Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyFebruary 21st, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Important Prop 8 Deadline: San Francisco, CA. Today is the last day in which Prop 8 supporters can file a petition for en banc review of the decision by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a lower court’s ruling that the passage of Prop 8 violates the U.S. Constitution. If Prop 8 supporters don’t file a request, then the stay on the lower court’s ruling expires exactly one week from today. If the do file a request, then the stay remains in place until until the request for a re-hearing is either denied or accepted and ruled on.
Alternatively, Prop 8 supporters have ninety days following the February 7 decision to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If they do that, then they can request an extension of the stay from the Ninth Circuit Court pending the Supreme Court’s review. If the Ninth denies the stay’s extension, Prop 8 supporters can also file a petition to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has responsibility for answering petitions in the Ninth Circuit. With all of those options, it still looks like it will be a very long time before marriages can resume in the Golden State.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Atlanta Gay Bar Bombed: 1997. Memrie Wells-Cresswell, of Snellville, GA, went to Atlanta’s Otherside Lounge to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Memrie had not told many people that she was lesbian, but the bombing that night at the popular lesbian bar would change all that. Five people were injured, but hers were the most serious: a three to four inch nail entered her arm and severed a brachial artery. When Mayor Bill Campbell mentioned her by name everyone suddenly knew her sercret, including her employer who fired her. She later told The Advocate, “The company ended up giving me some hush money just to make me go away.”
Police found a second bomb just outside the bar, which they detonated with a robot. It had been placed there to harm police and medical workers responding to the first explosion. That fit a pattern established with two earlier Atlanta bombings, one at the Centennial Olympic Park on July 27, 1996 and another at an Atlanta abortion clinic on January 16, 1997. Three days after the Otherside Lounge Bombing, police received a letter from an organization calling themselves The Army of God claiming responsibility. The letter threatened “total war” and promised more attacks against abortion clinics and gay people.
In 1998, Federal Authorities charged Eric Rudolph with the three Atlanta bombings and a fourth one at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. They spent the next four and a half years looking for him around the town of Murphy, North Carolina, where Randolph spent his teenage years. Murphy residents printed teeshirts reading “Run, Rudolph Run.” He was finally captured there on May 31, 2003. He was well-groomed and well-fed, suggesting he had help in Murphy. On August 13, 2005, Rudolph pleaded guilty to all four bombings in a plea agreement that allowed him to avoid the death penalty. In an eleven page statement, he wrote, “Whether it is gay marriage, homosexual adoption, hate crimes laws including gays, or the attempt to introduce a homosexual normalizing curriculum into our schools, all of these efforts should be ruthlessly opposed.” He also said that the attack on The Otherside Lounge was “meant to send a powerful message in protest of Washington’s continued tolerance and support for the homosexual political agenda.” He is currently serving four life sentences.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Alan Chambers: 1972. Exodus International president Alan Chambers yesterday tweeted out that today is his big 4-0. I don’t know whether he finds these kind of milestones difficult (Chambers doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to obsess over these things, but I don’t know him personally), but I can say that as someone who crossed the half-century mark more than a year ago that forty is no big deal. Life for many begins at 40. It did for me. That’s when I made the first steps toward coming out of the closet.
Latest Posts
Featured Reports
In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don‘t miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.
“Google” is a trademark of Google Inc.
© Box Turtle Bulletin. All Rights Reserved.
Posts 
Posts via daily email:
james
February 21st, 2012
30 was the big birthday for me. I finally felt I wasn’t “too young.” Of course, I came out when I was 18, almost as long as Mr. Chambers has been alive. For my 40th birthday, I forgave my father. For my 50th, I moved from a horrible town in one state to a great town in another.
Alan, at your age, you’re old enough to know better. Can’t understand why anyone would waste so many years not being themselves.
iDavid
February 21st, 2012
Olsen and Bois have said they will ask for any stay to be lifted.
@James
Anyone who is as addicted to fear of reprisal as Chambers is, and has no considerable masculine bravado to bust through it, it is most likely is the hardest nut for him to crack regarding authenticity. Too many layers of shadows to get through.
Charles
February 21st, 2012
I was living in Atlanta when the Atlanta bombers was active. In fact he bombed an abortion clinic that was right down the street from where I was living. It shook the house. That bastard also had set off another bomb as you say to kill those that responded to the first bomb. Thankfully, I believe that no one was killed in either bombing that day. One thing that you did not mention in your article is the Rudolph had a gay brother.
Jim Hlavac
February 21st, 2012
I have always marveled at people who come out so late in life, and so congratulations are in order. As too I marvel at Chambers sort of people, who are “out” but refuse to deal positively with their reality, and seek to deny their reality exists or to change it by keeping up the denials. They admit they’re “gay” but claim they aim to put a stop to it. Beats me why, it really does. It’s beyond my reasoning.
Having never quite been in, and having a very big and welcoming extended family that totally accepted, dealt with, and even mollycoddled me more than the rest of my 20 cousins got, even back in the early ’70s as it was, as I simply appeared among them — they didn’t ask, I didn’t tell, I didn’t even think about it, I just brought home guys and said, “This is my boyfriend,” and it was all in the open, nothing hid, and just natural — I can’t really conceive of this process, nor how one could have taken so long, nor why one would still refuse. I have a few pictures of several boyfriends at my family gatherings, many years ago, and they are among the most puzzled looking people one could imagine. Like “Is this real, do all these people really just accept me as Jim’s boyfriend?” And the answer was, yes they did. I was lucky, perhaps. But one of the strongest desires I have is that no one has to “come out” again, and merely is themselves from the beginning.
And I can only hope Chambers gets the big birthday gift of the acceptance of his reality and tells the people he works with “oh, forget about it, I’m out of here.”
Reed
February 21st, 2012
I think James (above, comment), and JB are my contemporaries.
I was outed (family)at 19, and stepped out “to the rest of the world” around 30. Had a great relationship with family all through.
I can’t imagine JB’s 20+ years of being in the closet, but he’s certainly made up for lost time since. The daily history, BTB, etc. AND heading up the Gang o’ Five atop the left column contact list.
Total hat-tips, Mr. Burroway.
Richard
February 21st, 2012
http://abcnews.go.com/US/tyler-clementi-bullying-trial-begins-today/story?id=15752236&singlePage=true
Jury selection begins Tuesday in a New Brunswick, N.J., courtroom for the trial of Dahrun Ravi, the Rutgers University student who with a silent flip of his laptop webcam secretly watched his roommate in a moment of gay intimacy, and unwittingly set in motion a series of events that would make him a national symbol of cyber-bullying.
Leave A Comment