Box Turtle Bulletin

LaBarbera Award: Laurie Higgins

The Nazis, of course, were notorious for having murdered an estimated six million Jews, along with another six million undesirable Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians — and let’s not forget homosexuals — for good measure. We all know that; that’s why you can say “Nazi” or “Hitler” without having to describe the abject evil they represent. And Laurie Higgins, of the Illinois Family Institute, thinks that Hitler’s atrocities are on par with homosexuality.

In an article she penned last July, Higgins says the “church should fight homosexuality like it did Nazism,” a confusing title given that she goes on to lament the church’s failure to fight Nazism as a parallel to today’s affirming churches:

What is alarming about the account of the German Evangelical Church’s reprehensible failure is its similarity to the ongoing disheartening story of the contemporary American church’s failure to respond appropriately to the spread of radical, heretical, destructive views of homosexuality. Don’t we today see church leaders self-censoring out of fear of losing their positions or their church members? Don’t we see churches criticizing those who boldly confront the efforts of homosexual activists to propagandize children and undermine the church’s teaching on homosexuality? Aren’t the calls of the capitulating German Christians for “a more reasonable tone” and a commitment to “honor different views” exactly like the calls of today’s church to be tolerant and honor “diversity”? Don’t pastors justify their silence by claiming they fear losing their tax-exempt status (i.e. government assistance)? Don’t they rationalize inaction by claiming that speaking out will prevent them from saving souls?

…I’ve asked this question before and I will ask it again: How depraved does the behavior have to be and how young the victims before the church, starting with those who have freely chosen to assume the mantle of pastor or priest, will both feel and express outrage at the indecent, cruel, and evil practice of using public money to affirm body and soul-destroying ideas to children?

Higgins asks, “where is the outrage?” Well I have some outrage for her. Virtually every question she asks is a strawman. First, is it even possible for Higgins to portray LGBT people less humanely than this? Nowhere is there even a hint that gay people are people, let alone fellow citizens, neighbors, parents, children, families, co-workers, care-givers, soup kitchen volunteers, or anything else remotely human. Instead, she equates her fellow citizens with the vile racism behind slavery and the horrific anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. Is that not, too, an outrage?

And further, how can she overlook massive numbers of evangelical, Catholic and Mormon churches which have actively fought to demonize LGBT people at every turn, including blaming gays for all sorts of natural disasters, economic crises and other evils in the world. They’ve accused LGBT people of conspiring to molest your children, abolish Christianity, and generally destroy civilization. They’ve collectively spent millions — probably even billions when it is all counted — to permanently render LGBT people as second-class citizens. I’m not one to draw parallels, but since she brought it up, I can’t help but notice that second-class citizenry was a tactic employed by the Nazis against a reviled minority back then.

Some Christians who think that being gay is a sin will say, in moments of pious reflection, that homosexuality is no worse a sin than any of the other sins and, heck, we’re all sinners. But Higgins is not that kind of Christian. She thinks being gay is a much worse kind of sin, a special Hitler-and-Nazi-Germany kind of sin. Higgins needs to bone up on her history and closely observe the consequences of labeling a hated minority with that kind of evil. And accept responsibility for her part in it.

Huckabee, Bauchmann, McClintock To Speak At Conference Featuring Hate Group

Former Arkansas Governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, Rep. Michele Bachman (R-MN), and Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA are confirmed speakers at the upcoming Take America Conference in St. Louis September 25 and 26. This same conference invited MassResistance to give a workshop titled “How to counter the homosexual extremist movement,” presumably on of the strength of their resounding successes in Massachusetts.

MassResistance is one of only eleven anti-gay groups designated as an official hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. MassResistance has developed closes ties with Holocaust Revisionist Scott Lively, where he was a featured speaker at the MassResistance banquet last January. Conference connections to hate groups don’t end with MassResistance. Host committee member Don Feder spoke at the 2007 Watchmen On the Walls conference in Riga, Latvia. The Watchmen, another SPLC-designated hate group, was also co-founded by Scott Lively.

