The "Whites Only" fountain once dispensed the same water as the "Coloreds" one did; but the implications of having to walk the alternate line to obtain the H20 spoke volumes.
Via Blue Jersey, here’s an example of how the consequences of separate but equal play out in the lives of gay people…
Consider Paula Long and Rosalind Heggs of Camden who have been together over 15 years. They were registered as domestic partners and also had a civil union from Vermont. Under New Jersey law, they have hospital visitation rights and the right to make decisions on behalf of each other when the other is sick. That’s what’s on paper, but when Rosalind had a heart attack and needed a blood transfusion, the hospital refused to allow Paula to give consent. Paula even had a highlighted copy of the relevant law with her, but that didn’t matter to the hospital. They demanded to see their marriage certificate. (see video of their story)
This story happens over and over again from one end of this country to the other, in red states and blue alike, and it’s indicative of a mindset. Here’s that mindset in a nutshell:
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were.
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… Bigots such as Orson Scott Card cannot, will never, acknowledge there is a bond between same sex couples, but only, and grudgingly, that they may feel themselves to have one. Card later wrote another column, in which he reduced the struggle of gay and lesbian Americans for simple justice, to a childish demand for "fairness"…
The single most effective argument being used to gain support for the redefinition of marriage to mean anything, therefore nothing, is this:
"It’s not fair that homosexuals can’t get married just like heterosexuals."
This argument is only effective because nobody is bothering to define "fairness" or to figure out whether the result will be in any way more fair than the hitherto universal definition of marriage.
When our kids were little, we made it a very clear rule in our family that fairness didn’t mean that everybody got exactly what anybody else got.
"Suppose we buy a dress for your sister," I said to my son. "Would you want us to get a dress for you too?"
Never mind for a moment, the brain dead sexism in that example (picture Card telling his daughter, "suppose we buy blue jeans for your brother. Would you want us to get blue jeans for you too?" "Well…yeah dad…why not?" But maybe females aren’t allowed to wear pants in Card’s family…) Just look at it for a moment. Card is saying there, that to ask hospital staff to let you be with your other half as they lay sick, and maybe even dying, is like a child throwing a tantrum because daddy didn’t bring him a present too. Read that entire column, and if you aren’t a bigot like he is, one sickening thing just leaps out at you like a ghoul at a fun house, and laughs in your face: nowhere in that column is there even the slightest hint that Card can see there may be a deep and profound bond of love between a same sex couple. It just doesn’t even cross his mind.
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Homosexual sex. Because they’re disfunctional….
But it is grossly unfair to demand, in the name of "fairness," that the normal pattern of marriage and family be deprived of its privileged position in our society, just so a few people can feel better about dysfunctions that even they insist are nobody’s fault.
This is the mindset that same sex couples have to face every time they try to assert their rights as a couple. The hospital staff that kept Paula Long out of the room where her other half was suffering from a heart attack, treated their union like it was some kind of pathetic imitation of their own, because that’s exactly what they thought of it. Equal marriage rights won’t change their minds about that. But what it can do is warn them upfront, that if they let their cheap conceits and bar stool prejudices devastate the lives of innocent people, there will be consequences. Separate but equal on the other hand, merely validates their prejudices and conceits. As long as they believe they can put the knife in our hearts and get away with it, they’ll keep doing it. Because it is unfair to demand that normal families loose their privileged position in our society, just so a few people can feel better about their dysfunctions .
When Bill Flanigan admitted his partner Robert Daniel to the hospital because of AIDS-related complications his loss was tremendous.
Kept from Daniel during his last hours alive, Flanigan was denied the chance to say goodbye to his partner of more than five years. He filed a lawsuit against the University of Maryland Medical System in Baltimore City Circuit Court on February 27.
Not only was Flanigan refused the right to be with Daniel, he was also not permitted to share Daniel’s treatment wishes with his physicians, according to a statement issued by Lambda Legal. All because the staff from the Maryland Medical System Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore said Flanigan was not family.
…
It was only after Daniel’s sister and mother arrived from out of town that the Shock Trauma Center released information on Daniel’s status that had been repeatedly denied to Flanigan, and allowed the entire family — including Flanigan — to see Daniel. But it was too late — Daniel was no longer conscious and his eyes were taped shut, and his wishes not to have life prolonging measures performed had been denied. There were tubes in his throat.
That was particularly hard for Flanigan to take.
At one point Daniel briefly regained consciousness, according to a nurse, and he tried to pull out the breathing tube. In response hospital staff tied down Daniel’s arms.
Last month, a conference of US Catholic bishops approved and released a letter entitled "Ministry to Persons With a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care". Calling homosexuality "objectively disordered" the document complains that western culture recognizes "no acts as intrinsically evil". It asserts that "any tendency toward sexual pleasure that is not subordinated to the greater goods of love and marriage is disordered, in that it inclines a person towards a use of sexuality that does not accord with the divine plan for creation". Then later, without any apparent irony, the document states that "many in our culture have difficulty understanding Catholic moral teaching because they do not understand that morality has an objective basis."
The document ultimately demands that homosexuals abstain from any and all forms of sexual intimacy congruent with their nature, and says that "chaste living is an affirmation of all that is human, and is the will of God. It is we who suffer when we violate the dictates of our own human nature."
Which is true enough, as any gay person who has tried to deny their nature will tell you. In 1975, one of Love In Action’s first clients, Jack McIntyre, committed suicide rather then, by his own reckoning, make one more promise to God he knew he could not keep. The effect of the Guidelines for Pastoral Care will without a doubt be to drive other gay men and women into self annihilating behaviors, if not outright suicide. "Chastity", say the Bishops, "means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being." But it is precisely that inner unity they intend to doggedly destroy within gay and lesbian people, in the name of god, in the name of Jesus, and in the name of love. How easy it is, to take that body and soul wholeness away from someone else, when you don’t have to live with the pain and the emptiness. It is we who suffer, when we violate the dictates of our own human nature, not the ones who teach us to fear and loath our human nature, the nature that our creator bestowed upon us.
