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.
According to arrest affidavits, [21 year-old Matthew] Guzman confessed to hunting down his victims, shooting and killing them because he thought they were gay and were coming onto him. The police report said, “His motive for committing the murder was due to his belief that the victim had homosexual tendencies. (The suspect) further stated that the victim had recently looked at him in an inappropriate manner of which (the suspect) felt was loaded with homosexual connotations, thus causing him to kill the victim. The subject confessed…eventually claiming that the victim made homosexual advances towards him, leaving him no choice but to shoot the victim.”
Wonder where he got the idea that it was acceptable to kill somebody because you perceive them to be gay.
It’s happening everywhere, all corners of the country, in all kinds of neighborhoods. I’m glad The News is paying attention:
A Mid-South teen said he was teased and beaten by a gang because he is bisexual.
Sharon Poindexter said she is angry about the recent assault on a bisexual teenager in her neighborhood. She said it is time for the violence to stop.
“Hitting with fists,” said Poindexter. “Kicking him with their feet.”
The attack on the 16-year-old happened right in front of her apartment on Thomas Street. Poindexter said when she heard the commotion, she ran outside and say eight other teens attacking the victim.
“He wasn’t crying,” said Poindexter. “He was lying there with his head covered up.”
Poindexter said she told the teens to stop, but they refused.
Memphis people are sharing this all over Facebook today, because I’d venture to say that this city has had it about Up To Here with stuff like this.
At a time which should consist of serious reflection and a wake-up call to the consequences of their words and actions over the years, the Religious Right is, unsurprisingly, doubling down, sticking their fingers in their greasy ears, and insisting that they have NOTHING to do with creating the climate that leads gay kids to commit suicide. For example, the Minnesota Family Council:
The Minnesota Family Council (MFC) is pushing back against efforts to improve the climate for LGBT students in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, where community members are mourning suicides by four LGBT students in the last year. The real issue is “homosexual indoctrination,” not anti-gay bullying, says MFC’s Tom Prichard, who says the students are dead because they adopted an “unhealthy lifestyle.” MFC’s campaign against anti-bullying education comes as national religious right groups mount a similar campaign in the aftermath of nearly half a dozen suicides by LGBT students around the country in the last month.
Prichard asserts that the suicide death of 15-year-old Justin Aaberg was not due to anti-LGBT bullying. Aaberg took his life in July, and his mother and friends say anti-LGBT bullying played a factor Prichard claims that “homosexual activists” are “manipulating” his death to get homosexual indoctrination programs into the school district.
“Whatever the exact reason for Justin’s suicide it’s an enormous tragedy that shouldn’t be manipulated for ideological purposes which is what’s being done now,” he wrote on Thursday. “I’ll of course be accused of being unloving, hateful, etc. But is the loving thing to encourage and promote unhealthy and harmful behaviors and practices?”
I would agree that youth who embrace homosexuality are at greater risk, because they’ve embraced an unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle. These alternative sexual identifications or lifestyles deny the reality that we are created male and female. To live or try to live in conflict with how we are made will invariably cause problems, e.g. emotional, psychological and social. Notwithstanding gay activist assertions to the contrary, people aren’t gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. by God’s design or nature. We are male and female with sexual expression designed for a lifelong union between a man and a woman. Denying or fighting against this reality is the reason alternative forms of sexual expression, whether homosexual or heterosexual, will put people at greater risk. To assert otherwise is to deny reality and involves “kicking against the goad” to use a biblical analogy.
How sick. He’s blaming the children. And this ignorant toad is continuing to assert that which is nothing more than Religious Right Diarrhea of the Mouth: that nobody is REALLY gay, that all people were “designed” — by a magic, invisible designer! — for “lifelong union between a man and a woman,” even though all the credible scientific literature basically says that he’s an idiot, when you reduce it to its simplest form.
Anyway, no, Tom Prichard, you repugnant tumor, people ARE gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender, and these kids would have no reason to hate themselves if people like you didn’t waste the only lives they’re ever going to get trying to hurt these kids, their parents, their friends, their families, etc.
Their pigheaded assertions to the contrary, in a world without religious bigotry, gays don’t just “naturally” feel bad about who they are.
