I do not know what this means, but I find it gross just the same.  Joe explains:

Maryland-based carpetbagger Bishop Harry Jackson appeared on the radio show of Minnesota hate preacher Bradlee Dean to declare that gay marriage is part of Satan’s plot to “destroy our seed.”

I had no idea wingnut seed was so weak, the motility so pathetically low, that the nice gay couple down the street sealing the deal legally would kill it.

Too bad, so sad!

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up a case seeking to force the Washington, D.C., government to hold a referendum on the city’s gay marriage law.

The high court declined to hear an appeal filed on behalf of opponents of a March 2010 law that made the District of Columbia the sixth jurisdiction in the United States authorizing gay and lesbian couples to marry.

The justices did not comment on the action. Their refusal to take up the case leaves in place an appeals-court decision upholding an earlier rejection of the planned referendum. The court ruled that the city was justified in rejecting the referendum because it sought to authorize a form of discrimination barred by the city’s Human Rights Act.

“Today’s action by the Supreme Court makes abundantly clear that D.C.’s human rights protections are strong enough to withstand the hateful efforts of outside anti-LGBT groups to put people’s basic civil rights on the ballot,” said Joe Solmonese, president of Human Rights Campaign, in a written statement.

This is why wingnuts don’t like the judicial branch. It’s one thing to convince a bunch of yahoos to vote against gay people’s fundamental rights, but in courts of law, they have to actually be able to back up their arguments. In this case, the Supreme Court simply said “nah, we’re busy.” As I said, too bad, so sad!

UPDATE:  SO this came across my Twitter feed and it didn’t even occur to me to look at the date.  This poll came out last year!  That being said, it’s there.  We’ve been talking about the tipping point a lot the past couple of weeks, and really, it’s an ongoing process.  These years, themselves, are the tipping point.  So we’re going to have a poll here that looks good, one there where we’re under by a couple of points, and then, in the next couple of years, it’s going to break off in our direction for good.  The rest of the post stands.

A new ABC News/Washington Poll has been released was released last year, and something has changed:

Take gay marriage, legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut and now Iowa, with Vermont coming aboard in September. At its low, in 2004, just 32 percent of Americans favored gay marriage, with 62 percent opposed. Now 49 percent support it, vs. 46 percent opposed – the first time in ABC/Post polls that supporters have outnumbered opponents.

More than half, moreover – 53 percent – say a gay marriage held legally in another state should be recognized as legal in their own state.

The surprise is that the shift has occurred across ideological groups. While conservatives are least apt to favor gay marriage, they’ve gone from 10 percent support in 2004 to 19 percent in 2006 and 30 percent now – overall a 20-point, threefold increase, alongside a 13-point gain among liberals and 14 points among moderates. (Politically, support for gay marriage has risen sharply among Democrats and independents alike, while far more slightly among Republicans.)

The tide has turned.  There is no reasonable indication that these numbers won’t continue to rise and rise.  Maggie Gallagher and everyone who thinks like her has lost.  Last night, Argentina welcomed marriage equality.  Today, a DC Court of Appeals told Harry Jackson and Tony Perkins to shove off in their quest to put minority rights up to a vote.  And now we have our first poll with a majority of Americans expressing support for full marriage equality for LGBT citizens.  (The bigots are having a really bad day!)

The fight, of course, is not over.  The professional anti-gay set will get more extreme in their rhetoric over the coming years, and there’s a possibility that they’ll incite violence from the lowest common denominators of our society.  But the war is, essentially, won.  Now we just have to stay engaged as it plays out to its conclusion.  The crazy thing is that it’ll be done without one fundamentalist losing her rights to be as bigoted as she wants.

(h/t David Badash)

Sometimes I completely misjudge whether a local story is going to become nationally relevant. A couple of things have happened in my backyard this week, one of which you may have read about yesterday, as it bounced around the corners of the gay-o-sphere and the netroots.

