shouldn’t that beCivil RightsTM?

Let’s put this on a billboard…

Closer to home…

Nope, nothing to be concerned about here…

Okay, if they’re not civil rights…… then what kind of rights are they?  Animal rights?  Unborn rights?  
I don’t get it.  The sign itself says that they are “gay rights”.  Since it’s people that gay rights apply to, how are they not civil rights and what kind of rights are they?
I seriously want to know: do these people have the first clue about the nonsense they’re babbling?  If you want to go out of your way to hate, at least make sense.  If your message really is “we hate gay people”, just say it.  At least you wouldn’t look like a first class idiot on top of being a bigot.

No gays are being persecuted in this country…

CNET: Wielding the Xbox ‘banhammer’ The article Wielding the Xbox ‘banhammer’ from CNET‘s Beyond Binary blog, written by Ina Fried. Large discussion about LGBT terminology and homophobia in the piece:

…One of the specific issues that has cropped up under Toulouse’s watch is the issue of whether and how users can identify their gender identity and sexual orientation. The issue gained some measure of attention starting last summer after several users were prohibited from referencing a gay identity in their gamer tags.
Microsoft’s current practice is to ban any discussion of sexuality in either tags or profiles–a move that makes it impossible for those gamers who want to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender to do so.
In part, Toulouse said, that’s because 98 percent of those who have tried to use the term gay have done so not as a means of self-identification but by using the word as a put down.
But for someone who wants to be more than a “banhammer,” Toulouse acknowledges just prohibiting all reference to sexuality isn’t much of a solution.
“I think what we have today is inelegant,” he said, adding that he is working on an improvement, but he still doesn’t have a timetable for when a better option will be in place. That’s basically the same position he took when the company addressed the issue in February.
“I haven’t made a change to date but I am committed to making a change,” Toulouse said. “We hear very clearly that customers wish to express this.”
Toulouse said that part of the reason it has taken so long is that the company is looking at changing not just the policy but also the profile technology, perhaps adding check boxes where people could include their gender identity or sexual orientation and perhaps other characteristics as well.
“That’s the thinking we are leaning toward,” he said, adding that no final decision has been made…

Even more on gaming homophobia by Ms. Fried at the link above.

They’re being dishonestabout banning mention of sexual orientation unless they also ban mention by people in hetero-supremacist states that they’re married.  If that doesn’t trip their unacceptable content ‘dar, then they’re not banning mention of sexual orientation in profiles — only banning mention of deviation from heterosexuality.

Civil rights for all citizensSimple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in discrimination.  Vote to take away the tax exemption from churches that discriminate against other citizens.  Work towards making sexual orientation a protected class through amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Nothing to see here…

Human RightsHow about Human Rights?  How about the right not to be murdered or beaten for your obvious or appearance of identity?  How about the right to show Love not Hate?  How about being left alone if you’re born with a “difference”?  How about getting real?

This didn’t happen on the back of a bus…

SickeningI’m at a loss. Excuse me for being unPC but the past half year has convinced me that the African American community is even more emotionally and psychologically screwed up than I imagined.  

This is the last one, but I could do this all night

i always pity the poor bigotwho can’t tell a faggot from a dyke.  i’ve had “faggot” yelled at me before, and i find it perversely hilarious.

More people need to see this.Thanks, Fritz, for posting these pictures. It needs to be done as painful as it is to see. I doubt I’ll ever get that photograph of the two young(Iranian, right?)gay men being hanged out of my mind. How about billboards showing this? If that doesn’t shut up the haters and deniers of anti-gay hatred then nothing ever will.

problem is, the haters will applaud the pictures.but i do think that average americans need to know this is happening to us.  most are completely unaware.

Religious rights…aren’t civil rights, either, then.  

I have nothing good to sayAt least we have proof that hateful christian thugs come in multiple shades of melanin.

ACLU Panel Discussion in Monterey CountyHere’s an open thread item for everyone.
My friends in Monterey had a great panel discussion on marriage equality.
Please check it out. These are some wonderful, hard working folks.
http://www.citizennewscaster.c…

Do you hate the Evangelicals yet, Grandfather?(with apologies to Dustin Hoffman’s role in Little Big Man)
I am sick of this. They are theocratic domionists who want to impose their religion, their particular brand of Pauline Chirstianity, upon us all, in a secular republic.
No more god, please
Out of the pledge, off of the money.
The evangelicals have made their god the enemy of human freedom and equality.
I don’t worhip it and I’ll be damned if I will be ruled by the most anti-democratic of his followers.
Perhaps a bit of ACT-Up’s more entertaining tactics are in order….