When Romney ran…for the Senate in 1994, he wrote a letter to the Mass Log Cabin Club in which he pledged: “[A]s we seek to establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent.” During the same campaign, when he was accused of having once described gay people as “perverse” during a religious meeting of Mormons, Romney’s campaign issued a forceful statement decrying the accusation as false and reiterating that Romney respected “all people regardless of their race, creed, or sexual orientation.”
SALT LAKE CITY — Speaking before an adoring audience of Utah Republicans last night, Governor Mitt Romney drew a link between America’s prestige around the world and the legalization of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts.
”America cannot continue to lead the family of nations around the world if we suffer the collapse of the family here at home," Romney said, calling the Supreme Judicial Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts ”a blow to the family."
Milt – while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2001…
During his 2001 run for governor, his campaign distributed bright pink flyers at the June Pride parade declaring “Mitt and Kerry wish you a great Pride weekend!” During his inaugural speech, he said it was important to defend civil rights “regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or race.” He appointed eight openly gay and lesbian people to high profile positions in his administration. And before he decided to run for president — that is to say, before he needed to establish some strong anti-gay bonafides — Romney doubled the budget line item for the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.
Milt – Last May…while campaigning for the 2008 GOP nomination for President of the United State…
This would be the same commission, mind you, that Romney tried to disband in highly public fashion last May.
What Would You Do For A Million Dollars? What Would You Do For A Million Votes…?
There’s this ethical question that goes something along the lines of, If someone offered to give you a million dollars to kill some random person, with the certainty that you would get clean away with it…would you do it? There was a time when I would have been shocked to hear people admit that they would.
What I would like to do now is change the terms of the test a little…
If you were running for President of the United States…and someone offered you a million votes in a swing state to kill some completely random person, with complete certainty that your name would never be attached to that murder…would you do it…?
Subject: re: you
From: "P. BELL"
Date: Wed, November 22, 2006 3:39 am
To: pam [at] pamspaulding.com
Why should you get the same privledges as we married couples do? I am not here to judge you. Love the person, hate the sin. But about you and Bush? I pray that law will be passed so you will NEVER be recognized in the US. Your beef will him is because he actually wants us to be more like we were when we first started this country-Chrisitian roots and all. I am not talking about the nutso Chrisitians out there who make a fool of themselves to be seen, I am talking about the people who really have a relationship with God, living the truth.
Did you know that homosexuality is specifically mentioned in the bible? Listed as ABNORMAL, DISCUSTING, and an ABOMANATION. You were not created to be this way, and so when you SLANDER a person who is againist you, mock their beliefs, and try to screw up this nation even more than it is for my children’s future, than you will deal with me.
I am not talking about the nutso Christians… You know this is only going to get worse, now that their White House messiah has lost his rubber stamp congress. And never mind the nutso Christians. Take a long hard look at how Mitt Romney and John McCain are belly flopping into the fundamentalist gutter now that the next presidential election cycle is closing in on us.
The problem the republicans face is that their policies are just not popular. Make the rich, richer…make the poor and middle-class poorer…rape the environment…curtail civil liberties…war, war and more war… There is no majority in America for any of that. So for the past few decades the republicans have been cobbling together a rough coalition of faux libertarians, fascists, Me-First Americans and bigots and with the ascendancy of George Bush, it’s won them elections…barely. Corruption and wild deficit spending cost them enough of the faux libertarians and the Me-Firsts that they lost last time. But make no mistake: the religious right and the rest of the bigot vote stuck with them. They lost the voters who finally got fed up with the spending and the corruption and the war. They loose the bigot vote now, and they’re done for decades to come and they know it.
The point being…don’t assume that as the Gay Bogyman looses it’s power to sway the independent voters that the republicans will stop using it. They can’t take even a middle ground position on gay rights, without loosing the bigot vote.
So republicans running for president in the coming years are going to fall all over themselves in the coming election to prove that they’re bigger gay bashers then the other guys. And in the process, they are going to deliberately rouse the passions of the mob. Because that mob is a vital part of their political base. Even long after it stops winning them elections. Because there is loosing, and there is having the bottom fall out. So they will keep inciting the mob.
And somewhere right here in America, some random gay people are going to die for the sake of giving those campaigning politicians some extra votes they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. Think about that, the next time you hear one of them talk about Morals, and Values and God and Country.
…and why I’m so thrilled that our gutter crawling bigot of a Governor John Ehrlich got the boot last Tuesday. In May of 2005, Ehrlich vetoed a domestic partnership bill, saying it would "…open the door to undermine the sanctity of traditional marriage." This was, some of us noted, at a time when he was conducting a whisper smear campaign against the family of Baltimore Mayor O’Malley, who everyone figured would be his democratic challenger in the upcoming election. Ehrlich and his henchmen spread lies that O’Mally was having secret extramarital affairs utterly without concern for the effect on O’Malley’s wife and children. So much for the sanctity of marriage.
Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. vetoed a bill yesterday that would have granted rights to gay partners who register with the state, concluding after weeks of intense deliberations that the legislation threatened "the sanctity of traditional marriage."
The emotionally charged bill was among 24 that Ehrlich (R) rejected yesterday afternoon, including legislation to raise the state’s minimum wage by $1, allow early voting in elections and heighten oversight of the state’s troubled juvenile justice system. Another measure sought by gay rights activists that would have extended a property transfer tax exemption to domestic partners was also scuttled.
(Emphasis mine) His staff made a big noise to the news media afterward that he would "probably" sign the bill adding gay people to Maryland’s anti-discrimination laws. But that was another of his little moves to the middle made only when he knew he had no choice. The statehouse would have overridden a veto of that particular bill and he knew it. But it was useful to put the word out there that he’d sign it, because he’d just made a move which shocked, shocked, the chattering class…
Ehrlich’s decision to side, almost without exception, with business interests and social conservatives surprised some analysts, who thought he might try to burnish his credentials as a moderate by allowing some of the session’s more controversial bills to become law.
