During my hiatus from computer-land, I vaguely caught wind of this story of a lesbian couple being harassed at Dollywood because one of them was wearing a t-shirt that said “Marriage Is So Gay.” My first reaction to that was, well, if this is true, Dolly’s not gonna be happy, not one bit. Here’s the background:
The tempest over Odom’s T-shirt happened on July 9, when she and Tipton, accompanied by a friend and her daughters, arrived at the popular Pigeon Forge, Tenn., park.
Odom and Tipton said what really rankled them was the explanation from the gatekeeper.
“He said it was a family park,” Tipton told the Knoxville News Sentinel newspaper. “Families come in a wide range of definitions these days, and we were with our family.”
Odom said she was furious but agreed to the gatekeeper’s demand because she “didn’t want to make a scene in front of the girls.”
And, as I predicted, Dolly’s not happy about this:
Country star Dolly Parton has personally apologized to a lesbian couple that was stopped at the entrance to her Dollywood theme park because one of the women wore a T-shirt that read, “marriage is so gay.”
“I am truly sorry for any hurt or embarrassment regarding the gay and lesbian T-shirt incident,” she wrote in a statement. “Everyone knows of my personal support of the gay and lesbian community. Dollywood is a family park and all families are welcome.”
That’s right, rogue Dollywood staff. EVERYBODY KNOWS Dolly loves her some gays and lesbians, so be nice.
Through ABC Family and the Christian Broadcast Network, industrialist and Christian Right evangelist Pat Robertson (not his real name) has spent more than 30 years using Hollywood and the cable television industry to inject his social prejudices — and his failed threats of destruction against various cities — into North American households. Mind you, these are households that never asked their cable company to pollute their living rooms with his Christian cash-crazed telethons such as The 700 Club.
While Robertson used Hollywood domestically to preserve various social bigotries and to market himself as a kindly Christian gentleman, he also used his industrial empire to profit from forced labor in the diamond and gold trade in Liberia, and to support notorious African war criminal Charles Taylor.
Few Americans know about Robertson’s history of international human-rights abuses, because he has focused his television empire on other issues to distract public attention. Robertson doesn’t choose issues such as social violence, middle-class poverty, inaccurate news shows, or infidelity and divorce — issues that might enjoy broad public agreement, but which would hit too close to home among his viewers and donors.
Pat Robertson says the primary threat that America faces is from homosexuals who are using Hollywood to glamorize gay people’s rights and to pressure straight actors into accepting gay roles.
Homosexual Hollywood — it’s an alarming prospect, isn’t it? There’s just one problem: Straight actors are taking gay roles (for pay) because directors and casting agents refuse to hire openly gay actors!
Homophobia is alive and well in Hollywood — and few should know that better than Robertson, who is a product of Hollywood conservatives’ glamorization of Christian Right war criminals and human-rights violators.
It always sneaks up on me because down South, so many of our Pride celebrations have been moved to the month of October, due to the fact that the heat becomes overwhelming by June, which leads many of us to not want to do anything outside that doesn’t involve a swimming pool. But it is June, which means that it’s time for Pride!
We have a lot of things to celebrate this year. The tide has truly turned, as for the first time, a majority of the American people, in multiple polls, support true equal rights for gays and lesbians, all the way up to marriage. People are starting to speak up and speak out like never before on behalf of gay kids, due to things like the “It Gets Better” project. Celebrities and other well-known figures are coming out of the closet in areas once considered “The Final Frontier,” and even professional athletes are starting to express their support for the LGBT community.
But there remains much work to be done. Teddy Partridge has an important piece up at FireDogLake which reminds us that, while we’re celebrating, we must remember that in certain very important ways, we still have disadvantages in this society that we must fight to fix. For one thing, despite myths to the contrary, the LGBT community, on average, makes less money than the greater population. Teddy points to an APA report on the socioeconomic status of the gay community:
Gay men earn up to 32 percent less than similarly qualified heterosexual men.
