Fighting Hate in Our Community

Yesterday we read a news report about Megan Williams, a 20 year old African American woman who was kidnapped, raped and tortured in Southern West Virginia by six White men and women for over one week.

The details are nauseating:

“[Megan’s] captors forced her to eat rat droppings, choked her with a cable cord and stabbed her in the leg while calling her a racial slur... [t]hey also poured hot water over her, made her drink from a toilet, and beat and sexually assaulted her during a span of about a week.”

And yet, shockingly, Megan's attackers will not be charged with a hate crime.

This is a sad day for West Virginia and for the entire country.

In West Virginia, hate-based violence has become a daily occurrence and is rapidly increasing across the country as elected officials, courts, law enforcement officers, religious “leaders” and the news media perpetuate a “them against us” dynamic.

Someone somewhere must be benefiting from creating a climate of fear of “the other” because there is plenty of it going around.

Ask yourself, who benefits and why?

As out and open West Virginia lesbians, we are keenly aware that some of our neighbors are told in church each week that we are despicable sinners.

We know that every time our President calls for an amendment to the Constitution to “protect traditional marriage” he provides cover for these homophobic gay bashers.

When Lou Dobbs rails against illegal immigration and treats lies as news, he perpetuates violence and misunderstanding against people of color.

When the Supreme Court virtually overturns laws prohibiting segregation based on race, they are rewarding White supremacists who’ve been offended since 1954 when they were forced to sit, eat and attend school with those they feel are inferior to them.

As we go about our daily lives, we have the choice to shake our heads with disbelief about Megan’s story or do something constructive about it while the iron is hot.

Perhaps violence motivated by hate is more difficult for us to ignore because we, too, are vulnerable. However, as history has shown, violence and cruelty based on "difference" is indiscriminate. We are all unique in some way or another and eventually the person who is different may be -- you.

Remember the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller during Hitler’s reign?

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

We for one will not stand silently by and allow acts of violence and hatred to occur in our state, in our community.

We know that people – even those who are outraged – often fail to act because they feel isolated, hopeless and helpless. How can they, as individuals make any difference or say anything to change the hearts and minds of those who hate?

That is why we need to stand together, People of Color, Native Americans, the poor, the young and old, gay and straight, Muslim, Christian, Jew and Hindu -- all of us need to understand that alone we are vulnerable but together we are strong.

Other communities have responded to hate crimes by using the incident to teach tolerance and acceptance. Resources are available to assist activists, educators and law enforcement officers to fight hate in their local community.

Today we are going to contact others in our local community to see whether we can work together to organize a rally or forum to educate around what happened to Megan.

What will you do?

Help! Pat Buchanan is Imposing His Marriage on Us!

When we watch the news and hear outlandish and false statements about LGBTQ people and our "agenda" go unchallenged, we worry that the misinformation will eventually be seen as "the truth."

Unfortunately, as occasional victims of these lies, we are left to scream helplessly at the television, demanding for a correction or an apology -- which never comes.

Today we want to address a particularly annoying lie that keeps recycling throughout debates over the Larry Craig debacle -- that gay and lesbian partners demands for equal marriage rights are unjustified and illegitimate.

As you are no doubt aware, Senator Larry Craig’s tearoom tap dance is all-the-buzz lately on every TV news/talk show.

Pundits and talking heads – most of them straight (at least publicly) males – are pontificating on the inescapable reality that the GOP is riddled with gay bashing hypocrites.

Last week, on one particular segment of MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, he and Republican strategist, Pat Buchanan spent about 15 minutes agonizing over the potential negative impact Craig’s sordid tale would have on the Republican’s chances of winning the 2008 Presidential election.

During their exchange, Matthews stated (and has since repeated) that it irks him to see self-hating gay bigots like Craig pushing for laws like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Constitutional Amendment to ban equal marriage rights.

Matthews is especially fired up over DADT, which he believes is a “legitimate” concern for “patriotic” LGBTQ Americans who want to serve their country (and implicit in his insistence that arguments against DADT are legitimate, is Matthews’ opinion that demands for marriage equality rights are not valid).

A few nights ago, Matthews went head-to-head with Pat Buchanan over the Larry Craig fiasco and the two pundits their views on the validity of DADT and the issue of marriage equality.

Matthews reiterated his views on DADT and Buchanan countered that the policy is a logical solution because it protects unsuspecting and vulnerable straight soldiers from being molested by gays as they sleep in their barracks. (What a bunch of hooey!)

