All posts by fontfolly

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About fontfolly

I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I write fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and nonfiction. For more than 20 years I edited and published an anthropomorphic sci-fi/space opera literary fanzine. I attend and work on the staff for several anthropormorphics, anime, and science fiction conventions. I live near Seattle with my wonderful husband, still completely amazed that he puts up with me at all.

…is just a red herring

writing, , ,

Lupo via Wikimedia Commons
Real herrings are never this red.
When a writer (particularly a mystery or detective story author) places details in a story to distract the characters and/or the readers to a false conclusion, that’s called a “red herring.” For many years, dictionaries and other references claimed that the origin of the phrase was a reference to a technique that used to be used to train hunting dogs to stay on the trail and not be distracted. When certain kinds of fish are preserved by being smoked and/or brined, the flesh of the fish turned a brownish red, and they often had a very pungent odor. Such “red herrings” or kippers supposedly could be used to throw a dog off the scent.

That origin is now generally accepted to be apocryphal, with the actual origin being from a political article written in 1807 in which the author said that he once distracted a dog with a red herring, and then accused other journalists of having been deceived in a similar way by a rumor. There is no indication of any actual hunters or dog trainers making it a practice to regularly use such fish in the training of hunting dogs.

But the apocryphal story remains useful in explaining the figurative meaning: distract the reader by placing a hint that appears to lead to something interesting in her path.

For the red herring to work in any type of story in which the characters are trying to solve a puzzle, it isn’t enough for the red herring to be a distraction. The red herring should point the characters (and the reader) toward a plausible alternative solution. When the trail turns out to be a dead end or a wrong solution, the trail itself still has to be something that plausibly would happen in that world.

It’s been annoying me about a lot of series I’ve been watching lately. Characters have a problem to solve, some information is found that points in a particular direction, when suddenly, blam! a supporting character that is loved one of one of the protagonists is attacked mysteriously. For the rest of the episode, everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off accusing people that have absolutely no motive at all for being involved in either problem. Eventually protagonist is confronted by the very person that clues which were seen before the distraction pointed to in the beginning. And here’s the part that’s crazy: either the mysterious attack is never explained, or it was done by some random person completely unrelated to the bad guy who is revealed three episodes later as a new big bad, but no rational explanation for why the new big bad attacked that character three episodes earlier is ever given.

I’m not sure if the problem is that most shows are written by teams where there may not be a clear “coordinator” with a strong artistic vision of what the story line is supposed to do, or if they simply think that throwing random stuff at the reader/viewer is what you’re supposed to do, or if they’re always in a rush without time to think things through. Or maybe they have fallen into that trap of thinking that, since sometimes meaningless things happen in real life, it’s okay for a story teller to do it, too.

It’s not okay. It shows that you are a bad writer. Yes, random things happen in real life. And you can even have some events happen in the story where the explanation in the story is that it was just dumb luck. But you are the story teller, and it’s your story. You have chosen to show this random action happened to your character. You need to have a reason, a reason that furthers the story or reveals something about the characters, for showing the bad luck to the reader/viewer.

It is okay if a red herring occasionally leads to a laugh without furthering the plot. If you have previously established one supporting character as being a bit of a dork or a goofball, for instance, you can one clue that leads to something completely unrelated to the plot that this funny character is doing. But it needs to be something that the readers/viewers will immediately think, “Oh! That’s so like him.”

Let’s say your current puzzle involves someone apparently attempting to kill a teacher by leaving some sort of deadly device for him. While the protagonists are following up clues, they discover that the teacher’s car in the parking lot is sparkling clean, as if someone wiped down the entire exterior. You can have the characters waste time trying to find a bomb of something on the car that never turns out to be there. Eventually, another supporting character finds video showing one obscure supporting character who is a student lurking around the car earlier. Eventually, the protagonists find out that said student, but realize that he’s failing said teacher’s class, and has been trying to curry the teacher’s favor.

It was suspicious behavior, it leads to a dead end, but it also makes sense within the story and is completely believable as something that could happen independently of the real stalker. Good writing.

On the other hand, having two supporting characters shot by a mysterious person off screen, who leaves them huddled together, holding each others wounds while waiting for an ambulance, and then never showing who shot the characters? Not so plausible. Or, showing who shot the characters three episodes later, but the person who did it is someone the audience would expect to want to kill the characters who were shot, and there was absolutely no reason for her not to have finished the job three episodes earlier? Bad writing.

