I like the guy who screamed, "God DAMN America!" better

It appears as though president-elect Barrack Obama has begun to sell out the Queer community before he even takes office with the careful selection of a raving bigot to deliver an incantation at his official inauguration. Rick Warren, leader of a superstition-based organization near LA dedicated to the legal subjugation of lesbian and gay people often referred to as a "megachurch" by the corporate media, will attempt to lead our nation in an organized superstitious ritual during the inauguration of our next president. Plans for a public protest have not yet been formalized.

Response to passage of Propostion 8 continues to grow nationwide

In California, another legal complaint was filed today because it is believed that the Mormons did not properly and legally report all money and labor that they donated to the political cause of persecuting gay and lesbian families in California. The California Supreme Court also appears to be taking the legal challenges to Prop 8 that have already been filed very seriously. Meanwhile, California Attorney General Jerry Brown appears visibly aged since November 5th. Perhaps he is losing sleep over the prospect of having to defend Prop 8 in court while also defending the validy of all the same-sex marriages performed between May and now? To complicate matters further, county clerks across the state are unclear on when or whether to stop issuing same-sex marriage licenses, and some appear to have made the decision based on subjective criteria. None appear to have made the decision in coordination with any other.

A nationwide protest planned for tomorrow, November 15, continues to attract national media attention. A "No-Gays-for-a-Day" nationwide protest is in the works for Friday, December 5, and Kathy Griffin has agreed to headline since her show is not airing on the planned date nor does she have any live gigs scheduled [and presumably her quote was met]. She plans on spending that day in the private company of Cher and Bette Midler.

In a less positive development, envelopes containing a "suspicious white powder" that turned out to be a "harmless substance" arrived in the mail yesterday at openly Mormon temples in LA and Salt Lake City. It is not known whether authorities are investigating the possibility that the envelopes were mailed by a Mormon (or Mormons) intent on making the LGBT community look bad (like that woman in Pittsburgh who carved a backwards B on her face and then falsely claimed to have been assaulted by an Obama supporter on the Drudge Report just before the election). After living in this country for thirty-eight years and paying attention to the news for about thirty, my best educated guess is that they aren't investigating that possibility, nor have they even entertained it. The authorities will, however, almost certainly use this episode as justification for further government encroachment on human and civil rights, especially in certain minority communities. Regardless of who sent them, the envelopes did cause the Mormons to temporarily divert money and labor that would otherwise have been spent persecuting gay and lesbian people, so I guess you could still say that every cloud has a silver lining [and maybe even magic underwear].

Passage of Prop. 8 in California catalyzes nationwide protests and resistance

It is now very clear that Proposition 8 was approved by California voters by a margin of 4.6%. This ballot proposition reclassifies gay and lesbian Californians as second-class citizens by reinstating a ban on same-sex marriages that was ruled unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court in May of 2008. This ban effectively withholds over one thousand special rights, responsibilities and privileges from up to 10% of the state's population. It is legally unclear whether the proposition will retroactively annul the tens of thousands of same-sex marriages that have been performed since the court decision that legalized them. It is also legally unclear whether the proposition will withstand numerous legal challenges that have already been filed against it.

The proposition passed with no small amount of financial and volunteer help from Christian extremists, many of whom, such as the Mormons in Utah and the all-male [wink] Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Vatican City, reside far beyond California's borders. Local nondenominational megachurches in California also contributed money and volunteer time to legally attacking the human rights of their own neighbors. If you'd like to know whether anybody in your hometown abetted this latest example of tyranny of the majority that will permanently stain American history books, you can search this database by specific name or browse a list of contributors by state and/or city. Hmmm, it appears that a John Templeton, Jr of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, president of the Templeton Foundation, felt so strongly in favor of persecuting gay and lesbian families in California that he donated a honking $450,000 twice. Must have a been a good year for him.

