Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding won plaudits Monday from gay activists for backing out of an agreement to argue to uphold the federal ban on gay marriage. But a day later the reviews were a bit more bruising in the legal community.
Top lawyers and law professors, with some notable exceptions, called it an embarrassing blunder by the prestigious firm or a betrayal of a client and legal principles. Others think King & Spalding, whose clients include General Electric and Coca-Cola, may have backed out because the firm fears the fallout from leading an anti-gay legal fight.
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
King & Spalding’s announcement it would not represent congressional House Republicans in their quest to defend court challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the subsequent decision of Paul Clement, the lawyer in the case, to quit the firm and take it elsewhere was the talk Tuesday among Yale University Law School faculty, said Lawrence Fox, a Yale professor and expert in legal ethics. DOMA defines marriage “for federal tax, Social Security and other purposes” as only a union between a man and a woman.
“We really go down a bad road if we say law firms can’t take on (controversial) matters or people will assume you have those views,” said Fox. “I’m going to walk into my class today and I’m going to use this. I’m tearing up my lesson plan … to talk about this case.”
The nice thing about working in an ivory tower is what you do doesn’t have to have any relationship to the world outside. Tenure. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who have to live there, in the world of the commoners, it’s only they who remember the panic that set in back in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples could not constitutionally be denied the right to marry. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the party of Lincoln and Fred Phelps pushed through congress the Defense Of Marriage Act to protect American heterosexuals from the damaging effects of having to live in a world where the sordid, brief and barren sexual assignations of homosexuals had the same legal standing as their noble unions of male and female. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the man who stood in front of them and said “I have a vision for America and you’re part of it” signed that bill into law in the dead of night, somewhat less then three years after he folded on his promise to let gay servicemen serve openly and with dignity. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who watched as the new republican majority in congress, elected on campaign pledges of jobs, set about immediately to work reassuring their base that the meager gains gay Americans had made while the democrats were in control would not stand, and that they would be steadfast in opposing president Obama’s plan to impose The Gay Agenda on America.
It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who read the steady stream of news reports of same-sex couples beaten down and destroyed by this nation’s abject capitulation to bigotry, month after month, year after year.
A gay Long Island couple who have played by the immigration rules for more than a decade are stuck in a Catch-22 that could tear them apart just when they need each other most.
New Yorker Edwin Blesch, 70 and his South African husband, Tim Smulian, 65, have been spending six months on Long Island and six months abroad to comply with Smulian’s tourist visa.
But Blesch, who has HIV, suffered several mini-strokes and other complications and is now unable to travel safely.
Smulian is his primary caregiver – but has no way to stay here permanently.
It’s unclear what will happen to the couples already profiled by major news sources, like Monica Alcota and Cristina Ojeda. The one thing that is clear is that this is a sad day for binational same-sex couples, and for everyone who values America’s tradition of being a place where people can come from anywhere in the world to make a home. Like so many other things, that seems to be a privilege reserved for straight people.
It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember their names…names like Laurel Hester. Not law professors in ivory towers.
Here is a law firm that proudly touted its support for gay Americans in their struggle for equality. Suddenly it is, in a very high profile way, part of the republican party’s DOMA circus. Suddenly every attorney, every clerk, every secretary, every intern working for this law firm is under a gag order…not simply to refrain from speaking about the case, but never to breath so much as a word against DOMA. Imagine that instead of Teh Gay this case was about defending a congressional ban on Jewish ownership of businesses. How many eyebrows would be raised when a law firm that touted its opposition to antisemitism, suddenly took on the congressional defense of that law, and gagged its partners and staff from ever speaking a word against the segregation of Jews? Who would complain when the law firm withdrew and the jackass antisemitic partner who dragged them into that despicable case left to pursue it on his own, that the Jews had gone too far?
But conscience, and a sense of basic human decency wanders in a lot of people, even now, when it comes to the persecution of gay Americans. Suddenly persecuting minorities becomes some abstract thing, less important, less real, then the right of republicans to conduct a great circus show of defending marriage against the forces of Obama and Satan, and demonize a segment of America for votes. The constant rain of gay blood on the streets isn’t even on their moral radar…
HRC is right to fight vigorously to overturn DOMA, which deprives gays and lesbians of many of the rights enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts. But it sullies itself and its cause by resorting to bullying tactics.
On February 22, around 11:00 p.m., Shortell was walking home to his apartment on Kent Avenue and North Fourth Street, a walk that never felt unsafe to him before, when he was brutally attacked by a group of four teenagers. The details were fuzzy after that and as a result of the incident, Shortell suffered a fractured chin and nose; eye sockets and cheekbones, requiring ten hours of immediate surgery, several days in the hospital, and a month of recovery since.
Bullying tactics? Bullying tactics? Here’s the problem: the scapegoats aren’t taking it anymore. They’re fighting back. Where is the outrage in the corporate news media…the comfortable McMansion in the rich white suburbs corporate news media? Once again, it’s directed at gay Americans. For standing up for their human dignity. For defending themselves against hate. For fighting back. Republicans inciting hatred for votes is just Business As Usual. Gays asking businesses to walk the walk not just talk the talk on civil rights is front page news! How dare they. Don’t they know their place anymore? What is this world coming to, when even homosexuals demand to be treated with respect? Who told the them they had a right not to be bullied? It certainly wasn’t us.
But We Must Consider The Feelings Of The Bullies Too…
The problem with directly confronting and dealing with anti-gay bullying is apparently we have to do it in a way that doesn’t make the bullies feel like they’re doing anything wrong…
A spate of teen suicides linked to anti-gay harassment is prompting school officials nationwide to rethink their efforts against bullying – and in the process, risk entanglement in a bitter ideological debate.The conflict: Gay-rights supporters insist that any effective anti-bullying program must include specific components addressing harassment of gay youth. But religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality.
It’s a highly emotional topic. Witness the hate mail – from the left and right – directed at Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District while it reviews its anti-bullying strategies in the aftermath of a gay student’s suicide…
What leaps out at you first here is the rote equivocation on the part of this mainstream reporter. Instead of stating what is simply a fact here that religious conservatives insist young people’s views of homosexuals must remain negative, its religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality. Never mind that. Note that its hate mail when it comes both from the homophobes and people outraged at what homophobes are doing to helpless children.
Reporters can’t be taking sides after all. Just imagine the national outrage and loathing if the news media was as carefully neutral toward Al Qaeda. We can’t call them terrorists after all, that would be taking sides…
This in a nutshell, is why gay kids are dying. The religious right has successfully convinced everyone that brutalizing gays is an essential part of their religious freedom. Hating Jews might raise a few eyebrows. Hating people of color might get them some frowns of disapproval. But to even question that they are and have been for decades now engaged in a systematic campaign of hate mongering, let alone question their need to hate their gay neighbor is apparently a step too far. And the consequence is that gay kids feel as though they have no friends in the adult world. Their need for love and acceptance in this world is of no more importance then the need of bigots to spit in their faces and look the other way while their kids kick them in the stomach. They are alone.
