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 16th, 2016
Police arrested a man in Brooklyn for assaulting a bouncer at a gay bar and threatening to “come back Orlando-style.”
At about 11:15 p.m. Monday night, Justin Rice, 40 was escorted out of the Happy Fun Hideaway, a gay bar Bushwick, after getting in a loud argument with his girlfriend. During the scuffle, Rice shouted, “I’m going to shoot this place up and get my 50 just like Orlando, Florida,” according to the police report. “I’m going to come back Orlando-style!”
“F–k you fa—ts, f–k that fa—t, I’ll kill you f—-ts,” he yelled while hurling a metal bucket filled with sand at the 34-year-old bouncer. The bucket hit a glancing blow, and the bouncer scuffled with Rice. The bouncer was able to hold Rice until police arrived. Rice was charged with aggravated harassment and attempted assault. More charges were added, including making a terrorist threat and menacing as a hate crime. Bail has been set for $10,000. He is scheduled to appear in court on Friday.
June 16th, 2016
Yesterday’s Senate filibuster in support of tightening gun control laws ended late last night, and now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) says the Senate will hold votes on the Democrats’ proposals, perhaps as early as this afternoon. I think this top headline at Politico right now sums up the situation nicely:
That’s pretty good. It’s actually quite Onionesque.
June 16th, 2016
On Tuesday, Anderson Cooper held Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi accountable for her years of opposition to marriage equality, and he took particular issue with her argument that allowing gays to marry in Florida would “impose significant public harm”. Bondi’s prominent media presence in the aftermath of the Pulse gay night club massacre presenting herself as a valiant defender of the LGBT community, has raised eyebrows in the LGBT community that remembers her previously strenuous efforts to block same-sex message. Since then, Bondi has been more or less pretending she was never involved in that fight.
Yesterday, Bondi was on WOR’s “Len Berman and Todd Schnitt in the Morning” complaining that she was blindsided by Cooper’s grilling on her same-sex marriage stance and that “completely flipped and got into a constitutional issue of course.” She also said that Cooper’s questions were out of line and that she was asked to speak with him on the air under false pretences. “The interview was supposed to be about helping people’s families, not creating more anger and havoc and hatred yesterday. Yesterday was about unity, about bringing people together, about helping people.”
Yesterday, Cooper responded to Bondi’s allegations:
…She’s either mistaken or she’s not telling the truth. Let’s be real here. Miss Bondi’s big complaint seems to be that I asked in the first place, in the wake of a massacre that targeted gay and lesbian citizens about her new statements about the gay community and about her old ones.
…For the record, my interview was not filled with any anger. I was respectful before the interview, I was respectful during the interview and I was respectful after the interview. I don’t know Pam Bondi personally, she seems like a nice person actually. I don’t think she has hate in her heart.
But what I think doesn’t matter. Its my job to hold people accountable. If on Sunday a politician was talking love and embracing quote “our LGBT community,” I don’t think it’s unfair to look at their record and see if they have actually ever spoken that way publicly before which I never heard her say.
The fact is, Attorney General Bondi signed off on a 2014 federal court brief that claimed married gay people would pose ‘significant public harm’. Harm. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Gay and straight taxpayers money, trying to keep gays and lesbians from getting the right to marry. Now look, good people can and do disagree on that issue. everyone has a right to their own opinion thank goodness. But Ms. Bondi is championing right now her efforts to help survivors but the very right which allows gay spouses to bury their dead loved ones – that’s a right that would not exist if Ms Bondi had had her way. I think it’s fair to ask her about that. There is an irony in that.
Here is that brief Cooper mentioned (PDF: 131KB/34 pages):
Governor Rick Scott, Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi, State Surgeon General John H. Armstrong, and Secretary Craig J. Nichols (the “State Officials”), pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b), move to dismiss the amended complaints in these consolidated cases. This Court lacks jurisdiction to consider the claims against all but the DMS Secretary, and all claims fail on the merits. The Court should also deny the preliminary injunction motions because there is no likelihood of success on the merits, there is no immediacy requiring a preliminary injunction, and disrupting Florida’s existing marriage laws would impose significant public harm.