The Take America Back conference is co-chaired by Phyllis Schlafly (Eagle Forum) and Janet Folger Porter (Faith2Action). Other host committee members include LaBarbera Award Winners Mat Staver (Liberty Counsel) and Rick Scarborough (Vision America), as well as Don Wildmon (American Family Association) Dick Bott (Bott Radio Network), Michael Farris (Home School Legal Defense Association), Phillip Jauregui (Judicial Action Group), Rick Green (Wallbuilders), and Joseph Farah (WorldNetDaily).

Air Force Pilot Outed By False Criminal Accusation

Air Force Lt. Col Victor Fehrenbach has made the rounds on radio and television ever since he came forward with the news that the Air Force was trying to discharge him under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” He even scored a meeting at the White House during the much-derided LGBT Cocktail Party to mark the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion in June. What hasn’t been told was how Lt. Col Fehrenbach got caught in the DADT crosshairs to begin with:

Fehrenbach confronted a crisis in a very different setting. A Boise police detective sat across a conference table questioning him about an alleged crime.

Fehrenbach, stationed at Mountain Home Air Force Base, was in a Catch-22. To clear himself of the claim he’d raped a man, Fehrenbach could tell police his side of the story. But admitting he’d had consensual sex could get him kicked out of the Air Force he loved after 18 years.

Fehrenbach asked Detective Mark Vucinich whether his employer had a right to see his statement. Yes, replied Vucinich.

Fehrenbach then told the detective he had sex with Cameron Shaner on May 12, 2008. He’d met Shaner, 30, on a gay Web site and invited him to his southeast Boise home.

Police and Air Foce investigations found no evidence that Lt. Col. Fehrenbach committed any crime. But Shaner, a discharged Army Veteran with a 100 percent service-connected disability for post-traumatic stress disorder and skeletal injuries, pressed the Air Force to begin discharge proceedings against Fehrenbach — all because of a false allegation:

Because of the criminal allegation, Victor confirmed the fact he was gay,” said Emily Hecht, a lawyer for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund. “That’s all the Air Force needed. Had his accuser been a woman, he’d have gone back to work with no further issue.”

The unique circumstances behind Fehrenbach’s case has caught the attention of Defense Secretary Bill Robert Gates and Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, who has the final call on whether Fehrenbach will be dismissed. He is currently still on active duty at Mountain Home Air Force Base near Boise, Idaho.

Lesbian Couple Say They Were Assaulted At Baptist Church

Rev. Kenneth Whalum, Jr., of New Olivet Baptist Church is running for Memphis mayor this fall. Monique Stephens and her partner were interested in supporting the Reverend in his mayoral run, and decided to attend the 11 a.m. service to get an up-close look at the man. That’s when things went awry:

An hour into service, Whalum told the congregation to bow to the ground and blow kisses to God, Stephens said, but she and her partner, who are agnostic, did not move. She said Whalum and church members began calling them “devil worshippers” and “gay,” among other derogatory names. Security guards surrounded and pushed them out of the sanctuary. Stephens said her glasses were broken and both she and her partner of three years have bruises and scratches from the altercation. No arrests were made, police said.

Rev. Whalum says the couiple were removed because they were being disruptive, not because they were lesbian. “If I put every lesbian out of church, we\’d be putting people out of church all day long,” he said.

August 24th Washington Referendum 71 Update

A total of 103,898 signatures have been reviewed, or 75.5%
A total of 91,716 have been accepted, or 76.1% of those required.

The current fail rate for non-deferred signatures is 11.69%. However, this is accurate for only the first 220 volumes; the rest is subject to revision for registrations not processed in the data base before it was downloaded. I project that there may be perhaps another 700 signatures that are considered rejected at the moment which will ultimately be accepted.

At this point we are working under assumptions and guesses, but the “real” fail-rate is probably around 11.0% of all inspected signatures. Unless there is a high fail-rates for the last quarter of signatures – perhaps 16.8%, then this referendum may qualify. Keep in mind that we do not know whether the petitions are homogeneous or if the last quarter is cleaner or less clean than the first three quarters.