Black prejudice… gay prejudice… totally diferent, what?I can’t believe the comments found in the article. A woman didn’t see any problem with the sign because she knows what it feels like, and the treatment of blacks was totally different? What?
I find it saddening that black men and women, who can still remember the times when they were so heavily attacked and stripped of their rights, won’t stand up for gay men and women facing similar threats.
Signs like that should NOT fall under freedom of speech as that’s hate crime through and through.

The pictures of the beaten peoplehas me hysterically crying.
I’m not saying that to make people feel bad but it just brings back bad memories for me and my own assault just because i’m gay and left me hideously scared on my arms.
We need to get more of these things out in the public.  So, whenever right-wing hater says that LGBT people don’t need protections because they are not being beaten for being LGBT (yes, they really say that) we can show them all these pics and share all our stories and let them know how wrong they are.
As for the billboard.  I would climb up it and remove the word NOT.

Yep!The one consolation in that case is that you get instant confirmation that the bigot is exactly as dumb as you would have guessed they were.

I wonderHas any gay group ever done an advertising campaign with these sort of photos? “This is what homophobia does.”
I think a lot of straight people mostly don’t think about homophobia, and assume that gays are like the caricatures they see on tv, happy peppy rich people where nothing could possibly be troubling them. I wonder if seeing the real effects of hate would nudge some of the folks in the middle. We’ll never win the extremists on the right, but we don’t have to if we get just a little bit more of the middle…

Really, massa?Yeah, because we all think alike, just like all white people, who are the only folks are gay. Yeesh, man. It’s the pot meeting the kettle for the first time.  

I’m sorry they brought back painI hesitated for a few minutes before posting them because I know so many of us have experienced similar violence.
But, I know that many of our opponents monitor this blog and perhaps just one of them will feel a twing of shame and see some real examples of what homophobia can do.

Where Are OUR Billboards?- and the murals, signs, and store display windows with the “Legalize Gay” T-shirts (did ya hear about that one?), and the replacement signs, and the replacement signs, and the replacement signs, and the replacement signs, and the……….
YEP – We will definitely have vandals, but it would be nice to see more PRO-EQUALITY signs around your neighborhood, and what an interesting way to do a  ”public litmus test” on local homophobia.
I put up simple informational flyers at our Farmer’s Market about the April 11 year olds’ suicides and was able to SEE people’s response; many looked deeply moved (how could you not if human?).  
If I had the cash I’d make and plaster “LEGALIZE GAY” stickers on every available inch of local, state, and federal property.  

Seems to me…………as though they are taking a page out of Obama’s playbook.

Reminds me of grafitti I had sprayed across my garage in a small MN townNot one neighbor said a thing, except one guy I said hi to when he was in his yard, stopped by after dark and asked me not to acknowledge him, it was too dangerous for him. He was the most liberal person in the town because his sister was a lesbian. I moved into the biggest gay ghetto in MPLS, and began my living as seperate from heteros as possible.

I’ve had three friends badly bashed, and had three guys with clubs come after me.One was police beating an ex-seminary man, who was as gentle a man as I ever met. He was still badly bruised two weeks later, and was embarrassed to be seen. One was a lesbian who asked me to donate sperm for her lover to concieve, she got knocked to the ground leaving a womyn’s bar and repeatedly kicked in her head. Another lesbian who was my Teaching Assistant’s lover was bashed really severly.

I just returned from seeing Harry Potter and the Half Blood PrinceThe film is good, but they substantially altered the climax. I thought the book version would have been better.

Wel lSpeaking as an African Gay Christian who’s family is from Texas…I can only say “What the hell do you think you know about what we are going through?!? No we didn’t have to ride at the back of the bus but being strung up on fence posts or shot in the head because you happen to have a crush on someone of the same sex, isn’t exactly what I would call getting over.
The real insult here is that as Christians we know Christ has already made the ultimate sacrifice for us all. SO why is it that modern day Christians think that Gays need to be placed on the Altar to please God?  

Me tooI enjoyed it and don’t mind if it is a bit different from the book.  Also for the first time in the series I found Ron Weasley damn sexy, though not pretty or anything.

Poison-tongued bullshitter or self-loathing closet case?

KCEN-TV interviewed some residents and one black woman said she had no problem with the sign because “as a Black woman, because I have been through … I know what it feels like and it’s totally different.”

Apparently she is also a lesbian. If she didn’t have both experiences, how could she compare them?

Old Roseanne episode

Chuck Mitchell: Look, all I know is it’s hard for a black man to get a fair shake in this country.
Leon Carp: Oh okay, well you try being a gay man in Lanford, Illinois. I mean, there is nothing like having to correct the spelling when somebody paints “faggot” across your garage door.