It’s your story, yes. But you need to tell it the best it can be told.

Responding to the devil talkers

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http://harlemagainstviolencehomophobia.mydagsite.com/the_story
A parents group started a fundraiser in response to the hateful church signs.
I hadn’t planned to spend nearly all last week talking about the very un-Christian actions of some so-called pastors. It just happened to several stories came to light at the same time. There are a few people who have done more than talk and spread the word, and I think those folks deserve our thanks.

A group of parents in Harlem, tired of the many hateful messages appearing on a church sign in their neighborhood (and the hateful sermons of the pastor there), have started a campaign to raise money for the Ali Forney Center: Harlem Against Violence and Homophobia. The Ali Forney Center is a non-profit dedicated to helping homeless LGBT youth. The Center provides a safe, home like environment for kids on the street who are not welcome with their families because they are gay. They’re asking people who are upset about the messages from Pastor “Jesus Would Stone Homos” Manning to donate to the center.

I can’t think of a better way to respond to such hate, than to send some love and support to some kids who really need it.

Another person from Pastor Manning’s neighborhood, inspired by the trans woman who dared an anti-gay lawmaker to stone her in January, Jennifer Louise Lopez went to the door of Pastor Manning’s church and told them that she was there for her stoning. She took a video of her conversation with the person who answered, and has posted it:

(And the first time I posted this, the embedding worked, but later it turned into gobbldeguck, so click here to see the awkward moment.)

It’s funny how uncomfortable and timid people become when confronted by the meaning of their words. I do wonder why there is so little outrage from mainstream America at the outright incitement to violence of Pastor Manning’s most recent church sign, though.

Meanwhile, the leader of the God Hates Fags Church finally died this week. I’ve already seen some people repeating the early speculation that he might have had a change of hear late in his life being reported as if it is true, even though there is not one single shred of evidence to support it. In fact, the person who is probably the world’s expert on the church (she wrote her doctoral thesis on them after spending a few years attending their services every Sunday and even traveling with them on a couple of their road trips to picket funerals) has pointed out that the leader was probably excommunicated simply because he was dying. The church’s theology includes the firm belief that Jesus is returning any day now, that the “elect” alive right now will not die. If someone who is alive “now” does die, then they aren’t going to heaven because of this last of the last days belief. The church hasn’t held a funeral for any of its members since 1986, and has excommunicated each of the members that have died in that time.

Anyway, Rachel Maddow did a wonderful Not-An-Obituary for the guy, “Pseudo-religious hate-cult leader fails, dies.” You really should watch it, because it isn’t about their hate, it’s about the good that it brought out of the rest of the world.

MSNBC.com
I would embed the video, but WordPress.com won’t let me for some reason. Click on the “watch it” link in the paragraph above.

Some years I wait longer than I meant to

life, , ,

Cat with Christmas lights wallpaper desktopnexus.com
Time to take down the lights!
The last many years, I’ve left the icicle lights that we hang around the porch up for a significant time after we take down the rest of the Christmas decorations.

The first year I did it was way back after our current landlady bought the place (and moved in down stairs). All of the porch lights for all the units in our little four-plex are controlled by a timer in the basement. We can’t turn our own porch light on or off. As summer changed to fall and then to winter, sundown went from well after 9:30pm1 to about 4:30 pm2, but the porch lights weren’t turning on until after 9. It was freakin’ dark around our front door. The icicle lights were controlled by a light sensor that I have plugged them into, and they made it possible for people to see to walk up and down the concrete steps, and for me to find the right keys to unlock the door.

We eventually found out where the switch was, and tried to teach the landlady how it worked, but she just didn’t understand. However, she gave us permission to adjust it throughout the year, and that’s what we’ve been doing since.

The next year, because we had control of the porch light, we took down the icicle lights right around New Year’s Day. And the landlady was very sad. She asked why we took them down, because she liked the lights. Also, after the lights came down, when she drove home from work after sundown, she kept driving past the driveway3, because she couldn’t tell which house was which, and she’d have to turn around and drive back more slowly to find the driveway.

The problem is, when I leave the lights up well past Christmas, I start feeling judgmental attitudes from other neighbors and strangers who pass by. I recognize that this is mostly just in my head, but it bugs me. Also, the PCV plastic on the lights isn’t really designed for prolonged exposure outside, and the longer you leave the lights out, the fewer Christmas seasons you will get to re-use them.

