The House of Representatives in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is likely to vote this week on an amendment to the island’s penal code that would strip sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression from the 2004 hate crimes statute, according to Michael Lavers of EDGE Boston.
The proposed changes, approved last week by the Puerto Rican Senate, would also eliminate hate crimes protections for people victimized on the basis of religious beliefs and ethnicity. Leaders of Puerto Rico’s LGBT and Dominican communities held a joint press conference yesterday to criticize the legislation, which is being considered in an extraordinary session convened by Governor Luis Fortuño.
According to Pedro Julio Serrano of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, LGBT-identified Puerto Ricans face violence on an “epidemic” scale. In July, Serrano reported that twenty LGBT people have been murdered in Puerto Rico since January of 2010. The 2004 penal code requires the authorities to investigate whether the killings were motivated by the victims’ sexual orientation or gender identity; however, Lavers writes that the Puerto Rico Department of Justice’s own reports reveal that “prosecutors have yet to convict anyone of a bias-motive crime on the island.”
Puerto Rico joins a growing list of places around the world where LGBTs face orchestrated legislative bullying, including Nigeria, Russia, Uganda, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe.
Despite the fact that the news has decidedly not been riddled with stories of fundamentalist Christians being bullied to death or being injured or maimed or killed for “standing up for murrrge,” aka using their culturally supremacist beliefs as an excuse to hurt gay people and our families, there are always going to be stories where they try to claim the mantle of victimhood. The crime committed against them? They simply are having to learn how to live in a secular society where their beliefs are not considered the norm. Welcome to grown-up land, fundies.
Right now, they are freaking out over the fact that a judge has ruled that the names of the petition signers for the Protect Marriage Washington ballot initiative to repeal domestic partnership benefits in that state [which failed] must be made public. They claim numerous threats have been made against them, which seem to amount to a few angry internet comments without any follow through. As always, we at Truth Wins Out remind our readers that, you know, making threats in comments sections is stupid and immature and shouldn’t be done, but it’s worth noting, again, that poorly thought out comments on the internet from gays don’t seem to lead to fundamentalists actually getting hurt. Anyway, here is some whining:
A federal judge has ruled that individuals who signed a petition seeking the repeal of a 2009 Washington State law expanding homosexual partnerships have no right to keep their names private. The ruling prompted fears that radical homosexuals will follow through on promised retaliation against the individuals.
There they go again, treating us like supervillains with immense power.
U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle ruled October 17 that Protect Marriage Washington (PMW), the conservative, pro-family group that had organized the petition drive, had not demonstrated “serious and widespread threats, harassment, or reprisals against the signers of R-71, or even that such activity would be reasonably likely to occur upon the publication of their names and contact information.”
“Had not demonstrated.” You see, this is the thing: if they HAD demonstrated that they have a reason to be soiling their adult diapers, and the judge had ruled this way anyway, that would be a problem. But they didn’t make their case!
The ruling, noted PMW in a press release, left the signers open to the wrath of radical homosexual activists who had earlier promised retaliation. Wrote the group’s president, Larry Stickney: “Evidence brought forward by Protect Marriage Washington included death threats, extensive vandalism, overt threats of destruction of property, arson and threats of arson, intimidating emails and phone calls, hate mail, mailed envelopes containing white suspicious powder, blacklists, loss of employment and job opportunities, and gross expressions of anti-religious bigotry, including vandalism and threats directed at religious institutions and religious adherents — all for doing nothing more than standing up for traditional marriage. Nevertheless, Judge Settle wrote that Protect Marriage Washington was unable to prove ‘a reasonable probability that the threats, harassment, or reprisals exists as to the signers of R-71.”
Oh, quelle horreur. The “wrath of radical homosexual activists!” Sounds to me like Protect Marriage Washington is really exaggerating a few internet comments here, and it also sounds like the judge agrees.
Here’s the leader of a pro-gay group involved, being soooo scary:
Meanwhile, at least one homosexual activist group, Know Thy Neighbor, said that it would begin to leak the names, made available by the state for $15, to homosexuals who were looking for people they may know. The group’s director, Tom Lang, told Washington’s NPR radio station KUOW that the group would publish the names in an online searchable database, allowing homosexuals and their friends to search out petition signers they are familiar with and confront them.
Lang cited examples of “people who’ve been in people’s weddings parties and they’ve signed, people in families where the grandmother signed knowing darned well that her grandson was gay. These are the types of conversations that are being had.”
