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 lobbyJune 27th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Smithsonian Folklife Festival Features AIDS Quilt: Washington, D.C. Every year during the Independence Day week of festivities in the nation’s capital, the Smithsonian Institution sets up a Folklife Festival on the National Mall. One of this year’s main programs is Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding the AIDS Memorial Quilt. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which has grown to more than 48,000 panels and has become the largest piece of folk art in the world. According to the Smithsonian:
Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt is the first Festival program to focus exclusively on community craft and performance that were directly developed in response to crisis and grief. With The AIDS Memorial Quilt as the anchor and through craft demonstrations, dance and musical performances, interactive discussions, and other activities, this program commemorates the innovative and resourceful ways through which communities have endeavored to educate people and to cope with one of the most complex pandemics in modern history.
The 2012 Smithsonian Folklife Festival will be open from Wednesday, June 27, through Sunday, July 1 and again from Wednesday, July 4, through Sunday, July 8. The Festival will be closed on Monday, July 2 and Tuesday, July 3. It is open to the public from 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Up to 8,000 panels of the quilt itself will be laid out every morning from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, and will be taken up every evening from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.,. Evening events on the Festival grounds will begin at 6:00 p.m. and may continue until as late as 9:00 p.m.
All 48,000 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt will be shown in various displays around Washington, D.C. over the next month. For more information, check out Quilt2012.org.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Albuquerque, NM; Arraial, Portugal; Bangor, ME; Barcelona, Spain; Cagliari Italy; Cincinnati, OH; Delémont, Switzerland; Dublin, Ireland; Edinburgh; UK; Helsinki, Finland; Istanbul, Turkey; Lexington, KY; London, UK (World Pride); Madrid, Spain; Naples, Italy; Omaha, NE; Oslo, Norway; Paris, France; St. Petersburg, FL; Salem, MA; Sofia, Bulgaria; Swansea, UK; Toronto, ON; and Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Canadian Rockies International Rodeo, Strathmore, AB; Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington, D.C. Eurogames 2012, Budapest, Hungary.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Exodus Freedom Conference: St. Paul, MN. Exodus International kicks off it annual Exodus Freedom Conference today on the campus of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The annual conference is, as they say in Minnesota, the real deal — a four-day gathering of ex-gay people (“strugglers” in the parlance of the in-crowd) who will attend worship services, fellowship, workshops and plenary sessions in a kind of a summer camp for those who are trying to avoid the “camp,” so to speak. This year’s theme is “made for more,” and yours truly is boarding a flight bright and early this morning to attend the conference and see for myself what more there is to see. We’ve been documenting several changes to Exodus’s public face oner the past year; this will be my chance to see how things look up close. If you are attending the conference, give me a shout via Twitter (@jfburroway) and say hi. If you’re not attending the conference, give me a shout anyway. The conferences begins tonight and continues through Saturday.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
The McCarren-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act: 1952. It was sixty years ago today when Congress passed a major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, removing the previous quotas which excluded immigrants based on the country of origin, and instead barring those who were deemed unlawful, immoral, diseased in any way, politically radical, and accepting those who were willing to conform to prevailing American political thought. Crafted at the height of the McCarthy Red Scare, it was the political aspects which drove Congress to pass the act. For the next four decades, the U.S. government used the act to prevent hundreds of people each year from visiting the U.S solely because of their political beliefs and associations.
Political beliefs however weren’t the only litmus test the government used. One provision prohibited entry to “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, epilepsy, or a mental defect.” Since the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental defect, the Immigration and Naturalization Service took that to mean that gays and lesbians were to be barred from entry into the United States. Even after the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, the INS continued to bar openly gay people from immigrating. As the years wore on, the ban was enforced haphazardly, but gay immigrants remained subject to deportation at the whim of an immigration judge. It wouldn’t be until the 1990 Immigration Act that homosexuality would be formally removed as grounds for exclusion. But by then, HIV had become the new basis for barring not just immigrants, but HIV-positive business people, HIV/AIDS advocates and even tourists from entering the U.S. for even a single day. That ban remained in place until 2010.
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And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
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Michael C
June 27th, 2012
Thank you, Jim, for checking in on Exodus. Despite recent changes in their organization, I have reservations about their presence on my home turf. I look forward to finding out what they are still saying and what they have actually changed.
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