married at around the same time we did. They were so inspired by the ceremony that they up and moved to Canada a few months later. They live in the Okanagan now, in a house surrounded by vineyards.
Four years after our Vancouver wedding, we also moved to Canada. Now we’re married all the time.
The prospect of legal marriage wasn’t the only reason or even the main reason that we emigrated, but we’ve both been surprised at the depth of the difference we feel. It’s a difference that makes it possible for me to shrug off the opinions of sweet old ladies on the street and even, to some extent, the prejudices of my child’s teacher, because– and here’s the part I didn’t think about much– here, we are not different. We’re not special, we’re not the subject of battles over court decisions and legislative changes. We don’t have to go to lawyers to make special arrangements and get special papers written up. We don’t have to qualify anything when insurance companies and mortgage brokers and doctors ask for our marital status. We’re married, period. The law is on our side.
Let me repeat that: the law is on our side.
This is a new concept for me, and not one I’d given much consideration before our move. After all, in Seattle we lived in a liberal bubble of tolerance and acceptance, taking for granted that under almost all circumstances– except legal ones– we’d be treated the same as our straight friends and neighbors. And just about always, we were.
But a bubble is just what it was. Underneath it all, recognition of our relationship was based on nothing but the good graces of our friends and relations. And while those good graces were pleasant and much appreciated, they still left us hugely vulnerable in the face of all the vicissitudes and disasters that could happen to any family. We were lucky that none of those happened to us. And we took for granted that dependence on luck and good grace, and the slight anxiety it brought with it.
Now, we don’t have that any more. It’s not just that we consider ourselves married, and our families consider us married, and our friends and neighbors and bosses and dentists consider us married: now, the Province of British Columbia and the Nation of Canada consider us married, too. And that has made all the difference.
Let me tell you about something that happened a couple of days before our wedding:
In Canada, you don’t go to City Hall to register for a marriage license, you go to a big drugstore and wait in line with the people who are getting their auto insurance renewed, all the while shopper push past you in their search for Q-tips and deodorant and hairbrushes.
And so, a few days before our legal marriage ceremony on the beach in Vancouver, the Renaissance Woman and I found ourselves at a booth in London Drugs, with our passports in hand. The clerk who processed our paperwork was a bored-looking middle-aged guy whose first language wasn’t English (not unusual in a city of immigrants). We filled our the required papers and passed them back to him, along with the payment, and he took them with barely a glance at us.
This was back in 2o03, and same-sex marriage hadn’t been legal for very long in British Columbia, and we were anxious and wanted to make sure the papers were done right, so they wouldn’t be invalidated in some unforseen way. So we pressed the point.
"We’re both women," we explained carefully, ready for shock or disapproval or at least the need to fill out a whole other set of special forms. "We’re getting married to each other."
"Yeah, yeah, okay," he nodded, filing and stamping and perforating and barely stifling a yawn. "Lots of people doing this. You sign here."
His shrugging matter-of-factness, the face of the machinery of bureaucracy chugging along on our behalf, was as sweet as wedding bells, as satisfying as the New York Times wedding announcement I’d wangled, as celebratory as the flowers MG tossed enthusiastically at the ceremony that weekend. It was the story we ended up telling over and over, in wonderment, after the ceremony. And it was one big reason that we packed up and moved four years later, and that we live here now.
I might live in Canada, but I’m still an American. I want everyone in my home country to have the chance at what I have now: an ordinary, boring, un-notable married life with the person I love. I’m seeing a chance of that, or at least a step towards it, in California. And like so many people, I’m e-mailing and reading and donating and watching and worrying about the prospects of Proposition 8: if it passes, that hope is so much further away.
And if not, if same-sex marriage stays legal in California, it’s at least a bit closer.
We used to joke about it, or sort of joke, whenever we drove up to Vancouver to visit friends. "We’re married now!" It won’t be a joke for me if I ever do manage to find my other half. There will be many states in this country we simply couldn’t pass on through, let alone visit, because the instant we were to cross that border we’d be, in effect, forcibly divorced for the duration, and if something were to happen to one of us…an accident or medical emergency…it could quickly become a nightmare for both of us. Life in some other country could start looking a lot more attractive.