…This Court also must balance the alleged harm to the parties against the public interest. An injunction would irreparably harm the State of Florida. Plaintiffs seek to enjoin a duly enacted constitutional amendment and statutory law. Enjoining democratically enacted legislation harms state officials by restraining them from implementing the will of the people that they represent. [Emphasis mine]
And by the way, I still can’t find Bondi’s “rainbow hands” here, here, or here.
June 16th, 2016
Franky Jimmy De Jesús Velazquez, 50 years old
Like so many of the patrons attending Pulse’s that night, Jimmy was originally from Puerto Rico. He had traveled the world as a professional Jíbaro folk dancer — Jíbaro being the name given to poor, backwoods mountain people in the island’s interior (akin to the American hillbilly). In Orlando, he was a visual merchandiser at Forever 21, designing displays for the Orlando stores. At fifty, he was the oldest of the victims killed at Pulse. He seemed to have taken his age in stride. On May 28, he posted a picture on his Facebook page of a T-shirt reading “Never underestimate an old man who is also a visual merchandiser.” “He was a very outgoing, friendly person,” said one co-worker who worked with him in Miami. “Everyone wanted to be around him.”
Jimmy wasn’t a big clubber, according to his sister, Bernice De Jesús. “He was the kind of person who likes to have a good time in the house with family and friends,” she said. “But that night he wanted to go because it was a Latin night. That is what one of his friends told me.”
Jimmy was at Pulse with his two roommates — they called themselves “the three amigos.” They heard the shooting, but thought it was part of the music until they saw people falling down. The friend tried to grab Jimmy, but he and others were pushed up against the wall by the shooter, who then started shooting at the group. His roommates were both seriously injured, but made their way out to the parking lot. Jimmy didn’t make it out. “It’s going to take a lot for them to recover,” said Bernice.
June 16th, 2016
Walt Whitman spent his last nineteen years in Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia (May 31). More than sixty years later, the Delaware River Port Authority’s Special Committee on Bridge Names voted unanimously to name a suspension bridge, then under construction connecting nearby Gloucester City, New Jersey to Philadelphia’s Packer Avenue, for Camden’s adopted hometown hero in advance of the centenary of the first publication of Leaves of Grass (Jul 4).
The announcement was made, the Centenary was celebrated in 1956, and the bridge’s construction continued with its opening slated for the spring of 1957. That should have been the end of the matter.
And it would have been, until Father Edward Lucitt, director of the Holy Name Union of the Diocese of Camden, Monsignor Joseph McIntyre, and seven other Holy Name Society leaders in Southern New Jersey wrote to complain that “Whitman himself had neither the noble stature or quality of accomplishment that merits this tremendous honor, and his life and works are personally objectionable to us.”
That letter, from December 16, 1956, was motivated by a series of articles in the Camden diocesan weekly newspapers by Rev. James Ryan, who denounced Whitman as a third-rate poet and a scandal to decency. Other Catholic publications picked up on the controversy and went through Whitman’s published work with a fine tooth comb. They criticized a line in Section 32 of “Song of Myself” where Whitman praises the irreligiosity of animals (“They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God”), and especially, of course, “As I Lay With My Head in Your Lap, Camerado.” In January 1957, the Committee received 467 copies of a mimeographed form letter, signed by clerics, nuns and lay people from across Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, which mixed moralizing with then-common red-baiting rhetoric:
Gentlemen:
We oppose the naming of the new $90,000,000 bridge as a memorial to Walt Whitman for the following reasons:
(1) He is not great enough to deserve this honor. In what way has he inspired or influenced American democracy for good?
(2) He boasted of his immoralities and published immorality as a personal experience.
(3) He held Christianity in contempt, and affirmed himself as the new savior of mankind.
(4) He attempted to teach rebellion against the natural law of God, and the right order established by the tortured experience of the centuries.
(5) His political philosophy, dusted off the scrap heap during the depression, as the Voice of the Common Man, has proved alien to Jeffersonian Democracy, and he is now the Poet Laureate of the World Communist Revolution.
Because the naming of the Bridge in his honor would raise him to the status of a national hero, give aid and comfort to the enemies of our established order of morality and democracy, make the teaching of religious concepts difficult, and bring the common stamp of morality in our heritage into contempt, we ask you to drop Whitman’s name from the Bridge.