Up to 64 percent of transgender people report incomes below $25,000.
While 5.9 percent of the general population makes less than $10,000, 14 percent of LGBT individuals are within this income bracket.
Moreover, it sort of depends on where we live. In Tennessee, bigots just passed a big government bill designed to hurt the gay community, prohibiting cities from establishing their own nondiscrimination policies. And these problems still exist in many places across the country:
Termination of an employee based on sexual orientation remains legal in 31 American states.
Termination of an employee based on gender identity remains legal in 39 American states.
Up to 68 percent of individuals identifying as LGBT report experiencing employment discrimination.
Those are big numbers. And while there are many of us who are mobile enough to look at those numbers and say “screw it, I’ll move to a real state where we aren’t treated like crap,” many more of us simply don’t have that option.
This is without even getting into the differences that exist for LGBT youth, and the fact that, according to the same report, twenty-six percent of youth that come out to their parents are kicked out of their homes. ["Pro-family" parents are amazing, aren't they?]
Go read Teddy’s piece, and this month, as you are celebrating, however you are celebrating, if you are celebrating, keep in mind the good and the bad, the jobs finished and those yet to be tackled.
This is the pink-shirted David Fowler, head of the cutely named Family Action Council of Tennessee [FACTn] [sic], standing on a playground and talking with his hands a hell of a lot, and gloating about the fact that his organization, a wang of the national hate group known as the Family Research Council, was able to pressure intellectually dead Tennessee legislators into passing a big government bill disallowing Tennessee cities from setting their own nondiscrimination policies, and instead lording their own goat-romancing “pro-family” ways over all of us.
I really have nothing to say about this, I’m just posting the video.
The failure of the American educational system right there, in that pink shirt, y’all.
I’ve been procrastinating when it comes to writing this up, just because I’m so embarrassed by what Tennessee and our governor, Bill Haslam, a particular brand of idiot if there ever was one, did this week. John Aravosis has had more stomach for this than I have this week, so I’ll let him fill you in:
The TN Chamber of Commerce, one of the forces behind anti-gay and anti-trans legislation that repeals a gay/trans civil rights ordinance in Nashville, and bans Tennessee cities from passing any civil rights legislation ever again, has just switched gears and is now opposing the bill.
Unfortunately, the Republican governor just signed the law.
“I don’t really like the state government telling local governments what to do, but I don’t really feel like local governments should tell businesses what to do either,” Haslam said Tuesday in Chattanooga, where he attended the grand opening of a new Volkswagen plant.
“In this case, we were going beyond what the federal requirements were, and I don’t think many Tennesseans feel like we don’t have enough mandates on businesses from the federal government.”
So the state will instead tell businesses what to do and not do, instead of leaving it to cities, because SMALL GOVERNMENT AND FREEDOMZ and something else I couldn’t understand because he had several of his fingers in his mouth at the time. Never mind the fact that the trend in this nation [in more successful states than *cough* Tennessee] is toward GREATER nondiscrimination protections for ALL employees. Again, Haslam isn’t the brightest bulb in the dim bulb factory, which considered relocating to Tennessee, but they actually care about their gay and lesbian employees and changed their minds.
The Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, of course, actively lobbied FOR the bill, but now they’ve had a magical change of heart. It seems they’ve suddenly discovered that the only motivations for this bill were pure, backwoods bigotry, and that doesn’t sit well with their bottom lines.
During the lead-up to the bill’s signing, Alcoa was the only board member of the Chamber of Commerce who had an actual come-to-Jesus experience, calling directly on the governor to veto it. Now I’ll let Scott Wooledge at the New Civil Rights Movement take over:
Other companies that control board seats include FedEx, AT&T, Comcast, DuPont, Pfizer, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Caterpillar, KPMG,Whirlpool, Embraer and United HealthCare.