Most of the legislation vetoed yesterday had been strongly opposed by Republican lawmakers. But Ehrlich’s appeal to swing voters was key to his 2002 election in a state where registered Democrats still hold a nearly 2-to-1 advantage.
"I think it’s just breathtaking that he’s casting his lot with the right wing of his party," said Tom Hucker, executive director of Progressive Maryland…"He ran for governor as the moderate, affable son of an automobile dealer who would stick up for working-class families."
No it wasn’t breathtaking. It was eminently predictable. Ehrlich ran as a moderate. But he wasn’t. A simple glance at his political career would have made it obvious to anyone. He’s pure Ellen Sauerbrey Republican, and there are no moderates in the Maryland republican party since the Sauerbrey wing took it over.
A leading Republican lawmaker praised him for making "a principled decision."
"I know the governor wrestled with this decision because he may be sympathetic to some of the intentions," said House Minority Whip Anthony J. O’Donnell (R-Calvert). "But sometimes bad laws are the result of good intentions."
Modeled after laws in California, Hawaii and other states, the legislation would have granted nearly a dozen rights to unmarried partners who register with the state. Among those: the right to be treated as an immediate family member during hospital visits, to make health care decisions for incapacitated partners and to have private visits in nursing homes.
A principled decision. Anyone who knows a same sex couple, knows exactly the threat that constantly hangs over them from their lack of legal recognition…
A woman who could have benefited from the bill, Stacey Kargman-Kaye of Baltimore, said yesterday that she was heartbroken. "I don’t understand how a human being who has a significant other and children could not see the need for this," she said.
Kargman-Kaye, 37, said that after she emerged from heart surgery five years ago, a nurse literally pushed away her longtime partner, who was there to support her, "because we’re not considered a family in the eyes of Maryland."
But republicans just can’t seem to twist the knife in us enough…
A group of conservative activists had launched a petition drive in recent weeks that sought to repeal the bill if it became law. They argued that it was part of a "homosexual agenda" advancing in Annapolis. Maryland allows residents to put legislation passed by the General Assembly to a public vote if enough signatures are gathered.
Del. Donald H. Dwyer Jr. (R-Anne Arundel), a leader of the petition drive, said organizers would soon decide whether to continue, in case lawmakers override Ehrlich’s veto in January. Dwyer said he was "very pleased that the governor has sent a strong message about the morality of the state."
Dwyer had been puking anti-gay venom into the Maryland statehouse for years now, and I am delighted to say he lost in his bid for re-election this year. Good riddence. Perhaps the voters in Anne Arundel Country had just about enough of his brand of morality…
A gay Baltimore man has won a courtroom battle to keep his late partner buried in the Tennessee grave the two men chose.
But the victory is not absolute. Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of Russell Groff have indicated they plan to appeal the Nov. 2 ruling that Olive received Thursday.
“This is awesome,” Olive said. “It may not be over if they appeal, but I feel so good.”
Baltimore City Orphans’ Court Judge Karen Friedman ruled against Lowell and Carolyn Groff, who sought to overturn their son’s will and move his body to a family cemetery.
Groff’s parents argued in court Sept. 25 and 26 that their 26-year-old son didn’t know what he was doing when he completed his will and burial instructions shortly before his death on Nov. 23, 2004.
Groff, who was HIV-positive, died from a staph infection that spread throughout his body.
Olive said Groff was estranged from his parents at the time of his death, and completed a will and burial instructions in anticipation of the legal battle.
So he knew what he was doing all right. He knew his own parents would try to take him from the man he loved after death. And they tried. And they might Still succeed. Morality.
Olive, who married Groff according to local Quaker tradition in 2003, said his battle illuminates the need for equal marriage rights for gay couples.
“I won, but I wouldn’t have had to go through this at all if the state had some sort of provision that allowed my partner and I to have legalized our relationship in some sense,” he said. “This is kind of bittersweet because I had to go through a lot of shit to get this.”
A principled decision… That simple Quaker marriage of two young men in love in 2003 did nothing, Nothing to harm the marriage of any heterosexual couple in this state, or anywhere else. It takes nothing away from anyone save for this one thing: the ability to twist the knife in the broken heart of a gay person who has just lost the love of their lives. There is no pain like the loss of a loved one. What kind of person wants to make that bottomless loss even harder for someone to bear? What kind of person sees righteousness in it?
You have to utterly dehumanize the person who suffers. (Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…) But before you can do that, you have to take your conscience around behind the barn and kill it. And you do that, so you can make other people scapegoats for everything fine and noble and honorable that a human being could be, that you could never live up to. All your cheap failures of character, all your pathetic evasions of reality, all those need a scapegoat. Otherwise, you’ve only yourself to blame. And the best scapegoat of all, the one you can hate the most without reservation, is the one who faced their life squarely, honestly, and honorably, and became everything a human being can, that you could never be. It isn’t the sanctity of marriage but the sanctity of gay bashing that they’re afraid of loosing. Because if we don’t bleed, if we can’t be made to bleed, then they’re not righteous.
So after a generally positive election day, one where I can take some solid comfort in the fact that although seven states voted to strip same sex couples of any and all legal rights one state refused to go along, I find myself sweating blood again over the situation in Massachusetts, the only state in the union so far, to allow same sex couples to actually marry, as opposed to being civil-unioned.
In states where it only takes a minority of voters to sign enough petitions to put a referendum on the ballot, and only a minority of registered voters actually vote on the measures, anti-gay bigots have been enormously successfully in writing their gay and lesbian neighbors out of their state constitutions. But in most of those states, the state-houses have had little to no backbone in them to resist the hate. The religious right is powerful in the heartland, and in the south in particular, and many politicians in those regions make their careers either catering to it, or kowtowing to it when necessary. Standing for the devil and against the baby Jesus just isn’t a winning proposition.