In the first, a softball team with a lesbian coach was banned from joining the softball league at Bellevue Baptist Church:

A local women’s softball coach said her team was banned from a Bellevue Baptist Church league after she acknowledged she is gay.

Jana J. Jacobson said church officials told her the “deviant” lifestyle would prevent the team from competing in Bellevue’s adult women’s softball league.

(…)

In May, Jacobson’s team, composed of straight and gay players, many of whom play one night a week in Bartlett, was looking for more games. They discovered Bellevue was allowing teams not associated with the Cordova church to join.

She registered, paid the entry fee and attended the preseason organizational meeting. This included outlines of league rules: no alcohol, smoking or cursing and no offensive terms on uniforms. She does not recall there being any morality clause.

(…)

According to Jacobson, Scotty Shows, the church’s recreation minister who also attended the second meeting, told her that because she was gay the team could not play. She was told that the team’s participation would send a message to Bellevue members that the church condoned her lifestyle.

Okay, let me offer a little local perspective for those of you who aren’t familiar with Bellevue. Bellevue Baptist Church is a mega-church of the first order in the Memphis suburbs. They have a congregation somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-27,000 members, a campus which covers many acres in suburban Memphis, and three giant crosses erected on Interstate 40, which are visible for miles. Bellevue was recently the host of a rally called “Stand for the Family,” at which Tony Perkins and Harry Jackson had a contest to see how many times they could invoke the gay menace in two hours. Bellevue also, by virtue of its insane coffers of cash and location, has a great sports complex, which ties them into the greater community. The softball team in question was playing in Bartlett originally, which is just to the north of Bellevue. So when Bellevue put out a call to let outside teams join their softball league, it wasn’t unreasonable for this team, from Bartlett, to say “Hey, that’s an idea,” and give Bellevue a call.

I point all this out so that people understand that this was not a Horde of Angry Lesbians nailing 99 copies of Indigo Girls’ self-titled album to the (truly enormous) doors of the innocent megachurch in the suburbs, which was, incidentally, minding its own business trying to find new and more dramatic ways to hurt gay families. (Grin. That would be a funny protest tactic.) This was simply Bellevue trying to have it both ways: putting out a call to “the community” for more softball teams, and then clenching up and losing it when they found out that members of “the community” were Evil Gays And Lesbians Trying To Ruin Everything.

Just so you all know, Bellevue isn’t faring well in the local PR department over this issue. If you read the comments section from The Commercial Appeal article (linked above), you’ll see that, though there are those who support Bellevue, most of the 865 (and growing) comments are supportive of the softball team.

Bellevue’s actions are not surprising, though. It’s not like the softball team wants to attend church at Bellevue. (As if.) But for a cloistered church like that, which has built a giant wall of separation meant to keep all messages of reality away from its parishioners, the mere presence of happy, healthy, well-adjusted lesbians on the softball field is, indeed, a huge threat. They say they’re worried that it sends a message that they “condone” the “lifestyle,” but when you read between the lines, it’s easy to see what they’re scared of. Bellevue and similar churches have a fierce need to keep as many of their people from knowing the reality of gay people as they possibly can. They know, on some level, that those who know gay people tend to support us, because they can easily see that the Religious Right garbage about LGBT people and families is simply untrue. Those lies only resonate among people who are “protected” from reality, just as the lie of creationism only resonates among those who have never been taught real science.

So hopefully that adds some context to a story you read about yesterday. I promise I’ll try to be better about throwing local stories into the national gay-o-sphere to see if they stick, because I totally heard about this last Saturday at an art opening.

Bad Evan.

