Posts for 2011

CA Supreme Court: Prop 8 Supporters Can Appeal

Jim Burroway

November 17th, 2011

The California Supreme Court has ruled that when state officials decline to defend a proposition, the proposition’s official proponents have legal standing to appeal (PDF: 343KB/72 pages):

In response to the question submitted by the Ninth Circuit, we conclude, for the reasons discussed above, that when the public officials who ordinarily defend a challenged state law or appeal a judgment invalidating the law decline to do so, under article II, section 8 of the California Constitution and the relevant provisions of the Elections Code, the official proponents of a voter-approved initiative measure are authorized to assert the state’s interest in the initiative’s validity, enabling the proponents to defend the constitutionality of the initiative and to appeal a judgment invalidating the initiative. …

So now the appeal of the lower court’s ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional goes forward in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Fly to Kenya Before Lunch

Jim Burroway

November 17th, 2011

Tired of the same old thing in The Advocate or Out? I got an email blast this morning from Kenyan LGBT activist Denis Nzioka, communication officer of Gay Kenya, who has announced the second issue of Identity (“gay, straight or on the rocks”). This issue is an impressive 35-pager that you can see online here. Thumbing through it is a real eye-opener on the gay experience in the East African nation. Articles that I found particularly interesting include the cover story about gay nightlife in Nairobi from the 1980s to the present. Another one that caught my interest was an article about Nicholas Otieno’s two-day ordeal in dealing with Ugandan police as he tried to cross the border with pamphlets and CDs that he had brought for an LGBT advocacy meeting in Kampala. He was held and interrogated for carrying “suspicious materials.” Other articles deal with what it means to be trans and African, gay and African, and more particularly, gay/trans and Christian — there’s a lot of material on that, reflecting the importance of religion in Kenyan culture. The range of issues explored here and the style of writing reminds me of the assertive, determined, yet optimistic feel one gets when one reads an old copy of ONE Magazine from the 1950s. But this is no throwback; the topics and presentation in Identity are very much rooted in the 21st century. The entire issue is available online here.

The Daily Agenda for Thursday, November 17

Jim Burroway

November 17th, 2011

TODAY’S AGENDA:
CA Supreme Court To Issue Ruling on Prop 8 Appeals Standing: San Francisco, CA. There is a slim chance (in my opinion, at least), that tomorrow might be the day when marriage equality effectively returns to California. To see how that might happen, let’s review: On August 4, 2010, Federal District Judge Walker Vaughn found Prop 8 unconstitutional because, as the lawyers arguing against Prop 8 put it, junk science, fear and prejudice were put in trial and lost. Conservatives tried to force Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown to file an appeal, but the California Supreme Court said they didn’t have to if they didn’t want to. Which they didn’t. That was kind of important because it wasn’t clear that anyone besides the governor and attorney general had standing for appeal. Since this involved California law, the Federal Appeals Court asked the California Supreme Court to perform one of the roles that state supreme courts are supposed to do and Federal courts are not qualified to do: interpret California law and tell the Feds whether the authors of Prop 8 had standing to defend Prop 8 on appeals.

While that was going on, Judge Walker decided to come out of the closet, which sent Prop 8 supporters in a tizzy. So Prop 8 supporters sued to overturn Walker’s ruling because gay judges can’t rule on gay issues, just like women judges can’t rule on women’s issues and black judges can’t rule on black issues. Oh, wait. It was a black judge they got to hear the case. Good thing that wasn’t really their argument, but the one they did try to use wasn’t any better.  The new judge upheld Walker’s ruling, so now we’re back to waiting on the California Supreme Court to decide whether Prop 8 supports have standing to appeal.

And that wait ends tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. PST. If the California Supremes advise the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that Prop 8 supporters don’t have standing to appeal, then the Appeals Court is likely to accept that advice and rule the case over with Judge Walker’s ruling intact. If that happens, then it’s a crap shoot as to whether the U.S. Supreme Court would even accept an appeal of the Ninth Circuit Court’s ruling, although that remains a possibility. It’s also possible though that the Appeals Court may still want to hear more briefs and more arguments before they are prepared to rule on the issue of standing for Federal Court.

However, if the California Supremes say that Prop 8 supports do have standing to appeal, then we have another long schedule before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for briefs, argument, and ruling on the appeal itself. And then, almost certainly, it goes to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the CA Supremes rule that Prop 8 supporters have standing. I doubt that for a question this important they’d be willing to effectively stop the process in its tracks right now on what many would see as a technicality. I really don’t see nondiscriminatory California marriage licenses showing up anytime in the near future. But hey, I’m not a lawyer. What’s your bet? Betting closes at 10:00 a.m. PST.