But more and more in the blue states, the fight against hate is being joined. In California, the statehouse there actually passed a law granting same sex couples the right to marry (which Arnold to the everlasting shame of his name promptly vetoed). And in Massachusetts they’re not taking the venomous hatreds of the anti-gay gutter laying down. And they’re not just fighting on principle either. They’re fighting, finally, just like the enemy does. To win. By any means necessary.
Lawmakers voted to recess the ConCon until 2 p.m. Jan. 2, 2007 by a 109 to 87 vote, which is the last day of the legislative session. Technically, lawmakers could reconvene to take the issue up, but it’s extremely unlikely. Which means that the amendment has died by procedural maneuver.
When I first read the news I was both elated, and still a bit worried. Why not just adjourn altogether? Why leave prejudice and hate that one last chance and keep gay couples in the state, and all over the nation looking to Massachusetts for hope, still holding their breaths? Well…here’s why:
The significance of the recess vote as opposed to an adjournment vote is that Governor Mitt Romney cannot call the legislature back into session.
Tactics. They have a bigot governor who is kissing up to the religious right in hopes of making a run at the presidency. He’s been kicking the homosexual devil for their approval for months now (which he’ll never get because he’s a Mormon, but that’s another story…). But in this state the fighters for liberty and justice for all have taken full measure of the enemy. They understand perfectly well that they’re in a knife fight, and so they brought a knife. That’s how you fight a knife fight: to win. Let the gutter howl that they’re being denied their rights. It was their neighbor’s rights after all, that they were seeking to take away. This fight was never about rights. It was about power. It was about a group of venomous haters trying to reserve democracy, and its promise of liberty and justice for all, to themselves. If that’s what you’re about, then don’t complain when someone else comes along and takes some of that away from you: brother, you asked for it.
"I’m probably 3,000 feet to the right of Attila the Hun. But the gracious people, the socially conscious people, the liberal people, you’re the ones who always want everyone to be heard. What about these 170,000 people?" said Democratic Rep. Marie Parente.
Yes, we’re the ones who are always wanting everyone to be heard. And yes, you’re not. And that’s the whole point here. One-hundred and seventy billion people would still not have the right to take away a single individual’s right to equality under the law, let alone the rights of tens of thousands of their neighbors. They only way you do that, is to assert a right of force, by virtue of the power of your shear numbers. The term for that isn’t democracy, it’s mob rule. And that’s why we have checks and balances in our form of government, to prevent democracy from degenerating first into the rule of mobs, and then into tyranny. We The People includes your gay and lesbian neighbors too you drooling moron. It includes all of us. And yes, we are the ones who believe that. And yes, you’re not.
The people can always vote the politicians who stood by the gay minority out of office. But that takes more work, and it means every voter must weigh one vote taken in the statehouse against many. Maybe a voter does not like the vote their representative made on the same sex marriage amendment, but they generally like their other votes. Do they vote a politician they generally like out of office on that one single issue? Now suddenly, the bigots need the rest of the population to be as passionate about denying gay people equality as they are. And the population at large just isn’t. They might vote against us if it’s presented to them as a single issue. But it is not the single issue of most voters and the bigots know it.
This is how the tables turn on the bigots. For decades now they’ve been fighting against equality for gay people in situations where they’ve been able to win on their sheer passion, against a voting public that is lukewarm at best in support of us, but only lukewarm at worst in their own prejudices. They may find us distasteful, but they’re not going to throw out a politician they generally like because that politician let the homos marry each other. At least not in the blue states. Every time the gay haters have tried to hold a blue state statehouse accountable when it has supported, in some measure, the rights of same sex couples, they have failed. They failed in Vermont. They failed in California. And they failed in Massachusetts. And that is why there were 109 votes to recess yesterday. The voters Have spoken, and what they’ve said is they really don’t care that much about gay rights. And the bigots know it. That’s why the bigots want to fight this in a forum where they know they only need a minority of the registered voters to win, and where they can make the stab against their gay and lesbian neighbors as easy and painless as possible for just enough voters, to rewrite their constitutions. Tactics. They can’t complain now that they were outmaneuvered.
Well…they can…they’re hypocrites too after all. And they can probably still keep winning this way in the red states. Most of them. They lost after all in Arizona, which is more "leave us alone" libertarian then conservative (no daylight savings time for us, thank you…). But they’ve about picked off all the low hanging apples now, and the rest of it is going to be a fight, and no bigot ever wanted a fair fight. A fight where they massively outnumber their victims, sure. Their vision of democracy is more mob rule then anything resembling the vision of the founders. Which is why the founders put in all those checks and balances. A democracy is a government of citizens, of equals, not of mobs.
But get on this. It looks like Virginia will decide the senate. Karl Rove has turned races like this around before. You don’t know the lengths they’ll go to. Believe me, you’re not being imaginative enough.
Check out Josh Green’s article on Karl Rove from two years ago. Look what Rove pulled off in the disputed Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice race. Read it.
Get ready for the bogus headlines on Drudge. The rumors and innuendo. Live boys and dead girls. Like I said, your imagination will only get you maybe half the way there. Get ready.
Right. We’re still in a knife fight for the future of the American Dream. But it’s hard not to feel a great satisfaction upon seeing images like this from last night…
Hello? Dubya? Dubya? Hello…?
Yes…a bunch more states passed amendments stripping same sex couples of any and all legal rights. But one state, Arizona, didn’t, and even though that’s only one state, it puts a knife in the homophobe’s argument that every time same sex marriage comes up to a vote it looses. Last night Arizona defeated one at the polls. And what is more, it was done without the help of our worthless national gay rights organizations…
With 94 percent of the vote reporting, it looks like Arizona’s Prop. 107, the gay marriage ban will go down — 51.6 percent against it, 48.4 percent for it. Of particular interest is Maricopa county (home of Phoenix) which went against the ban. Pima county, home of liberal Tucson, played a big part in the victory — defeating the amendment by large margins.