Judge Dismisses DOMA Case Which Prompted Controversial Obama DOJ Brief

A U.S. District Judge dismissed the case of Smelt v. United States, the Southern California lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act which became known for the controversial brief supporting DOMA that was field by the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. Judge David O. Carter dismissed the case on a technicality, ruling that that the suit had been improperly filed in state court before transferring to Federal Court. For the case to go forward, it must be re-filed in Federal Court. Plaintiffs’ lawyer Richard Gilbert said he would re-submit the suit again.

Sunday Driver: Where I Come From

I don’t know how much of this is true, but I think I remember reading that anthropologists say that those exotic names a group of people give themselves, whether it’s an American Indian tribe or an indigenous ethnic group in Africa or South Asia, often come down to just being that group’s word for “us” or “our people.” It’s the outsiders they name, not the in-group. The in-group is just “us.”

Welcome to my hometown, where Oxycontin is known as "hillbilly heroin."

Like I said, I don’t know how true that is but it somehow feels right. I grew up in Appalachia, which I guess makes me an Appalachian. I grew up in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the Ohio river right about where Ohio meets Kentucky and West Virginia. I don’t think I or any of my friends really thought of ourselves as Appalachians; the word didn’t really have any meaning for us until we moved away — that is, at least, among those of us who did manage move away. I mean, okay, we saw television commercials for Appalachian Power, and the mountains a hundred or so miles to the east were the Appalachian Mountains, but it was just a name to us. We were just “us,” just like the anthropologists said. It wasn’t until I left that I came to understand our Appalachian-ness.

Now, I know that Dolly Parton always says that when she was growing up, she didn’t think she was poor. Neither did I, but then again, we really weren’t poor. We were perhaps lower middle class, somewhat middle class-ish, somewhere in there. Generally better off than our neighbors, but not as well-off as middle class folks in the big cities like Columbus — which, by the way, was for us the very definition of a chic and sophisticated cosmopolitan city. Yes, Columbus. Which goes to show we really were Appalachian.

But it took me a very long time before I could own the name “Appalachian.” After all, it carries a lot of baggage in the larger American culture. Hillbillies, moonshine, “Deliverance,” — that’s just barely scratching the surface, and none of it was relevant to my growing up there. All of those images are grossly unfair to the good people who live there, including most of my own family who still make Southern Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia their home.

But over time I have come to embrace where I came from, although I have to admit that it is much easier being from there than it would be had I remained there. The further away I’ve moved, the easier it has become for me to be Appalachian. Maybe it’s the safety of distance that allows me to do this, but I doubt it. I think it’s more a matter of the perspective that that distance provides. I mean, think of it this way: we all come from somewhere, but so few of us come from a place so unique that outsiders had to give it a special name. So why not own that?

The remains of the steel mill where my dad and just about everyone else worked until 1980. There's a Wal-Mart there now.

I was reminded again of where I come from when I saw this article posted on my hometown newspaper’s web site. It appears that there are a couple of people there who are still looking for Bigfoot. You know, Sasquatch, the legendary man-beast of the forests. And someone else made a documentary about them, which debuted at SXSW in Austin last year. But according to filmmaker and Portsmouth native Jay Delaney, the movie’s not really about Bigfoot, but “the trials and triumphs of life in Appalachian Ohio. It\’s not only their research, but also the struggles they face in trying to hold on to this dream they have.” This trailer gives you a very good idea of what my hometown looks like and what the people there sound like.

Watching that made me just a little homesick. I know you won’t understand that, but there it is. I’m looking forward to the DVD coming out next month.

Sometime when I was in middle school, there was a huge local Bigfoot rage going on. We suddenly heard all these stories about Bigfoot sightings in the forests and hills out in the county, but no one ever got a good, clear picture of whatever it was they thought they saw. That’s why few people took these sightings seriously. In fact, someone or someones unknown decided to have a little fun with all the talk by creating three-foot long stencils of bare footprints and spray-painting huge white Bigfoot-prints on the sidewalks all over town. To paraphrase Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter, we may have been hicks but that didn’t mean we were stupid.