Transgender Day of Remembrance Several locations. While Sunday is officially the day set aside to remember those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia, some TDoR events are taking place today and through the weekend. TDoR began in reaction to the brutal murder of Rita Hester, who was killed on November 28, 1998. Her murder resulted in the creation of the Remembering Our Dead web site and a candlelight vigil in 1999. Observances typically consist of the reading of the names of those who have died because of their gender identity, expression, presentation or perception of gender variance. Observances are being held in cities all around the world. Click here to find an observance near you.

Transgender Day of Action: Washington, D.C. The nation’s capital has been the scene for several violent attacks against transgender and gender variant people, including LaShai McClean on July 20, and Gaurav Gopalan on September 10 (Golpan was a gay man dressed in drag when he was attacked). Beginning at 1:00 p.m. today, a broad coalition of organizations and concerned DC residents will be hand-delivering written goals, demands, and deadlines aimed at stemming the escalation of violent crimes against Transgender people in the District. Starting with Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier and U.S. District Attorney for Washington, DC (DA USAO) Ron Machen, who oversees the city’s federally-administered justice system, the activists will continue with Mayor Vincent Gray, and all 13 City DC Councilmembers. Click here for more details.

If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

Priorities and perspectives in Illinois

Timothy Kincaid

November 16th, 2011

The American Family Association has, unintentionally, the most revelatory article on the final cessation of the foster care program of the Catholic Charities of Illinois. Although the Catholic Church had appealed the state’s decision to allow gay couples to be foster parents, time has run out so they are dropping their appeal.

And so they are ceasing their 90 year old program. Because, unlike 90 years ago, the current Catholic Church is unwilling to fund a foster care program out of their own pocket.

But it is two statements within the article that caught my attention:

Now the state will only be dealing with organizations that are willing to hand children over to homosexuals.

There is something about that which is so bald, so unfiltered, that I caught my breath. The implications are astonishing.

This isn’t about “the best environment for children” or “denying a mom or dad” or any of the other catch phrases. Rather, there is a broadly shared assumption that gay people not only would be harmful to children, just by their being gay, but also that there is some nefarious element involved.

To Charlie Butts and Bob Kellogg, the authors of this article, being homosexual is cause not to have access to children. By default. And, like Catholic Charities, they would never “hand children over” to someone like you or me.

One of my themes in writing here, indeed one of BTB’s underlying themes, is to provide a more nuanced perspective on the views, goals, fears, and concerns of those who oppose our political equality. We don’t often use language such as “bigot” or “hater” here. Not only is it not particularly effective, it often isn’t an accurate portrayal of the motivations, thoughts or intent of those being called bigot and hater.

But there is something about that sentence – presented alone as its own paragraph – that is so full of contempt, so full of animus, that I have a hard time finding any motivation that isn’t based in hatred.

But then at the end of the article I read the words of a Catholic man, words which bring me hope and faith. I also found an irony, a sadness, and a recognition that while his church may have their own priorities, he needn’t follow their lead. Oh, I’m sure that AFA didn’t see it – and, indeed, he may not have seen it – but Gary Huelsmann could not have said it better.

Meanwhile, an organization once known as Catholic Social Services of South Illinois has severed its ties with the diocese in order to comply with the state law. Gary Huelsmann, executive director of the agency, recently told LifeSiteNews that it “boiled down to the Catholic Church needing to stay true to its core beliefs and the agency needing to take care for all of the abused, neglected children.”

What if there were a god named Fred who hated lies?

Timothy Kincaid

November 16th, 2011

Now I know that here at BTB we have readers from diverse places and a wide variety of beliefs. Some, like me, have a belief system that includes the divine while others are skeptical or dismissive about claims of supernatural beings that cannot be substantiated. From orthodoxy to atheism to skepticism and uncertainty, BTB accepts us all.

But let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s all suppose that there is one god, and that his name is “Fred”. (Fred either has six arms or two and is either inordinately fond of fried chicken livers or finds chicken repulsive – depending on which Order of Fred you ask. The ascetic monks of Outer Urboo even claim that Fred has tentacles and flies. But none of that is material to our story.)

We also assume that Fred is omniscient and that he has established a code of behavior. And, for sake of our experiment, let’s assume that within that code, Fred highlights ten specific things that humans are forbidden to do. And finally, let’s agree that in this hypothetical situation, that one of the ten forbidden behaviors is “bearing false witness”.

To be clear: often for simplicity’s sake, people talk about deities banning lying. But Fred is very specific. He forbids any instances in which you present yourself to others as a witness about a matter (as one who has information that others lack) and then give testimony about that matter that is false or intended to deceive. That is a really big no-no in Fred’s book.

With me so far?