Not all Catholics were on board with the anti-Whitman campaign. An editorial in The Ave Maria, published at Notre Dame University, warned against the foolishness of wasting the moral weight of Catholic opinion on “less important matters” when there were other things to worry about (such as the showing of “obscene movies” and “legislation authorizing the distribution of birth control literature.”) The New York Times picked up on the story, which led to a counter-campaign by those who either supported honoring Whitman or resented Catholic interference in public affairs. For at least one letter writer, Whitman’s sexuality was not an issue. “Michael Angelo was a homosexual,” he wrote to the committee. “Why don’t they destroy the Sistine chapel?” Another letter to The New York Post expanded on that theme:
(They) “want to take Whitman’s name off that bridge because he may have been abnormal sexually. If they succeed, their next job is to remove Michelangelo’s statues from the Vatican, tear down St. Peter’s Basilica and throw out all copies of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Da Vinci was actually arrested on a charge of perversion and Michelangelo’s sonnets suggest far more than any of Whitman’s poems.”
In the end, there appears to have been little desire among River Authority officials to consider changing the name. By the time the Walt Whitman Bridge opened to traffic on May on May 16, 1957, the controversy was over and mostly forgotten. Ten years later when the New Jersey Turnpike Authority renamed one of its service areas for Whitman, no one objected. Today, the Walt Whitman Bridge is a part of Interstate 76, which is known locally in the Philadelphia area as the Schuylkill Expressway.
[Source: Joann P. Krieg. “Democracy in Action: Naming the Bridge for Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 12, no. 2 (Fall 1994), 108-114. Available online here.
“Dal McIntire” (Don Slater) “Tangents.” ONE Magazine 4, no. 3 (March 1956):7.]
June 16th, 2016
The stage musical The Rocky Horror Show premiered in London at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs, a tiny 63-seat venue set aside as a project space for new works. Starring Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter — a “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” — the musical (set in Ohio!) follows the adventures of young lovers Brad Majors and Janet Weiss who came to the doctor’s castle to call a cab because their car has a flat tire. The production featured lots of catchy songs (“Time Warp” and “Science Fiction, Double Feature”), risqué sexuality and of course, lots of makeup. The show was an instant hit, and the cast was signed for a soundtrack album right after the show’s second night. By the time the show closed seven years and four venues later, it has gone through 2,960 performances and picked up several added songs along the way.
The Rocky Horror Show opened on Broadway on March 10, 1975, but critics panned it and the show closed just three weeks later. That same year, the play was adapted for the film and retitled The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It became a must-see cult classic that has kept art houses in business for the next four decades. Because it is still officially in limited release, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the longest-running theatrical release in film history.
June 16th, 2016
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS)
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) appeared on Armstrong Williams’s program to talk about abortion, disciplining children (he said he used a belt on his occasionally) and his childhood (growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s and early 1960s was a “good time in America.” And he also spoke on the controversial subject of same-sex marriage, two years after the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act. Williams asked Lott what he thought about homosexuality. Lott replied, “You still love that person and you should not try to mistreat them or treat them as outcasts. You should try to show them a way to deal with that.” He said his own father had had a problem with alcoholism, adding, ”Others have a sex addiction or are kleptomaniacs. There are all kinds of problems and addictions and difficulties and experiences of this kind that are wrong. But you should try to work with that person to learn to control that problem.”
President Bill Clinton’s press secretary Michael D. McCurry blasted Lott’s statement, saying it showed how difficult it was getting things done “when you’re dealing with people who are so backward in their thinking. For over 25 years, it’s been quite clear that sexual orientation is not an affliction, it’s not a disease, it is something that is part of defining one’s sexuality.'” Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) seized on Lott’s remarks to demand that Clinton’s nomination of openly gay James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg to be brought to the Senate floor, a move that had been blocked by Lott. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) came to Lott’s defense: “I abide by the Bible… I do not quarrel with the Bible on the subject.” The controversy eventually blew over and Lott kept his job as Senate Republican leader until 2002 when, at a party honoring the 100th birthday of Sen. Strom Thurmond (S-SC) who had run for President as a segregationist Dixiecrat candidate in 1948, Lott said that if Thurmond had won, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years.” Those remarks finally led to his resigning his leadership position.