But if we act aggressively to protect gay kids from bullying we’re taking sides and that just wouldn’t be fair…
But at least four younger teens have killed themselves since July after being targeted by anti-gay bullying, including Justin Aaberg, 15, of Andover, Minn., who hanged himself in his room in July. His friends told his mother he’d been a frequent target of bullies mocking his sexual orientation.Five other students in his Anoka-Hennepin school district have killed themselves in the past year, and gay-rights advocates say bullying may have played a role in two of these cases as well.
Carlson, the district superintendent, lost a teenage daughter of his own in a car crash, and says he shares the anguish of the parents bereaved by suicide. He acknowledges that a controversial district policy calling for “neutrality” in classroom discussions of sexual orientation may have created an impression among some teachers, students and outsiders that school staff wouldn’t intervene aggressively to combat anti-gay bullying.
As we software engineers say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature…
Here in my home state of Maryland, state delegate Emmett Burns Jr. (D – Baltimore County), known among activists here as a reliable opponent of equality for gay citizens, went on the offensive right out of the gate this year. The legislative session had hardly begun when he introduced House Bill 90, to invalidate same-sex marriages performed in other states…
But it isn’t just marriage Burns, and his anti-gay cohorts in the Maryland legislature want to deny gay Marylanders…it’s acknowledgment of the basic humanity we share with our heterosexual neighbors…and support in our time of grief.
Support such as that the Maryland Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, which gives money to victims of violent crime to help with medical and legal expenses. Along with the news of Burn’s latest attack on same sex couples, came news in the Baltimore Sun of a gay man shot and killed, apparently at random by a young man who had been overheard to say “I’m going to kill myself a gay tonight”. The killer left in his wake one dead man, and a grieving companion of 13 years. Burns, a longtime foe of same sex marriage will, if he has his way, insure that no grieving gay spouse will ever see a cent of help from the Board, even if they avail themselves of marriage outside the state.
What you need to understand about situations like this is they’re not a bug, they’re a feature. The message must be that the state does not care one whit what happens to gay people. But more then that, gay people must suffer, simply for existing. And what better time to drive the knife into our hearts then when we are burying our dead. Because if we don’t bleed, if our hearts don’t ache, then men like Burns, who says he is a Baptist minister, just aren’t being righteous enough.
The other day, while Judy Shepard, the mother of murdered gay college student Matthew Shepard, was giving a talk about hate crimes, a man rose from the audience to call her a liar…
About 45 minutes in, a man rose and asked a question that amounted to repeating a current popular right-wing lie – Matthew Shepard was killed because his killers were high and wanted to rob him; his sexual orientation was irrelevant. Mrs. Shepard refuted the claim – pointing out that in one of the killer’s confessions, he admitted they acted because of Shepard’s sexual orientation; the other, in his statement in court, admitted the same. Neither men tested positive for drugs or alcohol after Matthew’s murder. The interlocutor asserted at this point that she was lying and doing a disservice to history by lying about the reasons for her son’s murder. To my eyes, Judy Shepard appeared visibly upset by the man’s accusations. He claimed to be relying on a report from 20/20…
Ah yes…the 20/20 whitewash. That gift to America’s bigots that keeps on giving…
“The Matthew Shepard Story: Secrets of a Murder,” which aired Nov. 26, promised shocking new information about the case. But it contained mostly speculation, scandalous details, unreliable new witnesses and revised confessions. The premise of the report by Elizabeth Vargas was that McKinney attacked Shepard during a robbery under the influence of crystal meth and that the murder had nothing to do with the victim’s sexuality…
Vargas went out of her way to show that McKinney and Henderson did not hate gay people. She questioned previous reports that characterized them as “rednecks” (her word), and tells viewers that in fact they had steady jobs and girlfriends. Vargas reported that Shepard’s friends promoted the hate crime theory in the days following the attack…
Emphasis mine. I’ve written about the hacktacular 20/20 piece before. But it is best summed up by Rob DeBree, the lead investigator on the case…
In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that McKinney had for once told the truth. Obviously it’s unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There’s no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in a search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." Meth crimes do have hallmarks. One, "Overkill," certainly seems to describe what happened to Matt, but no others so seamlessly fit that night: "A meth crime is going to be a quick attack," DeBree pointed out. "It’s going to be a manic attack… No. This was a sustained event. And somebody that’s high on meth is not going to be targeting and zeroing in on a head, and deliver the blows that they did in the way that they did," with such precision. "Consistently it was targeted, and even if you’re drunk, you’re going to have a tough time trying to keep your target. No. There’s absolutely no involvement with drugs."
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 133 – 134
A week after we met in his office, Rob [DeBree] took me to the crime scene. As we drove out to the fence in a Sheriff’s Office SUV, he stopped in mid-sentence by the Wal-Mart" "Here’s where it began," he told me and gestured in imitation of McKinney striking Matt. We restart the conversation, but he’s made his point: the drive to the fence seems unimaginably long. It’s not far – no more then a mile or two – but the rutted dirt road they turned on to makes for extremely slow driving. When I say something to Rob about how long it takes, he agrees. "They were coming here to finish him." On that dirt track, it is hard to believe the defense attorney’s claims that the two killers had been drunk or high on drugs or crazed by homosexual panic. It just takes too long to get to the fence…
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 155 – 156
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 157
I drove that same path when I was in Laramie, to the extent I was able to before coming upon all the "private property signs", and that same impression swept over me like a cold clammy sickness. You simply cannot drive the path that Shepard’s killers took and come away from it believing that it was simply a robbery gone bad. Unless of course, that is what you need to believe.
Considering the sorry state of American journalism, to say the 20/20 piece represented a new low is almost complementary. But historically it is unremarkable. Since the 1950s, mainstream American journalism has always excused anti-gay violence, usually by blaming the victim. ABC didn’t so much sink to a new low, as pound some well worn territory. There is no violent anti-gay hatred in America, only homosexuals who go too far and suffer the consequences. That is what the news media in this country believes, if not on the beat, then without a doubt in the boardroom.
But now the creators of The Laramie Project have returned to their work to write an epilogue. And in the process they’ve interviewed one of the killers, Aaron McKinney…
"As far as Matt is concerned, I don’t have any remorse," McKinney is quoted as saying in the script, which was provided to The Associated Press by the production company.
McKinney, according to the script, reiterates his claim that the 1998 killing in Laramie, Wyo., started out as a robbery, but makes clear that his antipathy toward gays played a role.
"The night I did it, I did have hatred for homosexuals," McKinney is quoted as saying. He goes on, according to the script, to say that he still dislikes gays and that his perceptions about Shepard’s sex life bolstered his belief that the killing was justified.