Note that he said that the release of these names will cause something that probably truly is a wingnut’s greatest fear: conversations. Words are hard and are known to have a liberal bias. But I will say that I appreciate when I find out that a friend or family member has affixed their name to an anti-gay proposition of any sort. In my life it leads to neither violence nor conversations, but rather a simple severing of the relationship. Maybe that’s what the wingnuts are afraid of — bigotry doesn’t really like the light of day, does it?
If the release of these names somehow does lead to a sudden spate of violence against Fundamentalists, I’ll be the first to rethink my opinion on this, but until then…
Alex Pareene has a great column up at Salon about the goings on in Wisconsin, and the right wing pout-rage over a woman who, yes, got shoved by a union guy, in a provoked confrontation. Of course, as the video shows, the woman wasn’t really attacked. The guy seemed to be trying to shove the camera away from his face and the wingnut woman got shoved in the process. Granted, that is not nice, and should not happen. But, as they always do, wingnuts from sea to shining sea are howling about what victims they are now. This is not the “QOTD” part referenced in the post title, but it’s a little background:
Let me be clear: I abhor shoving of any kind. Shoving is never justified. The world would be a better place if there was no shoving, by anyone. Make loves, not shoves. But — and I could be wrong here — the gentleman’s actions seem to be aimed at the lens of the video camera, and not intended to cause harm to the person holding it. Pushing a camera away from one’s face seems less “thuggish” to me than it does … defensive. And purposefully picking fights with people in order to provoke an angry response does not really prove much of anything.
None of that matters, of course. What matters is that everyone on the right was simply waiting for one of their content suppliers to produce the requisite “violence from a union thug” video, and here it is. The scripts were all written in advance. Now everyone has jumped on the story.
[...]
Because these people are completely f**king shameless, the woman from the video has compared herself to Lara Logan.
Let me jump in real fast to note that these people are not only shameless about lying and crying victim, but this also shows the inherent misogyny of the conservative movement, in that the woman would compare getting shoved in an altercation she had a hand in provoking with a brutal sexual assault.
Here’s the QOTD part, and I’ll explain why this is relevant to us afterward, if it isn’t obvious already:
This is the height of the conservative movement’s pathological projection: Whatever they are accused of being or doing, the LEFT is the TRULY GUILTY PARTY. (This is the “liberals are the REAL racists” line, which is more of a comforting mantra than a compelling argument.) And now we’ve reached the point in that delusion where, if something bad happens to a leftist (and any member of the MSM is a default socialist), even if no one anywhere said it had anything to do with conservatives, it has to be demonstrated that the left does it too, and does it worse, and that conservatives are the true victims.
Sound familiar? It should!
Every time gay kids get bullied to the point that they take their own lives, wingnuts like Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera step into bitch and moan that “homosexuals are the real haters!” because we make fun of them and call them names like “Porno Pete.” Just yesterday, Porno Pete tweeted me [the poor thing wants attention], saying “Here’s some real hate – Dan Savage’s vile ‘Santorum [DOT] com’ — wonder if @splcenter frauds will list it as a ‘hate site.’” No, of course they won’t. Dan Savage started that little website for Rick Santorum in response to Santorum‘s own prurient obsession with gay sex and his demonization of an entire class of humans. Santorum is one moronic politician, and he’s a public figure. The site is what is known as “creative activism,” and it’s also hilarious. It does not demonize an entire group of people, and it’s not dishonest; these are two of the SPLC’s primary criteria for classifying groups as “hate groups,” and every Religious Right organization on the list is known for its rank demonization of LGBT people and its pathological dishonesty.
It’s useful to realize, especially when we’re dealing with issues of left vs. right, that these behaviors are exhibited by the Right, no matter what the issue is. There has been incident after incident of right wing violence over the past several years, and every single time, the flying monkeys of the Right scream about how The Left Does It Too! Guys? There hasn’t been a pattern of left-wing violence in this country since the 1960′s or so. That’s how far back we have to reach.
We also see it, ad nauseam, in the Religious Right’s constant repetition of three or four stories of supposed “Christian victimization” by gays — like the time the New Mexico photographer had to abide by the laws of her state, or the time that the New Jersey Methodists who operated a pavilion open to the public had to abide by the laws of their state, or the time a professional rabble-rouser feted by the Religious Right as a “frail, innocent old lady” got her styrofoam cross stomped on when she willingly entered into a mob of protesting gay people, angry that their rights had been taken away in California, etc. None of these incidents resulted in dead bodies or even injury, and the common denominator in most of them is that some Fundamentalist crackpot seemed to believe that their transmogrified understanding of Christianity should trump their obligation to abide by the law in a secular society. But we’ll keep hearing it! The Gays Are The Real Haters!
Hell, just yesterday, Pat Buchanan whined that Obama had “capitulated to militant gays” on DOMA. Oh yes, we are so militant, as we demand to be treated as equal citizens.
