Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJanuary 7th, 2008
Today the American Civil Liberties Union is a stalwart champion for equality for the LGBT community. But that wasn’t always the case. On this day in 1957, the ACLU’s Board of directors adopted this statement:
The American Civil Liberties Union is occasionally called upon to defend the civil liberties of homosexuals. It is not within the province of the Union to evaluate the social validity of laws aimed at the suppression or elimination of homosexuals.
That policy statement was published in the March 1957 issue of Civil Liberties: Monthly Publication of the ACLU. Ironically, that statement was placed next to a sidebar marking the 100th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision.
The ACLU would change course some seven years later, thanks largely to the efforts of Washington, D.C. activist Frank Kameny. In November, 1961, in the same month that Kameny helped found the Washington Mattachine Society, he also helped found that city’s chapter of the ACLU. After he persuaded that chapter to support gay rights, the Washington chapter lobbied the national ACLU to rescind their policy. The national ACLU finally acted in 1964, and by the end of the decade ACLU attorneys were on the front lines in defending gays and lesbians in American courts.
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Barbara Louise Jean
March 7th, 2008
Frank Kameney rescued Sandi Stancil from a Virginia Mental Health Institution (can’t remember name)sometime in the 1960s. Her parents in Lynchburg, knowing she was living with a Lesbian on a MD farm where they raised purebred poodles, called the FBI and said their daughter was crazy and had a gun. FBI arrested Sandi and took her to mental health place for “obser-vation”. Frank showed up on, I think, the 5th day and requested her release. Sandi was scared so refused to speak to the staff. She hoped her lover would call Frank; that was the hope that kept her sane. I hope Mattachine has a record of this because they saved her sanity. I met Sandi in 1978 and she told the story on lesbian radio in D.C., probably Sophie’s Corner. We were together for 9 years.
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