Emphasis mine. But wait…there’s More…
According to the script, McKinney expresses empathy with Shepard’s parents over the loss of their son, though he adds about Judy Shepard: "Still, she never shuts up about it, and it’s been like 10 years."
Gaze for a moment, if you have the nerve, into that utterly empty heart and then contemplate this fact: mainstream American news publishers, editors, owners, that rarefied media club of old boy straight male testosterone, still believes, 40 years after Stonewall, decades into the gay community’s struggle for equality here in America, that gay kids like Matthew Shepard are less a normal part of American society then this cold blooded killer is. The killer they can understand. They don’t approve of what he did that night, but they understand him. The gay kid they simply cannot. He was flaunting it. He was coming on to someone who was disgusted by homosexuals. He should have known better. He brought it on himself. In the end, when all the other excuses have withered away…it was a robbery gone bad…it was drugs…that knee-jerk understanding of McKinney’s disgust at homosexuals, that if Shepard hadn’t come onto him he would still be alive today, will remain, unmovable.
The media establishment does not regard homophobia as a problem because in the boardrooms, among the CEOs, media owners and big dollar producers, disgust is a normal reaction to homosexuality. See it here, in this article on 10 Sexual Controversies That Changed TV…
With everything from the new Melrose Place to trashy Twilight knockoffs, the new Fall TV season promises steamy viewing. Hemlines may rise and morals may fall, but TV writers would do well to remember that presenting sex on network TV has always been a tricky business. Though we’ve come a long way since Ricky Ricardo knocked up Lucy, only to discover that the network censors wouldn’t let him say the word “pregnant,” it’s amazing how sensitive the suits still are to sex. Here are ten TV shows in which the sex lives of their characters dramatically changed the entire series, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Yet in one instance after another that the authors cite, it’s homosexuality that causes an uproar, not so much among the viewing audience, as in the boardroom. Are you old enough to remember watching all of these TV shows and wonder why the gay characters never had lovers and somehow always ended up dating women…?
In the end, the network had it both ways, collecting their big ratings when everyone tuned in at the start to see what the fuss was about, then ordering that the creators downplay the sexy stuff and reshape the central storyline into a murder mystery. The worst damage was done to Crystal’s character, who attempted suicide in the hospital after being dumped by his boyfriend on the eve of his gender-reassignment surgery. He survived, but while the character continued to identify as gay, he never hooked up with another guy in the course of the series; instead, he had a quick fling with a woman, got her pregnant, and spent much of his remaining time on the show fighting for custody of his daughter…
…
…religious groups, rather than being impressed with Sidney’s anti-abortion bona fides, made such a stink about the idea of a gay man on TV that NBC delayed airing the pilot for a year, then insisted that Sidney be gelded. Apparently Sidney was so crushed by the death of his one male lover (whose photo on the mantelpiece watched over the action like a baleful ghost) that he could never date again. When, towards the end of the second season, he dipped one toe back into the dating pool, it was with a woman, as if he’d been on the shelf so long that he’d forgotten his orientation…
…
…Early ratings were shaky, and the CBS brass decided that it must have something to do with viewers being put off by threatening lesbian vibes. Though both characters were supposed to be straight, it was felt that when the two dark-haired, hard-edged actresses were seen in close proximity to each other, they looked like, in the words of an unidentified CBS executive, “a couple of dykes.” It was decided that the best way to solve the problem was to fire Foster and replace herwith the blonde Sharon Gless, who, according to some mysterious executive calculation, was judged more Malibu Beach than Isle of Lesbos…
…
…Coming at the end of an episode, the kiss was tantamount to a cliffhanger; it all but guaranteed that slack-jawed viewers would tune in next week. Those who did got to see Donohoe deliver a back-pedaling speech about how she liked both men and women equally and would be happy just to be friends if that’s what her new friend preferred, while Greene “considered” exploring a new side of herself before deciding that, nope, she wouldn’t be going there…
…
The show had a resident good-looking gay guy — Matt Fielding, played by Doug Savant — who, in contrast to the juicy goings-on by the hormonally deranged straight people all around him, seemed almost pathologically stable. When Matt was permitted to enjoy an on-screen kiss with a man, the network edited it out of the program before allowing the episode to be broadcast, though they had no problem with having him gay-bashed on camera, twice…
…
…As the show neared its seventh season, there was a persistent and widespread rumor that the youngest Connor child, D.J., was going to announce he was gay. It never happened — the big surprise of the season premiere turned out to be that Roseanne herself was pregnant again…
In 2005 the Hollywood establishment fled from Brokeback Mountain into the comforting arms of Crash, a self-serving story about racism in Los Angles, so John Wayne wouldn’t be rolling in his grave. Next year saw a remake of 3:10 to Yuma, with an added psychotic homosexual killer subtext that wasn’t in the original. Of course the psychotic homosexual killer is himself killed in the film’s climax, to avenge the heterosexuality of the hero. So the establishment returns again and again to its comfort food: Homophobia isn’t a problem, homosexuality is. Disgust toward homosexuals is both natural and normal. It is only when homosexuals flaunt it that things get violent and that is simply to be expected.
20/20 didn’t do a story about why Matthew Shepard was murdered, it did a story about why anti-gay hate coudn;t possibly have had anything to do with it. And if you think this latest confession from his killer changes that you aren’t paying attention. McKinney’s disgust and acid loathing are understood and shared throughout the media establishment, and so they see nothing out of the ordinary. It merely confirms for them that essential truth that it was Shepard’s being open about his homosexuality that got him killed. If you are a homosexual and you are open about it then you bring it on yourself. You should have known better. In the old media boardrooms that’s not considered hate, but merely a fact of life.
At The Center Of It All: The Right To Kiss The One You Love
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating again and again because it really says it all. An old high school friend of mine told me once about taking a college course on human sexuality. The course, he said, included a number of films which you might easily expect to find in an Adult Entertainment store then in a university classroom. Most of the kids who signed up for that course did so, according to my friend who probably did also, just to see those films.
What they didn’t bargain for was also having to watch a bunch of sex they didn’t much like. In addition to the hot young babes there was also footage of folks old enough to be their own parents having sex. This was after all, a course on human sexuality, not pornography. My friend said the sections on geriatric sex generally grossed out the audience. But not as much as the section on gay male sex. But it wasn’t just watching two guys having sex specifically, that bothered the audience. Some of them.
Which was what my friend was telling me about, in wide eyed wonder, since he was one of the few heterosexuals I knew back then who were really and truly unfazed by my sexual orientation. We were all in college then and I was in the process of slowly coming out to my friends, one at a time. He was one of the first I’d come out to and that afternoon he was telling me in wonder about his human sexuality class and the gay sex film they’d seen. I remember it well, because in retrospect it was one of those rare moments where I could actually see someone getting it. He said when the gay male sex scenes came on screen, the ignorant jock types in the class burst out laughing and mocked the couple. But then images of them being affectionate with each other came on screen and the atmosphere changed. Those scenes completely offended the jocks he said…far more, far, Far more, then watching them have sex did.
