Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, September 7

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival: Austin, TX. The festival actually kicked off last night with an opening night party, but the main events really get underway this weekend. aGLIFF is yet another opportunity to plug Morgan Fox’s This Is What Love In Action Looks Like, a documentary about the controversy surrounding sixteen-year-old Zach Stark’s committal to the Memphis-based ex-gay program known as “Love In Action” in 2005. Two years later, Love In Action shut down down the Refuge youth program that Zach was forced to attend, and LIA announced they were “suspending” their adult residential ex-gay program last week. You can read Daniel Gonzales’s film review here.  I’ve seen various trailers for the film, but haven’t had a chance to see the finished product yet. I look forward to seeing it soon. Most of the events for aGLIFF take place at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar.  Schedule and showtimes are available here.

Also, What “Love Won Out” Looks Like: Houston, TX. Exodus International will bring its Love Won Out road show to the Houston suburb of Sugar Land this weekend. As part of a lineup of activities to counter the event, Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out will host an overview of ex-gay ministries tonight at Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church, followed by a pastor’s panel and Q&A. Tonight’s activity begins at 7:00 p.m. And while you’re making plans, you might want to keep in mind that there will be a showing of Morgan Fox’s This Is What Love In Action Looks Like tomorrow night, also at Resurrection MCC. Fox and Brandon Tidwell, a former Love In Action client, will be on hand to answer questions after the movie. And on Friday, Ex-Gay Survivor and performance artist Peterson Toscano will reprise portions of his one-man play, “Doin’ Time In the Homo No Mo Halfway House,” along with excerpts from “The Re-Education of George W. Bush” and “Queer 101–Now I Know my gAy,B,Cs.” Resurrection MCC is located at 2025 West 11th Street in Houston.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Grimsby, UK; Humboldt/Eureka, CA; Limerick, Ireland; Mankato, MN; and Peoria, IL.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: Bathurst/Chaleur, NB.

Also This Weekend: Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, Austin, TX; Folsum Europe, Berlin, Germany; and OUT Film Festival, Nairobi, Kenya.

Joseph McCarthy and his "pixie," Roy Cohn

TODAY IN HISTORY:
McCarthy’s 145 “Deviates” In The State Department: 1952. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s (R-WI) anti-Communist hearings are a dark, well-known chapter in American history. His campaign to root out suspected “subversives” from under every bed wasn’t limited to Communists; there was a very strong anti-gay subtext to his witch hunts as well. For the first time, gay men and women were actively rooted out of all levels of government employment. Gays were seen not only as morally suspect, but also a security risk and a dangerous influence in government offices. In 1952, McCarthy published a book titled McCarthyism: The Fight For America, in which he laid out his crusade to rid the country of “Communists and perverts.” As part of his book’s promotion, McCarthy answered several question from the editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel. McCarthy accused several State Department employees by name of harboring Communist sympathies and took credit for their ouster. He also took credit for the removal of 145 “deviates”:

QUESTION — How many sex deviates have been removed from the State Department?

ANSWER — Ninety-one were forced to resign from the State Department prior to 1950 and 54 since that time. The Senate Special Investigating Committee had this to say about those who were allowed to resign: “In most of those cases, these known homosexuals were allowed to resign for ‘personal reasons,’ and no information was placed in the regular personnel files of the state Department indicating the real reason for resignation nor was the Civil Service Commission informed of the true reason for the resignation … Die ot the manner in which these cases were mishandled, 23 of those 91 state Department employees found there way into other departments of government.”

QUESTION — Do you claim that the sex deviates removed from the State Department were all disloyal?

ANSWER — No, but all were considered security risks. One reason why sex deviates are considered by all intelligence agencies of the government to be security risks in that they are subject to blackmail. Is is a known fact that espionage agents often have been successful in extorting information from them by threatening to expose their abnormal habits.

The Special Senate Investigating Committee had this to say about the high percentage of sex deviates in government: “The homosexual has a tendency to gather other perverts around him. Eminent psychiatrists have informed the subcommittee that the homosexual is likely to seek his own kind because the pressures of society are such that he feels uncomfortable unless his is with his own kind. Due to this situation the homosexual tends to surround himself with other homosexuals, not only in his social but in his business life. Under these circumstances, if a homosexual attains a position in government where he can influence the hiring of personnel, it is almost inevitable that he will attempt to place other homosexuals in government jobs.”