Okay, now – within that context – consider a hypothetical email message sent out by Fred’s Followers in response to the effort to repeal the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (which prohibits the Federal Government from recognizing same sex marriages). They warn their readers, as FF tracks such things and are better informed, of what the consequences would be of this bill passing. They are, in the words of our deity, “bearing witness” about the bill.

The repercussions are enormous:

  • States laws protecting marriage as between “one man, one woman” will become null and void – including the 31 states who have voted on constitutional amendments.
  • The military will be thrown into complete chaos and disarray, as Department of Defense leaders try to figure out housing, benefits, and “same-sex spouse” sensitivity training regimens.
  • Churches will come under fire from radical homosexual activists. Ministers and churches will be sued for “religious discrimination” for refusing to perform or allow gay “marriages.”
  • Public schools will be forced to indoctrinate our children, teaching them that homosexual marriage is both natural and acceptable.

Let’s take a quick look at these claims to see if Fred would approve. The relevant language from S 598 is as follows:

Sec. 7. Marriage

(a) For the purposes of any Federal law in which marital status is a factor, an individual shall be considered married if that individual’s marriage is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into or, in the case of a marriage entered into outside any State, if the marriage is valid in the place where entered into and the marriage could have been entered into in a State.

So how do the claims of Fred’s Followers match up to reality? How did FF do?

Claim 1. As we can see, nothing in S 598 addresses state laws at all. Not only are they not made “null and void”, they aren’t even up for consideration.

This bill only would define the federal government’s rules of recognition and further would actually recognize and honor the restrictions on marriage imposed by those 31 states. While a soldier in Alabama might have her marriage recognized on base, it must have been conducted in one of the states in which she could marry and there’s no requirement that the Fred-fearing people of Alabama not point at her and scream “single, single, single brazen hussy of the leeeeesbian variety” if they so choose.

Now it is possible, even likely, that the various state DOMA amendments will be found by the United States Supreme Court to be in violation of the US Constitution. But until such time as the Supreme Court steps in and reminds the states that “any person” does not have an asterisk, states will be free to continue to be as exclusionary and unfair as AFA’s readers wish them to be.

Conclusion: claim 1 has no truth whatsoever.

Claim 2. Currently the Department of Defense leaders are experiencing a small amount of disarray as they try and comply with the provisions of DOMA that prohibit them from treating gay service personnel the same as straight personnel. Like most employers, they would prefer to just have one set of rules that apply to everyone.

But recent efforts to simplify (e.g. applying chaplain marriage structure equally) resulted in outcry from folks like Fred’s Followers and congressional meddling and a lot of back-peddling to please those who do not wish for gay people to be accorded the same rights and privileges as heterosexuals. And Defense officials are still not entirely certain how to apply (or, actually, deny) benefits for gay soldiers. Ironically, rather than throw them into disarray, it would be a tremendous relief for the military if DOMA to no longer intruded into their obsession for procedure and order and equal application of rules.

Conclusion: not only is claim 2 false, the opposite is true.

Claim 3. This claim is deceptive in its wording and deliberately so.

The US Constitution provides churches with the freedom to conduct such rites as they choose and to set whatever parameters they like for refusal. That is not in question. So FF says that churches will be “under fire”. And, indeed, they will. From their own members.

Gay and Lesbian and equality-loving heterosexual Presbyterians will pressure the Presbyterian Church (USA) to allow clergy to conduct same-sex weddings and to establish standard language by which to do so. But that has nothing at all to do with S 598. They are already doing so. In denomination after denomination and congregation after congregation, churches are seeking wisdom and discernment over how same-sex attracted congregants fit into the body of faith and “radical activists” of all inclinations are telling their stories and sharing their insight.

And the idea of gay couples suing churches over “religious discrimination” is so obviously false as to be laughable. The whole point of denominational autonomy – and surely there is no one who does not acknowledge that the First Amendment protects denominational autonomy – is to discriminate between rites, beliefs, and practices. The Church of Fred has no obligation to provide a venue for marriage ceremonies to anyone and the Fredite priests have no obligation to perform them. And nothing in that will change with S 598.

Conclusion: claim 3 has no kernel of truth whatsoever.

Claim 4. This one is similar to Claim 1. Schools and their curriculum are under state and local control; nothing in S 598 will or could force public schools to teach anything at all about marriage – gay, straight, natural, acceptable, or in accordance with the Ancient and Most Holy Broom-Jumping, Hora Dancing, Egg Stomping, Henna Painting, Dowry Gifting Rites of Connubial Bliss established by the Good and Gracious Fred, himself.

Conclusion: not only is claim 4 a flat out lie, it’s a rather obvious one as well.