Cindy Jordan, chair of No on 107, credits the victory (if it occurs, knock on wood) to grassroots efforts.The big national gay organizations have been notably absent there, and the campaigns have been smart about attracting voters from both conservative Phoenix and liberal Tucson with targeted messages and tactics. "We did this with no national help," says Jordan, "this grassroot’s effort was local."
(emphasis mine) This is exactly why I don’t give money to those jackasses.
In Tennessee, voters passed an anti same sex marriage amendment by about 80 percent, which I know is going to cause a lot of pain to some very good people, and friends of mine down there. But according to reports I’ve seen it was done with only about 20 percent of the voters actually voting on it. I wonder what was going on in the minds of the people who voted, yet decided not to vote on that issue. I doubt it was because they didn’t think they knew enough about the issue to cast a vote on it. You’d have to be living in a cave not to have heard the issue being discussed, and you know damn well that practically every vein throbbing pulpit thumper down there was exhorting his flock to go to the polls and smite the homosexual devils. But only a small fraction of those who voted, voted on the issue one way or the other, if the stories I’m hearing are true.
Divided loyalties? I can’t vote against the baby Jesus, but I can’t vote against my son…daughter… brother…sister… aunt…uncle… co-worker…neighbors…? Tired of all the hate…but unwilling yet to take a stand against it?
I’m glad to see the South Daktoa seems to have repealed it’s horrible anti-abortion law. At Daily KOS, they’re saying that with 86% of precincts reporting, Referendum 6, the abortion ban was at 45% Yes; 55% No. The same sex marriage and civil unions ban was 52% Yes; 48% No. Almost exactly the inverse. The worst hypocrites of the night were those voters in South Dakota, who voted against the abortion ban and voted against giving same sex couples any legal rights too.
Full Text of Constitutional Amendment C:
Section 2. That Article XXI of the Constitution of the State of South Dakota, be amended by adding thereto a NEW SECTION to read as follows:
9. Only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in South Dakota. The uniting of two or more persons in a civil union, domestic partnership, or other quasi-marital relationship shall not be valid or recognized in South Dakota.
Democracy means liberty and justice for me…not for thee…
You have to worry that with so much corruption, so much fiscal debt, and the dawning realization now, even in the red zones, that Iraq is an unmitigated disaster, that so many of these races were so close. But any election night that costs so many gutter crawling bigots their seats, like Maryland’s own jackass governor Ehrlich and his bigot pal Steele, is still a pretty good one.
Gay Marylanders won’t have to beg you any more for a shred of common human decency Bob. Fuck off.
On October 29 the state of Tennessee essentially washed its hands of the question of whether or not Love In Action needed to be licensed in order to treat mentally ill "clients". Tennessee agreed to pay LIA’s legal bills in exchange for their dropping a lawsuit that claimed they had a religious exemption from any department of health oversight. Tennessee is accepting the word of a man who said God could make him see blue walls were there were yellow, that he has not, and will not be dispensing drugs to his "clients".
The fact of their forcing ex-gay therapy on unwilling gay teenagers, which was what started the public outcry over LIA practices, was never at issue, unfortunately. At least one gay teen has publicly accused the ministry of forcing him to take Prozac, which he did not have a doctor’s prescription for. LIA denied it, and apparently Tennessee never performed more then a perfunctory investigation of the allegations that they were giving clients drugs, let alone that they were forcing them on unwilling gay teenagers as part of their therapy to cure them of their homosexuality. What their dangerous mix of religion and invasive psyco-therapy does to adolescents, apart from any issue of drugging them, was never even looked into. So the abuse of gay youth in Memphis will continue. Probably until some catastrophe happens, at which point everyone will be wondering why nothing was done sooner…
I keep plugging Fred Clark’s blog, Slacktivist, because he’s a really decent guy, and in these times of religious right triumphalism this nation needs more voices like his. Had there been more Baptists like him in my life growing up, I might still regard myself as one.
Haggard has waged this political battle against homosexuality while living a lie. That requires two, related responses. The first is on a political level. Haggard and his allies have been fighting a political fight — they have been trying to wield power to force others to comply with their wishes. And it’s perfectly legitimate to respond to power with power…
…
But the second response — which I can’t ignore — has to do with Ted Haggard the person who is, among other things, my "brother in Christ." There’s a script for how this will play out in the evangelical community — a script written out on that very same NAE page cited above:
… homosexuality [is] a sin that, if persisted in, brings grave consequences in this life and excludes one from the Kingdom of God.
Individual Christians, ministers, and congregations should compassionately proclaim the Good News of forgiveness and encourage those involved in homosexual practices to cease those practices, accept forgiveness, and pray for deliverance as nothing is impossible with God. Further, we should accept them into fellowship upon confession of faith and repentance, as we would any other forgiven sinner.
All that language — forgiveness, deliverance, confession, repentance — really means here only that Haggard needs to go back to living a lie. If he agrees to live that lie, and with clenched teeth to continue proclaiming that others must join in living that lie, then Haggard will be "accepted" back "into fellowship."
Haggard is now seeking "spiritual advice and guidance," and there are tens of thousands of Very Nice Christian people praying for him. But his spiritual guides and advisors are all going to tell him to follow that script. Those people praying for him are all praying for him to follow that script. And that script is evil. That script is a lie.
For Christ’s sake, enough with the lies. The last thing Haggard needs is to be "accepted" into a fellowship that cannot accept who he really is. Both he and that fellowship have just been given an opportunity to abandon lies. I’m praying that they will recognize that opportunity and take it.
Go read the whole thing. I ping Fred’s blog often. You should too. At the end of her novel about the life of the poet Simonides, The Praise Singer, Mary Renault writes, "In all men evil is sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men." It’s a moral roadsign we can all try to keep in view, regardless of our spiritual or political beliefs. And it is the touchstone by which you can see, clearly, what distinguishes the militant religiosity of the right. This country desperately needs more people like Fred in the public discourse, who keep doggedly trying to rouse within others, their better nature.