The worst irony in all this is that throughout McCarthy’s witch hunts, a young lawyer by the name of Roy Cohn served as McCarthy’s right hand man. During one of McCarthy’s televised hearings into the supposed influence of communists in the U.S. Army, attorney Joseph Welch accused McCarthy of accepting a doctored photo as evidence. Referring to Cohn, Welch asked McCarthy whether the photo “came from a pixie.” When McCarthy asked what a pixie was, Welch replied “a close relative of a fairy.” Cohn would later become a regular fixture in gay conservative circles, and died of AIDS in 1986.

Global Economic Crisis? Blame the Gay!

Mark Steyn is a bestselling conservative author. Frank Pastore is the host of the biggest Christian radio talk show in the US. The radio host has been promoting Steyn’s big lie about economist John Maynard Keynes.

I’ve written about this in depth elsewhere (go here, if you’re a policy geek), but to summarize, Steyn writes this in his new book:

In his pithiest maxim, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century social-democratic state and the patron saint of “stimulus”, offered a characteristically offhand dismissal of any obligation to the future: “In the long run we are all dead.” The Greeks [currently in upheaval over their economic crisis] are Keynesians to a man: The mob is demanding the right to carry on suspending reality until they’re all dead. After that, who cares?

He’s got the quote right, but the interpretation is pure dishonesty.

Keynes wrote that in 1923, snapping back at classical economists who believed the government should do nothing when the economy goes wrong. It’ll fix itself in the long run, they said — which Keynes viewed as small comfort to hard-working folks who lose their jobs or homes or savings before the long run finally arrives.  As Keynes put it:

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.

Keynes wanted the government to even out the business cycle by running budget deficits in bad times, balanced by surpluses in good times. That way we’re not passing down debt or a wildly unstable economy to the next generation.

I learned about Steyn’s lie when Frank Pastore repeated it on his talk show. Their agenda is clear:  Those who want to stimulate the economy aren’t just bad — they’re horrible, selfish people who care nothing about the future.

But what does this have to do with gays?

Well, nothing, I thought, until my Friday evening commute when I heard Frank Pastore interviewing Steyn on his radio show.  Here’s my transcription (or you can listen here):

Frank Pastore: Mark, I was just checking the Drudge Report:  the lead headline right now is talking about the United States for the first time in history is ten trillion dollars in debt,  and of course the reality that in the West at large and specifically here  in America we just can’t continue to pay for a social welfare state.  Where’s the money coming from and it goes back to something that Keynes said, “In the long run we’re all dead.” Explain that.

Mark Steyn: Yeah, I’m always struck by that line. He’s the most influential economist of the 20^th century. Barack Obama is a Keynesian to a fault, they fall back on Keynes to defend the stimulus and all the rest of it. [dramatic pause] Keynes was a childless homosexual, he was a libertine in many ways in his personal life. And I think that reflected his particular view of the purpose of life: “In the long run we are all dead.” That’s his most famous quote, it’s the one that’s in Webster’s, it’s the one you can — if you’ve only got one if you’ve only got one quotation from Keynes, it’ll be that one in whatever quotations book you look up. And I think that’s not how humanity works, that human existence is a compact between the present and the past and the future…

<snip>

Keynes just says, “Huh! Nuts to that, in the long run we’re all dead.” And that’s what you see in the streets of Athens, when those guys are rioting, and that’s what you see in Madison, Wisconsin –-

Frank Pastore: Yes!

Mark Steyn: — when those union workers are saying they’re going to defend those –- they don’t care if their privileges bankrupt the state. In the long run they’re dead, as long as they keep the checks coming till they’re dead, they don’t care what it does.

Frank Pastore: Yeah, and who’s going to end up paying for this? And, well, basically, screw our kids and our grandkids. And we’re doing that, and it’s like it’s the mindset of, “Well, hey, after all, in the long run we’re dead.”

Emphasis added.

Steyn isn’t just continuing to bear false witness against Keynes and Keynsians. No, he offers up Keynes’ sexual orientation as an obvious explanation of how the man could be was so awful: Surely Keynes wasn’t as terrible as that — wait, he was a homosexual? Oh, well then of course he was a selfish bastard!

You almost have to admire Mark Steyn’s big brass balls. He’s attacking Keynes’ character and he’s doing it by telling a lie! But that’s just the start. During the middle of dishonest rant about the debt crisis, Steyn also manages to toss in a smear gay about people in general (though to be fair, he might only want to slander childless gays, and he’d be just as eager to demonize straight people who aren’t parents — ya think?). It’s as if he’s doing a product placement for homophobia in the middle of his movie about the recession.  People are selfish, don’t care about community, want to steal from our kids, yada yada yada — oh, and it’s all because we trusted a homo.