Fred’s followers may be fools who lack the intellectual capability of distinguishing between an apple and a pineapple. They may be so mind-numbingly stupid, so tragically impeded, or so hopped up on Delphic vapors that they actually believe what they wrote.

And Fred, being gracious, just might look at his followers sadly and wonder, “how did I end up as the god of a bunch of idiots?” Perhaps their simple-mindedness would incline Fred towards mercy. And being fictional, after all, Fred’s Followers aren’t hurting anyone.

But, as I’m sure you guessed, this story isn’t really fiction. And the American Family Association, the real organization who crafted the above email and sent it out to all of those on their email list, is hurting people. And they are not fools. The AFA knew that they were disseminating false witness. Those who receive and respond to an AFA Action Alert may be so divorced from the law and how it works that they could believe that S 598 will result in their pastors being sued or the Military devolving into chaos, but the Wildmon family and their employees are not.

So this raises a most peculiar conundrum.

The American Family Association claims that they believe in a deity. They state that they believe in God and promote virtue by upholding in culture that which is right, true and good. The god they talk about is a holy and righteous god that cannot abide sin. Their god has provided forgiveness but he also demands repentance and change. Their god intends to throw all liars into a lake of eternal punishment for willfully breaking his commandments.

And yet the American Family Association has borne false – blatantly, inarguably, false – witness. Again.

So how can this be? If the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked, then how can you, one of his followers, flagrantly and repeatedly defy a commandment so important to God that it made it into his top ten list?

If Don and Tim Wildmon and the others who pay their bills though anti-gay activism at the American Family Association believe in the god they preach, why then don’t they fall on their knees in fear and trembling and beg their god for mercy? Why don’t they dedicate their remaining days to recanting their lies and healing the damage they have caused?

Because they don’t believe. They couldn’t. And that’s their biggest lie of all.

We Already Have Same-Sex Marriage in All Fifty States

Rob Tisinai

November 16th, 2011

Same-sex “marriage.”

Grrr.  Anti-gays do love their scare quotes, as in:

Them:  There’s no such thing as same-sex “marriage.”

Us:  Hello? Same-sex marriage is legal in 6 states!

Them is wrong, but the response from Us doesn’t get at what they really mean. And when you look at what they really mean, a surprising conclusion leaps out:

We have same-sex marriage in all fifty states.

This occurred to me as Will and I watched The Eagle. You might think Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell as a Roman Legionnaire and his extremely fit slave would hold my attention, but the picture’s moody and slow. On the up side, it allowed plenty of time for a wandering mind.

At one point, our boys are traveling in the far north of Britain, past the borders of Roman rule. Channing shouts at Jamie, “You’re still my slave!” And I wondered, Is he? Why?

Why should Bell go on as Channing’s slave without the Empire there to enforce it? Slavery is not a morally valid concept. It exists, to be sure, but our moral code (well, mine at least, and I hope yours) never justifies saying, “This person should be a slave.”  Slavery is morally illegitimate, and exists only because a government (or a culture, or a person of low humanity and sufficient power) decrees it to be so.

That’s one way slavery differs from, say, honor. The US government awards the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry, but it doesn’t bring honor and gallantry into being. It merely recognizes the fact, which exists with or without government.

Our opponents view marriage through this lens. Marriage is a real thing. It predates government, and marital law should reflect its real nature. Same-sex “marriage” is a morally invalid concept, one that exists only when the government forces it on people.

Now you might not agree that marriage is something more than marriage law, but it’s our opponents’ view, so consider it for a moment.

First, it means that marriage is different from our understanding of marriage.  If marriage is “real,” and not just whatever we say it is, then we have to struggle with our imperfect human brains to understand it.

And this means marriage law has to evolve.

It’s happened before.  People realized women aren’t mentally and emotionally weaker than men, and the result?  The end of coverture:

As it has been pithily expressed, husband and wife were one person as far as the law was concerned, and that person was the husband. A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband’s wishes, or keep a salary for herself. If a wife was permitted to work, under the laws of coverture she was required to relinquish her wages to her husband.

This used to be the legal essence of marriage.  But people began to see that nothing justified such an automatic subjugation, so marriage law had to evolve.

In other words, we didn’t change the definition of marriage. No, we changed marriage law to reflect our better understanding of what marriage is (and our better understanding of human beings in general).

The same thing’s happening for gay people.  I was a 70s teenager, and in the back of B. Dalton Bookseller, I furtively looked up homosexuality in the most popular sex book of the day, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).  You know what the author told this teen?

He told me that homosexuals enjoy anonymous restroom sex, but most homosexual relations are more impersonal than that.

That homosexual encounters are always about the penis, never the person.