So we came up with a compromise. I agreed to leave the lights up until Daylight Saving Time starts, at which point sundown is late enough that usually when she’s coming home there is enough light for her to tell the houses apart by color.4 And she agreed to talk to her business partners who had nagged at me to take the lights down.5

Since Daylight Saving Time’s start keeps getting moved earlier, I decided to change my date to the Spring Equinox. Sundown well after 6pm by then, and twilight lasts a while after.

This year, I also left all the other outdoor lights up, though I had unplugged them. I didn’t mean to, at all. But every weekend since New Year’s Day has been either very rainy, or we had a lot of things going on, or I was really sick.8

This week, since I was going to take the icicle lights down, I was determined to get the rest of the lights no matter what. And I did. I haven’t heard from the landlady, yet, but I know when I next see her, she’ll be very sad that the lights are down.

So I’ll just have to remind her that she only has to get by without them until October, because that’s when I’ll put up the Halloween lights.9

Footnotes:

1. That’s one of the advantages to living as far north as we are.

2. And that’s one of the disadvantages.

3. She lives in the unit behind and downstairs from us.

4. She isn’t completely happy with this, because when she comes home later she sometimes still misses the driveway, and has to circle back.6 She also admitted that she just thinks they’re pretty and wishes everyone left their Christmas lights up all the time.7

5. Turns out she didn’t. Last year when she and him were meeting us and an inspector as part of the refinance of the mortgage, he started to give me shit about the lights, and I told him they were still up because she asked me to leave them up. She very sheepishly explained to him what was going on. He thought it was weird, but seemed happy when I told him I took them down at after the equinox.

6. I have pointed out that we have a bunch of those solar light sticks on the flowerbed running up the driveway, and by that time of year there’s enough sunlight during the day for the lights to glow until after midnight. I know they aren’t as easy to see as lights hanging from an eave, but I still think they should work.

7. When I pointed out that most years she doesn’t even put lights in her own window, she said that it’s mostly because she’s too tired and/or busy each year.

8. Several weekends, all three were true and my husband was as sick as me!

9. Of course I put up Halloween nights! Halloween used to be the high holy days of queers everywhere. Until the straights co-opted it for Heteroween. But that’s okay. Straights need a socially sanctioned night to dress up as sexy nurses or sexy firemen. They’re so reppressed the rest of the year!

Connections, rainbow or otherwise

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I’ve spent some time this morning crying at weddings more than a thousand miles away. I’ll likely spend a lot of time this weekend doing that. A federal judge ruled yesterday that Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional (given all the other rulings that isn’t much of a surprise).

Detroit Free Press and WoodTV.com
Couples getting married in Michigan today.
He refused to issue a stay on the ruling, pointing to the evidence presented in the trial that denying the marriages causes harm to the thousands of Michigan children already being raised by same sex couples. This is different than other such rulings, or the situation in Utah where the state simply didn’t think to ask for a stay until the weddings had started.

The Court finds Sankaran’s testimony to be fully credible and gives it great weight. He testified convincingly that children being raised by same-sex couples have only one legal parent and are at risk of being placed in “legal limbo” if that parent dies or is incapacitated. Denying same-sex couples the ability to marry therefore has a manifestly harmful and destabilizing effecton such couples’ children.

The clerks in four counties, so far, have opened their offices on the weekend, to give out “no waiting period” marriage licenses. State and county officials have come in to work on their own time to facilitate the weddings. Judges, ministers, and other people legally authorized to perform the ceremonies have also come in to perform them. Ordinary citizens, some of them friends and families of the couples, but others just people who believe in equality, have come in to help, to congratulate, to cheer.

Couples who have been together over 50 years have been among the people married this morning.