Sadly enough, that’s one product that still seems to sell.

Two Men Attacked In Wichita, KS

From the Wichita Eagle:

Sgt. Jesse Boomer said two cars pulled up beside the 18- and 19-year-olds walking in the 1700 block of east Douglas, near Hydraulic, around 2:30 a.m. Six men, all in their late teens or early 20s, got out of the cars, accused the two men of “being homosexuals” and attacked them, Boomer said. The victims drove themselves to a local hospital, where they were treated for minor injuries and released.

Tammy Baldwin Announces Senate Run

Wisconsin Rep. Tammy Baldwin has announced her candidacy for Senate this morning. The six-term Democrat is running for the open Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Herb Kohl, who has announced his retirement. If she wins, she will be the first openly gay Senator in history.

Religious Groups Push for Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill Revival

There has been a lot of talk about the pending revival of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill (a.k.a., the “Kill the Gays” Bill) in the next month or so, or even as early as this week. This morning’s Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, reports on one important religious group in Uganda that is organizing a campaign to pressure Parliament to take up the bill. According to Daily Monitor:

L-R: Unidentified woman, American holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, International Healing Foundation's Caleb Brundidge, Exodus International boardmember Don Schmierer, Family Life Network (Uganda)'s Stephen Langa, at the time of the March 2009 anti-gay conference in Uganda.

Parents under the Family Life Network and Uganda Coalition for Moral Values (UCMV) have opened a fresh campaign to force the government abandon economic and foreign policy considerations and pass the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009.”We urge you to do what is right even if it is not politically correct. Remember that your first obligation and loyalty should be to the citizens of Uganda and our children who are our future,” they urged government in a statement signed by Mr Steven Langa, the executive director Family Life Network.

Mobilising under the ‘Uganda National Parents Network,’ the “Pass the BILL Now Campaign” the parents addressed journalists in Kampala yesterday and outlined their course of action, following revelations lately that Cabinet had abandoned the bill owing to international pressure from donor countries.

Langa’s Family Life Network was the organizer of the infamous March 2009 conference in Kampala which featured American anti-gay extremists Scott Lively, Exodus International boardmember (and current Treasurer) Don Schmierer, and Caleb Lee Brundidge of Richard Cohen’s International Healing Foundation. It was at Langa’s conference where Lively dropped his now-famous “Nuclear Bomb.” Langa followed that meeting with another one in which he repeated the falsehoods he learned from Lively, Schmierer and Brundidge. He also organized a press conference with a claimed Ugandan “ex-gay”, who was later found to have been paid by anti-gay extremists for his cooperation. Langa also appeared on local FM radio announcing the names of gay people in Kampala and demanding mass arrests, and he organized a march on Parliament demanding stiffer penalty against gay people.

Langa is a member of Phoenix-based Disciple Nations Alliance. According to the DNA’s web site, he heads the Uganda affiliate called Transformation Nations Alliance (TNA). The first DNA Vision conference in Uganda was held in 2000 at Stephen Langa’s Watoto Church (then known as Kampala Pentecostal Church). The second conference in 2001 was held at the same church. The DNA claims that Langa’s mission at TNA is to lead “to the restoration of God’s original plan for creation.” The DNA’s mission is very similar to the Dominionist “Seven Mountain’s Mandate,” particularly where they say:

The Disciple Nations Alliance began in 1997 as a joint initiative of Food for the Hungry International www.FH.org and the Harvest Foundation www.harvestfoundation.org to envision and equip local churches worldwide to fulfill their strategic role in the transformation of communities and nations. The Disciple Nations Alliance began by promoting a “school of thought” centered on the power of Biblical Truth for cultural transformation, the strategic role of the church in society, and the importance of wholistic, incarnational ministry.

In the latest report from Daily Monitor, Langa promises to launch a recall campaign against any member of Parliament who fails to support the bill’s reintroduction into Parliament.

Beware The Hordes of Homosexuals

Anthony Pugno, head of California’s Yes on 8 campaign known as Protect Marriage, is worried that some of teh gay might accidentally rub off on him as he is forced to “push through the hordes of homosexual activists” on their way to the San Francisco State Supreme Courthouse this morning:

Please join us, and thousands of other supporters, in prayer this evening and tomorrow morning for safety as our Legal Team pushes through the hoards [sic] of homosexual activists into the courthouse in the heart of San Francisco, and for the wisdom and grace needed to prevail in court.

Protect Marriage is arguing before the California Supreme Court this morning for standing to pursue an appeal of the Federal Court decision which declared California’s Prop 8 unconstitutional. That ruling is stayed until the California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court works out whether Protect Marriage has standing to appeal since the State of California has refused to do so.