June 16th, 2016
Del Martin (left, 87) and Phyllis Lyon (right, 83)
Phyllis Lyon (Nov 10)and Del Martin of San Francisco (May 5) had been together for fifty-five years when they were finally married at city hall. Their wedding capped a lifetime of advocacy for gay equality. In 1955, they and six other women founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first major lesbian organization in the United States (Oct 19). Phyllis edited the DOB’s newsletter The Ladder beginning in 1956 (Jan 20), and Del served as editor from 1960 to 1962. They also took turns as head of the Daughters until 1964, when they helped found the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. Phyllis was also the first open lesbian to serve on the board of the National Organization for Women in 1973. Meanwhile, Del was heavily involved in getting the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
When the California Supreme Court ruled on May 15, 2008, that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional under the state constitution, it also issued a temporary stay to give the state time to implement the necessary changes in its forms and procedures. That stay expired at 5:00 p.m. on June 16. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom selected Phyllis and Del for the honor of being the first same-sex couple in California to marry in a ceremony began at precisely 5:01 p.m.
Phyllis and Del enjoyed two months of officially wedded bliss before Del passed away in August of that year.
June 16th, 2016
65 YEARS AGO: (d. 1991) The pioneering transgender activist had begun identifying as a “female transvestite” in 1973. Two years later, he moved to San Francisco and began identifying as a female-to-male transgender — and as a gay man. This didn’t sit well with the so-called gender specialists of the day, who saw sexual orientation and gender identity as, more or less, the same thing — gay men really “wanted to be women,” just like male-to-female transgender people, with only the degree of that “want” distinguishing the two. The idea that someone born female who identifies as a male but who also is attracted to other men — that just blew their minds, with many saying it just wasn’t possible.
So when Sullivan sought surgery, he was consistently denied it because, as far as the so-called gender experts were concerned, he was a woman who liked men and therefore there was nothing to “fix.” Sullivan was able to obtain hormones from doctors who were not associated with gender clinics, and he began lobbying the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (now known as WPATH, World Professional Association for Transgender Health), to recognize that, despite what the “experts” said, he really did exist. Sullivan wrote the first guidebook for FtM people, and he spent the rest of his life as an advocate and an educator on the clear distinctions between sexual orientation and gender identity. His efforts eventually paid off, and in 1986 he was able to undergo genital reconstructive surgery. Later that year, he was diagnosed with AIDS, which exposed him to yet another kind of stigma. Just before he died in 1991, he wrote, “I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me that I could not live like a gay man, it looks like I’m going to die like one.” The Lou Sullivan Society continues to serve the FtM community in the San Francisco Bay area.
June 15th, 2016
Owen Jones walked out of a Sky News panel discussion over panelists’ refusal to acknowledge that the massacre was an attack against the LGBT community.
June 15th, 2016
Chris Barron, who had co-founded the now-defunct gay conservative group GOPround, had been a Donald Trump critic until recently. But now, in the aftermath of the Pulse gay night club massacre, Barron has become a big Trump supporter and thinks you should be too:
“I have no doubt that Donald Trump would be better for LGBT Americans,” Barron said in an interview with CNN. “Hillary Clinton wants to continue a reckless foreign policy that has made the world less safe for all Americans, including LGBT Americans. She can find plenty of time to crucify Christians in the U.S. for perceived anti-gay bias, but when we’ve got ISIS throwing gay people off of buildings, when we have Muslim states that are prescribing the death penalty for people who are gay, I would think this would be something that a friend of the LGBT community would be able to speak out on, and Hillary Clinton finds it unable to do so.”
…Barron declined to share a list of potential signatories to his coalition letter in support of Trump, although other gay Republicans confirmed there was a draft letter circulating.
Barron, however, is an unlikely leader of a pro-Trump movement, and he has a mixed history with the mogul. In 2011, as president of GOProud, Barron coordinated a successful campaign to secure Trump a speaking slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the nation’s largest annual gathering of right-wing activists. The address was Trump’s first major speech to the conservative movement, and in many ways launched his political career.
But four years later, when Trump launched his campaign for president, Barron said he regretted ever inviting Trump to speak and giving him such a prominent platform. He staunchly opposed to Trump’s candidacy throughout the Republican primaries. Over a period of several months, Barron posted anti-Trump messages on Twitter, calling his supporters “idiots” and “morons.” He called Trump a “sociopath,” and in one post, Barron compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, writing, “The giant police state Trump supports would make Hitler blush.”