It is the tragedy of these times, not only for the Christian faith in America, but also the American Dream, which once upon a time offered the promise of religious freedom to the oppressed people of the world, that the arousal of ugly passions that turn neighbor against neighbor has become nearly synonymous with Christian politics in America. And the religious right is not completely to blame for it either. Secular and cynical politicians, republicans largely, have been using the fierce hatreds of that one strain of American Christianity as a crowbar to break this nation into ever smaller and smaller warring factions, the better to win elections. And they’re supported in that, by secular and cynical big businesses, who don’t give a good goddamn about religion, but about keeping big business friendly republicans in power.
Regardless of our spiritual beliefs, simply as American citizens, we all have a stake in making sure other Christian voices can be heard too. We can demand that our news media not routinely accept the pronouncements of the Dobsons, the Falwells, and the Robertsons, as "the Christian point of view". We can demand that whenever religion is brought into the public discourse, that the religious right is not given a free pass to define Christianity in the popular culture. Every one of us, whether we ourselves are Christian or not, have a stake in how broadly the Christian experience is represented in the media. Because the voices of peace and reconciliation must not be shut out of the conversation. Because a house divided against itself cannot stand.
(Denver, Colorado) Evangelist Ted Haggard, one of the leaders of a proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Colorado, stepped down from the ministry of his 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs after a male escort alleged he had a three year pay-for-sex affair with Haggard.
Haggard denies the affair, but in an afternoon news conference said that he was stepping down to allow church elders to conduct an investigation. Haggard also said he was voluntarily resigning as president of the multimillion- member National Association of Evangelicals.
After a day of whirlwind controversy surrounding New Life Church and its leader Ted Haggard, who went on administrative leave earlier Thursday, the acting Senior Pastor, Ross Parsley tells KKTV 11 News that Pastor Haggard has admitted to some of the indiscretions.
Thursday morning, Mike Jones went on a Denver radio talk show and said Pastor Haggard paid him for sex over the past 3 years. Jones also claims Haggard did drugs with him. Pastor Parsley says Haggard admitted that some of the allegations are true, but not all of them. The church is not saying what Haggard admitted to.
That’s the way this dance usually goes. First, denial. Then what Nixon aid John Ehrlichman once called the modified limited hang out. Coming next…the tearful confession and rehab.
Harper’s Magazine did a profile of Haggard in an article back in May 2005, titled Soldiers Of Christ …
The city’s mightiest megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle slope of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and blue, as it happens, are Air Force colors. New Life Church was built far north of town in part so it would be visible from the Air Force Academy. New Life wanted that kind of character in its congregation.
“Church” is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands of teens and twentysomethings for New Life’s various youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500; this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its 11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.
The picture that emerges of Haggard isn’t of just your usual babbling pulpit thumper, but an archetype of the new breed of confrontational, militant and coercive Dominionist. Haggard fancied himself, a Spirit Warrior…
He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the Air Force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings. One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—“Control.”
Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”
So Haggard, there in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain, built himself a command base of his own from which to wage spiritual warfare…
The Prayer Center—a joint effort of several fundamentalist organizations but located at and presided over by New Life—houses a bookstore that when I visited was called the Arsenal (its name has since been changed to Solomon’s Porch), as well as “corporate” prayer rooms, personal “prayer closets,” hotel rooms, and the headquarters of Global Harvest, a ministry dedicated to “spiritual warfare.” (The Prayer Center’s nickname in the fundamentalist world is “spiritual NORAD.”) The atrium is a soaring foyer adorned with the flags of the nations and guarded by another bronze warrior angel, a scowling, bearded type with massive biceps and, again, a sword. The angel’s pedestal stands at the center of a great, eight-pointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and blue-black stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in various states of undress….
In the chapel are several computer terminals, where one can sign on to the World Prayer Team and enter a prayer. Eventually one’s words will scroll across the large flat screens, as well as across the screens around the world, which as many as 70,000 other Prayer Team members are watching at any point in time. Prayers range from the mundane (real-estate deals and job situations demand frequent attention) to the urgent, such as this prayer request from “Rachel” of Colorado: Danielle. 15 months old. Temperature just shy of 105 degrees. Lethargic. Won’t eat.
Remember that passage from the Bible, where the devil tempts Jesus with kingdoms of the earth, and all the worldly power therein? There is no poor sucker more vulnerable to the temptations of power, then someone who wants to save the world. Particularly one who needs desperately to save the world, because they’re utterly unable to save themselves. Control won, and it wasn’t much of a contest. The hook was already in him when he arrived aimlessly in Colorado Springs, and when he saw that vision of a glittering city of spirit warriors his own magnificent redemption in the making of it was too much to resist and Control just reeled him in. It was his own spirit he needed to worry about. But you have to know yourself to win that battle, and Haggard, apparently, didn’t want to know.
This is from an interview with Haggard, quoted on Ex-Gay Watch…
The biblical argument could be made, but not in this particular case. In Washington, D.C., our argument has to be the fact that the greatest benefit to society and to our culture and to the children of our nation would be to instill in our Constitution that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. It would be devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization for us to say that homosexual unions or lesbian unions or any alteration of that has the moral equivalence of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.
So that needs to be inculcated into the Constitution, otherwise we run the risk of a Supreme Court decision that will say that a gay couple living together and a heterosexual couple living together have the same standing under the law.
If the only same sex intimacy the man ever permitted himself to experience was secretly with anonymous call boys, then it isn’t surprising that he’d feel that heterosexual coupling was a superior, more wholesome form of human union. You see the same thing happening over and over with these closet cases. Consider Mark Foley…
In 1992, as a Navy lieutenant, Thorne-Begland announced he was gay during a nationally televised interview, helping to lay the groundwork for the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy. Four years later, after Foley voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, Thorne-Begland called to complain.
