The story was like a stone dropped into a tiny pond, causing quick, brief ripples and then nothing after that.

Though I’d be surprised if the anti-gay movement’s media hadn’t made at least a little something out of it. I mean, a “San Francisco gay activist” child molester, that’s too delicious for them not to have made some kind of fuss about.

I have been trying to get the message out that Hesse is not some high-profile activist, nor does he “own” ProtectMarriage.com. He’s just an anti-gay DONOR, who’s been charged with sexually assaulting boys. Period.

ConBab was (as far as I know) the first to connect Hesse to his Prop H8 donation, and if you follow every subsequent blog post on the story, they all ultimately lead back to our original post.

As you can see, nowhere in that post is any of the erroneous stuff about Hesse being an “activist” or owning PM.com even suggested.

How anyone could possibly have come to the conclusion that Hesse was some big fish in the anti-gay movement — or how any of the “big” sites, like Raw Story, could have run with it without taking an extra 30 seconds to verify — is a mystery… and a shame.

The first thing any good blogger should have done was search for Hesse’s name in any reliable Prop H8 database. After finding the record in our own files, we cross-checked the Calif. Sec’y of State database, and even the L.A. Times database, just to make sure there was an easy way for others to find it online. (You’d think a few readers would want to check it out for themselves, wouldn’t you? Well, we thought so.)

The second thing — upon seeing the suspicious-looking claim that Hesse was some Prop H8 big-wig — any good blogger should have done was to run a WHOIS on ProtectMarriage.com. Jim, you’re probably the only blogger who did that. I can’t believe no one else did!

And this kind of sloppiness (or laziness, or whatever the problem) makes us all look bad.

Anyway, thanks again, Jim. I hope more people listen to you than they did to me.

P.S. If anyone’s wondering why we made the Hesse-Prop H8 connection in the first place, that’s what Conservative Bablyon does, and has been doing, since 2003: citing the hypocrisy of the “family values” crowd, particularly when it comes to anti-gays.

Honestly, we were quite surprised when the “big” gay blogs (Back2Stonewall, JMG, etc. — who, it should be noted, did NOT run with the false claims later blogs did) picked up our post on Hesse — which by that time was already ten days old — and ultimately sent us the biggest traffic spike in ConBab’s history.

Frankly, the Hesse story is no big deal to us — it’s typical of the stuff we read about and blog about every day. There are much bigger stories out there, and real anti-gay activists of note, doing things far worse things than what Hesse is accused of doing.

We can’t figure out why this story picked up so much steam — was it the Prop H8 angle? Why didn’t these same blogs go as nuts over the stories of Tommy Gene Daniels (another one whose Prop H8 donation we scooped) or Eugene Ballantyne or Jesse Ruhl? Beats us.

P.P.S. This sort of thing happened in 2008, with our old Lavender Newswire blog: Somebody linked a single word to one our posts as if to suggest we had some inside information about the Obama campaign. We didn’t, of course, and we still haven’t figured out what the “logic” was behind the link, but after the entire PUMA movement had played the game of “Telephone,” suddenly our quite-innocuous post was held up as “proof” of some vast Obama conspiracy. I guess people read into things whatever it is they want most to see.

This is the kind of thing that has been done to me, over both my color and my orientation, for over 60 years, but I understood, even before I read LoTR in 1956, that one cannot defeat orcs by becoming them.

In a propoganda war, there are no civilians. Hesse makes great copy.

If I were interested in a propaganda war, I’d agree with you. Come to think of it, I agree with you anyway.

But I’m not interested in being a cog in a propaganda war. That’s the heart of what’s wrong with our country right now. Everyone’s looking to win a propaganda war and nobody gives a shit about anything resembling the truth. You can totally, completely count me out on that, and I don’t give a flying farthing what anyone thinks about it.