Having a bit of experience with FedEx, it’s unsurprising that they did so little to encourage a veto. FedEx is dragged into every issue involving equality kicking and screaming. Perhaps if the largest employer in Memphis wasn’t such a pain about most everything, Memphis would be further along in its quest to be a world class city. Here’s FedEx’s statement from before the bill was signed:
FedEx did not lobby for SB632/HB600–it is our policy not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. While FedEx is a member of the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, we do not support every position proposed by the Chamber.
Whatever. Scott adds a clarification to FedEx’s crap:
This is disingenuous, and bordering on a lie. In fact, FedEx is more than a member, they’re on the board of directors. Which would place them in the position to, ahem, direct the Chamber’s actions. As such they cannot so easily wash their hands of this and say, “We didn’t know what the Chamber was up to!”
Uh yeah. I mean, their HRC rating was only 70 anyway. It’s not like they have a history of trying.
Anyway, this issue is, like I said, so embarrassing. Tennessee has so many wonderful people, gay and straight; it has history, culture, natural beauty, talent, incredible cities, and everything else.
It’s run, unfortunately, by a motley crew of thumb-sucking morons whom the educated segment of the population wouldn’t trust to walk our dogs, much less make important decisions for us.
The good news is that the bill will likely be tied up in litigation for a while and wonderful groups like the Tennessee Equality Project will be on hand to fight their damnedest to fix this. Stay tuned…
The support for our petition for Apple to remove Exodus International’s inherently bigoted iPhone app has been overwhelming. As I hit “post” on this piece, the number of signers sits at 139,943. [If you haven't signed yet, do it!] We at Truth Wins Out are thrilled with the response, and we encourage Apple to listen.
However, there have been pieces and comments here and there which suggest that some people, even some ostensibly on our own side, don’t quite understand why we’re doing this, or why it’s important. Some of the complaints mention the First Amendment and/or censorship, neither of which are really appropriate critiques here. Other complaints suggest that, while those making them may indeed understand Apple’s policies against defamatory apps, they don’t quite understand the inherently hateful message of Exodus and similar groups, couched as it is in sugary, “loving” religious language.
So I wanted to take a few minutes to really break this down, and as my framework, I’ve decided to respond to a piece in Forbes by a writer named Victoria Pynchon, who I truly believe is completely well-meaning, but nonetheless doesn’t quite get it. Here is how Pynchon starts her piece:
I downloaded the Exodus App today to see whether it contained something akin to hate speech which has been variously defined as any communication which disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race or sexual orientation; or attacks or disparages a person or group of people based on their social or ethnic group.
At the risk of putting myself at the center of a firestorm of disapproval, I have to say that what I viewed and read on the Exodus app was not hate speech but simply the expression of religious beliefs with which I, and many other people, disagree.
Exodus International appears to be a non-denominational religious organization that believes homosexuality is a sin. It also promotes the idea that this sin can be relieved by establishing a spiritual relationship with Jesus.
Let us talk about “religious beliefs” for a moment. Many religious beliefs are uniformly harmful. The religious belief that black people should be the natural slaves of white people is/was harmful. We do have a First Amendment in this country which protects speech, protects against the establishment of a state religion, and at least endeavors to keep religious expression and the state separate. However, the free practice of religion doesn’t always extend any old place the religious want it to go. In short, your “religious freedom” ends the second it damages my constitutional freedoms.
Now, that was sort of an aside, because let us be clear that this issue has nothing to do with the First Amendment. No one is telling proponents of Exodus-style brainwashing that they cannot exercise their religious beliefs. However, Apple has a stated policy regarding their apps, which specifically excludes apps that are defamatory/hateful toward entire groups of people. Racist apps do not get in. Anti-Semitic apps do not get in. Perhaps some of the confusion, then, is in what precisely about Exodus and similar groups makes them inherently hateful, inherently bigoted, and inherently discriminatory against the entire LGBT community. Peterson Toscano, who is one of the most well-known survivors of the Exodus world, broke it down the other day in a piece where he quite simply labels Exodus-supporting groups as straight supremacists:
Why all the fuss? Why not let these folks have their freedom of speech even if what they have to say is wacky, antiquated, and panned by proper medical folks?