That was 1973 or ’74 as I remember it. Back in those days if you wanted to watch pornography you either got some grainy 8mm stag films from some shady character or you went to an X-rated movie somewhere in the really bad part of town (or Viers Mill Road across from the Zayres if you lived in Rockville, Maryland…). Nowadays you download it off the Internet and teens as young as 13 are way more sexually confidant and secure then my generation ever was. The cultural scolds are bellyaching that the nation is swimming in sexually charged images and that it’s dragging our morals into the gutter. But notice that one of their biggest bugaboos, their deepest fear, their prime target in the culture war isn’t the proliferation of pornography…it’s same-sex marriage. This, this above all else, is their evidence that the culture is sinking into a bottomless pit: homosexuals couples are getting married.
Try this experiment. Open a gay bath house somewhere in the Bible Belt, and nearby, open a same-sex wedding chapel, and see which one gets the most protests. Trust me it won’t even be close. It will be as though the bath house isn’t even there, as long as the chapel is.
The lightning rod, the flash point in homophobic bigotry has always been same-sex love, not same-sex sex. It isn’t that we have sex that bothers the bigots. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard that "I don’t care what you people do in the privacy of your bedrooms…" bullshit I’d be rich. It’s when we Flaunt It that they start screaming about militant homosexuals. And what, exactly, is flaunting it? Well I can tell you what it isn’t: having sex.
The tectonics of attitude are shifting in subtle ways that are geographic, psychic and also generational, suggested Katherine M. Franke, a lesbian who teaches law and is a director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University. “I’ve been attacked on the street and called all sorts of names” for kissing a female partner in public, Professor Franke said. “The reception our affection used to generate was violence and hatred,” she added. “What I’ve found in the last five years is that my girlfriend and I get smiles from straight couples, especially younger people. Now there’s almost this aggressive sense of ‘Let me tell you how terrific we think that is.’ ”
Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.
That Times article begins with a story about how a candy commercial featuring an accidental same-sex kiss generated enough controversy that it had to be withdrawn. The article noted that the incident, "had the inadvertent effect of revealing how a simple display of affection grows in complexity as soon as one considers who gets to demonstrate it in public, and who, very often, does not."
And so it goes. A same-sex couple is brutally beaten in front of a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona simply for holding hands inside. So security guards at a fast food joint throw a same-sex couple out for sharing a kiss and then call the police on them. So a same-sex couple, strolling too close to the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, get handcuffed and arrested for kissing. That arrest for kissing in front of the Mormon Temple, so soon after it became apparent that Proposition 8 was funded by massive amounts of Mormon money and labor, made headlines all over the world. The response of the Mormon hierarchy was to smear the kissers with accusations that they were groping each other in public. Not a shred of evidence exists, apart from Mormon propaganda to support that charge, but look at it for what it says about the thinking here. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
When they talk about their "deeply held religious beliefs", this is what they mean. Not the belief in God Almighty. Not the belief in Christ the redeemer. Not the belief in the literal truth of the Bible. This is the deeply held religious belief that they will not suffer doubt in. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. A kiss in public between a same-sex couple isn’t a gesture of affection, it’s a sex act.
One denomination after another is stressed — possibly to a breaking point for some believers — by furious battles over the roles of openly gay people in church life and ministry. Can they be clergy or bishops? Can their relationships be blessed?
And the newest protest symbol by gay activists is a kiss…
But this has always been the battle. Not to have sex, but to be allowed to love. The difference between the thugs who beat up Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost in front of the Frasher’s Steak House in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Mormon church, isn’t so much one of degree as clarity of purpose. It came to this: When Mormon security guards saw a same-sex couple share a kiss, they had to detain them and call the police. When that arrest became a headline all over the world, the Mormon church immediately sought to replace the image of a kiss in the public mind with an image of two men groping each other. You hear the anti-gay warriors say time and again that there is no such thing as a homosexual, there is only homosexual behavior. But look at their attitudes toward marriage generally. Men are the God ordained head of the household. Women must submit gracefully to their husbands. Their union isn’t validated by their joy in one another, but by the blessing of the church. It isn’t something that exists for its own sake, but to further God’s plan for humanity. It is not simply that there can be no homosexuals. There is no such thing as love. There is only authority. There is only power. And a kiss embodies everything that power hates and wants to exterminate from the human spirit.
If You Understand Nothing Else Understand This: Those Days Are Over
Dan Savage puts his finger on what’s so utterly dumbfounding about the Rainbow Lounge raid…
…The police burst into that bar as if it were still 1968, the year before the NYPD’s raid on the Stonewall Inn, as if the old rules were still in force. They assumed that the other men at Rainbow Lounge that night—the men who witnessed four officers assaulting Chad Gibson—would disappear into the night, grateful that they got out of the Rainbow Lounge without getting assaulted and arrested too. The police didn’t expect the other gay men men at the Rainbow Lounge to talk to the media—or to organize a protest outside Fort Worth’s city hall. The police didn’t even seem to realize that there were men taking pictures with their cell phones during the raid. It’s as if the police in Fort Worth didn’t know what decade this is.
Point Taken…But You Still Aren’t Paying Attention…
Andrew Sullivan updates his post on Virginia Foxx and Matthew Shepard…
I should be clear: I do not for a minute believe that the bigotry behind the Matthew Shepard murder was a hoax. I think it was murkier and more complicated – i.e. more human – than some want it to be. Of course, if you believe that his murderers deserved the maximum sentence because they brutally murdered someone, and not because they were meth-fueled bigots, it doesn’t matter. I want the same laws against the same acts enforced equally on everyone. If police don’t enforce the law equally, get on their case. But leave the laws alone.
Okay…point taken and granted. He’s not saying hate had nothing to do with the murder, which is Exactly what the kook pews are saying. As to his horribly misinformed attitude about anti-lynching laws hate crime laws, I’ll leave that argument for another time. But this business that the murder of Matthew Shepard was "murkier and more complicated" then it at first appeared is a load of horseshit.
In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that McKinney had for once told the truth. Obviously it’s unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There’s no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in a search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." Meth crimes do have hallmarks. One, "Overkill," certainly seems to describe what happened to Matt, but no others so seamlessly fit that night: "A meth crime is going to be a quick attack," DeBree pointed out. "It’s going to be a manic attack… No. This was a sustained event. And somebody that’s high on meth is not going to be targeting and zeroing in on a head, and deliver the blows that they did in the way that they did," with such precision. "Consistently it was targeted, and even if you’re drunk, you’re going to have a tough time trying to keep your target. No. There’s absolutely no involvement with drugs."