And, as this blogger points out, not only for the legal recognition. I suppose when the stress of always knowing in the back of your mind that you are living on the edge of a precipice goes away, life probably does become a lot sweeter.
This is what writing us out of the state constitutions, if not the federal one, is meant to do. Not protect marriage, but keep us fearful. Life can’t be sweet for us. Maybe they can’t always prevent us from finding love…but they can make fear walk in lock-step with love. The sweetness of life for a bigot, comes only from taking it away from the ones they hate. That is the beginning and the end of what this fight has always been about.
The campaign promoting Proposition 8, which proposes to amend the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriages, has masterfully misdirected its audience, California voters. Look at the first-graders in San Francisco, attending their lesbian teacher’s wedding! Look at Catholic Charities, halting its adoption services in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal! Look at the church that lost its tax exemption over gay marriage! Look at anything except what Proposition 8 is actually about: a group of people who are trying to impose on the state their belief that homosexuality is immoral and that gays and lesbians are not entitled to be treated equally under the law.
That truth would never sell in tolerant, live-and-let-live California, and so it has been hidden behind a series of misleading half-truths. Once the sleight of hand is revealed, though, the campaign’s illusions fall away.
Take the story of Catholic Charities. The service arm of the Roman Catholic Church closed its adoption program in Massachusetts not because of the state’s gay marriage law but because of a gay anti-discrimination law passed many years earlier. In fact, the charity had voluntarily placed older foster children in gay and lesbian households — among those most willing to take hard-to-place children — until the church hierarchy was alerted and demanded that adoptions conform to the church’s religious teaching, which was in conflict with state law. The Proposition 8 campaign, funded in large part by Mormons who were urged to do so by their church, does not mention that the Mormon church’s adoption arm in Massachusetts is still operating, even though it does not place children in gay and lesbian households.
How can this be? It’s a matter of public accountability, not infringement on religion. Catholic Charities acted as a state contractor, receiving state and federal money to find homes for special-needs children who were wards of the state, and it faced the loss of public funding if it did not comply with the anti-discrimination law. In contrast, LDS (for Latter-day Saints) Family Services runs a private adoption service without public funding. Its work, and its ability to follow its religious teachings, have not been altered.
That San Francisco field trip? The children who attended the wedding had their parents’ signed permission, as law requires. A year ago, with the same permission, they could have traveled to their teacher’s domestic-partnership ceremony. Proposition 8 does not change the rules about what children are exposed to in school. The state Education Code does not allow schools to teach comprehensive sex education — which includes instruction about marriage — to children whose parents object.
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
Emphasis mine. Go read the rest of it. This is how the game has always been played against your gay and lesbian neighbors. Lie. Then lie some more. Wash, rinse, repeat. But look closer at the tax cases. The people pushing anti-gay legislation are saying basically that their animus toward homosexuals gives them the right to demand government funding without having to follow the rules that come with those taxpayer dollars. They have the right to tax breaks without having to meet the same requirements other people do in order to get those same tax breaks.
Here’s what’s missing from this: gay people pay taxes too. Nobody is saying that gay haters can’t avail themselves of state funded programs because of their prejudices. Any homophobe who wanted to could have gone to that Catholic adoption agency, or married in that Methodist pavilion. And I’m sure a lot did. But with tax dollars comes this one important thing: equal access. Because everyone is paying for it out of their taxes, then everyone must have equal access to it. In Massachusetts adoption by same-sex couples is legal. If you operate with taxpayer dollars, then you must treat all citizens equally. How hard is that to understand?
But there’s that word the haters keep choking on: Equal. As the pig said in Animal Farm, Some animals are more equal then others. Understand this if you understand nothing else about the mindset of the hater. They don’t so much think gay people are less then equal, as they think they themselves are more equal. So, naturally, they have the right to dictate terms nobody else does. They are the superior beings here…the Elect…the chosen ones… The bitter irony here is that they accuse gay people of wanting Special Rights.