Brian at Right Wing Watch also points out that this Prichard character still believes the lie, which only was around for about twelve minutes before it was discredited completely, that Matthew Shepard’s death had nothing to do with his sexuality:
The manipulation of this tragedy is reminiscent of the Matthew Shepard tragedy. Shepard a homosexual was brutally murdered by two men who robbed him. It was asserted that Shepard was murdered, because he was homosexual. It turns out that wasn’t the case. No matter. Shepard’s tragic death served an important ideological purpose for homosexual activists.
Yeah, and it was such an important ideological purpose that his freaking mother decided to change the course of her entire life to educate people on anti-gay bigotry. She was all part of the eeeeeeeeeevil plan.
This Prichard dude is a supreme moron.
When will these people discover a hint of self-awareness? Will it hit them like a ton of bricks, or will they go to their graves blissfully unaware of the fact that they’re the bad guys? Because I don’t think they want to be bad guys. Their sense of morality and reality is just skewed too far into DSM-IV territory, due to their religious brainwashing.
Earlier this year a group of plaintiffs from Michigan, represented by the Ann Arbor-based Thomas More Law Center, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed in 2009, violated their religious freedom and freedom of speech rights. The judge dismissed the case this week.
The plaintiffs include Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association – Michigan; Levon Yuille, pastor of The Bible Church in Ypsilanti, Michigan; René B. Ouellette, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Bridgeport, Michigan; and James Combs, pastor of four different churches in the state.
The judge did not take kindly to the fact that they filed the lawsuit, despite having never been affected in any way by the Hate Crimes bill, rendering it a waste of everyone’s time.
If you’re interested, click over and read the ruling.
I lost all respect for Sen. John McCain when he nominated Sarah Palin for vice president. While he liked to say he put “country first”, this crass political pick showed he only cares about his political career.
In a tough fight for reelection, McCain has abandoned every value and principle he once pretended to care about. First, he claimed that he never said he was a maverick. Then, he abandoned campaign finance reform. Now, he is trying to win over Tea Party voters by veering sharply to the right.
Sen. McCain has become a disgrace, showing that he is one of the most solipsistic men in the Senate. Here is his latest tirade, against hate crimes and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.
We all know that Bryan Fischer is nothing if not an attention whore, but he’s really starting to go Full Metal Phelps, and he’s doing this while on the dime of the American Family Association, which seems to grow more extremist and dangerous by the day, all while their partners at Focus on the Family try to split the difference between hatred and a kinder, gentler sort of hatred. Here’s what he said on the radio on Friday, via Right Wing Watch:
I want to read a passage that my wife pointed out to me this morning from Numbers 25. This is a story about a man by the name of Phinehas, the nation had lapsed into rampant sexual immorality – I don’t know if that sounds familiar to you, it certainly does to me – and Phinehas was motivated to do something about this and he did something very decisive: he found an Israelite in flagrante with a Philistine woman and he ran them both through with a spear, pinned them both to the ground inside their tent, ran his spear through both of them, right into the ground. And that shook up the nation, it got their attention and they transformed, they made a decision, they turned from that kind of behavior and renewed their commitment to follow God.
[Fischer then reads Number 25: 10-13: 10 Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 11"Phinehas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned away My wrath from the sons of Israel in that he was jealous with My jealousy among them, so that I did not destroy the sons of Israel in My jealousy. 12"Therefore say, Behold, I give him My covenant of peace; 13and it shall be for him and his descendants after him, a covenant of a perpetual priesthood, because he was jealous for his God and made atonement for the sons of Israel."]
So Phinehas is commended for his zeal, that he was willing to take action, that he was willing to act boldly, he was willing to act decisively out of his jealousy for his God and his jealous desire to see that his people, his nation, would be wholly devoted to God.
So what God is obviously looking for is more Phinehases in our day … you know, and it’s striking here, that here’s the actions of one man, here is one man by his action, by his commitment, by his energy, by his commitment, by his willingness to take decisive and assertive action when that’s what was called for, he alone was able to turn back the wrath of God from his people, from his nation.
So may his His tribe increase, may each one of us be a Phinehas our own world and in our own generation.
“May each one of us be a Phinehas.” Huh. Sounds like a thinly-veiled call to violence to me; how does it sound to you? Because, if I’m reading Numbers 25 correctly, it sounds like Fischer is praising this very ancient wingnut named Phinehas who decided to make it his business to drive a spear through two people who were having sex he didn’t approve of. You know what we call that in all modern societies today? A hate crime. Oh, and also murder. And if he’s calling all to be “a Phinehas,” it would seem to logically follow that he’s suggesting that common wingnuts take matters into their own hands in their own communities and kill or otherwise maim any they perceive to be “sexually immoral,” by the patriarchal, harmful standards of the fundamentalist Christian church.