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 133 – 134
A week after we met in his office, Rob [DeBree] took me to the crime scene. As we drove out to the fence in a Sheriff’s Office SUV, he stopped in mid-sentence by the Wal-Mart" "Here’s where it began," he told me and gestured in imitation of McKinney striking Matt. We restart the conversation, but he’s made his point: the drive to the fence seems unimaginably long. It’s not far – no more then a mile or two – but the rutted dirt road they turned on to makes for extremely slow driving. When I say something to Rob about how long it takes, he agrees. "They were coming here to finish him." On that dirt track, it is hard to believe the defense attorney’s claims that the two killers had been drunk or high on drugs or crazed by homosexual panic. It just takes too long to get to the fence…
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 155 – 156
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 157
There is more. Much, much more. But that last paragraph I quoted pretty much sums it up. There is absolutely nothing murky or mysterious about the death of Matthew Shepard. It is one of the most crystal clear examples of purely venomous anti-gay murder in the record. They spent time torturing that kid. That is not hyperbole, it is the one overwhelming fact at the heart of what happened. That, and that they made an effort to take him where they did. Whatever their intent when they walked into that bar that night, when they walk out of it with that kid, they were about torturing and killing a homosexual.
The only confusion regarding this case, is what has been deliberately and maliciously injected into the national conversation about it by the religious right. And to understand why they’ve been so vehement about denying that anti-gay hate was the root of it, you have to consider not only the political context of their opposition to hate crime laws, but the context in which Shepard’s death came to light.
What happened was that Shepard’s death brought to a grinding halt, their brand new nationwide 600,000 dollar anti-gay ad campaign. That summer, starting with a full page ad in the New York Times that proclaimed "I’m Living Proof That The Truth Can Set You Free", a group called "Truth In Love" sponsored by fifteen arch right anti-gay groups began a national campaign to roll back the gains gay activists had won, using ex-gay therapy as their ruse, not to talk about curing homosexuality, but to demonize homosexual people. Wayne Besen in his book, Anything But Straight, documents the brutality of that campaign. Behind the smiling faces of people who were now free, free at last from the loathsome taint of homosexuality, the campaign was peppered with lies about gay recruitment in schools, child molestation, the spread of AIDS, and how homosexuality leads to drugs, disease, and death and many biblical condemnations of homosexuality. Don Wildmon, whose group was one of the sponsors, was busy telling people that…
Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to "breed" is to RECRUIT!"
In the midst of this propaganda onslaught, comes the news that a gay college student was practically crucified on a deer fence in Wyoming…that the kid who found his dying body thought a first that it was a scarecrow. And then a couple days later, news that Fort Collins Colorado fraternity revelers during their homecoming parade, entered a float that bore a scarecrow with a sign that read "I’m gay" And disgust swept across the nation. The ad campaign now seemed less an outreach to homosexuals in the public mind, and more like what it really was, an attack on their lives.
Almost Immediately the religious right set about blaming Shepard for his own death. It’s not hard to understand why. They deliberately created the climate of hate toward gay people that made that both kid’s death and the mockery of it in Fort Collins not merely inevitable, but intentional. Desired. The homosexual monster must be feared. The homosexual monster must be eliminated from our midst. The very last thing they wanted was that the climate of hate would be held to account…that terrorizing homosexuals would be considered criminal.
For generations the act of beating, and even murdering, homosexuals was considered less a crime and more a distasteful consequence of homosexuality in society. Randy Shilts related how a young gay man who was raped sought medical help, telling a doctor what happened, only to have the doctor look at him and say "Well you’re a homosexual aren’t you?" Matthew Shepard put a human face on all that…the face of anyone’s kid…and suddenly it seemed as if for once beating and killing a homosexual wouldn’t just be swept under the rug as par for the course…no more then what you got, and probably deserved if you were a homosexual. Instead, the nation was appalled at what happened to that kid.
And that made the religious right livid.
They began Immediately to smear and slime that poor kid’s memory. What ABC News and 20/20 did by taking that smear campaign and elevating it to the level of "respectable journalism" is unforgivable. ABC News ground another cigarette into a dead gay kid’s body so they could get some ratings. At least the hatred of Fred Phelps is genuine.
There is nothing murky about what happened to Matthew Shepard. Nothing. The evidence leaves absolutely no doubt that a 112 pound gay college student was tortured and murdered by two thugs because they thought homosexuals were human garbage and their contempt for them justified anything they did to that kid that night. They had Fun. They enjoyed themselves. Anyone who cites that 20/20 hit piece is in about the same category as William Bennett, citing Paul Cameron on the shortened lifespan of homosexuals. You are dispensing bullshit that even Baghdad Bob would laugh at.
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Take a wee stroll around that lonely prairie grass field of evidence sometime. It’ll rip your comfortable 20/20 myths…and then your heart…to crying pieces.
The footprints and the tire tracks were perfectly etched; Matt’s watch, his student ID, and a quarter were laid out by the fence like props. All that told DeBree a pretty clear story about what had happened there, including something I’d never heard in all the reporting of the crime – that Matt had made a run for it that night. First, he had desperately "tried to stay in the truck," Rob believes. Once out, he tried to escape. "Henderson had made a statement to Chasity Pasley that she told us about, that Matt was able to break free and tried to run. And according to what we were able to see at the crime scene, we could pretty well put that together. His wristwatch was located twenty-three feet or so from where he was tied up, and I think that’s essentially what he was trying to do, was just to run. He was tackled down; then he was drug over to the fence and tied by Henderson."
There Is No Morality That Stands On A Bedrock Of Lies
Via Dan Savage… I’ve been railing online since the early 1990s about how essentially immoral the anti-gay religious right is. How the scorched earth take no prisoners war they’ve been waging against gay people demands absolute renunciation of everything fine and decent a human being can possibly be, systematically strips away any human nobility they might have possessed, any aspiration to honor and justice and truth, any higher emotion then simple, relentless, pure as venom hate. The culture war leaches out of them anything decent they might ever have been, leaving behind a pathetic caricature of a human being, whose only purpose in life is hating someone a little more today then they did yesterday.
The Moral Majority. Family Values. Traditional Values. Christian. God Fearing. Bible Believing. I grew up in that milieu, and the people waving those flags today have utterly no relation to any of that. None. Morality, virtue, values, these are not things they aspire to, they are masks they hide behind. Time and again back in the Usenet days, I would find myself arguing with a bigot who told me with easy confidence that I didn’t want to get into an argument about morality, so thoroughly had they co-opted the meaning behind the words. Time and again I would beat them over their pathetic heads with their own cheapshit failures of moral character. I was raised in a Baptist household, and I know how fire and brimstone are done. Often I wished that I could see others doing the same, rather then conceding the moral argument to a bunch of gutter crawling louts. Listening to James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, William Bennett, Lou Sheldon, et. al., yap, yap, yapping about morality is like listening to Al Capon bellyaching about crime.