Special Rights?? Like…the right to feed at the government trough and then pick and choose who you will serve? Like…the right to get tax breaks for property in exchange for opening it up to the public, and then decide for yourself who can and who cannot use it? Those kinds of special rights?
What’s changing now is that these liars, these cheats, have grown more and more powerful and now the rest of America is getting a good look at how they operate. Like Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people some of the time…
Please Donate to No On 8. And if you live in California, please be sure to vote on Tuesday. Take nothing for granted. As the saying goes, pray as though everything depends on God, but act as though everything depends on you. In an election this close, your vote Will make a difference. So please…vote…so that love can have a chance in this world.
Nutball Congressman Chris Cannon (R-UT) tried to hire an Oxford don to use his special computer program to prove that Obama’s memoir was actually written by Bill Ayers. The program "can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases." Apparently, he got cold feet after the he learned that the Oxford academic, Dr Peter Millican, would release the results publicly no matter what they showed.
No sense in letting the voters know something if it isn’t something you want them to know. The soul of a political movement isn’t the faces at the top of the ticket, or the rhetoric of its intellectuals. Its soul, its heart, resides in all the people who do its day-to-day grunt work. The grass roots. The rank and file. The True Believers. It’s not the headline grabbing crimes that reveal the character of an ugly movement…it’s in all the little moments of casual mendacity by its grass roots. There is where the people are. There is where the movement is.
Yesterday, as I was driving home, I was listening to the Michelangelo Signorile show on Sirius OutQ. He was playing a radio clip that was particularly chilling. It was James Dobson of Focus On Homosexuality The Family choking up for his listeners as he told them how God wanted him to drop everything and lead a "prayer" vigil in California to ban same-sex marriage. Right Wing Watch has more…
James Dobson dedicated his radio program today to explaining his sudden decision, which we mentioned earlier, to go to California this weekend to join Lou Engel, Tony Perkins and others for a massive "The Call" rally of prayer and fasting in the name of saving "traditional marriage."
In the clip below, Dobson has just explained that he received a letter from Rev. Jim Garlow, one of the leading organizers of the "yes on 8" movement pleading with Dobson to attend and, after reading it, felt God’s hand on his back telling him to attend "The Call." Dobson chokes up explaining that despite having been on the go for weeks and being exhausted, he knew God wanted him there. Dobson had to call his son to tell him he couldn’t babysit for his grandson this weekend as planned and his son Ryan then confirmed that God wanted him in California instead. Dobson could barely keep it together when he explained that "the Lord must be involved in this" and then hands over the program to Garlow, who also gets choked up and speaks of their level of spiritual desperation and their constant "crying out to God" to save California because they are "watching the destruction of Western civilization."
You can listen to the clip there. I heard it on the Signorile show, and listening to it I just knew it was going to drive the kook pews to open their wallets up in droves. All the little old ladies who believe Dobson when he tells them that gay people are the tools of Satan and that same sex marriage will allow homosexuals to molest children in public schools will open their fixed income pocketbooks and give, and give and give. And thus the smear campaign being waged now in California will get a new infusion of cash, allowing them to wash one final media tidal wave of lies over every television in the state, scaring people into believing every filthy lie they can get away with about their gay neighbors.
I was on my way home from the Lakeshore district when I encountered this group of supporters of Prop 8. After turning my vidphone on, I was screamed at, physically intimidated and eventually attacked by one of the more aggressive sign-wavers.
…
I asked the most aggressive woman (who was not underage) "are you afraid to be online?" She answered, "oh, no, they already videotaped me, but these kids don’t want to be online, cause they’re [unintelligible] loaded on a sexual perv profile and [unclear] look at my little cousins." Fair enough. I’m all for protecting the innocent. (Not that there’s anything particularly innocent about shouting hate speech in public.)