"I said, how could you vote against me, my family, your own self-interest?" recalled Thorne-Begland, now an attorney for the city of Richmond, Va. He said Foley responded, "I could never compare any relationship I have ever had to the nature of my mother and father’s relationship."
When you see your sexual nature as something innately broken and unwholesome, then you’re going to seek out broken and unwholesome sexual encounters. It’s not a matter of proving to yourself that being gay means having nothing but brief, barren assignations. It’s because you don’t believe down in your gut that it could ever be anything more.
And when you see other gay people fighting for equality…well…you just know in your gut that those kinds of relationships aren’t equal, can never be equal. Because that brokenness inside of you is all you know. But you’re not broken because you’re gay…you’re broken because you threw your sex life into the gutter. Just like the gay haters told you to.
And when you see other gay people holding on to their spirituality, steadfastly insisting that God does not condemn them, or their love, you just know in your gut that they’re deceiving themselves. God condemns them, because you condemn yourself. Just like the gay haters taught you to.
I have a YouTube posted in the previous blog, that’s a satirical salute to all the closeted gay people in Washington working to deny equal rights to gay Americans. The list is amazingly big, and as the film makers go through one name after another, with Judy Garland singing "Over The Rainbow" in the background, you really realize how much damage these people are doing, not only to the gay community as a whole, but to the American Dream as well. At the end of it, a banner on the screen reads, "It’s okay, boys… A closet is just a bedroom, with no self respect."
There is no line this President has not crossed — nor will not cross — to keep one political party, in power.
He has spread any and every fear among us, in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears — some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency.
And now it is evident that it no longer matters to him, whether that effort to avoid the judgment of the people, is subtle and nuanced — or laughably transparent.
Senator John Kerry called him out Monday.
He did it two years too late.
He had been too cordial — just as Vice President Gore had been too cordial in 2000 — just as millions of us, have been too cordial ever since.
Exactly right. We’ve been in a knife fight ever since the republicans took, let’s be honest here…Seized, power in 2000, for the fate of the American experiment in democracy. Perhaps some of us saw more clearly then others what was coming, your gay and lesbian neighbors especially, since we’ve been fighting the radicals on the right, both religious and secular, for decades now. But as Bush tore up one institutional check on his power after another, over and over again treating the constitution as a mere suggestion, if not a dirty joke, it should have become obvious what we were dealing with. These are not your grandfather’s republicans. I’ve heard them referred to as feral republicans. But really…they’re fascists. For some of us, the time for being cordial ended long ago. For the rest of America, it ended in November 2000.
There is tonight no political division in this country that he and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no anxiety that he and his party will not inflame.
Why do they do it? Simple. United we stand…divided we fall. It really is all about that. When Pat Buchanan said to Nixon, "If we tear the country in half, we can pick up the bigger half," he wasn’t talking about the bigger half of a democracy. The right wingers want to govern…they want to rule…they have no interest whatever in letting the people govern themselves. Because then their power is less. Because then they’re merely citizens like the rest of us. It really is all about that. We are going to loose this democracy if more of us, and in particular the other political parties, are not willing to confront republicans as bluntly and as forcefully as necessary, and name what it is that they have become, and where they are relentlessly dragging this country. Garrison Keillor was only partly right…they are not merely republicans first, and Americans second. They are only republicans. It is not democrats and liberals they oppose. They oppose democracy itself. The stand solidly against the bedrock this nation was founded upon: liberty and justice for all. To them it is a dirty joke. That needs to be said now. No more cordiality.
[Update 2]… In comments, Peterson Toscano gives a link to the original. I can’t embed it here, apparently it’s supposed to be a commerical, not for a video, but for the services of Dr, Corvino and other lecturers at Kirkland Productions and they don’t want it floating around the net (and I want to vent about this kind of thing later), but the original is Here.
[Update…] Crap…this video is marked as being "no longer available". So I’ve taken it down. What the flying fuck is wrong with these people?
Via a friend on MySpace… Some excerpts from a lecture on the morality of homosexuality by Dr. John Corvino. He makes a lot of the same points I keep trying to make here, but I really like his approach to that Texas legislator who kept insisting whenever a gay rights bill came up that "animals don’t do that".
A former LIA "client" and now booster takes issue with this post of mine. Here’s my reply…
—–
> I, having been a client at LIA (March, 2005), would like to know some of
> Lance’s horrendous experiences caused by his time there.
A client were you? Swell. You know the difference between being a "client" and being an inmate…right? There’s the beginning of the horror right there buddy, and what’s disturbing right off the bat about your comment is that you seem utterly unable to even notice it. So you my friend, are part of the horror.
Those kids are not in there by choice. Most of them had either made peace with their sexual nature, or were at least beginning to, when they were dragged into LIA by parents terrified from the cesspool of anti-gay propaganda that the religious right vomits into the public discourse, much of which John happily repeats. Joe Stark was on Pat Robertson’s 700 club, mindlessly babbling that gays only live an average of 36 years. Where the hell did he hear that claptrap, if it wasn’t John? Even Paul Cameron isn’t claiming 36 years. But John doesn’t seem to care where he gets his facts on homosexuality, as long as they’re sufficently ugly.
For months at least, if not longer, John was linking his LIA website to a group called The International Organization Of Heterosexual Rights, and using their bogus statistics to paint a picture of homosexuals and homosexuality that was relentlessly perverse and disgusting. After community activists started pointing out how unChristianly it was to be linking to a hate site, John pulled the link. But he kept their bogus fact sheet online. So at least for a time (I haven’t been there recently), people visiting his site were still being given this crap from a hate group…only they weren’t being told who the source of this information was. Dig it. John responded to the accusation that he was spreading hate rhetoric, not by taking it down, but by making it harder for people to discover that the facts on his website were coming from a hate group.