Whenever I catch that episode on re-run, that line always makes me howl with laughter.  The underlying reality of it, though, the fact that people do not even understand who we are at the same time as they are literally hating us to death, that’s the fucking long and short of it right there.  Our identities have not only been systemically and violently oppressed, we have scarcely even been allowed to exist openly enough to develop a language to articulate ourselves.
Many of my friends have been beaten for being gay, some by strangers, some by intimates, some by the cops.  Several of my dearest friends, both men and women, have been hate-raped for it, some by random strangers that picked them out at gas stations off the interstate, some by members of their own families and in their own homes.  I myself was thrown out of my family within 1 day of being outed, homeless at age 16 with nothing but the clothes on my back and $2 in my pocket.  My other “choice” was to let my mom ship me off to one of those We’ll Be Happy To Torture The Queer Outta Your Kid places, which, uh, no thanks.  I had to hide from my own mother until my 18th birthday so she couldn’t legally use the cops to round me up.
The Reagan administration let a LONG list of my friends die, and if I live to be 400 I will never forgive the Republican party for it.  While many of my straight friends from high school were enjoying their college/party years, I was working my ass off.  I was putting myself through therapy to develop a shred of self-worth, plus spending time taking care of my sick friends whose asshole families had ditched out on them too, only to ultimately attend their funerals.  I keep all their pictures nearby still today, whisper their names to myself; sometimes at night, even though I’m not what you’d call “a believer”, I whisper to my friends like maybe their spirits are still out there somewhere.
Whenever someone cranks up this Oppression Olympics bullshit, I have to admit, I cannot deal with them rationally, because all the pain converts to rage and it just takes me over.  If I don’t walk away, I start shaking and hollering.

This is a funny coincidence.I am reading Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” right now and have been struck by how similar my ‘growing up gay’ experience has been to his ‘growing up black’ experience.  He talks about pathology in the black community being the direct result of experiencing raw hate from the white community.  I talk about pathology in the gay community being the direct result of experiencing raw hate from the straight community.  Page 195 of the paperback,

The stories that I had been hearing from the leadership, all the records of courage and sacrifice and overcoming of great odds, hadn’t simply arisen from struggles with pestilence or drought, or even mere poverty.  They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate.  That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.

While not qualifying my experiences growing up gay over his growing up black (just as he does not qualify his own growing up black experience over the other, different experiences of his black friends and acquaintances), the striking similarities reside in the themes of self-hatred, self-doubt, paranoia, and the daily discrimination felt (whether real or imagined) from the external world and the struggle to reconcile who you truly are as a person with the picture the world seems to assign to you.  If black people choose to not see the similarities, they are simply acting out of prejudice and are choosing to not trust/believe what I/we are saying about our LGBT experience.  The point is not to trump the black experience.  The point is to show similarities that lead to understanding and empathy in the effort to secure civil rights (including marriage) so that LGBT will have the same protections and chance for family and community that the black community relies on so heavily in the face of continuing, yet now-illegal, discrimination they deal with every day, which is still very legal against LGBT.  Of course there is still rampant pathology in the black community that causes a woman to say she is ‘ok’ with that sign…….how could she, as a non-LGBT, be asked to take one of the most hurt parts of her soul and equate it with an experience she has been taught is completely outside the realm of her own personal experience?  
LGBT have no Gay History Month.  We have, like, three children’s books that were never read to us as children by our straight families who further claimed they had no idea we might be gay.  We had no LGBT teachers (who were out).  We had no LGBT role models in business, church, family, community.  In fact, we had the opposite: emphatic and explicit words describing us as sinful, wretched, unnatural, Satanic, gross, disgusting, etc.  The black communities at least had each other and their strong family units to retreat to.  LGBT had nothing until adulthood.  I would argue this means pathology in the LGBT community is probably more destructive because it was put on children during their most fragile developmental phases and at a time when none of us had the support of our parents or churches or communities.  The lack of ANY knowledge or history about LGBT means the straight world (of which this woman is a part) had no way of knowing us either.  So no way to empathize and support.  
I would take this issue one step further:  The straight black community is finally able to genuinely agree (from a most heartfelt and prayerful level) with the white straight community on something: the seemingly obvious inequality of LGBT people.  The black community sees this as one piece of the evidence of their ultimate proof of equality with whites.  LGBT are one of the most important pieces in black/white history for coming together as equals (especially when you throw Christianity in the mix).  Black and white relations may be the best they have ever been right now (no, not naive on my part, not saying everything’s hunky dory, but when it comes to LGBT, hey, that’s something black and white can be at peace with each other about).  LGBT are just a red herring, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Maybe this is our role, our gift to the straight world.  Maybe we are a gift that will finally heal race relations between black and white.  The black community certainly seems willing to sacrifice us to finally reconcile their own pathologies from their own difficult past.  I might even be ok with that because I believe black people deserve relief from their endless discrimination.  I just want to be able to file my taxes jointly with my wife.  Maybe we can make a deal, you know?  