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, September 6

TODAY’S AGENDA:
CA Supreme Court to Hear Arguments on Prop 8 Standing: San Francisco. When Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker struck down California’s Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, he did so without the State of California’s defending the proposition. Instead, the Alliance Defense Fund stepped in to unsuccessfully defend Prop 8. However, now that it is appeals time, the Ninth Circuit Court asks the Supreme Court of California for a legal interpretation of that state’s constitution to determine whether which the authors of a proposition could appeal a federal decision if the elected representatives of the state choose not to do so. In other words, does California law allow non-elected persons to step in to enforce a state law by appealing a federal court decision finding the law unconstitutional when the duly elected officials (i.e. the state Attorney General) decides not to do so. Parties for and against Prop 8 will appear today before California’s Supreme Court to flesh out that very question. Oral arguments will be televised on the statewide California Channel public affairs network, and the proceedings get underway at 10:00 a.m. PDT. LGBT advocates will hold a “No Standing for Prop 8” sit-in on the steps of the Supreme Court beginning at 8:00 a.m.

Schematic diagram of Louis William Max's device for inducing a powerful electric shock. (Click to enlarge.)

TODAY IN HISTORY:
First Recorded Case Of Electric Shock Treatment for Homosexuality: 1935. The idea had been floated around for quite a while among therapists practicing a brand new, non-Freudian form of psychology known as Behavioral Therapy. The premise for this form of therapy goes back to Pavlov’s dog, which was trained to salivate whenever it heard a bell ringing. Behavioral Therapy used various systems of rewards and punishments — mostly punishments — to instill desired behavior in their subjects. And therapists were always on the lookout for new, effective forms of punishment. Shocking patients with a dose of electricity was seen as one promising avenue, but improperly administered, electric current could be lethal, as prisons from Sing Sing to San Quentin demonstrated on a regular basis. But in early 1934, that problem was solved. New York University’s Louis William Max introduced a new device that he invented to safely administer a painful electric shock to his patient at a meeting of the New York branch of the American Psychological Association. The following year, Dr. Max traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to present a brief talk before the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting about his attempts to cure homosexuality using his new electric shock device. On Friday, September 6th at 2:00 p.m., the APA convened a panel on Abnormal Psychology at the University of Michigan’s Chemistry Amphitheater (room 165, to be exact), where Dr. Max gave his talk. The transcript of the talk itself is not available, but this brief synopsis appeared the following month in the APA’s Psychological Bulletin:

Breaking Up a Homosexual Fixation by the Conditioned Reaction Technique: A Case Study. Louis Wm. Max, New York University.

A homosexual neurosis in a young man was found upon analysis to be partially fetishistic, the homosexual behavior usually following upon the fetishistic stimulus. An attempt was made to disconnect the emotional aura from this stimulus by means of electric shock, applied in conjunction with the presentation of the stimulus under laboratory conditions. Low shock intensities had little effect but intensities considerably higher than those usually employed.on human subjects in other studies, definitely diminished the emotional value of the stimulus for days after each experimental period. Though the subject reported some backsliding, the ” desensitizing ” effect over a three month period was cumulative. Four months after cessation of the experiment he wrote, ” That terrible neurosis has lost its battle, not completely but 95% of the way.” Advantages and limitations of this technique are discussed. [10 min.]

Behavioral techniques to try to “cure” homosexuality took many forms, from electric shock therapy on adults and adolescents, to so-called “mild swats” on four-year-old boys like Kirk Andrew Murphy who underwent behavioral therapy at the hands of George Rekers. You can learn more about the role of Behavioral Therapy in attempts to “cure” homosexuality in Blind Man’s Bluff, an epilogue to our original investigation, What Are Little Boys Made Of?, about Kirk’s treatment at UCLA under Rekers.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Sylvester: 1946. He lived his entire life on the corner of Gay and Black. Born in Los Angeles, he moved to San Francisco where he began performing with the gender-queering troupe known as the Cockettes. He also performed in drag in a musical review of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday songs. He went on to form several bands before finally latching onto the disco craze in the mid-1970s a solo artist. His second album, Step II, yielded his greatest funk/disco hits, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat)”. In 1979, he appeared in the film The Rose, starring Bette Midler, and in 1983 his Hi-NRG dance hit “Do You Wanna Funk” appeared in the film Trading Places. During the disco era, he was called “The Queen of Disco,” but as he moved away from disco and toward a more Dance/Funk sound, his record company wanted him to butch things up a bit. Sylvester’s response was to attend meetings in full-on drag. A drag photo shoot that he put together to tweak his record label bosses ended up yielding the cover art for his posthumous release Immortal. His last hit, 1986’s “Someone Like You,” hit number 1 on the U.S. Dance Chart, and came from his only Warner Brother’s album, Mutual Attraction, which featured cover art by Keith Haring.  Sylvester is another of the many giant talents consumed by the AIDS epidemic; he died in 1988.