This next story, though, may not get as much press, because it was resolved so quickly and painlessly. A lesbian couple went to the recreation center at the University of Memphis and tried to purchase a family membership, at which point they were rebuffed, because they didn’t meet the criteria of “family” according to the school’s policies. News quickly spread, via Facebook, and many calls were made to the University President’s office. One of those calls was made by yours truly, and I had a lovely conversation with the woman who answered the phone in the President’s office. Those of us who were sounding the alarm on this were trying with all our might to encourage people to be respectful and friendly when they called, though there were a couple of calls made which didn’t fit into that category. Part of the reason that was important was that the University of Memphis has a fairly good track record when it comes to being inclusive and nondiscriminatory, and I had a suspicion that this was more of an oversight than anything else, perhaps an issue that just hadn’t come up. Turns out my suspicion was correct. Wendi Thomas, the best columnist in Memphis, wrote an update to this story yesterday:

Starting Wednesday, the University of Memphis began offering family memberships to its student recreation center to students who can prove they’re living in a family unit, regardless of the sexual orientation of the family’s adults.

The university, not known for speedy bureaucratic moves, took less than a week to change its membership policy, after hearing from a concerned student, Edie Love, and her supporters.

Love, a senior, simply wanted to take her four children and her wife to the UofM’s rec center, just blocks from their house.

(…)

It will take a few days to finalize the language in the new policy, and a few more days to get the new policy on the university’s website, Lipman said, but she’s already instructed the student rec center to begin accepting the new memberships.

Love, who learned of the decision after she’d met with Lipman on Wednesday morning, is elated and expects her children and her wife to be in the pool by the end of the week.

In the end, the university was able to offer healthy living opportunities to all of its students and their families for the family fee of $45.

However, the downside to this, as Wendi goes on to explain, is that decidedly not all of the calls to the University were friendly in nature, and apparently one caller even used racist language.

Many [called the university] — several, unfortunately, using profanity. Lipman said one male caller stated that while black people had ruined the city, they expected more from the university.

Except he didn’t call African-Americans black, he instead used the six-letter n-word.

Whoever you are who did that, and there’s a good chance I know you, nice job, champ. Way to fight for the equality of one group, while simultaneously insulting another!

My god. This should be a lesson to some of our brothers and sisters who are of the firecracker variety, those who seem to always be looking for a fight. You need to know who it is you’re talking to before you fly off the handle. The fact that the University of Memphis is a strong ally for the causes of equality and tolerance is fairly well known and/or easy to find out. There was no good excuse for taking this as an opportunity to browbeat University officials or, worse, to go all Southern-Fried Racist on them.

Because I guarantee you, the University didn’t (quickly!) change this policy because of the people who called into abuse them, but rather in response to the other discussions they had, which, in a friendly, constructive way, brought to their attention an injustice that had been overlooked. Because really, in the year 2010, not everybody is out to get gays and lesbians! Sometimes people just need the friendly help of the community to make sure everybody is treated equally. In this case the University changed its policies within the first half of a week in the summer, simply because it was brought to their attention. Those who took the opportunity to abuse the University staff acted no better than the wingnuts who actually do discriminate against gay people, like those in the Bellevue story above.

Moral of story: Some cases of discrimination are overt, obvious, and motivated by animus. Some are just oversights from friends and allies. It’s useful to find out which you’re dealing with before you fly off the handle, okay?

UPDATE: In perusing the comments on Wendi Thomas’s piece about the University of Memphis, I literally LOLed when I read one of the early comments. The fifteeneth comment says, “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Does the word abomination mean anything anymore? It will someday though it will be too late for so many.” A stupid, trite comment, to be sure, from the sort of person who can’t think of anything to say, so instead just regurgitates the words from Fred Phelps’ tamer posters. Two comments later was when I LOLed:

Well played!

Tony Perkins spoke tonight in Memphis at an event at Bellevue Baptist Church.  I jokingly live-blogged it from the future using my truly heinous psychic powers, because I knew exactly what was going to happen at that event.  The rally was called “Stand for the Family,” and it featured Perkins and Bishop Harry Jackson.  It was organized by a group with the adorable name “FACTn,” which stands for Family Action Council of Tennessee, in response to the fact that inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances are passing in the Memphis area.  In other words, the “pro-family” forces are scared.