Ron Prentice: When Pedophiles AttackH/T Unite The Fight …
Ron Prentice: When Pedophiles Attack

“So, for example, if a pedophile were to attack – I say ‘attack’ – approach a child in a church or in an employment situation or public school situation and you or I were to pull that pedophile off the child and say something to that pedophile about his poor behavior, that pedophile could actually file suit against you for having committed a hate crime against them for what you verbalized.”

Ron Prentice: Thank you, MormonsH/T Unite The Fight …
Ron Prentice:  Thank you, Mormons

“Next week, I’m told, Time magazine is putting out an article that talks about how Proposition 8 was successful. They give a lot of credit to the Latter-day Saints, as they should. Because Latter-day Saints were out there on the street. LDS’s have a model of community action and when we worked with LDS and said this is what we want to do, you know, before we knew it, they were knocking on doors with their own information about marriage. It was wonderful. And the Roman Catholics and the Evangelical Protestants had to catch up. And, fortunately, eventually, we feel like we sort of did. But I remember being here, and addressing a group of 200 or more pastors about Prop 8 early on, and the Time magazine article is gonna say that the Evangelicals were nowhere to be found. And I had a call from one of the members of our executive committee for Protect Marriage who is Mormon and he said, ‘I just want to apologize, because I didn’t write this article, but it gives all kind of credit to LDS’ and I said, ‘Mark, don’t worry, the LDS deserve a lot of credit …’”

This Ron Prentice:  Crusading for ‘Judeo-Christian values’ doesn’t come cheap  

Not as screwed upas the “white community” that has been funding all of this shit in the first place, bigot.

exactly!!

Gays and blacks are not mutually exclusiveBut this is a very poor defense of our rights.
HOWEVER, even if every single gay person were white, anglo-saxon, and protestant, the struggle for gay rights would STILL be part of the civil rights movement.

NoNo, it just happens to contain a few individual screwballs, like any other community that’s based on any other characteristic.  (Our own, even – remember, Andrew Cunanan was gay).
It’s true that many of the individual screwballs happen to fit a “type” – i.e., loony pastors of certain kinds of high-percentage black congregations holding certain kinds of traditionalist cultural views.  However, this by no means calls for the impugning of the African-American community as a whole.
Now, it does call for an attempt by sociologists, communication experts, political types, etc. to figure out the source of / mindset behind the homophobia associated with this particular kind of highly traditional mostly-black church, so that we in the GLBT community can take this into account and design more effective outreach strategies.  But using it as an excuse for racism manifests the same kind of hatred that GLBT’s destroy when it targets us.

DING!You hit the nail on the head.  Black folks were, and lamentably in many places still are, stripped of just the rights we are.
Potential refusal to hire on account of the personal characteristic in question?
Race: CHECK.  Orientation: CHECK.
Can’t marry the one person you truly love if they happen to belong to a certain category?
Race: CHECK (historically; people of other races).  Orientation: CHECK.
Face discrimination, and potential physical violence, from police in some localities?
Race: CHECK.  Orientation: CHECK.
The list goes on and on.
What’s it going to take to coalesce a common effort among the similarly-oppressed?

Sorry“same rights we are” – WE as LGBT’s generally.  Didn’t mean to imply the same kind of exclusion of black LGBT people as some right-wing black churches imply regarding LGBT black people.  As a white guy, it’s easy for me to fall into this trap, and I apologize.

I’m going to set up a special fund……containing half of all tips I receive from pizza deliveries to churches or the homes or offices of known fundamentalist individuals.  And this specific money will go to the making and purchase of such stickers.  :-D

Heavens to Judy!1) Speaking to someone isn’t a crime to begin with.  Therefore, it couldn’t be enhanced into a hate crime.
2) Even insofar as the act of pulling the pedophile off the child may consist in assault or battery (depending on how it’s done), the person who does it will EASILY be exonerated under a justification defense.  Bear in mind, that’s IF the local prosecutor is enough of a bull-headed dumbass to charge him in the first place.
…On the upside of all this, at least the sheer lunacy of these weirdos’ mental processes continues to put the FUN in fundamentalism.  :-D

Protest StickersEasy as PIE!
Buy some AVERY stickers – whole sheets, not already divided into sections (for versatility).
Create a table in WORD, say 2 columns of 4 rows (8 stickers a page), but here is where it’s fun.   You can make 8 1/2 x 11″ posters that STICK, or many little ones that fit everywhere (bus handles, door handles, post office mailboxes, etc.).
Create a message of your choice – concision is best.
LEGALIZE GAY is a great one.
END DOMA
END DADT
MARRIAGE EQUALITY NOW
END THE WAR
Print, cut, peel, and then freely deface government public property since government literally SHITS on our family, and doesn’t even supply any T.P.
Placing a sticker on glass or metal early in a hot day will almost GUARANTEE that it will be impossible to remove.   I’ve heard….