In the case of Exodus, here’s why we fuss. For one, we are NOT talking about a freedom of speech issue. Exodus is free to say whatever they want on their blogs and pulpits. No private company like Apple has to use their resources to promote Exodus’ message. Apple has the right to say, no.
Exodus spokespeople paint themselves in the media as kindly folks who simply want to help those who are unhappy with being gay. They don’t force anyone to do anything against their will. They do not want to interrupt the lives of happy homosexuals who are content with their sexuality or identity. That’s what they say, but that’s not what they mean. They are being wise as serpents and gentle as doves. They are duplicitous.
Exodus is a Straight Supremacist group that believes that heterosexuality, straight marriage, and gender normative behavior are superior to anything lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) people have going on in their lives. At Exodus conferences, in their books, through their many local programs they state that LGBTQ people are inferior to heterosexuals. They say over and over that LGBTQ folks are morally, spiritually, developmentally damaged. Just last week Alan wrote that even celibate gays who still identify as gay “fall short of God’s best.” In fact, he makes it clear that God’s best is for people to be heterosexually partnered, even if they are not heterosexual. They do not seem to consider the needs of a straight person who may well suffer as a result of this union (which is often the case.)
[...]
And what is Exodus’ big goal for 2011? To reach out to youth in middle school and high school with a message of hope! You don’t have to be bullied for being gay because you can chose the superior identity of being straight. They have a new iphone app in large part to reach out to the younger generation with their straight supremacist message. In essence they say, “The bullies are right. You are a worthless piece of shit, but we can bring value to your life. We can help you leave all that gayness behind and become holy and valuable to the world around you.”
You see, Ms. Pynchon, Exodus does not exist without an inherently defamatory framework which blames gay peoples’ problems on our sexuality, and which states that indeed we are worthy of hatred and scorn, and then makes money off promulgating the entirely false hope that one can leave all of these problems behind by denying our true selves and joining up with the Straight Supremacist cause. Imagine, then, a group which was based on the idea that any time a black person has problems, their skin color is the root of that problem, but if you spend several years and tens of thousands of dollars, you, too, can leave the African-American lifestyle and live as a Caucasian. It wouldn’t pass Apple’s policies, would it?
Now, there are racist websites and anti-Semitic websites and anti-gay websites all over the internet. No one is trying to “suppress” their rights to speak out. But Apple is a private corporation with a stated policy against defamatory and hateful apps. Facebook has similar policies. What we are doing here is simply asking Apple to abide by their own guidelines, and if that means it’s time for the Apple hierarchy to spend a moment getting educated on what Exodus International really does, so be it.
Apple had no problem deleting the bigoted Manhattan Declaration app, because the hate in that document was so in your face that a fool could see it. We understand that Exodus is far more serpent-like in the way they go about their business, but here is something important to understand: the entire ex-gay industry mostly serves as a tool to prop up the very same bigoted groups behind the Manhattan Declaration. Because there is an arm of the Religious Right claiming to love gays so much that they’ll help us find “freedom from homosexuality,” hate groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association are able to maintain a veneer [even if only in their own minds] of plausible deniability over whether they actually hate gay people. ”Of course we don’t hate gay people! We love them enough to try to free them from their sin!”
Later in her piece, Pynchon engages in what I see as a deep over-analysis of the subject, trying to suggest that somehow Apple products have become the arbiters of our “national narrative”:
There’s something deeper at work in the demand for the expulsion of Exodus from the App store than what might underlie calls for the boycott of an enterprise whose policies don’t meet with a certain group’s approval – Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE:ANF) and the HRC Index come to mind.