I think part of the reason he does it is because he knows that it frightens parents, and that’s his last best source of clients now: Helpless gay teens who cannot legally refuse his dangerous blend of anti-gay religiosity and junk psychology. As more and more comes to light about the practices of these ex-gay ministries, and their spectacular rates of failure, fewer and fewer grown adults are checking in. So the kids, who cannot legally refuse, are his last best source of income, which he needs to keep the operation afloat. Never mind what it does to kids, to their parents, to the bond between parent and child…John’s on a mission from God, and Gods don’t feel shame.
Imagine a teen who is left handed. Imagine they’re told that their left-handedness is unnatural, perverse, a God condemned abomination. Imagine sending that kid to a place that claims to be able to treat left-handedness through prayer and counseling, and establishing a closer relationship to Jesus. They claim that left-handedness is a form of addiction, that using your left hand to do things like writing is no different from people who use their hands to rob, assault, and murder, people and animals. Imagine that left-handed kid being forced to sit next to grown men who’ve used their hands to do all manner of cruel and perverse things to animals and humans alike, while the staff of this treatment facility is telling him, perhaps not so much in word but sure as hell in deed, that he’s no better then those men. Someday, his desire to use his left hand instead of the God ordained right hand, will lead him into all manner of brutish, deviant, ugly acts.
Imagine this kid trying desperately…trying, trying with all his heart and soul to pray away his left handedness. But he can’t…he’s left handed. And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, it only serves to remind him that he doesn’t love God enough, that he’s headed for the same life that all those robbers, and murderers live. He’s going to become just like them one day…
What does that sort of thing to to a kid? Well we all know what it does to an adult because it happened. Does the name Jack McIntyre ring any bells? Or has John finally erased all memory of Love In Action’s bloody birth? McIntyre was one of LIA’s first clients (I say client because he went in of his own accord…a choice of free will that neither Lance nor Zach nor any kid in the horrifically misnamed Refuge "program" are allowed) A few months ago I finally stumbled on a copy of his suicide note. You want to know what the horror is my friend? Well…take a peek into the Pit then…
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
No. May God have mercy on yours, because I don’t have any to spare for the likes of you. Jack McIntyre killed himself, rather then make one more promise to God he knew he could not keep. Bad enough John Smid is doing this to grown adults. Now he’s dragging kids into his little psych room, where he’ll sit them down right next to grown men who have engaged in the most extreme sexual perversions imaginable, and let them know that they’re just like those men are, that their sexual orientation will lead them into all of that and worse. This is what John is subjecting gay teenagers to. He takes in kids who are more or less fine with their sexual orientation, or getting there, and puts his crowbar to their self esteem and tries systematically to utterly destroy their deepest sense of their inner selves, to make them see their sexual nature as ugly and perverse and foul, and that only a relationship with Jesus can save them from their homosexuality. But it won’t. They’re Gay. What happens is that they loose their faith, and often enough, loose their family too. But as long as the checks clear, John doesn’t seem to mind.
> I speak on behalf of LIA, not only because I believe in what they’re doing, but also
> because I care a great deal about John Smid and the LIA staff.
If you care about any of them then you need to do whatever you can to convince them to stop tormenting gay people, and particularly gay teens who are content with who they are. John is trying his best to gut their ability to ever feel good about themselves as gay people, and ever experience what it is to love and be loved, body and soul. He is systematically trying to put as much fear and loathing into teens and adults of their sexual nature so that they’ll never be able to love wholeheartedly without feeling ashamed and dirty. To assault someones sense of self to the point where they cannot see one of this life’s most wonderful, beautiful, amazing things as anything other then ugly and perverse is a crime against them of absolutely staggering magnitude. To do that to children is a crime against humanity.
> Zach Stark’s opinion of "reparative therapy," as it’s being dubbed, variegated a
> great deal after his experience at LIA. "Love In Action has been misrepresented
> and what I have posted in my blogs has been taken out of perpective and context,"
> as Zach is quoted at 365gay.com on 8-1-05. My question to Lance is this: What
> specific occurrences at LIA made your experience so horrendous?
As for Zach…I’m a little fuzzy about how you expect a kid who was forced into ex-gay therapy against his will, and who said in an update to that blog post you’re quoting from there that he could only post blogs his father approved of, to speak out publicly against his treatment. Actually, I’m being sarcastic. You know damn well he couldn’t. Since he’s still underage, and cannot speak for himself without suffering whatever consequences his parents (you know…the ones who put him into LIA in the first place) can dictate, it’s unreasonable to expect him to get on a soapbox about his feelings toward LIA. If I were you though, I would strongly suggest that his silence on the matter since those first couple of posts speaks volumes.
I was with Lance at a protest against reparative therapy in Silver Spring, Maryland. John Smid was there too, but too cowardly to come out to the line and speak with Lance himself. One of the other LIA staffers, a new guy, did come out because, as he said, he wanted to hear from Lance himself why he was upset about what LIA did to him. Lance gave him an earful, the gist of which was that he resented being made to feel horrible about himself simply because he’s gay.
John likes to boast that he brings families together. What happened to Lance after he left LIA was horrible, and he finally had to move out because his mom had become so abusive. The day he moved out, his mom cornered him and started beating the crap out of him. He’s told this to reporters and gave a more detailed account to Morgan Jon Fox who is doing a documentary on the LIA protests. Morgan and Lance let me sit in on the interview to take some photographs and Lance’s story nearly brought me to tears and I had to concentrate on what I was doing and I almost couldn’t. John did nothing, nothing for that family, except tear it apart. Oh…and he cashed the check.
You care about the LIA staff do you? Then dig up whatever stunted whithered stump of a conscience any of them still have left in them, and make them see two things they really, really need to see. First, that they are committing a monstrous assault on the human identity of the people they’re "treating" and their capacity to love and accept love from another. Second, that John has no brakes, and one of these days he’s going to push a gay kid too far and then they’re be more then Jack McIntyre’s blood on the LIA account books, and if you think the judgment on LIA has been harsh up till now, you haven’t seen anything. Yet.
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