I never saw Bigfoot, at least not in real life. But they did come to me once in a dream. I dreamed I was hiking in the woods out by Turkey Creek Lake where I came across a family of Bigfoots — a father, a mother, and a couple of, I guess, Littlefoots? Anyway, they were in a cave sitting around a stone table about to have dinner. Daddy Bigfoot saw me and gruffly hustled the kids away, but Mamma Bigfoot stayed behind so we could talk. “You’ll have to excuse him,” she said. “He’s really very nice once you get to know him, but he just doesn’t trust people. You see, we’ve been hunted down, chased, and treated very badly by them. Humans just won’t leave us alone.”

I nodded, and felt a little bit ashamed for having encroached on their home. But she reassured me that everything was okay with a gentleness that I found very touching. I was then overwhelmed by a desire to prove that at least one human could treat a family of Bigfoots with dignity and respect. But in order to do that, there was one point on Bigfoot etiquette that I really needed to know. So I decided to broach what seemed to me a delicate subject.

“May I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she said, raising her furry eyebrows ever so slightly.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what do you call yourselves?”

She looked at me with a look of gratitude that I would ask such a question. “Why, we call ourselves ‘Our-Its.'” Wow, I thought, just as anthropologists observed so many times before. And then she reached out and put her hand on my arm, leaned in ever so slightly, and said, “You know, we really hate the name ‘Bigfoot.’ It’s so… “ she paused, then whispered, “demeaning.”

Yeah, I know just what she means.

What Is “Sunday Driver”?

Through the week, all of us here at BTB write a lot of serious stuff about what’s happening in and to the LGBT community. It can get pretty heavy at times. I’ve always found that one way to unwind is to take a meandering, slow journey to nowhere in particular; a sort of a brief respite before beginning again for another week. I love nothing better than getting behind the wheel and seeing where the road takes me. To me, that is pure relaxation.

That’s the idea behind a new series at BTB we call “Sunday Driver.” It’ll be a time when we can take a pause and remind ourselves about the good and enjoyable things in life. Perhaps a road-trip or weekend outing, or just some random thoughts that we’ve gathered along the way. The trip can be a real place that few people know about, or it can be a figurative destination of ideas and imagination.

And you can join in too. If you have an essay, photograph, video, or anything else that you think might be an interesting journey — whether it’s your favorite weekend getaway, unusual hobby, funny incident, poignant moment, or whatever you want to share, you can send it in. If it makes the cut, we’ll let you take the wheel for an upcoming Sunday Drive.

So tell me, where do you want to go?

Playing For Our Team

Here’s an interesting tidbit from a magazine that I would never read otherwise. ESPN ran a very non-scientific, non-representative poll of 85 current college players about the state of the game for the “College Football Confidential” edition of ESPN’s TheMagazine. To the question “Do you have any gay teammates?”, about half of those surveyed — 49.4% for the sticklers among you — said yes, they believe they have at least one teammate sharing their lockerroom. In the Pac-10, 70% said yes. And no, I have no idea how many PAC-10 players they surveyed.

[via Queerty]

Lutheran Schism In the Making?

Leaders of Lutheran CORE (Coalition for Reform) responded to the church decision to accept partnered gay clergy with a press release (PDF: 25KB/2 pages) calling on “faithful Lutherans” to meet in Indianapolis in September to begin an “expanded ministry that draws faithful ECLA congregations together”:

“We are encouraging individuals and congregations to join us in Indianapolis to discuss what the future for faithful Lutherans in the ELCA might look like and how faithful congregations and individuals can work together ,” [Lutheran CORE chairman and bishop Paull] Spring said. “It is crucial that those ELCA Lutherans who uphold the authority of Scripture work together. We need each other. We urge people to come to Indianapolis.”

“We intend to gather the largest possible body of faithful Lutherans so that we might collectively plan a united common future. For that reason it is important that congregations and individuals not make hasty decisions about their future in the ELCA,” Spring added. “We want to work together to do what will be best for all of us and for the continuation of faithful Christian teaching.”