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

Salt Lake City Gay Bashings “Not Related”

More than a week after Dane Hall was brutally beaten outside a Salt Lake City night club, police finally decided to get around to interviewing him. Attackers stomped on the back of his head, broke his jaw, and knocked out several teeth. The local gay community is rallying around Hall and are trying to raise money to pay his medical bills. Hall has no health insurance and his bills are mounting. That same night, another man, whose identity has been withheld, was also severely beaten. The Salt Lake City Tribune (no link) reports that police, who are refusing to regard the attacks as hate crimes, say that the two assaults appear unrelated. I don’t know which of the two statements in that last sentence I find more disturbing: the idea that it’s not a hate crime, or the idea that more than one roving band of anti-gay attackers were on the loose in Salt Lake City on the same evening.

Google Celebrates Freddie Mercury’s Birthday

As I noted in my personal recollection in today’s Daily Agenda, today is Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s 65th birthday. It’s Labor Day in the United States, so Google is displaying only a discrete American Flag at the bottom of the U.S. edition of Google’s home page. But go to google.co.uk, Google’s search page for Britain where September 5, 2011 is otherwise known as “Monday,” and the page looks rather different. Clicking the Google Doodle plays this video:

Why We Celebrate Labor Day

I know this isn’t an LGBT-related topic, but is one that has a direct bearing on how we regard each other as Americans and as human beings. Seven years ago, I had a much more personal blog where I posted stuff that a lot of people posted about before there was such a thing as Facebook and Twitter and the incredible shrinking of the American Attention Span. Since today is Labor Day, and because I’ve already alluded to my Appalachian background today, here’s a story that I’ll bet you’ve never heard before, and one that I think should be required learning in every American History class.

The West Virginia Mine Wars
Originally written September 3, 2004

The United States was at war in August, 1921. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I learned about it some five years ago, and I think it is one of the more fascinating chapters in American history. In today’s election year, political discourse has broken down to an acrimonious level that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. But as bad as it is today, things really have been worse. This story has some very cautionary lessons for today.

The war in question was known as the West Virginia Mine War. Actually, there had been two wars. The first one took place in 1913, but the most dramatic confrontation was in 1921 at the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Today’s conflicts in the Middle East are illuminated against the backdrop of oil. But at the turn of the twentieth century before the dawn of the automobile age, coal was the principal fuel in the United States and the rest of the industrialized world. It ran the factories, steamships and railroads, and it heated the schools, churches and homes. The country’s appetite for coal was insatiable, and we were consuming it as fast as it could be brought out of the ground. Poor white workers and immigrants were brought to West Virginia on the promise of plentiful jobs. And indeed jobs were plentiful, but the conditions in the coal fields made the coal miners virtual slaves.

Miners' company houses, Chaplin, West Virginia (Library of Congress American Memory Project)

A miner who moved his family to West Virginia would have put his family in a company-owned home, paying rent to the company up front. Since the miner didn’t have any money, the company would extend credit so his family could have a roof over their heads. Then he and his family would be given credit at the company store for food and other necessities. When the miner showed up at work, he found that he had to lease his tools and equipment from the company, but again the company would extend credit. From the very first day on the job, the miner was deeply in debt to the company.

The miner would be paid not by the hour, but by the ton of coal he extracted from the mine. His coal car ostensibly held 2,000 pounds of coal, but more commonly held 2,500 pounds. While the miner was supposed to be paid by the ton, he found that he was simply paid by the car load. Furthermore, in a practice known as “cribbing,” his pay would be docked for any slate or rock that the checkweighman found in the car, which was an arbitrary judgment call, subject to the checkweighman’s whims. Cheating was rampant.

Interior of a miner's company-owned house, Scott's Run, West Virginia (Library of Congress American Memory Project)

When payday finally arrived at the end of the month (miners were typically paid monthly), the miner would discover that he was not paid in cash. Instead he was paid in company “scrip” which was accepted only in company-owned stores and other establishments at greatly inflated prices. But that didn’t matter much, because his debts were deducted from his pay, and that nearly always wiped out anything he might have had coming to him.

