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 lobbyJuly 8th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Budapest, Hungary; Cologne, Germany; London, UK (World Pride); Los Angeles, CA (Black Pride); Prince George, BC; San Luis Obispo, CA; Sitges, Spain; and Victoria, BC.
Other Celebrations This Weekend: Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Roanoke, Lynchburg, VA. The Family “Research” Council, an SPLC-certified hate group, continues its Values Bus Tour with the Heritage Foundation today. The tour is part voter registration drive and part propaganda tour where they will disseminate “materials on defending life, marriage and religious liberty.” The bus tour begins its day this morning at the First Baptist Church in downtown Roanoke from 8:00 a.m. to noon. The bus will then roll merrily along to Lynchburg, with a stop at Heritage Baptist Church (where “Biblical heroes define masculinity“) from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
The bus’s next stop will be in Richmond, Virginia on Tuesday.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Austria Decriminalizes Homosexuality: 1971. On July 8, 1971 an amendment to the Austrian criminal code was signed which abolished the criminalization of consensual homosexual contact. Austria’s code had criminalized both male and female same-sex contact under its “crimes against nature” clause. With the new law, male homosexual contacts with a young man under 18, male (same-sex) prostitution, and “advertising” or “encouraging” homosexuality were still criminal after that date. The latter provisions were abolished during the early 1980s to make HIV-prevention easier. The age of consent remained 18 until 2002, when it was held unconstitutional by the Austrian Constitutional Court. It age of consent is now 14 to 16, depending on the age of both parties, and consistent with the age of consent for opposite-sex couples.
Murder Suspect Goes Free Because Gays Fear Coming Out of the Closet: 1977. The Associated Press reported:
(San Francisco) Police say a suspect in 14 homosexual murders has not been charged because three survivors of his knife attacks, including a “well-known entertainer” and a diplomat, won’t “come out of the closet” and testify against him. For the past year, police have been questioning a young man they call “The Doodler” about the 14 slayings and three assaults that occurred in San Francisco’s gay community between January 1974 and September 1975, Inspector Rotea Gilford said Thursday.
…In the attacks, the murderer met other men at a number of after-hours gay clubs and restaurants in San Francisco. He usually sketched them men before having sex with them and then stabbing them. Police believe the man committed the murders after feeling shame over his homosexual experiences.
With no witnesses willing to identify him, “The Doodler” was never brought to justice.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Philip Johnson: 1906. He was only twenty-four years old and fresh out of Harvard when he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He would have been regarded as a great visionary even if that had been his only accomplishment. But Johnson wanted more, and in his travels to Europe he became exposed to such masters of modernism as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. Johnson’s 1932 MOMA show, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922,” introduced modern architecture to the American public, and Johnson became an evangelist for the International Style. Johnson’s travels to Europe also exposed him to the early ideology of Hitler’s National Socialism, which Johnson also eagerly embraced. He remained enamored with Nazism until Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, when he toured that conquerred country at Hitler’s invitation. As Johnson later said, “I have no excuse [for] such utter, unbelievable stupidity. … I don’t know how you expiate guilt.”
Philip Johnson's Glass House
Fortunately for Johnson, there would be a second chapter to his life. After the war, he designed his 1949 masterpiece Glass House as his own private residence in New Canaan, Connecticut. That design put him at the forefront of modernist architecture in America. In the 1950s, he teamed up with his mentor Meis van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in New York. The steel-and-glass design would define the essential elements of American skyscrapers for the next sixty years. Johnson’s minimalist steel and glass design would also be the defining feature of his Chrystal Cathedral, which he designed for televangelist Robert Schuller in Garden Grove, California (and which has been sold in a bankruptcy transaction to the Orange County diocese of the Catholic Church).
From the sublime to the ridiculous: the AT&T Building, 1984.
By the 1980s, Johnson had decided that minimalism had boxed him into a corner, if you will excuse the pun. So in a fit of iconoclasm, he abandoned his minimalist signature by placing a garish chippendale corbel on top of the AT&T building in New York, thus heralding the utterly lamentable post-modernist gewgaws that are the bane of every tacky strip mall in North America. Johnson’s latest design is considerably more redeeming. It is also for the largest LGBT congregation in America, Dallas’s Cathedral of Hope, whose Interfaith Peace Chapel opened to the public in 2010. Johnson didn’t live to see it come to fruition however. He died in his sleep at Glass House in 2005, survived by his partner of 45 years.
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).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
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Charles
July 8th, 2012
Jim, was “The Doodler†ever identified by name? And, if so, whatever happened to him?
Charles
July 8th, 2012
Here is what Wikipedia had to say. Apparently the suspect was never named.
“The Doodler, also known as the Black Doodler, is an unidentified serial killer believed responsible for 14 slayings and three assaults of men in San Francisco’s gay community between January 1974 and September 1975. The nickname was given due to the perpetrator’s habit of sketching his victims prior to having sex with them and then stabbing them to death. The perpetrator met his victims at after-hours gay clubs, bars and restaurants.
Police had developed a prime suspect in the case, identified by two of his survivors, but authorities could not proceed with an arrest as the surviving victims refused to “out” themselves by way of testifying (one was an entertainer, the other a diplomat). Meanwhile, the suspect spoke freely with police, although he did not admit the slayings.
At the time, Harvey Milk publicly expressed his empathy for the victims who refused to speak, stating “I understand their position. I respect the pressure society has put on them.”
To date, the suspect has never been publicly named or apprehended, and the slayings have faded into obscurity; very little information is currently available about these crimes.”
Smith
July 9th, 2012
Are you using some kind of special word processing program to write these posts? Because you are generating strange errors. Your blurb on the Doodler refers to police as “polio.” Your blurb on Philip Johnson refers to his having “touted that concurred country” as opposed to “toured that conquered country.” It seems to me that you have a program that is running automatic spell checks and is changing words.
Jim Burroway
July 9th, 2012
I’m using a new Apple Macbook, and the latest version of Apple’s operating system appears to have a rather aggressive auto-correct spell check that goes ahead and assumes it knows what I’m trying to type. In the old days, I at least had a fighting chance with all the red squiggly underlines to tell me I spelled something wrong. Now it just quietly makes the changes and it’s sometimes hard for me to notice what happened. I need to figure out how to wrestle that sucker to the ground.
Nathaniel
July 10th, 2012
I love how the ‘Biblical heroes’ that ‘define masculinity’ include David and Jonathan as prime models, considering some interpretations of scriptures suggest they were lovers. I doubt that is the king of ‘masculinity’ this church wishes to encourage. Even if they were only really affectionate friends, I have my doubts that this church would encourage such displays amongst their boys by calling them ‘masculine’, so I have to wonder what the motive is. Are they possibly trying to recover D&J from the ‘taint’ of ‘the gays’?
Timothy Kincaid
July 10th, 2012
Nathaniel,
I also wonder how many good Christians know that Daniel (of lion’s den fame) was a eunuch or, as good ol’ King James Version puts it, “Now God had brought Daniel into favour and tender love with the prince of the eunuchs.”
Or, for that matter, that they were vegetarian.
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