These are not moral people. They are thieves in the house of human virtue, leaching off the efforts of better men and women who have tried over the ages to lift humanity from the caves to the stars. They steal from those of us who love life, and love humanity, and love this good earth and want to leave it a little better for our having walked upon it, the tools we have uncovered over the centuries for testing right from wrong, true from false, good from evil, and turn them against us, to drag us down into their gutter, so that they will shine. They have preached for so long that they are the keepers of civilization’s essential virtues that many of us have come to believe it. They are vampires, feeding on them, never to be nourished by them.
If I’m grateful for anything, it’s that I lived long enough to see the moral crusade being brought right back to them. Here’s a video from YouTube user robtish that shows in neon lights how horribly warped the moral compass is over at the Traditional Values Coalition. What do you call a people who claim FBI statistics show only a small number of violent crimes were committed against homosexuals in 2007, while omitting, among other violent crimes, the category of murder from the tally? Moral? Virtuous? Christian?
This is what the culture war does to its soldiers. It strips them of everything within them that could have been fine and noble and decent. No higher virtue then hating the enemy is allowed to live within you. Not honor, not reason, not any sense of right and wrong is allowed. Hate does not share power with anything else a human heart might be capable of. You let it in, and it will consume you. There is the evidence…right there, laughing in your face.
Freeing People From The Bondage Of Homosexuality In Uganda, One Bullet At A Time…
Via Box Turtle Bulletin… Scott Lively and Exodus’ hard work in Uganda is paying off it seems…
Timothy Kincaid, notes that the Ugandan government is now denouncing Amnesty Internation and UNICEF the U.N.’s children’s relief fund, for promoting homosexuality (UNICEF is accused of smuggling pro-homosexuality books into Ugandian schools…) and he asks…
I wonder if American anti-gay groups, including Exodus International, are proud of the part they played.
Yes.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers, To Simple Questions…
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.
Two 22-year-old men who left a campfire to walk along the beach in Seaside were beaten unconscious in what appears to have been a hate crime, according to police.
The man disembarked the bus moments later, followed by Idris and an associate. Police say Idris again approached him, telling the man that homosexuality violates his religion.
Kafagolis and Kirkwood reportedly inveighed against the victim, screaming anti-gay epithets as they punched and kicked him, knocking him to the ground.
…they were returning to their car parked near Raymond Boulevard and Broad Street from the Prudential Center at approximately 11 p.m. when a group of 15 to 20 teenage girls and boys approached them from the opposite direction and then punched and kicked them as they yelled an anti-gay slur.
Hate crime cases involving anti-gay sentiment shot up in Santa Clara County last year, a striking increase that a leading prosecutor attributes to controversy over Proposition 8, the voter-approved ban on gay marriage.
Anti-gay incidents accounted for more than half of hate-crime cases last year — 56 percent — a big jump from only 15 percent in 2007. There were 14 anti-gay cases out of 25 hate-crime cases in 2008, compared with only 3 out of 20 in 2007.
"My belief from having done this work for many years is that surges in types of hate incidents are linked to the headlines and controversies of the day,” said Deputy District Attorney Jay Boyarsky, who is assigned to monitor hate crimes. "Marriage equality and Proposition 8 have been in the news, and we have seen an increase in gay-bashing.”
I’ve been sitting at my computer, seeing one report of anti-gay violence after another glide across my screen, week after week since Proposition 8 and the election of President Obama. Numb, and unsurprised. You hear crackpots calling down God’s wrath on gay folk all the time. You hear them comparing us to murderers and terrorists. You hear them citing the passages in Leviticus that call for homosexuals to be put to death. It’s when you hear all that coming from the statehouses that it makes you wonder if a threshold has been crossed in the culture war…
Last night, Utah’s local ABC station received leaked portions of an interview with state senator Chris Buttars (R), which will be highlighted in an upcoming documentary on Proposition 8. Buttars is an outspoken opponent of gay rights; in the latest interview, he compares gays to alcoholics and Muslim terrorists, and warns that gay people are “probably the greatest threat to America.”
…If it passes, SB 88 would extend state employee health benefits to same-sex partners of state employees.
Renfroe said he was voting against the bill because it would sanction sin and be an abomination to God.
“The Lord God said it is not good for man to be alone — and so he made a helper suitable for him — and that was woman,” said Renfroe, quoting a Bible verse from Genesis. “God blessed them and said be fruitful and multiply.
“Leviticus 18:22 says, ‘You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination.’
“Leviticus 20:13 says, ‘If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.’
State Representative Tony Shipley was quoted on OpenPen on March 13 in a blog that had jaws dropping throughout the GLBT community. Shipley today told O&AN and Jenny Ford, a lobbyist for the Tennessee Equality Project (TEP), that the quotations were taken out of context.
A lobbyist writing under the name Desoto quoted Shipley as saying, ”They can do whatever they want out in California, with gays passing babies around, and violating God’s law, but when God drops California off into the sea, they will have to deal with the consequences of their actions.”
…
In the blog, Desoto also reported that Shipley said, ”That [gays adopting] ain’t gonna fly-I’m sorry, I’m a Southern Baptist, I’m a Christian," and "If they [the "secular progressives"] keep pushing and pushing and pushing-they’re pushing us too far, and something will happen-just like we did in 1860." Tennessee
…and in one statehouse after another where they are still fighting over same-sex marriage, adoption, hate crime laws, and anti discrimination laws. They can’t seem to hate us enough. I was sitting in the office one of my project managers and told him offhandedly about my decision to not take my usual cross-country drive this year because I was disturbed by all the anti-gay rhetoric I was seeing coming out of the heartland statehouses, and the resulting violence. He was genuinely shocked to hear about it. But to see it happening, you have to read the gay news blogs. As far as the mainstream news media is concerned, violence against homosexuals is still an unremarkable thing. Something like dog bites man. Not worth wasting their reader’s time over.
I read a Baltimore crime blog almost daily now, to get a feel for what’s happening at street level in my city because mainstream local news coverage is so crappy. It’s basically an aggregator, just posting links from other sources to crime stories, with maybe a little commentary between them. There needs to be something like that for the gay community. Some place were we, and everyone else, can see how dangerous things are. Because there is still a lot of denial that so many violent words flung at gay people, can possibly be turning into violent acts.
I don’t want my little life blog to be that place. But I am sick of seeing one act of violence after another flashing across my screen and it’s too much to comment on all of it. So from now on, instead of just letting it go, I’m going to compile them into a running series of posts.
"During the wars with Napoleon, when Admiral Nelson asked for the numbers of men killed and wounded in a week of action, he said ‘Let me have the butcher’s bill for the week’". Dritz sighed to a reporter one day. "As I make out these reports with the new numbers of AIDS cases each week, and as I check them off when they die, I feel like I am writing the butcher’s bill of this epidemic."
-Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On
Here’s a few line items in the culture war on gay people…
"I had him in my arms, and as I had him in my arms I was calling the paramedics," Brown said. Duncanson, who had been stabbed four times in the back, was taken to Kings County Hospital, where he died roughly one hour later.