At what point are people going to realize that we liberals occasionally call people like Fischer the “American Taliban” for a damned good reason?
Here’s the video if you’re into that sort of thing:
He sounds sexually aroused when he says “rammed through them with a spear!”, doesn’t he?
SAN FRANCISCO — Three Hayward cousins are facing hate crime charges after a man was shot in the face with a BB gun because the attackers believed he was gay, according to San Francisco authorities.
A video of the assault and other similar crimes was recorded by the attackers and is being held as evidence, assistant district attorney Brian Buckelew said.
Mohammad Habibzada, 24, Shafiq Hashemi, 21, and Sayed Bassam, 21, were arrested about 15 minutes after the shooting, when police spotted a car in the area that matched a description given by the victim. The suspects have addresses in Hayward.
Because it was committed by guys with Muslim names. You have to take heart, gays, because in the daily wingnut Two Minutes Hate, Muslims appear FAR more often than gays.
Do they know if this was specifically motivated by religious animus? Not yet. But they do know enough that
All three suspects are facing three felony counts and one misdemeanor. They include assault with a deadly weapon with a hate crime enhancement, discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, and attempted mayhem.
Okay, so they know it was motivated by anti-gay animus. First, let’s enter the mind of the wingnuts reacting to this.* In their widdle world, liberals absolutely LOVE conservative Muslims. They arrive at this conclusion because They Are Not All That Bright, and can’t compute the idea that liberals might detest the values of radical anti-everything Muslims and simultaneously** have an issue with insdiscriminately bombing the hell out of anything we please in that part of the world. They can’t grasp the idea that “not bombing” does not equal “surrender,” because wingnuts only understand force when it allows them to feel like their penises are being vicariously represented in the fight.
Hmm. “Three cousins from Hayward,” huh? Mormons opposed to gay marriage? Knuckledragging rednecks insecure about their own sexuality? But no. Instead, a little touch of old Amsterdam comes to the city by the bay.
The title of his post? “Celebrate Diversity.” He’s absolutely gleeful that this was done by the big bad brown people from the “turrist” part of the world. It would be a valid point if we didn’t have such a long history of hate crimes against gays perpetrated by all manner of Christian/Christian-influenced terrorist born and bred right here in the good old US of A.*** But see, again, this is the weirdness of being in a wingnut brain, because people like Mark Steyn think that liberals want nothing more than to roll out the red carpet for radical Muslims.
Next up is Daniel Blatt from GayWingnut,**** who has also convinced himself that mean liberal gays don’t seem to mind when radical Muslims assault/kill gays:
Now, I certainly wouldn’t go as far as her, but she raises an interesting issue: will gay groups cover this with the same degree of frenzied fervor they would if the three men were evangelical Christians?
Um. Wow. First of all, “Jenny” is expressing a sentiment that has nothing to do with gay people, but everything to do with racism against the millions of peaceful, nice Muslims in the world, some of whom emigrate from their home countries to the United States. As I’ve said before, gay wingnuttia really has nothing to do with gay rights or equality, but rather is about taking weak Republican talking points and inserting the word “gay” into them, a la “We should listen to Bill Kristol and pre-emptively bomb all Muslim countries to death because, um, they’re mean to gays?” or “We should continue to pass irresponsible tax cuts and run the US based on discredited and disproven Laffer economics, because, um, gays with money likey the tax cut?” or “We love the anti-gay Sarah Palin, because, hellloooooo, DIVAAAAAAA!!!!!”
Right. Anyway. But secondly, Blatt is engaging in the same kind of barely-contained glee as Mark Steyn is. For gay wingnuts, Republicans and Evangelicals are the chosen people, even if said chosen people hate their guts, and all Muslims are the enemy. And they participate in the same Two Minutes Hate as straight wingnuts, so they’re essentially willing to throw themselves prostrate before people who don’t believe in their inherent dignity, because hey, at least they hate Muslims more!
But here’s the thing that completely tears their strange views about liberals to shreds, as explained by Roger Ailes (no, not the evil one):
The biggest problem Steyn has (apart from his poodle toupee) is that the men have been arrested and charged, and face enhanced punishment for committing hate crimes regardless of their religion. So [Steyn] can’t pretend that our godless liberal enclaves are under the thrall of Sharia law. If convicted, the three gentleman will recieve serious punishment, and that punishment will be enhanced because of their bigotry. And Steyn will remain free to spew his bigotry, as long as he doesn’t act on it.