Unfortunately, the net effect of all of this was that the miner simply went deeper and deeper in debt to the company. And as long as he was in debt, he was legally bonded to the company. There literally was no escape for him.

The doctor was a company employee. So were the school teachers and preachers at the church – which was also company owned. This ensured that even the sermons they heard on Sunday towed the company line.

All of this was perfectly legal. The coal companies had already instituted a weakened state constitution in the 1870’s under which they were able to control the political climate of West Virginia. This allowed them to avoid paying taxes while enjoying tremendous legal advantages in acquiring and exploiting mineral rights.

Miners lifting coal car onto the tracks, miners' company houses in the background, Chaplin, West Virginia (Library of Congress American Memory Project)

The problems the miners faced weren’t just about money. Coal mines were notoriously dangerous. The coal operators refused to invest in even the simplest or cheapest safety equipment because, after all, it was cheaper to just hire another miner than to protect the lives of those who were already there. During the years of the First World War, miners were killed at a greater rate in the mines than American soldiers were on the battlefields of France.

These conditions weren’t limited to miners, but they had it the worst. Many industries paid in scrip and operated company stores and housing. Steelworkers routinely suffered horrible burns because the mills refused to provide simple protective clothing that was available at the time. The death toll was staggering. Railroad workers routinely had missing fingers and hands due to accidents in the rail yards – if they were lucky. Even autoworkers suffered long hours of repetitive motion and, in the case of Ford workers, intrusive company spying in their homes to make sure nobody drank off-hours. Industries throughout the country sought not only cheap, plentiful and compliant labor, but they often sought to exercise control over their employees’ private lives as well.

When miners tried to improve their conditions by joining a union, their families were evicted from their company homes. They were also subject to summary justice by private guards, most of whom were agents of the Baldwin-Feltz Detective Agency. These guards were hired by the coal operators to serve as the de-facto police force, but they often operated like modern-day paramilitary forces that we hear about so often in Latin America. But this wasn’t Columbia or Guatemala. This was in the United States.

The miners couldn’t turn to the local police for protection because they were often under the coal operator’s control as well. For example, the Logan Coal Operators Association paid Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin to beat, arrest, and otherwise harass anyone suspected of attending labor meetings.

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“There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice. Injunctions and guns, like morphia, produce a temporary quiet. Then the pain, agonizing and more severe, comes again.”

— Mother Jones.

Mary Harris Jones was a staunch champion of miners and industrial workers. She started her campaign for workers rights by rallying against the widespread practice of child labor. Later, she became a key figure in union organizing activities, especially in the early days of the United Mine Worker’s Union. She was well into her seventies when she started working to organize the miners in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Colorado. Her feisty temperament shamed the tough men of the mines into standing up for their rights and their families. This little old Irish widow with a fiery temper became known throughout the labor movement as “Mother Jones”.

She cajoled presidents and captains of industry. She was thrown into jails and vilified by the public press for advancing the cause of coal miners and other workers. And she didn’t hesitate to admonish the union leadership whenever petty squabbles threatened to throw everything into chaos. She was a powerful voice that could not be ignored or silenced. Industrialist and politicians called her “the most dangerous woman in America.”

She was a fearless firebrand who was able to rally the coarse mountain men and give voice to their cause to the outside world. It was puzzling to many that this very old woman could be such an inspiration to these tough men. Women weren’t looked to as leaders in the rough Appalachian mining culture, but they adopted her as “the miner’s angel” nevertheless. She organized relief efforts when the miner’s families were thrown out of their homes and into makeshift camps, and she challenged the miners’ very sense of manhood to go out and fight for their families.

Mother Jones was involved in union activities during the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strikes in 1920. These strikes lead to further union organizing efforts in Mingo County, which finally reached the small town of Matewan.

On May 19th, Matewan agents of the Baldwin-Feltz agency began evicting hundreds of families of miners who had joined the union. When the mayor and police chief intervened, the company guards tried to arrest the police chief on a bogus warrant. (This goes to show how brazen the private guards were.) Mayor C.C. Testerman stepped in to prevent the illegal arrest but the company guards shot and killed him. More gunfire broke out, and when it was over ten were dead and four were injured.

Police Chief Sid Hatfield was the hero of the day, but the “Matewan Massacre” sparked a low-level guerrilla war through the remainder of 1920 and into 1921, in which over one hundred striking miners were killed. On August 1, 1921, Sid Hatfield and his best friend Ed Chambers were assassinated on the steps of the Welch courthouse by Baldwin-Feltz detectives. They were killed in front of their wives in broad daylight.