Turns out my live-blog was pretty darned accurate.  I wasn’t there, but in an effort to be two places at once, a friend was helping me follow tweets from another friend with GetEqual who decided to brave the malignant air inside Bellevue.  The words “homosexual” and “crossdresser” were thrown around quite a bit.  There was lots of fearmongering about undefined “threats” to the “family.”  Tony Perkins even said “abortion” two whole times, which, hello, look at #5 in my live blog from this morning.  I knew it would be brought up, because it’s their other boogeyman, but I had a feeling it would be an afterthought.  No, hating LGBT people was for dinner at Bellevue.   But no, I didn’t attend.  I was down the street at another event at another church called “Stand for ALL Families,” organized by the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center.

Point:

Tony Perkins and Harry Jackson on a stage reciting the same claptrap anti-LGBT talking points for the fearful masses under the guise of “protecting the family”…

Counterpoint:

A pastor in her mid/late 50′s who also happens to be a lesbian speaking authentically about her life, her wife, and her experience of God. A young mother with a second child on the way who spoke, sometimes tearfully, of the things she and her husband take for granted, about how she was blindsided by how much deeper their relationship became when they got married, and about how she was speaking up because she wants her kids and their friends to be able to take those same things for granted, no matter who they love.  A multi-racial lesbian couple who looked FAR too young to be raising a teenager, talking about just how mundane their “lifestyle” really is, as they go about raising a family together.  A straight Catholic mother of two sons, who just about brought the house down as she related her experiences fighting for ALL children in the face of insane bigotry, hatred, and institutional religious discrimination.  An African-American lesbian couple who married a couple of years ago, stepping forward to encourage more African-American LGBT people and allies to speak up for themselves and each other.

And so on.

Which one of these things is truly “pro-family”?

One speaker made the point that, for Tony Perkins and Harry Jackson (and, I would add, Linda Harvey) and the fundamentalists congregated in the theater seats of the megachurch down the road, this was a game where, in order to protect their worldview, someone had to lose.  They cannot protect their worldview…it has nothing to do with their “families”…without tearing us down.  We are their negation.  Meanwhile, as we sat and had fellowship together, straight, gay, black, white, Christian, atheist, and every other permutation you can imagine, we stood for all families.  In fact, we stood for the families at the Tony Perkins rally.  Because our equality takes nothing away from them.  In fact, in a world where all families are allowed to exist peacefully, more families will thrive.  The dirty little secret that Tony Perkins won’t acknowledge is that WE were in the room with him that night.  Every family in that room had a gay relative, a gay neighbor, a gay son, daughter…whether they know it or not.  But Tony Perkins and Harry Jackson don’t actually support families, because in order to do that, you have to support all members of all families, even the ones who don’t conform to your unscientific and wholly disproven ideas of gender and sexuality.

There was indeed a pro-family rally in Memphis tonight.  It was lovely.

It’s that time again, apparently.

No, not for movies or whatever, but (I think?) those are coming soon.*

Peter LaBarbera has been nominating people for his inaugural “Gay Grinch” award**. He’s picked all kinds of people, like our own Wayne Besen, some couple in California whose Halloween decorations aren’t to Pete’s liking, Rachel Maddow…just, you know, random people who have messed with Peter’s mind over the past year. Or whenever. The meaning of the Grinch reference isn’t clear, unless, in Peter’s mind, it’s actually the gays who have stolen Christmas. Anyway, it’s boring, who cares?

The point is that Joe Jervis (another Grinch nominee) is having his own contest, and unlike The Peter, Joe believes in deciding the winner democratically, so here are your choices for the Anti-Gay Douchebag Bigot of 2009:

Bishop Richard Malone
Carrie Prejean
Harry Jackson Jr.
Maggie Gallagher
Matt Barber
Peter LaBarbera
Pope Benedict XVI
Tony Perkins

Now, they’re all fame-seeking malcontents, obviously (especially Ratzi), so we don’t really want to encourage them, but this is funny, so GO VOTE.

*I know, I know, I need to turn in my gay card and be put on probation.

**Ceremony to be held at some hitherto unannounced bathhouse/leather convention, I presume. Stay tuned, I guess?