That public sex is the core of homosexuality. He asked, But all homosexuals aren’t like that, are they? and answered, Unfortunately, they are just like that. 

And when it comes to “homosexuals who live together happily for years”?

They are mighty rare birds among the homosexual flock. Moreover, the “happy” part remains to be seen. The bitterest argument between husband and wife is a passionate love sonnet by comparison with a dialogue between a butch and his queen. Live together? Yes. Happily? Hardly.

The original version of this #1 bestseller reached over 100 million readers — no wonder it’s taken people so long to accept same-sex marriage! And this might explain a quirky contradiction of my adolescent mind.  I had no guilt or denial over my attraction to men, but as far as being a homosexual, I certainly wasn’t one of them.

Lord. Who knows how many other people had their view of us warped by this vile piece of work?

Today, though, more than half the Fortune 500 companies offer domestic partner benefits, and less than half the country opposes same-sex marriage.  That’s not a blip or a fad or a fashion. That’s 40 years of extraordinary progress. Anti-gays chalk it up to political pressure and liberal misinformation, but if that were true? Then people who know gays would be less likely to support our rights. And that just ain’t so.

Back, then, to this notion that marriage is a real thing, which predates government, and that marital law should reflect its real nature. Marry that with our better understanding of gay men and women.  What do you get?

You get that marriage law must change if it’s to represent our best understanding of what it means to be human and married, our best understanding of marriage is.

So when somebody tosses those scare quotes at me and declares, There’s no such thing as same sex “marriage,” I’m going to reply:

We already have same-sex marriage in all fifty states. We’re just waiting for the government to see it.

Prop 8 may be decided at 10 a.m. tomorrow

Timothy Kincaid

November 16th, 2011

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. (Pacific Time), the California Supreme Court will advise the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as to whether the anti-gay activist organizations that are seeking to step in place of the State of California to defend Proposition 8 have standing, under California law, to do so.

Should the CA Supremes advise that the Proponents of Proposition 8 have no standing, and should the Ninth Circuit accept that advice, then the case is over. Proposition 8 will be dead and marriage equality will return to California.

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, November 16

Jim Burroway

November 16th, 2011

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Glenn Burke: 1952. He was known as “the guy who invented high fives,” when in a game in 1977, Burke was standing on deck fellow Dodger Dusty Baker was rounding third and headed for home after hitting a home run. As Baker crossed home plate, Burke raised his had. Baker responded by raising his also, and when the two slapped hands, history was made. Believe it or not. And to make the scene complete, Burke then stepped up to the plate and hit a home run of his own.

Burke made another kind of history, after a fashion: he is believed to be the first gay ballplayer who was out to his team mates. According to his 1995 autobiography, Out at Home, Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis offered to pay for his honeymoon if Burke agreed to get married. Burke said no. He also angered manager Tommy Lasorda by hanging out with Lasorda’s estranged gay son. The Dodgers soon traded him to the Oakland A’s, where manager Billy Martin called him a faggot in front of his teammates. He retired in 1979. In 1982, Burke became the first professional league player to come out as gay. He was a hero in his adopted community in San Francisco’s Castro, but without baseball his life soon spiraled downhill. He struggled with drug addiction, and for a while became homeless. He spent several months in prison for grand theft and possession of a controlled substance. His final months were spent with his sister before succumbing to AIDS in 1995 at the age of 42.

If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

Oh Stop Whining And Just Pay The Lady

Jim Burroway

November 15th, 2011

John Becker wrote about going undercover as an “ex-gay” patient at Marcus Bachmann’s clinic. After publishing the results, he also, as you can imagine, decided not to go back for any more “treatments.” Becker called to cancel his three remaining sessions, but apparently the receptionist only cancelled one. Which means that Bachmann is now is demanding payment for Becker’s two no-shows. He really wants that $150, and left this message on Becker’s voicemail:

Hello John Becker, this is Doctor Marcus Bachmann (emphasis his); I received a message from our billing department asking if we would write off the two no-show fees for 7/7/11 and 7/12/11. We will not (emphasis his) be writing those off, so you do owe those no-show fees, and we would expect payment as soon as possible, otherwise we will have to turn it over to collections. If you have any questions you can call …

Totally reasonable if you ask me. After all, those bills from Nordstrom can really add up fast.

Ugandan Health Officials Claim Human Rights Groups Are “Spoiling Our Response to HIV/AIDS”

Jim Burroway

November 15th, 2011

Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, reports that the Uganda Network of AIDS Service Organizations (UNASO) has identified several deficiencies in the country’s fight against HIV/AIDS. Among the shortcoming cited include a shortage of qualified health workers, anti-retroviral medications, and test kits. But the Ministry of Health sees another culprit:

However, Ministry of Health is blaming the stagnant HIV prevalence rates in the country on uncoordinated response to the epidemic by pro-gay and lesbian civil society organisations. Uganda’s HIV prevalence rates have remained between 6.5 and 7 per cent for about two years.

According to Dr Zainab Akol, the coordinator of the national Aids Control Programme, the number of Ugandans dying from Aids-related infections has reduced significantly over the last two decades; but added that the fight is now being derailed by the civil society.

“They are spoiling our response to HIV/Aids. They are derailing us by dragging us to human rights issues of homosexuals. We in the health ministry do not want to know your sexual orientation. We treat everyone so long as that person is sick,” she said.

Akol claims that Uganda was denied a US$270 grant from the Global Fund to Fight Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV/AIDS due to lobbying by human rights groups. A major AIDS NGO however denies the charge:

However, Mr Godfrey Tuwesigye of HURINET Uganda, described Ms Akol’s comments as misleading. “We have never called for cutting funding for HIV/Aids activities. We are just telling the ministry to streamline lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) in HIV/Aids activities. If in future we get a new type of virus among homosexuals, will they say they were not aware?” Mr Tuwesigye said.

Two months ago, we learned that Health Minister Christin Ondoa is also a pastor at Life Line Ministries, where she works under the direction of apostle Julius Peter Oyet. He is one of the most influential evangelical leaders in Uganda you’ve never heard of. Oyet was present in the gallery when the Ugandan Parliament first considered the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009, and he has been very open about his belief that homosexuality should be a capital offense. Oyet, who is also President of the Ugandan branch of the U.S.-based College of Prayer (or COP, which itself is a ministry of Rev. Fred Hartley’s Lilburn Alliance Church in Atlanta), was made a member of M.P. David Bahati’s staff to lobby Parliament for the bill’s passage. While Bahati is the bill’s author and sponsor, Oyet played a crucial role in its drafting.

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, November 15

Jim Burroway

November 15th, 2011

Frank Kameny (Washington Blade/Michael Key)

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Frank Kameny Memorial Service: Washington, D.C. Organizers had originally planned a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Washington Mattachine Society (see Today In History below), complete with a short talk by the Society’s founder, Frank Kameny. But Frank’s passing last month has prompted a change in plans. The planned commemoration will, fittingly, now become a memorial to Frank’s lifelong fight for gay equality. According to a statement released by the organizers:

Friends and allies of Dr. Kameny, and members of the general public, need no invitation to attend this service on Capitol Hill, capacity permitting. This spacious and historic venue was made available through the generous support from leaders of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, allies in LGBT equality and national service.

This historic date – November 15, 2011 – is the half-century anniversary of Dr. Kameny’s co-founding of the Mattachine Society in Washington D.C., considered the earliest “homophile” rights organization established in the Nation’s Capital and among the earliest in the United States. Fifty years ago in 1961, Dr. Kameny also filed the first gay civil rights brief before the U.S. Supreme Court. His original brief is now preserved at the Library of Congress.

The memorial will take place in the Cannon Caucus Room, Room 345 in the Cannon House Office Building beginning at 4:30 p.m. EST. The Cannon House Office Building is located south of the Capital, bounded by Independence Avenue, First Street, New Jersey Avenue, and C Street S.E.

Nigerian Embassy, London

Kiss-In At Nigerian Embassy To Protest Bid to Criminalize Same-Sex Marriage: London. Nigeria’s Same Gender Marriage (Prohibition) Bill seeks to outlaw same-sex marriage. It stipulates three years jail for a person who enters into a same-sex marriage, and five years jail plus fines for anyone who “witnesses, abet and aids” a same-sex marriage. A Kiss-in in front of the Nigerian Embassy in London is being organized by Nigerians in the diaspora. It will take place this afternoon from 4:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Nigeria House, 9 Northumberland Avenue, London Wc2N 5BX.

Frank Kameny (center) marching with members of the Washington Mattachine Society in 1970.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
First Official Meeting of the Washington Mattachine Society: 1961. On this date in history, gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny and several others held the first official meeting of the Washington Mattachine Society. The Washington Mattachines, unlike other Mattachine Societies elsewhere in the country, brought a new, aggressive approach to the fight for gay rights. Frank Kameny later reflected on the society’s founding in an essay he contributed to Eric Marcus’s Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights : 1945-1990 : An Oral History:

Meanwhile, other things were going on with Mattachine. The national structure of Mattachine collapsed in March of that year. The San Francisco Mattachine had cut loose all the other affiliates and wished them well, urging them to change their names and to keep on working. The Denver group became The Neighbors and disappeared. The New York group retained its name and incorporated as a nose-thumbing gesture to San Francisco. It be came the Mattachine Society, Incorporated, of New York versus the Mattachine Society in San Francisco. It was all very petty.

…That following November, on November 15, 1961, we had our first official meeting ofthe Washington Mattachine. I was the organizer and founder. We did all the things that an organization does when it gets going. We took out a back account, got a post-office box, wrote our constitution, elected our officers, set up our meeting structure, and chose a name. I opted against using the Mattachine name, but I was outvoted. I wanted something that was more explicit and expressive, but would’t have used the word gay then. While it was an in-group word, it hadn’t yet gone public.

Now the movement of those days was very unassertive, apologetic, and defensive. I don’t say this critically, and not necessarily derogatorily, but it was a different era. First of all, up to this time, homosexuality had never been publicly discussed. Let me give you an illustration of that. As you’re aware, the question of queers int he government was very much part of the grist of the mill for McCarthy in his hearings in the early 1950s. When McCarthy was riding high, I was still in graduate school at Harvard. I read the Boston Herald every day. I read the New York Times every Sunday. I listened to the radio all the time. I read Time magazine weekly. Yet I did not learn until somewhere around 1958 or 1959 that homosexuality had been a theme of those hearings because it was not widely reported.: the word homosexual was not fit to print or discuss or be heard. Virtually from one end of the decade to the other, outside the medical books, there was nothing anywhere on the subject. It was blanked out, blacked out. It wasn’t there!

Because there was no publicity, there was no way of getting to people. The people in the small movement at that time were only talking to themselves. There was absolutely nothing whatsoever that anybody heard at that time, anywhere that was other than negative! Nothing! We were sick; we were sinners; we were perverts. And so the movement, predictably, in retrospect, did not take strong positions. It gave a hearing to everybody, saying, “As long as it deals with homosexuality, all views must be heard, even those that are the most harshly and viciously condemnatory to homosexuals. We have to defer to the experts.” My answer to that was, “Drivel! We are the experts on ourselves, and we will tell the experts they have nothing to tell us!” Giving all views a fair hearing didn’t suit my personality. And the Mattachine Society of Washington was formed around my personality.

So we at the Washington Mattachine characterized ourselves within the movement as an activist militant organization. Those were very dirty words in those days in the movement, such as it was. You weren’t supposed to be militant. And we were, both in our actions and our goals. Our statement of purposes set out our goals, which were generally to achieve equality for homosexuals and homosexuality against heterosexuals and heterosexuality. Equality was the primary issue.

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About that last post…

Rob Tisinai

November 14th, 2011

I don’t know if I need to say this outright, but that last post was entirely satirical.  The TempFlow salesman didn’t blink an eye when I mentioned my same-sex partner.  He was great.

In that post, I was mocking our opponents who accuse us of flaunting our sexuality when we’re merely talking about our lives with conventional frankness.  I was pointing out the absurd lengths to which we’d have to go in order to mollify them.

I forgot, however, that this isn’t genuinely absurd at all — in fact, in too many places and for too many people it’s a daily reality.

Don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t take it as satire.  The fault is mine.  The fact is, some of our opponents — “respectable” ones, who are paid to write columns, who appear as experts on cable shows — have views so oppressive that my satire is no exaggeration of them at all.

Trying Not To Shove It Down Their Throats

Rob Tisinai

November 14th, 2011

I feel awful. I just flaunted my sexuality to a stranger.

It’s time for a new bed. Tempur-Pedics are pricey and apparently make some people feel overheated. I researched an alternative called TempFlow, which has a factory showroom near my work. They arranged to have a salesman waiting for me, so I warned them:

I won’t be buying today. I can’t buy anything until my partner checks it out. He’d kill me if I bought a bed without letting him test it.

The salesman laughed in commiseration. Our opponents, though, have taught me that deep inside he must have been suffering: I’d just shoved my sexuality down his throat! Since then I’ve pondered how I could have phrased that without violating his religious freedom to work in a place free of the homofascist harassment and bullying I’d just subjected him to.

Obviously, as a first step, I could choose not to refer to Will as “he.” That’s still leaves the problematic “partner,” though — who besides homosexuals refers to their partner as “partner”?

Finally I came up with this:

I won’t be buying today. I can’t buy anything until the person with whom I share my bed checks it out. The person with whom I share my bed kill me if I bought a bed without letting person with whom I share my bed test it.

There. That’s perfectly natural and not awkward at all. I feel like such an ogre for not plotting this out beforehand, perhaps typing it up so that I could read it from my computer screen, alongside inoffensive versions of a few hundred other comments I might have needed.

Now if I can just figure out an inoffensive way to lie down on the showroom bed and check it out with Will…

[UPDATE:  Please see http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2011/11/14/38790.]