The furor over the Exodus App suggests that the iPad, by virtue of its shape and function, is assumed to be carrying our national “super story” – the tale a community tells about itself to establish a shared identity. As scholars explain, these national narratives hold us together and keep us apart.
[...]
When we demand that people be ejected from the public square based on the content of their speech, we’re usually doing so because we don’t want them to be telling any part of our communal story.
[...]
If the iPad and iPhone have become, by virtue of their information app-lization, a version of the public square, we’d be better off letting the public decide whose ideas are more consistent with our national character and whose are not.
No, Ms. Pynchon. It is not that complicated, at all. The Apple products are not The Public Square, and you’d be hard-pressed to point to a situation where gay activists are truly asking that Religious Right opinions be removed from The Public Square. Indeed, we spend our days highlighting and refuting their statements, thus giving their opinions more airtime on the internet [which IS the public square] than they’d ever have before.
This is very simple. Apple has a stated policy against discriminatory and defamatory apps, but unfortunately, as with so many sectors of our society, which have yet to catch up with the fact that anti-gay bigotry is no better than racism or anti-Semitism, they have failed to make the connection that this app goes against their policies just as a white supremacist app would. No one is trying to take away Exodus’s “Freedom of Speech.” We’re asking Apple to be consistent and treat their LGBT customers with the same dignity as they’d treat anyone else.
Focus St. Louis and the Clayton Chamber of Commerce said today that they are canceling a planned presentation by Dan Cathy, president and COO of Chick-fil-A, following complaints that Cathy and his company are involved with anti-gay organizations.
Chick-fil-A, which is known for promoting a company vision of Christian values, was enmeshed in a controversy earlier this year involving an independent Chick-fil-A operator in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which is affiliated with the Family Resource Institute. The latter institute was recently designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of its anti-gay positions.
The decision to cancel Cathy’s March 18 presentation here was made after PROMO, a statewide organization that advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, protested his appearance and asked Focus and the Chamber of Commerce to reconsider.
Ellen Gale, the head of the chamber, said today that when the groups agreed to co-sponsor Cathy’s appearance, they had no idea he held controversial views.
Sometimes all you have to do is bring it to their attention. I’m always very cautious when protesting things like this planned speech, because very often, what you have is not a matter of discriminatory beliefs or activities, but rather oversight. In this case, once the Clayton Chamber knew what kind of unsavory activities Cathy and the Chick-Fil-A corporate team have been involved in, they said “No thanks.”
Clayton, which is just outside the city of St. Louis, is one of the loveliest towns in the United States, for the record.
You’ll remember a few weeks back that a beloved soccer coach had been fired, by most accounts directly related to the fact that she told her women’s soccer team that she and her partner were expecting a baby. The board of trustees has now voted to add sexual orientation to the school’s nondiscrimination policy. There’s a bit of a weird X-factor still in play though:
A university that came under fire from students for the departure of a lesbian women’s soccer coach has added sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy, but it was not clear whether it covered sexually active gays.
President Bob Fisher announced the policy approved by trustees, but wouldn’t answer questions Wednesday regarding ex-soccer coach Lisa Howe. The private university has said her departure on Dec. 2 was a mutual decision. But students and players protested, saying Howe was let go because she told them she was having a child with her same-sex partner.
[...]
Several reporters wanted to know whether Belmont was making a distinction between sexual orientation and sexual practice.
Belmont’s student code of conduct lists sex outside of marriage as “sexual misconduct.” Since gays and lesbians cannot marry in Tennessee, there is no way for them to be sexually active without violating the code.
Fisher would not say whether the new policy meant whether openly gay people could work at Belmont.
“I would put that in the category of a hypothetical,” he said.
The thing about wingnuts is that everything they disagree with is, in their minds, endowed with superpowers and possibly capable of bringing about the very apocalypse they simultaneously fear and desperately wish for. Consider this bit of mildly positive news about HUD:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is taking steps to ensure gays and lesbians don’t face discrimination when applying for federal housing assistance.