The woman continued to poke at my face with her sign and call me "nasty." Genuinely disturbed by the complete lack of rational behavior I’d seen up to this point, wanting to look into her face and possibly connect on some level with her as a fellow human being, I pulled a corner of the sign down away from my eyes and asked "why are you calling me nasty?"
That’s when she attacked, clawing, grabbing and then shoving. I didn’t fight back; she was much bigger than me. Calling me a "nasty fucker" and threatening to kick my ass, she pried my phone out of my hand and tried to break it in half while her friends egged her on.
Please note that I never touched or threatened her in any way (unless you want to consider my pulling the edge of her sign out of eye-poking territory a threatening gesture).
As she grabbed at my phone, I stood there stunned, not really sure what to do. One of the counter-protesters (the woman who you see saying "No on Prop 8" towards the beginning of this clip) quickly intervened and calmed the attacking woman down enough that I felt safe enough to try to take my phone back. After a second or two of grappling, she let go and went back to screaming at cars from a lawn chair near the side of the road.
(Big love and gratitude to the kindly counter-protester who pleaded for calm. I don’t think my phone would have survived without you!)
I stood there for another minute or two, checking the phone’s applications for damage. One of the other sign-wavers, a teenage boy standing nearby, leaned over and whispered "fuck you, dyke."
Even though I wasn’t hurt besides a small scratch on my hand, and my phone was okay, being attacked definitely shook me up. I was a bit tearful. Call me naive, but I never thought I’d actually be in physical danger just for shooting footage of their activity and pulling the edge of a person’s sign out of my eyes. Verbal insults, sure. But attacked by an anti-gay activist? In one of the most queer-friendly neighborhoods in the bay area? Yikes.
The man holding the "Vote No" sign noticed that I was in tears and approached me. We hugged to a chorus of jeers, exchanged some reassuring words, and I turned to leave. Someone called after me: "keep crying, and keep walking."…
(Emphasis mine…) You can see the video of the incident at the link above. When Dobson says god wants him to go to California, this is the flock to whom he will preach, that they are the salt of the earth, defending it from unspeakable evil… One of the other sign-wavers, a teenage boy standing nearby, leaned over and whispered "fuck you, dyke"… "…keep crying, and keep walking."
This is what Dobson and his congregation are doing to California. This is what they have been doing to America for decades now. Dividing us against one another, so they can carve their own personal kingdoms out of the shattered pieces.
Behold their righteousness…
Ken Mettler, a politically conservative activist and member of the Kern High School District Board of Trustees, was caught on video kicking and punching a protester at a Friday night demonstration against Proposition 8.
Mettler said the following day that he was only defending himself.
"I was assaulted," Mettler said. "A fellow threw a punch at me. He missed, and I did hit him."
The incident was recorded by another protester. The video shows Mettler taking signs which originally read "Yes on 8" but had been altered to read "No on 8."
And…surprise, surprise…the video tells a somewhat different tale…
Here is the America of their dreams…a place where high school trustees beat the crap out of dissenters and then lie through their teeth about it afterward. Tell me that the kids in this man’s schools won’t take a cue from this, that it’s okay to beat the crap out of their gay and lesbian peers. Tell me he wouldn’t want them to take that cue. Tell me Dobson wouldn’t want them to take that cue. Homosexuals are destroying Western civilization. That means it’s okay to shove that terrified gay kid’s face into his locker, like they’ve been wanting to do for weeks now…
So…what are you going to do about it? I know…I know…you’re going to vote for Obama. You’re going to work like hell to keep McCain and especially Palin out of the White House. You are going to help get better democrats elected, so this country doesn’t have to endure another year, let alone four, let alone eight, of rule by the kook wing of the republican party. Fine. Good. Wonderful. Really. But…can you spare a few dollars in the fight for the right to love? Because that’s what this fight is about, in its starkest terms. This is about hate that cannot bear the sight of decent, wholehearted human love, and urgently wants to snuff it out.