The system works.
Exactly. You see, the reason gays in the West focus a lot more on anti-gay violence perpetrated by Christian rednecks is that most of the anti-gay violence in the West is perpetrated by Christians of some sort. I should point out here that arguably the most violent anti-gay sub-population in the United States are Slavic Evangelicals, who live largely just over the mountain from San Francisco in Sacramento. I wonder if Dan Blatt and Mark Steyn will go just as crazy next time one from that population murders/assaults a gay person! (Actually, no, I don’t care.)
Meanwhile, on the international front, we’ve been spending a lot of time on the anti-gay violence perpetrated by Christians in Uganda, because that’s something we can do something about. I completely grant that the hatred and violence LGBT people are subjected to in Islamic countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia is awful, but at the same time, I also know that supporting Bill Kristol’s or Daniel Pipes’ latest wet dreams about bombing the holy hell out of Islamic countries in the name of protecting their gays is beyond stupid. For one thing, their foreign policy ideas are a complete failure on all fronts. But if we’re going to talk about the plight of gays, let’s talk about the fact that the religious government that has taken root in Iraq since neoconservative wingnuts cheerled us into war with that country in the name of showing them how big our dicks are, is extremely anti-gay! Violence against gay people in Iraq has only gone up since we deposed Saddam Hussein. Hussein was a bad guy, obviously, but because he was secular, there are certain things he didn’t put up with. Women had it better under his rule, and so did gays.
The common thread here is that extremist religion is the prime motivator of anti-gay animus and violence, and if we had a Christian theocracy like many in the US dream of, we’d have a hell of a lot more anti-gay violence on our plates.
So yes, wingnuts, it’s outrageous that this happened, and the proper authorities are dealing with it. But try to conceal your pants-wetting glee over the fact that Muslims did it, because the point you’re trying to score is one that doesn’t exist outside the echo chambers of your minds.
*Canary recommended.
**Two thoughts, one brain, same time?!?!
***Oh look, radicalized conservative Jews have done stuff like this too! I guess the problem is religously-motivated hatred of ALL kinds?
****I would call it “Intellectual Chernobyl” but that’s already taken.
On the Exodus blog, Exodus spokesman Randy Thomas earlier this week defended “Pastor” David Manning, after YouTube removed Manning’s video for inciting antigay violence, encouraging blind hatred of LGBT customers of YouTube, and violating YouTube’s terms of service.
In addition to promoting hate-based violence against LGBT people, Manning encouraged a government shutdown of all non-fundamentalist media (including, presumably, YouTube).
Thomas falsely claims that U.S. constitutional protection of free speech applies to private properties such as YouTube.
Manning, Thomas, and ex-gay activist McKrae Game also falsely blame the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act for the removal, ignoring YouTube’s terms of service. That federal law only applies to sentencing following conviction for felony acts of violence.
Game added ominously, “The statement that Hate Crimes legislation was passed supposedly to protect not just homosexuals but people of faith is extremely questionable.” That, too, is a lie: The legislation was an add-on to existing law that already offers full protection to persons of faith who are subjected to felony violence. The add-on legislation reiterated that no part of the law may be used to inhibit speech.
Lies, incitement to violence, and censorship: Exodus becomes ever-more anti-Christian, indecent, apostate, and selfish in the methods with which it “equips” its Exodus Church Network to violate LGBT Americans’ lives and undermine public morality.
Meanwhile, for better or worse, it’s a free country — and YouTube can host or remove whatever it pleases.
Kevin: Adam, you took the words out of my mouth. I feel like every time I see Sandy on television or...
Donny D.: The important thing is that he's a big media figure with a large following, most of which doesn't overlap the...
Donny D.: I've read somewhere (sorry I don't remember where) that for poor, rural women, the general health exams that they along...
Donny D.: Nick K. wrote,
Next Mr. Blatt will be saying that it’s actually Obama who’s oppressing the LGBT community and not the...
David Fishback: For those who wish to keep moving the ball forward in Montgomery County, please check this out:
http://metrodcpflag.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/its-about-more-than-just-fliers/
David Fishback, Advocacy Chair
Metro...
And 
On the 