When the dueling conservatives got around to discussing marriage, blow-hard Buchanan bellowed that advocates for equal marriage rights are trying to force him to accept our marriages as legitimate – and that would be unfair to him:

“You‘re—but see, the two homosexuals would be asking their—they‘re imposing something on me. They‘re saying, you must recognize my—our relationship as marriage. And I say, look, my values say no. I mean, if you‘re living in Dupont Circle, that‘s your business.”

As usual and until now, Buchanan’s absurd statement went unchallenged.

We will now offer the response we can only dream of hearing on the air some day:

• First, that kind of insulting and conceited statement just infuriates us!
  

• Second, just how would our marriage be in any way an imposition on Pat Buchanan -- or anyone else besides us for that matter?
  

• Third, assuming that Pat Buchanan is a married man, we are not in the slightest bit burdened by his marriage. Despite knowing that somewhere lurks the specter of Buchanan’s marriage, we go on about our daily lives as if it does not exist at all.
  

The only problem we have with Buchanan’s marriage is that although we are American citizens and we pay taxes that support programs that are available to Buchanan and his wife, we are not able to enjoy the same rights and privileges granted by those programs.

Want to know what is really unfair? That WE are the ones forced to accept Buchanan’s marriage while being denied the right to our own!

If you want to add your voice to the growing chorus of American’s who are sick and tired of anti-marriage legislation, please sign our petition and we will pass it on to the President and your representatives in Congress.

Here you will find many more examples of Republican ‘moral values’ hypocrisy.

Bald-Heads and Other Fetishes

Senator Larry Craig likes anonymous gay sex and as the photo collage on the right illustrates, George W. Bush likes the feel of bald heads.

It seems right wing-nuts are more obsessed with sex than Larry Flint.

While they noisily demand adherence to laws and policies that establish socially acceptable, sexual “norms” for the rest of us, many of the loudest of the pontificators of Puritanism have secretly carved out exceptions to those rules for themselves.

The more extreme the anti-sexual rhetoric -- the more bellicose the protestations -- the more likely we are to discover they have their own hidden and lurid fetishes. In the meantime, LGBTQ people are forced to live our lives without the legal rights and protections of marriage.

The scenario has become so silly and obvious: from now on, when we hear extreme conservatives preach aggressively in support of legal and social controls for private sexual behavior between consenting adults, we will see it as a symptom of that person’s own Paraphilia.

Now that we understand the situation, we can easily see why these wing-nuts continue to dwell on the subject of sex, even when the rest of us are concerned about the war, the economy, jobs, fair trade policy, election fraud, democracy, and other minor issues of the day.

We see nothing wrong with wing-nuts obsessing over sex – as long as they do so in private and with other consenting adults. In fact, we wish them well in their pursuit of group sex, threesomes, homosexual or heterosexual sex, pornography, S & M, whatever “stiffs their spiffs.”

But as long as our government is controlled by closeted sexual deviants, same-sex partners will continue to suffer the consequences of life without legal rights and protections. Such rights will only be granted to “normal, heterosexual married couples.”

While we wait for the rest of the country to wake up to the fact that perceptions about equal marriage rights are being warped by negative stereotypes sputtered by holier-than-thou hypocrites, our families bask in the purgatory of second-class citizenship.

Because marriage confers legal rights, protections and obligations we do not have, we are forced to make the time and take the extra effort to get legal documents to protect our families.

And we absolutely cannot and should not wait for our elected perverts to do it for us.

The Gay Life

This from an article we read this morning:

"Larry Craig is a clear illustration of what the gay rights movement is up against in our fight to be removed from the list of second class citizens. He cares more about his purse and his image on the world stage than he does the suffering of a class of people of which he is a part. He is as much a traitor and betrayer as Judas Iscariot himself.

All of this begs the question, "why?" It's a question that has yet to be satisfactorily answered. What about homosexuality is so threatening to society that groups like the RepubliKKKan party and the Religious Reich are compelled to do all in their power to keep gays in the closet, in the tearoom, and by the actions of vice cops, in the courtroom?

I have no real answers on the why. I have some theories, but I can't call any of them facts.

Social control: Politics and religion are in the business of social control. They use many means to maintain their power over society as a whole. By effectively making homosexuality both a crime and a sin, effectively if they can't shame us into compliance by invoking the name of god, they will get us with the threat and real possibility of legal action. By using these methods, they insure that none but the bravest or most foolhardy will have the courage to come out. They also insure that those who have the need, but not the courage to be honest will eventually wind up busted, and in the legal system. That means dollar bills. If there is one thing that America loves, it's those filthy green-backed pieces of rag paper.