HUD has unveiled a series of proposed rule changes that would prohibit lenders from using sexual orientation or gender identity as a way of determining a borrower’s eligibility. The rule change would state that eligible families have the opportunity to participate in HUD-based programs regardless of marital status or sexual orientation.
The new rules, if adopted, also would prohibit owners and operators of HUD-funded housing from asking applicants or household occupants about sexual orientation or gender identity.
The proposals must undergo a 60-day public comment period before formal implementation.
So, that’s nice. Not a huge change, but a small step to ensure fair treatment for all people.
Now, let’s watch Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association absolutely weeing all over himself over this news. The headline:
HUD projects now hunting grounds for homosexual child molesters
Religious Right figures bitch when we call them homophobes, but this is why. Can you not just smell the abject, night-sweat-producing fear in that headline? It’s bizarre, like all irrational prejudice against entire groups of people is bizarre, but there you go.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is proposing a new rule that would require that homosexuals, transsexuals, transgenders, and cross-dressing transvestites be given the same access to taxpayer-funded HUD programs that sexually normal people have.
I don’t know that I would call fundamentalists “sexually normal.” I mean, the English language is evolving, but come on now.
No “arbitrary exclusion” would be allowed, as if taking sexual deviancy into account is something capricious. But we know that homosexual behavior poses the same health risks that intravenous drug use and prostitution pose
Liar or stupid…liar or stupid? [Both.]
Survey after survey indicates that homosexuals have higher levels of income and education than sexually normal individuals, meaning they have a greater range of housing choices than normal folk as it is.
See, now we run into the dual nature of homophobia. In Bryan’s world, where cognitive dissonance does not exist [words too big, cannot process], gays are BOTH dangerous, dead-end, diseased health risks like lepers, but ALSO we are the richest, smartest damn lepers on the planet. We saw this during the fight to repeal DADT, when wingnuts like Bryan simultaneously made jokes [meant to prop up their thin images of their own masculinity] about gay people “feminizing” the military, making us weaker, etc., but also warned that gays are More Brutal Than Nazis and will “take over” the armed forces. We are that powerful with our pink curtains and stuff, you see. Wingnuts turn their ideological opponents into superheroes, while at the same time desperately trying to convince themselves and others that they are the ones holding moral and physical authority. It’s funny to watch, and kind of sad, sort of like when upon a summer’s day, you happen to chance upon a bumblebee repeatedly flying into a window, slamming up against it, coming back, slamming up against it again, never learning, etc.
So this really isn’t about access to housing; it’s about forcing the rest of us to accept homosexual behavior as normative, something no sane society should ever do.
Canada, Sweden, etc. = insane.
Iran = epitome of sanity.
[Bryan and pals: Seriously, just convert to Islam and move there. It's not like your religious beliefs have anything to do with the figure of Jesus anyway.]
The second thing at work here is that not only will this rule demonstrate government endorsement of homosexual behavior – which is the real goal of homosexual activists – it will give activists a way to punish, marginalize, and silence any landlords with deeply held moral and religious convictions who won’t cravenly capitulate to political correctness.
In other words, if this is going to be a “rule,” there have to be penalties for breaking it. Ultimately, this is about inflicting Inquisition-type pain on any HUD landlord who holds time-honored convictions about human sexuality. The vicious homosexual lobby wants to make them pay, and pay they will.
Being forced to follow the law in a free country, by not discriminating against entire groups of people = “Inquisition-type pain” for fundamentalists. Because they are weak people.
Now, for the obligatory quote combining the wingnut victim complex with their constant obsession with gay sexytime:
This has already happened in England, where an elderly couple has just been dragged into court, convicted, and fined for refusing to rent a room with just one bed to a pair of homosexuals looking for a countryside tryst.
Straight couple going to bed and breakfast = vacay.
Gay couple going to bed and breakfast = ILLICIT COUNTRYSIDE TRYST!