So now, Barron’s cozying up with Hitler. I guess that’s a bit a step up from when GOProud counted Ann Coulter as a strong ally.
June 15th, 2016
Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who had been one of the country’s staunchest opponents of marriage equality and is a regular speaker at the Family “Research” Council’s annual Values Voter Summit, broke ranks with the majority of his caucus today on CNN’s New Day, when he told Chris Cuomo that it was “clear that gays were targeted in Orlando”:
I think it’s clear that gays were targeted in Orlando. It does matter. And it’s tragic that they were targeted because of their sexual orientation. I talk with hundreds of conservatives over on this side of the aisle. No one brings up the fact in any derogatory way or even mentions it to that extent. I mean, it’s tragic. And we’re sorry about that and they are in our prayers as if they were the Christians that were slaughtered in Charleston, South Carolina some time back, equal standing with God, Chris.
So yeah, there’s probably no reason to get too excited by this. I mean, those gays in Orlando aren’t Christians, but they do get equal standing. Which is, I guess, is some kind of a small improvement. Two years ago, King said of gay people: “I’ll just say that what was a sin 2,000 years ago is a sin today, and people that were condemned to hell 2,000 years ago, I don’t expect to meet them should I make it to heaven.” Whatever.
June 15th, 2016
A CBS News Poll out today shows that a majority of Americans strongly disapprove of Donald Trump’s responses to the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse gay night club. Americans are fairly evenly split when it comes to Secretary Hillary Clinton’s response.
| Clinton | Trump | |
|---|---|---|
| Approve | 36% | 25% |
| Disapprove | 34% | 52% |
| Don’t Know | 30% | 24% |
The report adds: “Most Democrats (62%) approve of Clinton’s response, while just half of Republicans (50%) approve of Trump’s. More independents are critical of Trump’s response than Clinton’s.”
Americans have also soundly rejected Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.:
| Total | Reps | Dems | Inds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yes, should ban | 31% | 56% | 14% | 30% |
| No, should not ban | 62% | 37% | 79% | 62% |
Americans across the board largely hold that the attack was both an act of terrorism as well as a hate crime (57%). That response was similar for Republicans (65%), Democrats (53%) and Independents (56%). A larger minority of Republicans say it was “mostly” terrorism” (22%) than Americans as a whole (14%), while a somewhat larger majority of Democrats say it was “mostly a hate crime” (37%) than Americans as a whole (25%).
The margin of error for the entire group is ±4%. The margin of error for the Republican, Democratic, and Independent subgroups will be greater according to their respective samples sizes.
June 15th, 2016
The video is not embeddable, but this rather interesting TV media monitoring service has it along with a transcript. Yesterday evening, during a vigil held at Orlando’s First Baptist Church, Pastor Joel C. Hunter of the unaffiliated evangelical Northland Church in suburban Longwood, invited The Task Force’s National Campaigns Director Victoria Kirby York to teach the Baptist gathering about how to pray for the particular needs of LGBT people in Orlando:
Pastor Hunter: When they asked me to pray for the LGBTQ community, at first I was honored and thrilled, and then I was convicted. I‘m not sure how to do that. I‘ve never been a part of a vulnerable community. I‘ve been a part of powerful communities all my life and never been a part of a persecuted community. Short doesn’t count.
When we lose someone, we have two feelings immediately. One is we wish we’d is have built a better relationship. And the other is — and I’ve been searching my heart — is there anything I did that was complicit in that loss? I‘m going to continue searching. But i will not presume to know what this community is going through, the LGBTQ community. And so i asked Equality Florida to send someone. And my new friend, Victoria Kirby York, who is the national director of campaigns for the National LGBTQ Task Force — I‘m going to keep saying those initials often enough that they roll off my tongue. I asked her to come and just share maybe with many of us who would not know what to pray for in that community right now. What to consider that we might not you understand. Victoria, could you help us?
Victoria Kirby York: Good evening, beloved community. Thank you so much for being here, for standing in the gap for so many of our community members. Some of you who are here, so many who aren’t here, those who are watching and those who wish they could be here. I grew up about 50 minutes away from here in a town called Brandon, Florida, and lived here until recently and have a lot of friends across central Florida. Many who frequent Pulse nightclub. Many who lost friends Sunday. And as I heard about the news, like many of you, I was heartbroken. I wanted to search out ways in which i could come back home to Florida and get engaged, see what I could do to provide any kind of healing that I could do. And I can tell you that standing up here right now looking at all of you is such a beautiful sight. I‘m going to talk to you a little bit about why it matters so much to the LGBTQ community that each and every one of you are here in a church.
..As the national campaign director of a national LGBTQ organization, I look into the faces of so many people who have been kicked out and rejected by their churches. 13-year-olds who are forced to live on the street because they’ve been kicked out of their homes. 35% of homeless youth in this country are LGBTQ youth, even though we represent less than 5% of the population. and many of those young people have been kicked out because they have family members, parents specifically, who have not accepted who they are and who they love. We also look at the suicide rates amongst LGBTQ people, particularly youth. Again, over a third of suicides, one of the leading causes of death, sadly, for far too many young people come from the LGBTQ community. Again, less than 5% of the population. So death has been a reality that we experience for those who have attempted to take their lives, for the dozens of transgender women particularly of color who have lost heir lives due to hate crimes over the last couple of years and before.
And so when we look at that question how we can make good come out of this moment, my charge to you all for this prayer is for grace, for graceful conversations with each other and for each other. To come into those conversations on both sides from a place of wanting to understand, wanting to heal, wanting to emphasize. Because our community for far too many years have never witnessed a sight like this, a church where they can come, be prayed over and not be forced to change who they are, or who they love. For some people this image that I‘m staring at right now exists only in their dreams.
Update: Christianity Today has more about Joel Hunter:
The senior pastor of Northland Church, a 20,000 member, nondenominational church, admitted that “institutional forms of white Christianity” have been complicit in the denigration of LGBT communities, but expressed hope for “the next generation” of Christians.
Speaking in the aftermath of the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Hunter told RNS that he had “to go back and examine my own heart, starting tonight in services.
“I’ve got to confess to my congregation that if there’s anything I’ve said that could have ever led to anything — the dismissal or denigration of any other population — God, I am so sorry for that.”
He admitted that “many of us, especially those in the conservative evangelical branch of the faith, don’t normally think of the vulnerability of many of the communities around us…but this has put it on the agenda.
Hunter says he’s not quite ready to change some of his theological positions as a “matter of hermeneutical integrity”, he admitted “there’s much of scripture that can come up to a greater visibility when it comes to treating people who don’t interpret scripture like you do or who may not believe in scripture at all.” Which is pretty much how all movement among religious people start.
June 15th, 2016
Utah’s Republican Lt. Governor Spencer Cox gave a surprising speech during a vigil in Salt Lake City for the victims of the Pulse gay night club massacre. During the speech, he apologized for how he had treated gay people:
I grew up in a small town. I went to a small rural high school. There were some kids in my class that were different than me. Sometimes I wasn’t kind to them. I didn’t know it at the time, but I know now that they were gay. I regret not treating them with the kindness, dignity and respect — the love — that they deserved. For that, I sincerely and humbly apologize. Over the intervening years, my heart has changed. It has changed because of you. It has changed because I have gotten to know many of you. You have been very patient with me as I went through this change.
He also posed a very pertinent set of questions that he aimed to “the straight community”:
But now we are here. We are here because 49 beautiful, amazing people are gone. These are not just statistics. These were individuals. These were human beings. They each have a story. They each had dreams, goals, talents, friends, family. They are you and they are me. And one night they went out to relax, to laugh, to connect, to forget, to remember. And in a few minutes of chaos and terror, they were gone.
I believe that we can all agree we have come a long way as a society when it comes to our acceptance and understanding of the LGBTQ community. … However, there has been something about this tragedy that has very much troubled me. I believe that there is a question, two questions actually, that each of us needs to ask ourselves in our heart of hearts. And I am speaking now to the straight community.
How did you feel when you heard that 49 people had been gunned down by a self-proclaimed terrorist? That’s the easy question. Here is the hard one: Did that feeling change when you found out the shooting was at a gay bar at 2 a.m. in the morning? If that feeling changed, then we are doing something wrong.
…And so may we leave today, with a resolve to be a little kinder. May we try to listen more and talk less. May we forgive someone that has wronged us. And perhaps, most importantly, try to love someone that is different from us. For my straight friends, might I suggest starting with someone who is gay.
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