All hell broke loose. On August 7, several thousand miners gathered on the lawn of the state capital in Charleston where union leaders called for a march on Logan. They assembled at Lens Creek, just inside the Logan County line on August 20th. Mother Jones, fearing a devastating setback if the miners were defeated in their attempt to take over Logan, tried to convince the miners to turn back, but they refused to follower her advice. Instead, they moved on to Sharples on August 27th after the state police killed two miners in raid there.

The miners organized themselves along military lines – many had served in WWI just a few years earlier. They adopted the red neckerchief as their uniform. Many people today believe that the term “redneck” came from the red neckerchiefs worn by those miners. They advanced by foot, automobile and commandeered trains to the town of Blair at the foot of Blair Mountain, which overlooks the region’s principal town of Logan, home of the hated Sheriff Don Chafin.

Three counties were in open rebellion. The governor placed the state under martial law. On September 1st President Harding called out the U.S Army Air Corps with orders to bomb U.S citizens for the only time in America’s history. The Secretary of War even authorized Brigadier General Billy Mitchell (who later became the father of the U.S. Air Force) to use chemical weapons against the miners. Fortunately, the canvas and birch biplanes were too primitive to carry out the job and no chemical weapons were ever deployed.

Sheriff Don Chafin raised an army of 1200 men to man the barricades along the crest of Blair Mountain. National Guard Colonel William Eubank brought in a few planes to try to bomb the miners. A few bombs were dropped, but no major damage was done.

When federal troops finally arrived from Ft. Thomas, Kentucky on September 3rd, most of the miners decided that it was foolhardy to fight against the much-better equipped army. Confronted with such overwhelming force, they hid their guns in the mountains, removed their neckerchiefs, and went home. By the next day, the Battle of Blair Mountain was over, with at least twelve miners and four of Sheriff Don Chafin’s men dead.

Several hundred miners were tried for treason, murder and other crimes. The miners’ crushing defeat set union activities back in southern West Virginia for the next twelve years, although it did succeed in prompting numerous federal inquiries and nationwide awareness of the conditions in the coal fields. But little changed for the miners until the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when New Deal legislation in 1933 finally outlawed many of the practices of the coal operators and guaranteed the rights of workers to organize.

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These miners fought hard for the simplest of things: the right to shop wherever they wanted, the right to be paid in cash instead of worthless scrip, the abolition of cribbing, the right to attend a church that was not run by the company, and the right to be furnished – free of charge – their tools and safety equipment. These miners fought for a respectable wage, decent and safe working conditions, freedom from arbitrary and capricious workplace rules, and a measure of dignity in their work and freedom in their lives.

It is easy to believe that unions are no longer necessary, but we must remember the conditions that led to their rise. They fought hard for the freedoms we enjoy, and which we often assume can never be taken away. But no one should ever assume our freedoms are assured. It has been my observation that the industries with the “worst” unions are the industries which have richly earned them the most.

I think it is very appropriate that our summer season is bracketed by two holidays which commemorate those who fought for our freedoms. The summer season begins with Memorial Day, in which we honor the soldiers, sailors and airmen and -women who defended our freedom against foreign enemies. The summer season ends with Labor Day, in which we honor the workers who fought and paid their price for freedom as well. These men and women are heroes, every bit as much as those who served in uniform. The symmetry of the two holidays is very fitting.

For more information on the West Virginia Mine Wars, check out this web site by the Friends of Blair Mountain, dedicated to preserving the historically-significant battlefield.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, September 5

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Today is Labor Day in the United States, which makes it a long weekend for just about everyone here. There’s not much happening today, but to take advantage of the three day weekend there are still a few celebrations going on.

Pride Celebrations Extended Through Today: Atlanta, Ga (Black Pride) and Duluth, MN.