Dominionism Is Not A Myth, Ctd.

Jim Burroway

November 14th, 2011

Yes, you can actually buy one of these so you can remind “both Americans and those abroad, of the Virtue that this Great Nation was founded on.”

High Crimes

Jim Burroway

November 14th, 2011

I’ve said this before and I’ll probably say it again a thousand more times: I cannot fathom what it is that gets into people who think that the appropriate response to witnessing the commission of a felony is not to call the police. Instead, they “report” it to a bureaucrat of an institution in whose best interest it is for the “scandal” — no, it’s not a scandal, it’s a crime — to be brushed under the rug and kept out of the newspapers. For decades, children were molested by Catholic priests and nobody thought to call the police. For decades, gay kids have been feloniously assaulted in the schools and an administrator is called upon to do what the prosecuting attorney is legally constituted to do.

And so we see the familiar pattern repeated again at Penn State. A grad student witnessed Penn State’s defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky raping a ten-year-old boy in the football team’s shower room and what was his response? If you had guessed that the burly former star Penn State quarterback stepped in to rescue a defenseless child from a rapist, you’d be wrong. Instead, he told Joe Paterno, who told someone in the administration, and everyone along the line let the matter drop after, I assume, a stern scolding of Sandusky. “Don’t do that again!”, I’m sure they told him. Except he did, of course, for more than ten more years and who knows how many more victims. Meanwhile, Mike McQueary, that grad student, went on to become an assistant coach. And Paterno, that paragon of virtue and civic responsibility, y0u know his response would have been very different had McQueary told him that something funny was going on between Sandusky and Paterno’s grandson. But that’s not who the victim was, and so Paterno revealed that all of his virtues went toward defending Penn State, and not an innocent young rape victim at the hands of his former employee in his own shower room.

Sandusky has finally been arrested, along with two Penn State officials who covered up his crimes and enabled him to continue raping God knows how many more kids in the decade since McQueary and Paterno’s shrug. The more he know about Sandusky, the more we can see that he fits an exceptionally well-defined pattern of a pedophile. First off, this case shows that heterosexual adult men — Sandusky is married and the upstanding father of six adopted children — can and do abuse boys. In fact, it’s the norm. Sandusky’s targets were mostly prepubertal males between the ages of 7 to 12. (Gay men, if they do engage in sexual conduct with underage males, are much more likely to choose post-pubescent males, not pre-pubescent ones.) A pedophile typically prefers a specific pre-pubertal male or female body type, but will sometimes abuse the other gender if their preferred type is not available, To a pedophile, pre-pubertal children’s bodies are sufficiently similar. He carefully selected his victims and “groomed” them with gifts, tickets to Penn State games, and access to the child’s football heros before and after the game. Plying them with gifts like these not only won over their trust — and their parents’ trust as well — but also ensured their silence when payback time came around:

The coach’s actions, according to his accusers, followed a pattern. He’d invite them places, pick them up in his car and then, they say, place his hand on their thigh while driving.

At the Penn State football facility, the grand jury alleges, he’d take them to work out and then suggest they shower together, where the touching progressed: soap fights, back rubs and naked bear hugs. It would allegedly lead to more.

Some accusers described a basement room in Sandusky’s house where they stayed overnight. He’d lie down and tickle them, rub their backs, and blow on their stomachs, they said. One alleged victim, now 24, told the grand jury he “would roll over on his stomach to prevent Sandusky from touching his genitals.”

If any of the boys tried to avoid him, the coach would stalk them by calling dozens of times and by visiting their homes, according to the grand jury report.

He’d try to regain their favor by buying them gifts: shoes, electronics, clothes, anything a kid might want.

Sandusky’s tactics didn’t always work. Many boys resisted. But others didn’t. And in the most insidious aspect to this whole mess, Sandusky set up an entire charity which may well have done some good in the lives of some of these young boys, but we also know it served as a conduit of victims for Sandusky’s ongoing criminal activities. That alone makes this case rather unique. Most pedophiles don’t have the resources to create their own supply chain. But other than that, Sandusky’s case represents a textbook case of what has been identified as a “regressed” type pedophile. For more information into this phenomenon, please see our report, Testing the Premise: Are Gays A Threat To Our Children?

And finally, some on the extreme right are taking this case as a reason why gays and lesbians shouldn’t be around children. That reaction is as predictable as it is nonsensical. If there had been a nationwide ban on gays being within 100 yards of a child, these crimes would have still gone on undetected. Remember, he was married and would have been completely protected by both this imaginary ban and the ongoing collusion of Penn State officials. This has about as much to do with homosexuality as the Charles Manson murders has to do with gun control or John Lennon.

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