This nation has a lot of work ahead of it, healing the wounds from decades of republican hate mongering for votes. Making gay and lesbian people second class citizens, cutting the ring fingers off of devoted, loving couples, only prolongs the bitterness. It could last for decades. Do you want to see hundreds of loving couples forcibly divorced? Do you want to see thousands more denied the right to marry. Do you think another two or three decades of this…
Is going to help America heal its wounds? What kind of America do you want. This one…
Or this one…
I’m in for another $500 dollars. That makes $1,500 I’ve given to this fight and it will take me months to pay it off, win or loose. But I can live with that, so long as I know I gave it everything I had, cut to the bone, so that love could have a chance in this poor angry world.
I’m not asking you to cut to the bone. I’m not asking you for hundreds, let alone thousands. Can you spare 20? 10? 5? It’s easy. Just go to the No On 8 site and give. Anything. Anything at all. The polls all say it is close. We can win this. We can. But we have to give the people fighting on the front lines of this something to keep their ads going. The other side is going to spend millions in the next few days to dump an tidalwave of hate mongering over California. The polls all say that when our side gets its message out in equal force, we win.
They have the Mormon church, which has given anywhere from 40 to 70 (!) percent of the money for the Proposition 8 campaign. They have Pope Ratzinger’s Catholic church. The have James Dobson, and the protestant religious right. They have their own array of right wing billionaires. They have Fox news. What do we have? We have a dream. An ages old dream of freedom and justice. For all. Where Americans can live together in peace. Where love is not spat upon, but nurtured and cherished. Where hate does not rule.
I know this fight is an uphill struggle. I know how much it can soul-weary a person, how deeply it can wound. Hate takes its toll on all of us. I still vividly remember sitting in my eighth grade sex ed class, hearing our gym teachers tell me and everyone I knew in that school, that homosexuals mutilate the bodies of people they have sex with, and then, usually, kill them. I have no idea how many of my classmates from back then still believe that. But I suspect even now some of them still do. And some of those who still believe it, are themselves gay, and they have loathed themselves all their lives.
And that is why, win or loose on the night on November 4th, I know where my name will be written…
BARBARA GARRETT $100 CERRITOS CA 90703 ST FRANCIS HOSP Support
BRAD GARRETT $500 SAN JOSE CA 95133 APPLIED SIGNAL TECHNOLOGY Support
BRETT GARRETT $250 REDWOOD CITY CA 94061 SAME NAME Oppose
BRETT GARRETT $100 REDWOOD CITY CA 94061 YOHOSTCOM Oppose
BRUCE GARRETT $500 BALTIMORE MD 21211 SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INST Oppose
BRUCE GARRETT $500 BALTIMORE MD 21211 SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INST Oppose
DAVID GARRETT $100 WALNUT CREEK CA 94597 SELF-EMPLOYED Oppose
DAVID GARRETT DDS $1,000 LA CANADA CA 91011 DAVID P GARRETT DDS Support
So I be written in the Book of Love,
I Do not care about that Book above.
Erase my name, or write it, as you please..
So I be written in the Book of Love.
Will you write yours there with mine? You have the power to tell the heart-wounded, young and old, that they do not have to hate themselves…that they never had to hate themselves…that love is possible to them. Please donate to No On 8. Write your name in the book of love.
So this spam email arrives in my personal (not my work…there’s pretty good about blocking spam here at work) mailbox. Gain Inches The Easy Way…reads the subject line. Ah-ha…thinks I…of course it’s easy. Just stuff your face with cookies all day long and you’ll gain lots of inches. Er…around the waste. That’s what you meant…right???
Ever notice how much spam is targeted at male sexuality? Never mind the porn ads…just look at all the ads for bootleg Viagra, among other things. Either spammers think the entire world is gay (and that gay men like straight male pornography too) or they’re targeting all this to a mostly straight audience. Yet we gay men are the ones who are obsessed with sex, and have like, thousands of sexual partners every night or something…
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