Envy: As I said above, men are horny from the time that testosterone begins raging through their bodies around adolescence. Gay men as a general rule are more likely to find a willing partner for quick anonymous sex. The sex we have has no way of being reproductive. Effectively, without the threat of AIDS or other STD's, gay sex is sex for pleasure. It is sex for pleasure with no ill effects, or nine month surprises. The same cannot be said of heterosexual contact. There is the ever present reality that the nine seconds of pleasure of the orgasm will be followed by nine months of worry followed by eighteen years of child support. Tell me that isn't cause for jealousy. If people will kill because of jealousy, does it not stand to reason they would label someone who was getting more sex than themselves a sinner?

The need to hate: There are simply some people out there who have to hate. It is their Alpha and Omega. It is their overriding reason for living. Gays make a convenient target. As a matter of fact, the use of the word "faggot" remains the last socially acceptable bit of hate speech. The actions of the Religious Reich and the Republicans insure [sic] that nothing short of our own version of a march to Selma will ever begin breaking the hatred."

Read the entire article here

Dems: Talking the Talk

We hope you were able to watch the LOGO TV Democratic Candidate forum. If you missed them, check it out here.

The format was so GAY!

It had the feel of a television talk show -- with a Merv Griffin-esque set -- very chic and stylish.

Each candidate entered the studio to a musical refrain with a dance-club kind of beat. One at a time, they walked passed the well-dressed, mostly white and mostly young audience and made their way to the stage where they were seated in an over-stuffed chair.

Obama, Edwards and Clinton -- AKA the "front runners" -- seemed the most comfortable seated there. Perhaps they are more relaxed in general, or maybe they are just good at acting -- which may be why they are the front runners in the first place!

The questions were surprisingly good with Melissa Etheridge asking the best, most heartfelt questions.

All in all, the forum was a success in bringing out the candidates stance on the issues, which boil down to this:

• Each of them supports State and Federal legal protections for same-sex couples

• They all want to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell

• Every one of them agree that we need more funding for AIDS education
  

• Only two -- Kucinich and Gravel -- support full marriage equality
  

The "worst" candidate was Richardson who believes "homosexuality" is a choice. He also would not sign a Marriage Equality bill even if it passed the house and senate.

Hillary lectured us on why her husband -- who let the LGBTQ Community down in so many ways -- was actually our champion because he prevented the Gingrich Republicans from inflicting even more harm to our families. In Hillary's view, DADT and DOMA were the solution to even harsher policies being pushed by right wing-nuts.

Maybe she's right. Thats how the game is played in Washington. LGBTQ people are/were used by both parties as political pawns to divide the country into mean-spirited factions who make a big stink over non-issues while the power brokers rape and pillage the economy and the military industrial complex wages an endless war and builds an unstoppable empire.

But hey, that just our opinion.

We are going to support Kucinich even though we are completely aware that he has a snowball's chance in hell of winning. But why should we support any other candidate when they do not fully support US? It seems like anything else would be a form of self-abuse.

Not that any of it matters anyway. We are skeptical about whether the election process and democracy even function any more.

The voting machines are hackable, the media is owned and controlled by big corporations, the Republicans, led by Rove, have reconfigured the justice department and have gerrymandered the voting district lines so that Republicans always have an edge.

But what gives us hope is the understanding that although the cards were stacked against the Democrats in November 2006, the people's will was stronger than the Republican machine.

Unfortunately, the stage is now set for Bush to suspend the elections in the event of a "national emergency" of his own making.

So, if there ARE elections and any one of the Democratic candidates are able to get elected, they ALL say they will fight for our rights to have a semblance of legal equality -- which is more than we can say for the Republicans.

The Dems -- they all talk the talk, but will they walk the walk?

We shall see...

Did You Miss the Gay Debates? Watch Them Here!

If you missed the LOGO/HRC - first ever - Presidential Forum, here is your chance to watch each candidate answer questions in a non-debate, informal setting.

Today you can watch. Tomorrow we will share with you our impressions of the format, the moderators, the questions, the candidates and their answers.

We hope you will also let us know what you think by commenting (use the link below) so that we can share your views as well.

Whatever else you may think, this is an amazing event.

Enjoy!

Barak Obama:


John Edwards:


Dennis Kucinich:


Mike Gravel:


Bill Richardson:


Hillary Clinton:

You Know You WANT IT!

... legal protections that is.

Even though the Winter Holidays are 6 months away, we have been working very hard (like Santa's elves) making a surprise JUST FOR YOU!

We are sad to say that we couldn't get you FULL and EQUAL RIGHTS, but we did the NEXT BEST THING by expanding the services we are offering on Rainbow Law.

Many of you wanted to know why we only offer a Living Trust and not a Last Will Package. We explained that a Trust is more effective in protecting rights between partners who are not recognized as such by law.