‘He assumed the two guys were men he had met and they said ‘hi’ and called him over. He went over and said hi. They asked him if he was gay and when he said yes, they knocked him down and kicked him in the face,’
They lived together in the Spanish province of Vigo and were planning to get married. Both were stabbed to death by Jacobo Piñeiro Rial in their apartment in the early morning of January 13th, 2006. The bodies showed a total of 57 stab wounds, according to forensics. After killing them, Piñeiro took a shower and cleaned himself up. He filled a suitcase with some of their belongings to make it look like a robbery and then spilled clothing all over the place. He poured alcohol over everything, including his victims’ bodies, turned on the gas spigot on the stove, and set everything on fire.
"Dean told jurors that Gunter punched him in the nose and that the next thing he remembered was seeing two men beat him. Gunter kicked him in the back and Singleton kicked him in the face before he lost consciousness again, he said. A witness testified hearing Gunter and Singleton make anti-gay remarks during the attack. As a result of the attack, Dean suffered a fractured back and dislocated jaw, and his chin was broken in half. He testified that he has vision problems, lost his sense of smell and is still missing teeth."
According to the paper, defense attorneys argued that Singleton was responsible for the beating.
Scott Lively, author of the revisionist Pink Swastika, is in Uganda. Lively has previously traveled to eastern Europe, and the former Soviet block, to tell the people there that the Nazis who massacred millions of Slavs during World War II were homosexuals. Here’s what I wrote about it a year ago January…
Alex Shevchenko has been arraigned for a hate crime tied to the assault and eventual death of Satender Singh in July. According to prosecutors, Mr. Shevchenko and Andrey Vusik taunted Mr. Singh in a park because they thought he was gay. Mr. Vusik eventually threw a punch that toppled Singh, dashing his head, they charge.
Gay leaders in Sacramento say the incident followed several years of escalating tensions with some Slavic immigrants.
"The gut feeling of the [gay] community is that preaching among the local Russian evangelical community is breeding hate and that something would happen. And Satender was the something that happened," says Ed Bennett, a gay Democratic activist.
While Slavic leaders say their community is being unfairly scapegoated for legitimate political protests and deeply held religious beliefs, some monitors warn that an emerging group called the Watchmen on the Walls may be fomenting a dangerous atmosphere within the ranks of Slavic immigrants here.
I’ll say it’s dangerous. Scott Lively, one of the group’s founders, is also the author of The Pink Triangle…a Holocaust revisionist book that argues that the Nazis were basically a homosexual movement and that rather then being among the victims of the Holocaust, homosexuals were the primary instigators of it. Consider that Lively is now preaching this message to Slavs in what was the eastern Soviet bloc at one time…a people who suffered a staggering loss of life at the hands of the Nazis during world war two…
Videos of Watchmen conferences abroad suggest some leaders are less modulated, and their audience less against violence. One video shows Lively giving a version of Singh’s killing different from reported facts, including the notion that Singh was undressing in front of children. The audience cheered twice as Lively recounted the punch and the death of Singh – a reaction Lively rebuked, saying: "We don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved."
The camera was on and Lively knew it. There is no way on God’s green earth Lively doesn’t know the impact his message that the Nazis were homosexuals and homosexuals are all basically Nazis has on this particular group of people. He knows Exactly what he’s doing. He has never publicly condemned the killing of Satender Singh by a group of young Slav men in Sacramento. There’s a reason for that.
Eastern Europe taken care of, and sufficiently incited to murder, Lively has now traveled to Africa, with basically the same message: African genocide is caused by homosexuals…it is the homosexuals who are killing Africans… Jim Burroway reports…
According to anonymous blogger GayUganda — as we said, Ugandan gay bloggers need to remain anonymous for their own safety — American Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively provided the much-anticipated red meat on day three of the anti-gay conference taking place in Kampala.
On Saturday, Lively repeated his discredited historical revisionist theory in which he claims that the cornerstone of Germany’s Nazi lies firmly in the gay movement, and that the gay movement today, if left unchecked, will result in a similarly murderous fascism wherever it goes. In Kampala, he went further by expanding his examples of what he calls homosexuals’ murderous impulse by blaming the 1994 Rwanda genocide on gay men.
Now consider the environment Lively is pouring his gasoline into…
Lively was asked about the current state of Ugandan law, which provides for a life sentence for homosexuality. Lively reportedly approved of the existing law, and endorsed adding a provision mandating forcing convicted gay men and women into ex-gay therapy. Conference speakers had called for such a law on the second day of the conference. Adding more fuel to the fire, GayUganda had earlier noticed that this apparent press release was posted on The Earth Times:
Kampala Anti-gay activists in Uganda Saturday formed a pressure group to discourage homosexuality, following a two-day conference of religious leaders, teachers and social workers in the capital Kampala.
The group, to be called the Anti-Gay Task Force, is intended to “fight against the spread of homosexuality and lesbianism in the country,” spokesman for the group Stephen Langa told reporters. Same sex-relationships and marriages are illegal in Uganda, and human rights groups have criticized the government for harassing homosexuals.
The task-force said that it would one day “wipe out” gay practices in the African state.
The threat to “‘wipe out’ gay practices” is not an idle threat in a nation that provides a life sentence for those convicted of homosexuality. Further, Uganda witnessed at least three seperate campaigns of government sanctioned and media-led vigilantism between 2005 and 2007. The last spate of violence was sparked by a press conference of LGBT leaders calling on the nation to simply allow gays and lesbians to live in peace. The LGBT leaders at the conference wore face masks out of fear of being identified.
This conference poses a very dangerous development in a country with such a volatile history in how it treats gays and lesbians.
Which is precisely what Lively went there to accomplish. Is there any doubt now that this man wants to rise the mob against gay people, in order to enact his final solution? This is deliberate incitement to violence. There is just no mistaking it for anything else. Like so many other Culture Warriors, Lively wants gay people dead. But unlike most of the others, he has a plan to accomplish it. Step one: Go to nation that has suffered genocide. Step Two: Teach the people of that nation that the ones who killed their kinfolk were homosexuals. Step Three …
Satendar Singh was a native of Fiji. At age 19 he immigrated to the USA and lived with relatives in the Sacramento, California area. He worked at an AT&T call center. He was well liked by both his co-workers and friends.
On Sunday afternoon July 1, 2007 he and 6 friends, reportedly 3 couples of Indian and Fijian descent, were partying at a California State park at Lake Natoma, east of Sacramento. Trouble broke out between Singh’s group and another group, reportedly Russian speaking and of Russian descent. Verbal assaults were traded between the groups. The Russian group allegedly made racist and homophobic comments to Singh’s group and singled him out for homophobic comments.