In GLBT communities across the United States, reaction to the passage of this punitive and ambiguously worded proposition has been unexpectedly swift, assertive, widespread, and well attended. The international press has even taken notice. Protesters appear to be focusing their resistance on the Christian extremists who made this theft of human rights their latest crusade in a long, ultimately unsuccessful series of reactionary attempts to force those whose behavior they take issue with because it violates some of their superstitions to live the way they do.

If you'd like to protest Proposition 8 yourself, you are invited to make a big creative sign and go to your local city hall, Mormon temple, or Roman Catholic cathedral basilica this Saturday, November 15 for a national day of protest. You can find specific information about any planned protests in your hometown here. In California the demonstrations began spontaneously immediately after the results became known and continue to this day, especially in the gay-friendly areas of West LA and the San Francisco Bay. A protest at the Mormon temple in Manhattan, NY also attracted thousands on Wednesday, November 12.

If public demonstrations aren't your thing but you still want to express your feelings about this perversion of democracy, you can chat with a Mormon missionary online. Fun questions to ask might include, "Which version of traditional marriage is most traditional, the one where there is one woman and one man or the one where there is one man and as many girls and women as the man can afford or keep captive?" Or, "Why do you hate gay people and want to steal their human rights and dignity when Jesus said to love everybody as you would yourself?" You can also feel free to boycott the states of California and Utah, the former being much more difficult than the latter.

Californians pervert the machinery of democracy to abet religious extremists in an obsessive drive to re-secure special legal status

The state of California, second in the United States following Massachusetts to ensure legal equality for all of its citizens, has suffered a temporary legal set-back in the form of a confusing, discriminatory, and punitive ballot initiative that was funded in no small part by Christian extremists from other states, including the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) in Utah. Although California election officials have not finished counting all the votes, the Christian extremists have already claimed victory in their obsessive drive to re-secure special rights for themselves and those who share their ancient, superstitious beliefs regarding the consensual sexual behavior of legally competent adults. Despite numerous appeals, it appears likely that California's gay and lesbian citizens will once again, at least temporarily, be designated second-class citizens to appease Christian extremists.

John "Maverick" McCain Selects a Bigotted Psycho Nazi Jesus Freak for His Running Mate

Her name is Sarah Palin, and she believes that American women should cede control of their genitalia and reproductive organs to a cabal of straight, white, male, hypocritical perverts in Washington who have become obsessed with controlling the sexual behavior of a nation of nearly 300 million people in order to make it conform to their own warped superstitious beliefs[, which allegedly have something to do with orthodox Christianity]. She believes that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people are less than human and do not deserve the equal protection of our legal system. She [is rumored to have] faked her seventeen-year-old daughter's first pregnancy by pretending it was her own fifth pregnancy and has now coerced that same daughter into bearing a second [or first] child before she is old enough to vote and into marrying its adolescent, teen-aged father under planetary public scrutiny. She is opposed to birth control. She thinks it's ethical to shoot wolves and bears from airplanes for state-subsidized sport, and she spent almost half a million dollars of those same federal subsidies illegally attempting to influence the outcome of an Alaskan referendum on that same issue. She spent federal subsidies instead of Alaskan tax dollars, which would also be illegal, because Alaska receives more federal money than its citizens pay in federal taxes than any other state and could never exist as a populated American territory if it were not for those diverted tax dollars, which are excised from the hard-working and economically productive citizens of places like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Rhode Island, and Delaware. Sarah Palin is also willing to allow beluga whales and polar bears go extinct if it means we can prolong our nation's unhealthy addiction to fossilized dinosaur shit for a few more weeks or months. She is a former "beauty queen," and her executive political experience is limited to running a state with fewer people than most campgrounds in the Northeast regularly accommodate on summer holiday weekends with less environmental damage (and also without the benefit of federal subsidies). There are no links in this post because no one could make this shit up.