BUT NOOOO!

YOU said you HAD to have more OPTIONS, and so....


You GOT IT!

We hope you will check out the newly updated Rainbow Law and find the Legal Document Package you need to protect your relationship and your rights!

On a side note -- we couldn't let the day go by without mentioning that earlier in the week, Bush's "conservative" Supreme Court decided several cases that prove we were right to worry about an erosion of civil liberties...

A big THANK-YOU to all the Democrats who voted to confirm Roberts and Alito. We will be showing our appreciation come next election day!

The farther right the court leans, the longer it will take before we have real Equality.

In the meantime... please take advantage of your Free Advance Directives!

And come back tomorrow for more on the Supremes!

Save the Supreme Court -- vote Democrat in 2008

If you are tempted to vote for a (supposedly non-partisan) Independent or Republican candidate for President in 2008, please read on!

As you know, G.W. Bush has already appointed two conservative Supreme Court Justices – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito (and the terrifying truth is he may still get another shot at an appointment), thereby cementing a neo-conservative agenda on the Court that will adversely impact American jurisprudence for decades to come.

These appointments are even more distressing when you consider that Americans, in general, are becoming more progressive over time:

"The fact is that America is a progressive country and getting more progressive all the time," said Paul Waldman of Media Matters. While people may call themselves conservative, he said, "that doesn't tell you much about what people actually believe." Research shows that a majority does not embrace the free-market Darwinism, the aloof government and the militarism that is at the heart of conservative ideology.

So, in order to make sure that the Supreme Court retains a semblance of judicial balance, it is imperative that we elect a Democrat for President in 2008!

In an article in today’s RainbowZine, Margaret Kimberley writes:

“It is obvious that the current Supreme Court is quite simply not the place to get justice. Good cases that can undo great wrongs should not be heard there unless or until there is a Democratic president who can change the makeup of the court.”

Her article highlights the cases of Ledbetter v. Goodyear and Uttecht v. Brown. Ledbetter involved pay disparity between female and male employees of Goodyear Tire Company. In that case, the court held that female employees (who are being paid less than similarly situated male counterparts) have 180 days after the discriminatory treatment occurs (whether or not they are aware of it) to file their complaint. In other words, a company can discriminate against you indefinitely if they are able to keep you in the dark about that discrimination until the time limit expires.

In Uttecht, the Court ruled that “potential jurors who express any reservations about the death penalty can be excluded from death penalty eligible cases.” This of course means that there will be more white jurors (who are more likely to support a death penalty) on juries which will adversely impact minorities (who are more likely to be arrested than whites who engage in similar activities).

What Kimberley does NOT mention in her article is the issue that is of great concern to the LGBTQ Community -- basic and fundamental rights to protect our families.

Recent polling showing that a majority (54%) of Americans support the right of same-sex partners to obtain legal protections that are similar to those automatically granted to heterosexual married couples.

And, over the next decade or more (52-year-old Roberts could be on the court for 30 years) it is virtually certain that the Supreme Court will be asked to decide the constitutionality of state bans on same-sex marriage, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) denying homosexuals federal benefits conferred by marriage and the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) ban on gays and lesbians in the military.

If the Court shifts just one millimeter to the right, we can kiss our equality goodbye!

While it is true that Democratic Presidents have let us down (Bill Clinton signed DOMA and DADT), Kimberley reminds us that:

“the Democrats at their most craven, compromised and triangulated are better than Republicans. Judicial appointments are one of the clearest examples of the Democratic lesser evil being preferable to the Republican evil that scores an eleven on a scale of one to ten. There is no hope of any semblance of justice unless a Democratic president is making judicial appointments.”

FYI, here is a list (sans Roberts and Alito) of the current Justices who may or may not outlast Bush or another 4 to 8 year Republican reign:

• Progressive: John Paul Stevens, appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975. He will be 88 by the next election.
  

• Progressive: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993. She will be 75. She survived cancer, but is rumored to be visibly ill lately.

• Moderate: Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Ronald Reagan (1987) will be 72.

• Conservative: Anthony Scalia, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, age 72.

• Progressive: David Souter, appointed by George's old man in 1990. He'll be 69 in '08.

• Conservative Clarence Thomas, appointed by Bush the elder, is only 57!

• Progressive: Steven Breyer, soon to be 70.
  

So please, even if you feel compelled to cast your vote to protest the two major parties – or if you just feel like abdicating your right to vote because you think it does not matter WHO wins -- remember, whoever gets the White House in the next go-round will drastically alter life for your children and grandchildren -- for better or for worse -- UNTIL DEATH DO THEY PART.