Also Wrapping Up Today: Burning Man, Black Rock Desert, NV and Southern Decadence, New Orleans, LA.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Freddie Mercury: 1946. I was a freshman in high school in my quiet, Appalachian home town when “Bohemian Rhapsody” came screaming out of our radio speakers like an alien from outer space. Nobody was quite sure what to make of it, and nobody wanted to be too enthusiastic about this very flamboyant song. But whenever it came on the radio we always turned it up. And we listened, trying to figure out exactly what it was we were hearing. Queen had already been very popular in the U.K. for several years, but “Bohemian Rhapsody” was our introduction to this new band and we had almost nothing to prepare us for the — well, I’ll say it again — flamboyance of the band’s lead singer. Even the band’s name was provocative. One of my friends bought a Queen teeshirt at a concert clear out in Dayton, but his mother prohibited him from wearing it. It was “too homosexual.” And so was Freddie — maybe. Except he had a girlfriend, as the press went, so maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it was all an act, we told each other and ourselves. You know, a character like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Alice Cooper any of the members of Kiss. Whatever he was, he flaunted it, as it went in our vernacular, but as long as it was a character he was flaunting, maybe it was okay. It helped that Queen’s follow-on hits — “You’re My Best Friend,” “Someone To Love” — were sufficiently “normal” while unmistakeably Queen to calm things down a bit. By the time News of the World came out and the testosterone-laden “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions” became my high school’s unofficial anthem the same year that we won the state AA basketball championship, everyone had chilled. Those of us in that town and school who were easily freaked out over the very possibility of homosexuality — including us homosexuals — were well served by our sometimes willful naiveté. Without it, it would have been socially impossible to enjoy the music.

Freddie was something else. And he hoodwinked all of us who wanted to be hoodwinked, just enough so we could enjoy the music and the spectacle. The hits kept coming: “Fat Bottomed Girls,” Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Another One Bites The Dust,” “Under Pressure” (with David Bowie, of course).  By the time it dawned on me that he really was gay, I had long since left home and it no longer mattered socially whether I was a fan or not. And by the time it was announced that he had AIDS and would die very shortly, nobody was surprised but everyone was saddened. It seems that there are some people who are too outsized in our world to remain in it for very long, and Freddie was one of them. On November 25, 1991, the day after he died, Britain’s tabloid The Sun carried a very simple headline: “Freddie Is Dead.” It’s hard to believe, but if he had survived he would be sixty-five today.

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

“Don’t Let Your Kids Watch Chaz Bono On ‘Dancing With the Stars'”

That’s what Fox News commentator Dr. Keith Ablow is warning parents. Because, you know, you might see a guy who looks like a heavy-set guy dancing with a girl.

Earlier this month, Keith Ablow, who calls himself a psychiatrist, called pedophilia a sexual orientation. The APA disagrees sharply, defining sexual orientation as attractions based on genders, not age groups. According to the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, sexual orientation consists of the four broad categories of homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual and asexual. Pedophilia is a paraphilia, not a sexual orientation. Either Ablow is ignorant, or he’s deliberately misleading his audience. Those are the only possibilities here. If in giving him the benefit of the doubt and conclude he’s merely ignorant, then he needs to go back and re-study Sexuality 101, assuming he ever studied it in the first place. But either way, this is what passes for “science” at Fox News.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, September 4

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Pride Celebrations Today: Atlanta, Ga (Black Pride); Calgary, AB; Columbia, SC; Duluth, MN; Essex, UK; Québec City, QC; Oakland, CA and Scarborough, UK.

Also Today: Burning Man, Black Rock Desert, NV and Southern Decadence, New Orleans, LA.

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

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, September 3

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Atlanta, Ga (Black Pride); Calgary, AB; Cardiff, Wales; Duluth, MN; Essex, UK; Québec City, QC; Leicester, UK; Oakland, CA; Reading, UK and Scarborough, UK.

UPDATE: Late addition: Columbia, SC. My apologies. I wish I had known about it earlier.

Also This Weekend: Burning Man, Black Rock Desert, NV and Southern Decadence, New Orleans, LA.

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

Prosecuters Vow To Retry Larry King’s Killer

Ventura County prosecutors announced today that they intend to retry Brandon McInerney after a judge declared a mistrial yesterday. Jurors were unable to decide whether to convict McInerney as an adult of first-degree or second-degree murder, or voluntary manslaughter. McInerney was fifteen when he shot fourteen-year-old Larry King at an Oxnard middle school in 2008. Legal observers believe trying McInerney as an adult made it harder to convict him. Prosecutors say they are considering whether to try him as an adult again:

“We will consider the fact that this was a very significantly split jury. We will consider everything,” said Chief Asst. Dist. Atty. Jim Ellison. “There are obviously very strong reactions on both sides, and we will consider all those in how we proceed.”

…Laurie Levenson, a Loyola law professor and former federal prosecutor, said it was possible that jurors thought the charges were too harsh.

“Jurors felt prosecutors overcharged, and they were clearly not comfortable putting the boy away for life. They probably believed the dynamic between two adolescent boys is not the same as two adults,”  Levenson said. “With a hate crime, there is usually an agenda to go after a whole group, and this case as presented was a very personal. This was a shooting but not a traditional cold-blooded killing. It had an emotional complexity, especially one associated with adolescents.”