Why do they do this? I think there are a lot of reasons, but one is that I believe that many wingnuts, deep down, know full well, that they’re on the wrong side of all of these issues. On the gay front, it’s pretty much an accepted fact that hateful, anti-gay, religious rhetoric is not only conducive, but necessary, to create such a climate that in many corners of this country, it’s still okay to bully and abuse LGBT kids. The fact that they’re still trying to explain away Matthew Shepard’s murder as a drug deal gone bad is just more evidence of this. The fact that they have the unmitigated gall to oppose anti-bullying programs in the aftermath of a spate of gay kids committing suicide after being bullied, all in service of their opposition to the “homosexual agenda,” is evidence of their full-blown denial. And the pathology came full circle when Linda Harvey blamed the suicides on the “gay agenda.”
The left does it too! The liberals are the Real Racists! The gays are the Real Haters! It’s their fault, not ours! Please, please, please, let us find a way to wash all this blood off our hands, so that we may sleep at night!
And so on. It’s helpful to understand the specific fights we engage in with conservatives in context with the rest of their movement. It’s not just about gay people, or unions, or women’s reproductive rights, or the poor, or Muslims, or blacks, or anything else. It’s about all of these things, of course, but it’s mostly about propping themselves up as the Real Americans, which requires anyone who doesn’t conform to be demonized as “other,” while absolving themselves of any responsibility for the havoc they wreak on our society.
People who haven’t dissected a pig since high school won’t want to miss MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s dissection tonight of Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, whose support for antigay genocide in that country has won him financial and political support from U.S. Republicans and evangelicals.
Stopped clocks are indeed right twice a day. It’s good to see, though, any time a public figure like Glenn Beck reacts so fiercely to anti-gay behavior or violence, because his is an audience that needs to hear it.
Glenn Beck returned to his television show Wednesday with a lengthy, impassioned condemnation of the brutal anti-gay assault and torture of two teenage boys and a man in the Bronx.
[...]
Beck said the attackers — who, among other things, tortured, beat and sodomized their victims — represented “a whole new level of evil.” He agreed that the attacks were grounded in homophobia, but said they went beyond just that.
“This is not only anti-gay, it is anti-human,” he said. “It is bigotry for sport.”
Indeed. Oh my, I just said “indeed” in response to Glenn Beck. Oh my. He’s really pissed off, though.
Hop over to Mediaite for the video, as it seems to be incompatible with our software. Doy!
In the following video, FOTF considers people bullies for rejecting the organization’s affirmations of antigay violence and suppression of speech and expression. FOTF denies the very existence of LGBT people and the relevance of antigay violence, and therefore FOTF refuses to explicitly oppose violence against a population whose existence FOTF seeks to erase.
FOTF implies that antigay conservative Christians are the only people who are entitled to freedom of speech, expression, and religion in schools.
Despite the departure of co-founder James Dobson, Focus on the Family continues to affirm its allies’ campaigns of violent proselytization and outright terror against religious and sexual minorities.
In a blog post on June 1, Exodus International blames the Old Testament for the emergence of a fundamentalist Christian punk-rock music group which espouses Islamist-style genocide against homosexuals. Thomas also denies any responsibility — at headquarters or locally — for the decision by its Exodus affiliate in Minnesota to host that same music group.
Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas says:
Using Old Testament scriptures to condemn a person to death is not “loving” … it is incomplete theology and powerfully irresponsible.
In other words, Thomas is saying: Don’t blame conservative Christians for the Jewish words of Leviticus — or for preoccupations with the Old Testament that result from Exodus’ own decades-long exploitation of politically selective Old Testament verses. Thomas tries to explain away Exodus’ literalist misuse of the Old Testament by diverting reader attention to the New Testament.
He (Jesus) died and paid the price for all of our sin, including those of us who have or do struggle with homosexuality.
Thomas is speaking of conservative Christians when he says “our” and “us” — not liberal Christians, not Jews, and certainly not atheists, Buddhists or anyone else whom Thomas deems to be spiritually unclean and ostracized.
In rejecting the literalism of music group You Can Run But You Can’t Hide (YCR) as “incomplete,” Exodus is in fact projecting its own incomplete literalism upon YCR. Exodus mandates belief in a literal Bible while averting public attention from the Bible’s numerous literal endorsements of rape, incest, polygamy, slaughter of innocents, bodily dismemberment, stoning, slavery, and ethnic and sexual bigotry. The legalism of YCR reflects the completion of Exodus’ own incomplete and politically neutered fundamentalist theology.