About 8pm that evening as Singh’s group was leaving, the men of the Russian group confronted Singh’s group in the parking lot. During the confrontation one man punched Satendar Singh in the face and Singh fell backward hitting his head. Singh slipped into a coma never to regain consciousness. Four days later on July 5, 2007, family removed Satendar Singh from life support and he died.
Some time ago the Bay Shore Gay and Lesbian Center for Youths was vandalized. Its front door was broken and its van had its tires slashed, its windows busted out, and its sideview mirrors mangled.
Today I read that arrests in the case have been made and…surprise, surprise, the police have in their impartial wisdom determined that the vandals had not a prejudiced bone in their bodies after all…
Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy called the vandalism at a Bay Shore gay and lesbian center for youths an "attack against the gay community."
Gov. David A. Paterson dispatched the state’s commissioner of human rights to visit the site and deliver a message calling for acceptance.
And the Suffolk County Police Hate Crimes Unit investigated last week’s incident as a hate crime.
It turns out the vandalism at the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth Center was not a hate crime after all, police said Tuesday.
What a relief to know that! Because…er…because… Well because the police just say so…
Police declined to say what led them to determine the crime was not bias-related.
I see. Three men and a woman, two of them 21 years old, one 20 and one 19, decided to slash a van’s tires completely at random. And then they broke out all its windows. And then they mangled the sideview mirrors. And then…again completely at random, they decided to break out a door that only happened to belong to the same group that owned the van. Just…on a lark… It had nothing to do with the fact that the van had the Long Island LGBT Youth center logo on it. And that door…it was just a coincidence that it also happened to be the door to the Long Island LGBT Youth center. There was no anti-gay animus involved here. Take our word for it. Because we insist you take our word for it.
Police arrested three men and a woman, all from Bay Shore, Monday in connection with the vandalism and charged each of them with second-degree criminal mischief. None of the four was charged with a hate crime.
Mischief…
Mischief…
But seriously…what more could attacking homosexuals amount to anyway, other then mischief? You say "hate crime" like its a bad thing…
[Update…] Reports are coming out now that two of the suspects were former clients of the center, who had been asked to leave for an as yet unspecified disruptive behavior…more then three years ago.
Steve Fidel over at the Mormon Times complains, Thusly ….
For those who have (correctly) assumed the editor of a Web site called MormonTimes.com is a Mormon, I’ve been called on to be an insider in this discussion by those looking for support for their views against same-sex marriage. As a Mormon, I’ve also been the target of the most angry threats and rhetoric I’ve seen in 25 years as a journalist from the community that considers gay marriage a civil right.
Two men walking in Vancouver’s Davie neighborhood were targeted for attack in still another anti-gay incident in the gay-friendly area.
The attack took place on the evening of Dec. 4 at around 8:00 p.m., according to a Dec. 8 article posted online at Canadian Web site Xtra!.
Chris Hiller was quoted as saying that he and his boyfriend had just come out of a gay bar and were walking along the sidewalk holding hands.
Hiller noted that he knew another person was following behind, but the presence of the other individual did not alarm him until, Hiller said, "my friend goes, ’Come on, Chris, let’s keep walking,’ and next thing I know I’m on the ground with my face covered in blood and dazed, and my friend’s gone to get help."
Hiller did not see his attacker, but he said that he heard the man utter the words, "You fag, I’m going to beat the shit out of you, I don’t like you, stay away from me."
Added the alleged attacker, "Don’t even come near me, you fag."
The article said that Hiller recounted being stuck on the jaw and then receiving a blow right to the teeth.
The article quoted Hiller as saying that he was down for "about four to five minutes," at which point, "I got up and I’m woozy and staggering a bit."
Hiller continued, "I couldn’t see for a few minutes, and then I sat down."
Police arrived a few minutes later in response to the call Hiller’s boyfriend placed, but by then the alleged attacker was long gone.
A state appellate court reversed Steven Pomie’s conviction on charges of first-degree assault and first-degree assault as a hate crime in the 2005 anti-gay attack on Dwan Prince, ordered a new trial for Pomie, and said he could only be tried on lesser charges of second-degree assault and second-degree assault as a hate crime.
The assault, which happened in Brooklyn’s Brownsville section, left Prince permanently disabled and unable to work.
Note that three of the four appellate judges in that case, Peter B. Skelos, Robert A. Lifson, and William F. Mastro, were appointed by Republican Governor George Pataki. Oh…and Skelos is the brother of Dean Skelos, currently the Republican majority leader in the State Senate. You know…the guy who has been single handedly blocking a vote on same-sex marriage in New York for the past several years.
In 2005, Lifson was one of three judges on a five-judge panel who barred a gay man from bringing a wrongful death suit against St. Vincent’s Hospital after his partner died there. The majority ruled that only a spouse could bring such a case and that the couple’s Vermont civil union did not confer that status on the surviving partner. That same gay man won a 2008 case that sought a benefit from an insurance company for his partner’s death. Mastro was one of two judges who dissented from that ruling from a five-judge panel.
We can only assume it would have been even worse for the spouse, had he been a heterosexual Mormon suing for the wrongful death of his legally married wife. Who knows what angry threats and rhetoric he’d have had to endure then.
So…I write back to Mr Mormon Times Fidel…Thusly…
"As a Mormon, I’ve also been the target of the most angry threats and rhetoric I’ve seen in 25 years as a journalist from the community that considers gay marriage a civil right."
I see. Tell you what… Walk down almost any street in America holding another man’s hand and see what kind of angry threats and rhetoric you get. That’s all. Just holding hands. That simple, elegant, beautiful gesture of heart-to-heart love is enough to get your head bashed-in, in a lot of places. And you don’t even have to be gay to get gay bashed either, as Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay found out. A couple brothers walking down the street arm-in-arm and suddenly an SUV full of angry young men jumps out at them and one of them has an aluminum baseball bat in his hand. And now Jose, alas, is dead. And his brother will take the memory of that night to his grave. Or if holding another man’s hand is too much for you, just try putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car. You might get what happened to a lesbian in Richmond California last week when four young men saw the rainbow sticker on her car. All those ads your church paid for warning Californians that the homos were coming into the schools for their kids sure paid off didn’t they? You wrote that sentence I quoted above for your fellow Mormons to read so you could all nod your heads together about how hateful the gays are, didn’t you?
I love it when the faithful complain that teh gays are trying to elevate behavior to the level of a civil right. You’re a Mormon…right? Well…no. You aren’t. Mormon is just a behavior. It isn’t what you are, it’s what you do. You attend church. You do whatever church activities it is that Mormons do. And it came to pass you read the Book of Mormon. You wear the magic underwear. Mormon is something you do, not something you are. See? And we don’t want to be elevating behavior to the status of civil right now do we?
Jackass.
—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.
Which is about as much calm and respectful dialogue as I can manage at the moment. It’s too early in the morning here in Baltimore for me to be getting angry at knuckle-dragging morons.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