Partnered Gay Lutherans Can Be Pastors

Capping a week in which the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America took strongly affirmative stances in welcoming and supporting gay Christians, the Lutherans have now voted to allow gay and lesbian ministers in lifelong monogamous same-gender relationships to serve.

First the assembly voted to keep today’s controversial vote a simple majority, rather than a 2/3 supermajority. Then they affirmed, by a 2/3 vote, a new statement on sexuality.

Today the denomination addressed the four step process outlined by their task-force, though the ordering has shifted to 3, 1, 2, 4:

Step three asks this church whether, in the future implementation of these commitments, it will make decisions so that all in this church bear the burdens of the other, and respect the bound consciences of all.

This step was confirmed 771 – 230.

Step one asks the assembly whether, in principle, this church is committed to finding ways to allow congregations that choose to do so to recognize, support and hold publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships.

This step was confirmed 619 – 402.

Step two asks the assembly whether, in principle, this church is committed to finding a way for people in such publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships to serve as professional leaders of this church.

This step was confirmed 559 – 451. It is official. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in American will accept as ministers – for those churches who so desire – gays and lesbians with partners.

Step four proposes the specifics of how this church can move toward change in a way that respects the bound consciences of all.

The details of this step are yet to be announced.

A New Wrench in the Washington Count

There is good news and bad news in the Washington Secretary of State’s verification of signatures for Referendum 71, the effort to stop enhancements to domestic partnerships from taking effect.

Good news: the fail rate seems to be inching closer to 12.4% every day. With 64.1% inspected, the permanant rejection rate is now 11.92%. But…. not exactly.

Bad news: there is another level of inspection which has previously not been included in my calculations. The position of the Secretary of State is that if 120,737 registered voters signed the petition, it goes on the ballot. In our reviews of the rejected signature rates, we have not been accounting for some valid signatures that are currently considered rejected.

The SoS is comparing signatures to a copy of the registration as of a specific date. But if a voter both registered and signed the petition on the same day (a not-uncommon occurance) then they would be a valid signature but their registration would not show up on the copy. So a final inspection is made of those signatures that have not been found on the rolls to see if their voter registration was processed after the database was secured.

Our checkers are finding in the live database about 12 percent of the names that were originally “not found” on the late June database copy. That is, of course, because the referendum organizers were encouraging people to sign the petition and register to vote at the same time, so many people actually registered to vote in July for the specific purpose of signing this petition. It is common practice for signature gatherers to register voters while circulating initiative and referendum petitions. In the past, signature gatherers have submitted voter registrations during the signature collection effort.

So even if there is a 12.4% fail rate, some of those “permanantly rejected signatures” will find themselves back in the accepted pile. About 84% of rejected signatures are from the “not registered” category and of those about 12% will later be deemed to be good.

Assuming that these will be added back, the “real” rejected signature rate is about 10.72%. So while the rate edges up daily, yet again our assumptions that this will fail have to be adjusted and it is – as the SoS has said all along – too close to call.

Lutherans Allow Blessing of Gay Unions

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted today to allow — but not require — congregations to bless same-sex unions. The vote was 619 in favor and 402 opposed. Next up later today: a vote on allowing gay clergy to serve while in committed relationships.

Tel Aviv Gay Center Faces Threats

The Tel Aviv LGBT center, site of this month’s horrific shooting spree, has reopened under the protection of an armed guard, among other security measures. The center’s leaders have continued to receive death threats, with the latest coming from an Orthodox Jewish web. A writer for that web site told the Ha’aretz newspaper that the “perverts” who manage the gay center “should be forced to face a firing squad.” His remarks came in response to a controversial unsigned letter posted on that web site calling on authorities to arrest the center’s leaders for “the acts they carried out on minors behind the walls of that club of perversion”.

The Peter Discovers Bisexuals

That’s right. There are bisexuals among us. And Peter LaBarbera found a “homosexual newspaper” that was willing to admit it. One can only guess what Peter thought the “B” in LGBT stood for. At any rate, it seems he’s still struggling with the concept. His headline? “Half of Homosexuals Are Bisexual”.