Raging Bigots Stifled By One Courageous Pennsylvania Senator

At the behest of Republican Rasputin-wannabes such as Karl Rove, Pennsylvania, not unlike many other "swing" states, has recently been subjected to repeated efforts by Christian extremists (who receive much of their funding from forces outside the commonwealth) to ratify a constitutional amendment that would relegate our law-abiding and tax-paying gay and lesbian citizens to permanent second-class citizenship by denying them legal recognition of any marriages, civil unions, or domestic partnerships they might choose to form. Before any constitutional amendment, even bigoted and Nazi-apartheid-like amendments such as this one, can be put to the citizens of Pennsylvania in a referendum, it must be passed by both houses of the legislature in two consecutive sessions with reconciled language. Last session, the House and Senate each passed very different versions and then did nothing to reconcile the versions, putting the Christian extremist bigots back at square one. This session, the extremist forces managed to convince one bigoted freshman lawmaker to re-introduce the failed legislation.

They didn't anticipate the reaction they would receive from Senator Vince Fumo this time around. No one did. Fumo has always believed that gay and lesbian people deserve equal treatment under the law. Now that he's announced he's retiring because of health issues and an ongoing corruption investigation, he apparently feels more free to really say what's on his mind. During testimony before his committee, Fumo informed one Christian extremist who happened to be African American and was speaking in favor of the amendment that Fumo's more conservative colleagues in the Senate would certainly vote to re-legalize black slavery if they could do it on a secret ballot. People pretended to be shocked, but anyone who knows upstate Pennsylvania (anywhere besides Philadelphia and its adjacent suburban counties), knows that Fumo was telling the sad truth, not committing hyperbole as the Daily diplomatically asserts in this op-ed.

After the slavery revelation failed to derail the legislation (which would be surprising almost anywhere besides Pennsylvania), Fumo attached an amendment to the amendment so that it would also outlaw most heterosexual divorces. Up to that point in the debate, the bigots kept asserting that they were not bigots, and all they wanted to do was to protect the institution of marriage. However, when they were faced with the prospect of legislation that might actually preserve a few marriages (on legal paper at least) but would do nothing to subjugate gay and lesbian citizens, they turned around and went home as very unhappy and unfulfilled bigots. The amendment was promptly tabled. The next time it could possibly come up for debate would be after the 2008 presidential election.

Thanks to the infinite fuck-ups and abuses of the Bush-Cheney junta, our beloved country is in a sorry state. It's nice to know (and it gives me hope that we may re-establish democracy on a national level very soon) they don't always get their way.

State-Sponsored Homophobia Provides Common Ground for US-Iran Relations

General Pace has something in common with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both are incapable of dealing with gay and lesbian people in a realistic and respectful way, and both were mocked and derided by ordinary Americans. At least Pace didn't attempt to deny the existence of gay and lesbian Americans serving in the military as Ahmadinejad attempted to deny the existence of GLBT Iranians living in Iran.

Gay and Lesbian Italians Confront Bigotry Forcefully

Proving once again that there are very real consequences resulting from the public espousal of bigotry and hatred, an undemocratically chosen official of the superstition-based Roman Catholic hierarchy, "Bishop Bagnasco," has been provided lethally armed bodyguards by Italian taxpayers, hundreds of thousands of whom are gay and lesbian themselves and therefore the targets of Bagnasco's hatred and bigotry. The object of previous direct actions following speeches in which he called for the initiation of antigay pogroms, Bagnasco claims to have received during the weekend a bullet in an envelope emblazoned with his graven image and a Nazi swastika. Exactly what such symbolism was intended to signify is debatable, if we can believe Bagnasco's account at all since it is entirely possible, likely even, that he is fabricating the whole scenario in order to generate bad publicity for people who want no more than legal equality. I happen to think the bullet was intended to be more of a reminder to Bagnasco about all the innocent people who have died violently because of the church-sponsored bigotry he is actively perpetuating than it is a threat to his own personal safety. We can at least feel comforted by the fact that he's much less likely to molest any children with a lot of armed cops watching his every move.