Regarding YCR’s youth outreach events (of which Exodus knew the content), Ex-Gay Watch observes:
At least from this writer’ understanding, there didn’t seem to be any trace of orthodox Christian theology present ‚Äî just constant worship of a nebulous idol called “the law.” These are the extremes of our age, and Dean in particular seems never to have met a conspiracy theory too wild to be considered seriously.
Exodus hosted YCR because it shares much of YCR’s legalism and its abusive “scared straight” attitude toward sinners. How, one may ask, is Exodus legalistic?
Exodus practices religious legalism when it hosts a punk-rock group that is notorious in Minnesota for its legalism and its arrogant hatred of “sinners.”
Exodus practices religious legalism when it routinely cites proof-texted Bible verses to justify discrimination and harassment against LGBT people, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution says about individual rights or the freedom of religious minorities.
And Exodus practices religious legalism when it uses word games to dance around its responsibility for hosting the group — and for its “ministry” guidelines which encourage affiliation with abusive organizations and counselors.
For all his belated and elliptical criticism of the kill-the-gays group, Thomas declines to oppose antigay discrimination and imprisonment. He does not criticize either LWCC or Exodus representative Janet Boynes — a key ally in Exodus HQ’s battle against inclusion of sexual orientation in hate-crime laws — for hosting a notorious hate group, nor does he demand change in Exodus affiliate guidelines for hosted events.
At Exodus, no one is ever held responsible — except, of course, the supposed homosexual sympathizers who expose Exodus’ wrongdoing.
Instead of engaging in true conversation through schools’ Gay-Straight Alliances or the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network’s annual Day of Silence, Exodus continues to con its youth groups into a phony, egocentric conversation amongst themselves.
Exodus’ DOT website now hosts two new videos featuring what it calls “man on the street” interviews at an unidentified school:
The interviewees are reasonably diverse, but ignorant of antigay violence and bullying — and kept ignorant by Exodus. Besides sidestepping the focus of the Day of Silence, the videos also perpetuate Exodus International’s relativist habit of encouraging people to define reality to be whatever they want it to be — not what medical, statistical, and psychiatric facts dictate.
Besides fact-deficient videos, the DOT offers:
a “survey” in which antigay youths and faculty are encouraged to invent their own reality.
a “supplies” store where people can buy posters, shirts, and cards that, again, are free of any troubling doses of factual reality.
Until Exodus supports and interacts with existing channels such as GSAs and GLSEN, its DOT must be regarded as a campaign to deliberately suppress public awareness of antigay violence, to sidestep real conversation, and to insulate self-identified “Christians” from reality.
Focus on the Family blasts the Day of Silence — GLSEN’s annual antiviolence vigil and conversation-starter in schools — as a sinister manifestation of the “homosexual agenda.”
Focus is alarmed that the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network encourages schools to acknowledge the existence of LGBT youth — such acknowledgment being an obvious prerequisite to stopping violence against those youth.
Instead of acknowledging that gender- and orientation-variant youth exist and should not be assaulted and intimidated with impunity, Focus claims that the ex-gay activist group Exodus International offers “redemptive truth” as an alternative to nonviolence.
Exodus’ Day of Truth, purposely scheduled one day prior to the Day of Silence, condemns LGBT youth to hell and urges “Christian” youths to view their LGBT-tolerant classmates as inferior prior to any “conversation” about violence that the Day of Silence might otherwise prompt.
Violence does not concern Focus; “lesbian, gay and bisexual materials in the classroom” do.
Focus and Exodus are purposely ignorant of the New Testament’s repeated admonitions against violence toward ethnic and gender minorities; and where Focus and Exodus claim to be knowledgeable, the knowledge is false. “The biblical truth for sexuality” — as interpreted by their mentor James Dobson — isn’t Biblical at all. It is a 1950s TV sitcom fantasy of heterosexual marriage at age 18 followed by premature child-raising and lives of suffocating gender-role conformity. This myth of white suburban Americana rejects the Bible’s conflicting affirmations of celibate evangelism, polygamy, rape, and same-sex relationships; ignores the ethnicity and modest living standards of Biblical characters; and applauds the Bible’s ignorance of crucial scientific and historical facts.
Do Focus or Exodus offer Biblical truth? No. Redemption? No. Freedom from violence? Absolutely not. What they do offer is little more than a cocoon of smug self-satisfaction, ethnic and sexual ignorance, and the sort of hypocritical moralizing and intimidation that Jesus of Nazareth reputedly condemned.
The House of Representatives in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is likely to vote this week on an amendment to the island’s penal code that would strip sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression from the 2004 hate crimes statute, according to Michael Lavers of EDGE Boston.