So funny.
There are two more reasons why this is a perfectly bad idea. (I brought both of these up with the writer of the Christian Post article, but they did not make it into the published piece.) One, many young boys living in HUD housing are already in troubled domestic situations, many with no father presence in the home. The last thing they need is suddenly to be living next door to two males modeling a sexually abnormal lifestyle. Role models matter immensely to young boys, and they don’t need any more adults around them setting bad examples. They’ve already been exposed to enough of that.
Bryan Fischer thinks of the poor first, you see, as long as he can use his dim charitable instinct to bolster his case for hating gay people.
And we know – despite the howls of protest to the contrary – that male homosexuals molest young boys at a hugely exaggerated rate. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, did a study of its own priests who molested children, and found that 81% of the victims were boys.
Stupid, or liar? Stupid, or liar? [Still both.]
For slow members of the class: No credible study has linked homosexuality to pedophilia. Moreover, anyone with half a brain and a perfunctory knowledge of the subject knows that pedophilia is not about sexual orientation, i.e. the gender of the child does not matter. It’s about power, and it’s a sickness, and the reason there are more boy victims in the Catholic church is that [I cannot believe I'm having to explain this] priests have more access to young boys! [Duh.] Because of the gender separation reinforced by the patriarchy, priests have always been given beaucoups access to boys, so when they’re feeling molest-y, as so many of them so often do, the victims they have access to are boys.
That’s enough Bryan for now. I truly think he may be the world’s stupidest, most fearful wingnut.
A lesbian couple has faced two hate crimes within a week, with anti-gay slurs tagged on their home and vehicles, and a fire destroying their business.
Couple Lindsay Curnow and Juliet Leigh have lived peacefully in the small coastal village of Mangawhai Heads, Northland, for seven years. They said their sexuality has never been an issue before in the community.
But now they live in fear, not wanting to leave their home and return to something worse.
Two weeks ago the couple had their home and vehicles tagged with offensive anti-gay slurs.
Then a week later their shed, which is at the heart of their mail-order bulb business, was completely destroyed by fire.
“They’ve really invaded our privacy. It was a bit like being burgled, you know that sort of violation that you have,” Leigh said.
A Carroll County man told Channel 2 Action News that he believes he was the target of a hate crime.
Chris Staples said someone threw a rock through his window with a piece of paper attached that was covered in anti-gay slurs.
“I was watching TV and just finished smoking a cigarette and I heard this big thud. Boom!” Staples told Channel 2’s George Howell.
The rock had a threatening note attached.
“It said, ‘we know you’re gay. And God hates gays. You won’t be raping anybody in the county and God’s going to make sure that you burn in hell.’ And something about my daddy… my daddy will make sure you burn in hell,”
Then hours later, he woke up to flames filling his bedroom.
The principal of Jarvis Collegiate Institute said allegations that students are hurling slushies, shoes and homophobic slurs at residents of the Gay Village are being “treated very seriously.”
However, Enza Anderson, who has been harassed in the past, called the students “teens of terror” and has organized a public meeting to discuss what she describes as homophobia in the community after a recent attack.
Paul Winsor, a local florist, was singled out by a group of about 12 students who soaked him with two frozen beverages last Monday.
The 49-year-old narrowly dodged an airborne chunk of ice as he chased the teens before they ducked into the school at Jarvis and Wellesley Sts.
“A slushie drink is one thing — it stains your clothes and hurts your pride — but when it escalates to chunks of ice, that’s dangerous,” he said.
Just as there are gay people everywhere, in every nation and culture, there are also pig ignorant bigots. Sad, but true.
During my hiatus from computer-land, I vaguely caught wind of this story of a lesbian couple being harassed at Dollywood because one of them was wearing a t-shirt that said “Marriage Is So Gay.” My first reaction to that was, well, if this is true, Dolly’s not gonna be happy, not one bit. Here’s the background:
