Box Turtle Bulletin

Texas Agents “Raid” Dallas Gay Bar

I’m putting “raid” in quotes because reportedly that’s how a local television station described it, but so far there are no reports of arrests or injuries. Agents from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission visited the Dallas Eagle last night and shut it down sometime before midnight. Last night was the opening night at the Eagle’s new address, and TABC reportedly went because of a discrepancy between the new address and the one listed on the Eagle’s liquor license.

Tammye Nash at the Dallas Voice was careful to say that local NBC television station KXAS is calling the action a “raid.” (KXAS hasn’t posted the story on their web site yet.) When I lived in Dallas ten years ago, KXAS Channel 5 tended to be among the more sensationalistic of the local newscasts. They had this gimmick of calling themselves “The Texas News Channel,” with an absurd emphasis on Texas in all of their stories. I remember once they reported that a plane crashed somewhere but no Texans were on board. That was a long time ago; they may very well have changed since then. I see that they are no longer “The Texas News Channel,” but just NBC 5. As we learn more, we may find out that this is a real deal. But for now I’m taking the word “raid” with a massive grain of salt.

Update: Were TABC agents wearing “Ninja masks”? Tammye Nash is trying to sort fact from fiction and will have more later.

Hot Or Not?

According to New York Times columnist David Brooks, a certain unnamed Republican Senator just couldn’t help himself.

Throw the Book (of Mormon) at Them

Get fit in Salt Lake... unless you"re gay

It seems that the police in Texas are inspiring the Salt Lake Police Force. The story involves a couple walking along what used to be a public street.

In 1999 the City sold a block of Main Street to the Church. Because all public policy statements and documents emphasized the need for pedestrian traffic on this downtown grid, the City retained an easement for public passage and access. The Church placed restrictions on speech and behavior on the plaza.

Courts struck down these restrictions, so in 2003, the City of Salt Lake transferred the Main Street Plaza easement to the Mormon Church so as to facilitate their desire to eliminate criticism from that public thoroughfare. Now those that use this public thoroughfare are on private property. And gay people had better remember it. (Salt Lake Tribune)

Aune said the incident started when he and Jones were walking back to his Salt Lake City home from a Twilight Concert Series show at the Gallivan Center. The couple live just blocks away from the plaza in the Marmalade district of the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

The pair crossed the plaza holding hands, Aune said. About 20 feet from the edge of the plaza, Aune said he stopped, put his arm around Jones and kissed him on the cheek.

This kiss resulted in being thrown to the ground by security guards, hand-cuffed, and being issued trespassing citations when the police arrived. Oh, and they are banned from all church property for six months – including that which had previously been public streets owned by the taxpayers.

Now the Mormon Church will tell you that it doesn’t hate gay people. It loves them, but disapproves of their sin just as they would the sin of an adulterer or fornicator.

I don’t find that argument convincing.

Update on “Chico’s Five”

The story of the five gay men kicked out of Chico’s Tacos in El Paso because they were gay has picked up momentum.

National news outlets, civil-rights lawyers from El Paso to Austin, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen and City Council representatives all chimed in on the Chico’s five.

Also additional information has been presented.

The phrase the security guards used was, “Si seguian con sus payasadas, los vamos a sacar de aqui, no permitimos que anden haciendo cosas aqui de jotos.” Jotos is a pejorative term perhaps best translated as “faggot”.

Mirroring the situation in Ft. Worth, the police tried to defend their discriminatory actions – only making the situation worse.

But El Paso Police Detective Carlos Carrillo defended the officers actions, telling the paper that every business has “the right to refuse service to whoever they don’t want there.”

Well as it turns out, no the restaurant cannot refuse service due to sexual orientation discrimination. (El Paso Times)

Lisa Graybill, legal director of the ACLU of Texas, said a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case determined that places of public accommodation cannot refuse to serve someone based purely on discrimination and must establish a reasonable basis for turning someone away.

Gay men and women have an additional protection in El Paso, where in 2003 the City Council adopted an ordinance that prohibits restaurants and other businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation, she said.

Local civil rights groups are upset and some gay people are protesting.

Word of the altercation between the gay men and the security guard spread quickly through El Paso. A text-message and e-mail campaign on Thursday urged people in the gay community and others to participate in a peaceful protest at 5 p.m. today in front of the Chico’s on Montwood. Thursday night, about 35 people protested outside the Chico’s Tacos. Several held signs that read, “Equal rights,” and “I want to kiss in public” and “It was only a kiss.”

Rev. Lee Threatened by Nat’l Civil Rights Group for Supporting Marriage Equality

Rev. Eric Lee, the president of the Los Angeles chapter of The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has been a valuable ally for marriage equality. He is a principled man (religiously conservative) who opposes discrimination where he sees it.

But Lee’s opposition to bigotry and bias has now gotten him in trouble with a group that was founded on the principles of equality for all. (NY Times)

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the 50-year-old civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others, is seeking to remove the president of its Los Angeles chapter in response to his support of same-sex marriage in California.

But those in the national organization may not be able to insist on endorsing discrimination in Southern California.

Because chapters of the leadership conference operate autonomously and presidents are picked by local boards, it is not clear that the national organization has the authority to remove Mr. Lee from his post, which he has held for two years.

“It\’s been our position that the local board hired him,” said Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer, chairman of the local board and secretary of the California Democratic Party. “And, in fact, we are also the ones that approved his stance on the position of marriage equality. We have asked the national board if we have violated any procedures, and we have not gotten an answer.”

Rev. Lee is sacrificing and taking the tough road and facing hardship and standing up to opposition in order to speak the difficult and unwanted message that “any time you deny one group of people the same right that other groups have that is a clear violation of civil rights”.

Dr. King would be proud.

Anti-Gays in Maine Claim 70,000 Signatures

According to Everyday Christian,

Earlier this week, about 70,000 signatures had been gathered, with more expected, according to Bob Emrich.

Earlier this week, other press was reporting 55,000. I guess we’ll wait and see.

King’s Killer Offered Plea Deal

On February 12, 2008, Brandon McInerney walked into his eighth grade classroom and put two bullets in the back of classmate Larry King’s head. His reason? Because Larry King dared to flirt with him.

Ever since that date, his defense has sought every opportunity to portray McInerney as the victim and King as the aggressor. Brandon was just a poor tormented kid who couldn’t take it any more. Newsweek contributed by running a hit-piece on Larry King. He has even been helped by King’s previous guardians who think that by portraying Larry as a threat to all that is heterosexual, they can get money from those who were actually caring for him.

But District Attorney Maeve Fox is refusing to allow Brandon McInerney’s attorneys to portray him as an innocent or to trash the name of Lawrence King and seek to blame him for his own murder.

After the Newsweek article ran portraying McInerney as basically a good kid who “was smart” but “had his share of troubles” (unlike King whom they portrayed as a “flamboyant” disturbance who “flaunted his sexuality and wielded it like a weapon”), Fox released information that revealed an entirely different Brandon McInerney than that portrayed by his attorneys and parroted by an inexperienced and gullible journalist who was more concerned about “the story” than the truth.

• Investigators seized white supremacist materials, including doodlings of Nazi swastikas, from the bedroom of Brandon McInerney.
• McInerney looked for others to join in a gang beating of King in the days before the shooting. Unable to find others interested he decided to kill King.
• McInerney was familiar with the gun with which he killed King, having used it for target practice.
• It wasn\’t until King had suffered months of being called “faggot” by McInerney and others that he began to retort by making sexual taunts to McInerney.
• Other students heard McInerney threaten to shoot King in the days before he did so.
• In addition to the skinhead and neo-Nazi materials, McInerney also had a training video called “Shooting in Realistic Environments”.

Fox has been harshly criticized for trying McInerney as an adult. With no one to speak for Lawrence King, McInerney’s supporters painted her as bloodthirsty and overly harsh. Even some gay groups and liberal organizations joined the chorus, saying that McInerney was being scapegoated and that he should not be tried as an adult. They felt that a possible 50 year sentence was just too much, considering his age (some of this concern has dissipated as more about McInerney’s character has been revealed).

Finally McInerney’s defense has gotten under Fox’s skin again. On Wednesday defense attorney Robyn Bramson accused prosecutors of being vindictive. They should have known better. Fox released information which put exposed their lack of forthrightness. She had offered McInerney a plea deal.

The district attorney will allow 15-year-old murder suspect Brandon McInerney to plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a lighter sentence, officials announced publicly today.

“It would bring (the sentence) down, from a maximum of 53 years to life, to 25 years to life,” said Senior Deputy District Attorney Maeve Fox, who is prosecuting this case.

NY Senate Stalemate Over

The stalemate in the New York State Senate is over in the same way it began. (NY Times)

The bitter standoff that has paralyzed the New York Senate for nearly five weeks ended on Thursday, when a senator from the Bronx who had defected to the Republicans returned to the Democratic fold, giving the party the majority it needed to re-establish control.

And now that the Democrats and Malcolm Smith have regained control, marriage equality has been taken back off the table. One ironic twist in this convoluted story is that there was an assumption that under Republican structured leadership, the marriage bill would have been brought for a vote. And it is even possible that there are adequate Republican supporters to make up for the vocal opponents in the Democratic caucus.

But the reforms that would have allowed Senators to bring forward legislation without the support and express permission of the Senate President appear to have been abandoned and the current Senate President, Malcolm Smith, has shown a stubborn insistence on keeping the bill from a vote. So it appears to me that marriage equality is dead in New York for the forseeable future.

Three Pro-Gay Groups Respond To AFER’s Letter

Chris Geidner has gotten some reactions from the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal, and the ACLU concerning the letter from the America Foundation for Equal Rights (the group behind the Olson and Boies lawsuit challenging Prop 8) sent to those groups demanding that they not seek to intervene in the suit:

Looking at [AFER board president Chad] Griffin\’s letter, it is clear that — far from being blindsided by the Perry lawsuit — the LGBT legal organizations were well aware of and chose not to participate in the filing of this lawsuit. It is also clear, though, that the groups have been working with the lawyers for the case since its filing to discuss strategy and a way to “integrate” the groups more fully in the case.

When contacted Thursday, James Esseks, the co-director of the ACLU\’s LGBT Rights Project, said of the distinction between the groups\’ initial response and their filing on Wednesday, “People can disagree about when and whether to jump into the pool, but once you do it makes sense to swim as hard as possible to get to the other side. . . . We\’re all in the pool; it\’s not just those plaintiffs.”

..Toward the beginning of Griffin\’s letter, he stated of the groups that “it is inconceivable that you would zealously and effectively litigate this case if you were successful in intervening.” Esseks, of the ACLU LGBT Rights Project took strong objection to that, saying, “Any suggestion that [the groups] would want to lose a marriage case is off-the-wall to me. It\’s unfathomable.” Likewise, Shannon Minter, the legal director at NCLR responded in a statement that “Our only focus right now is on doing everything we can to help win the case.”

I don’t think the letter from AFER suggests that any of the groups would actually want to lose the case. What it does suggest is that a group that doesn’t believe that a case should have been filed may not be as effective as those who do.

Chris argues that the groups are right to try to intervene in order to broaden the factual record for the inevitable appeals to the appelate court.

The Guardians Of Marriage

Sens. John Ensign, Tom Coburn, the secretive Christian cult known alternately as The Family or The Fellowship, and the House on C Street:

I used the term “cult” to describe The Fellowship. How else does one describe an outfit founded by a man who had a special visitation from Jesus who told him that Christianity got it wrong for the past two thousand years?

Jeff Sharlet’s book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power examines this strange organization in greater detail.

DADT’s Repeal Has A New Quarterback

Iraq War Veteran and former West Point Military Academy professor Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) says that now is the time for Congress to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Anti-Prop 8 Legal Team to Pro-Gay Groups: Back Off

The American Foundation for Equal Rights has released a letter they wrote to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal, and the ACLU of Southern California, asking the three groups not to intervene in the Boies and Olson challenge to California’s Prop 8 in federal court.  They recounted the many ways in which the three groups had previously opposed the lawsuit and raise a very legitimate concern now that those groups want to enter the lawsuit on the side of the plaintiffs:

In public and private, you have made it unmistakably clear that you strongly disagree with our legal strategy to challenge Prop. 8 as a violation of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the United States Constitution…. Having gone to such great lengths to dissuade us from filing suit and to tar this case in the press, it seems likely that your misgivings about our strategy will be reflected—either subtly or overtly—in your actions in court.

The letter provides an interesting detail surrounding the amicus briefs filed in the case calling for Prop 8 to be declared unconstitutional. According to the letter:

Even after you filed an amicus curiae brief urging the district court to grant our motion for a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of Prop. 8, you refused to characterize your position as one of “support.” Indeed, Jennifer Pizer of Lambda Legal went so far as to insist that we alter a press release that described your amicus curiae brief as “supporting” our suit. In response, we issued a second release addressing her concerns.

The letter also details several instances in which the Boies and Olsen team and AFER reached out to the three groups. After all that, AFER says that they “remain willing to work closely” with them, but not as co-council:

Your intervention would create a complex, multi-party proceeding that would inevitably be hampered by procedural inefficiencies that are directly at odds with our goal—and the goal of Chief Judge Walker—of securing an expeditious, efficient, and inexpensive resolution to the district court proceedings. As a result of your intervention, we could be mired in procedurally convoluted pre-trial maneuvering for years—while gay and lesbian individuals in California continue to suffer the daily indignity of being denied their federal constitutional right to marry the person of their choosing. … Delaying equal marriage rights in California serves none of our interests.

[Hat tip: Rex Wockner]

Click here to read the complete letter

Three Pro-Gay Groups Seek To Elbow Their Way Into Prop 8 Lawsuit

My first reaction on learning that Attorneys Theodore Olson and David Boies were filing a lawsuit in federal court to challenge the constitutionality of Prop 8, I was cool to the idea. But now with two other lawsuits from Massachusetts which are also challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, as well as the frustrations many of us are feeling over the distinctly unfierce advocacy taking place in Washington, I’ve changed my mind. I’m glad that Olson and Boies are going forward.

That said, I have to wonder what’s going on with three pro-gay groups who have petitioned the court to be admitted as parties to the case. The three groups — American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights — have asked the judge to allow them represent three gay community groups in the lawsuit seeking to overturn Proposition 8.

These same groups were among the eight who immediately opposed the lawsuit when it was first announced. Last week, they reversed their position and filed amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs, which is, I think, a very positive move. They seem to have warmed to the idea, much as I have.

But now all of the sudden they want to become parties of the lawsuit itself, even though they wanted nothing to do with the move in the beginning. Olson and Boies oppose their petition, saying that involving more groups would delay and unnecessarily complicate the proceedings. I agree. It worries me that one of the more important LGBT cases making its way in the federal courts could wind up having four different captains trying to pilot the ship. That alone should worry us.

But there’s something else that’s troubling. Kristin Perry, Sandra Stier, Paul Katami, and Jeffrey Zarrillo are the four Californians named as plaintiffs in the suit. They have the grievance, they’ve selected their lawyers, and they are ready to go to court to have their rights upheld. That’s what plaintiffs do in lawsuits. And so it seems to me that those four plaintiffs should have a right to have their case argued on their behalf by lawyers of their own choosing. They shouldn’t have to contend with three other outside groups with differing agendas who think they know better on how to try the case — especially when their first stab at knowing better was to publicly denounce the lawsuit to begin with.

Rep. Chaffetz: A Shining Illustration of Anti-Gay Intellect

Representative Jason Chaffetz, a California Jewish Democrat turned Utah Mormon Republican, is now auditioning for the position of Congress’ Biggest Homophobe. As lead Congressional opponent to D.C.’s out-of-state marriage recognition bill he was strikingly inept, but he did manage to get some press by announcing:

“It’s not something I think we can just let go lightly into the night.”

Chaffetz got into BYU on a soccer scholarship so perhaps he can be forgiven for mangling Dylan Thomas’ poetry. But his other comments suggest that his approach to legislation is not particularly nuanced (abc4):

“Marriage should be defined as a union between a man and a woman. I don’t see much other wiggle room for it.”

This stance comes in a week where America’s fifth state legalized same sex marriages.

So, we asked the congressman whether he is going against a trend towards gay unions.

He said simply, “The trend is still 45 states don’t.”

Sorry, Jason, but a trend would be… oh, well… nevermind.

But now Jason has now found his cause. He has discovered that he can get the media’s attention by saying some rather, ummm, interesting things about gay folk. So he was quick to state his mind when he found that Rep. Tammy Baldwin wants to pass legislation that would give benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. Baldwin thinks its a matter of equal compensation for equal work.

But Chaffetz called the legislation “directly discriminatory” against heterosexual couples that choose not to marry.

That argument didn’t get much traction with the other panel members who noted that gay couples don’t have the choice to marry in most states (including Utah). Rep. Gerry Connolly found his argument “a screaming contradiction”.

Ah, Jason. You haven’t yet figured out that everyone is laughing at you, have you?

Will NY Senate Stalemate End?

In an effort to break the petulant partisan bickering that has ceased all movement on any legislation in the state Senate for the past month, Gov. Paterson has appointed a Leutenant Governor. The state has been without a Lt. Gov. since then Governor Spitzer resigned and Paterson left that spot to become the state’s governor.

The problem?

The move comes even though the state’s top lawyer, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, warned earlier this week that such an appointment would be illegal.

Meanwhile the state’s vote on marriage sits in limbo.