My favorite part of this judge’s ruling (in his findings of fact—that will be very important during the appeals process), is his total evisceration of the notorious Regnerus study:

“The Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration. The evidence adduced at trial demonstrated that his 2012 ‘study’ was hastily concocted at the behest of a third-party funder, which found it ‘essential that the necessary data be gathered to settle the question in the forum of public debate about what kinds of family arrangement are best for society’ and which ‘was confident that the traditional understanding of marriage will be vindicated by this study.’ While Regnerus maintained that the funding source did not affect his impartiality as a researcher, the Court finds this testimony unbelievable. The funder clearly wanted a certain result, and Regnerus obliged. Whatever Regnerus may have found in this ‘study,’ he certainly cannot purport to have undertaken a scholarly research effort to compare the outcomes of children raised by same-sex couples with those of children raised by heterosexual couples. It is no wonder that the NFSS has been widely and severely criticized by other scholars, and that Regnerus’s own sociology department at the University of Texas has distanced itself from the NFSS in particular and Dr. Regnerus’s views in general.”

(You can read Judge Bernard Friedman’s entire ruling here.)

@SteveFriess
A little girl with rainbow star stickers at a courthouse in Michigan with morning. (Photo by Steve Friess)
In case you are unfamiliar, Regenerus compared a few hundred children whose parents had divorced, and in which the non-custodial parent later came out as gay or lesbian, to a control group of children raised by parents who never divorced. Not surprisingly, the children whose early childhoods were disrupted by a divorce tended to have trouble in school and show the other typical problems that have been documented many time before when families experience “household instability and parental relationship fluctuation.” Regenerus then claimed that this proved that children raised by same-sex parents have worse outcomes than children raised by opposite-sex parents.

Except that this doesn’t show that, because none of the children in that group were actually raised by a pair of same-sex parents. None.

It is true that his study also included two children whose parents divorced and the custodial parent came out as lesbian. Those two children did spend part of their childhood being raised by their mother and her same sex partner. Regenerus was forced to admit under oath that these two children did better than average in school, and otherwise had “better outcomes” in all the areas he measured than the others.

So, the only children in his ‘study’ who actually were raised by a same sex couple were success stories, rather than the horror story he has claimed.

So far, every state that is defending bans against marriage equality has cited the Regenerus study, despite its having been debunked many times before this. As far as I can tell, this is the first time that a court has specifically gone into the reasons that they have not been persuaded by the study.

@SteveFriess
“The Washtenaw county clerk @kestenbaum hands out xeroxes of the 14th amendment, equal protection.”
Freelance journalist (and former POLITICO writer, and now an instructor at Michigan State University) Steve Friess has been at a courthouse in Ann Arbor covering the story all day. He posted a link to his dropbox folder containing photos he’s been taking all day, which he is offering free with attribution. But I think my favorite is one he tweeted earlier: a print-out of the 14th Amendment one of the county clerks is handing out, reminding us that this has nothing to do the activist judges, and everything to do with enforcing the constitution.

I’m going to go look at more wedding pictures. Pass me another box of kleenex.

Update: Alas, the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court has issue a stay at least until Wednesday, when they will hear arguments as to whether the stay should be permanent until the Appeals Court rules on the original case. It’s disappointing, though not entirely unexpected. I do have to re-ask the question of just what the attorney general requesting this stay hopes to accomplish? He can’t be so delusional as to think the the whole country is going to reverse course on this sometime soon, can he?

Friday links!

blogging,

SomeFun.Com
Yay!
Amazingly, it’s Friday, again! Here’s a collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:

Measles was on the brink of being eradicated, but Thanks, Anti-Vaxxers. You Just Brought Back Measles in NYC.

Anti-science Wingnut Jenny McCarthy Asks; the Internet Slam Dunks.

ANTI-GAY GROUPS FAIL: ALL THREE ILLINOIS REPUBLICANS WHO VOTED FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY WIN PRIMARIES.

Country resistance to gay marriage an urban myth – in Australia.

NASA releases 680-gigapixel interactive mosaic of Lunar North Pole.

Oregon AG Files Brief: Marriage Ban Serves No Rational Purpose And Harms Citizens.

Why doesn’t god kill Bill Maher?.

GOP Obsessed With Birth Control Banning, OK With Penis Pumps And Viagra.

Why Are So Few Books From the 20th Century Available as Ebooks?.

Republicans Outraged Americans Are Happy With The Affordable Care Act.

McConnell fundraiser: Wives have ‘obligation’ to sleep with husbands. Except he didn’t say ‘sleep,’ of course, he said “sexual relations regardless of their mood.”

Louisiana Public School Finds Out It Can’t Force Christianity On Students. (You may have seen the story earlier of the teacher who singled out a buddhist student in her class to explain to the other kids how “stupid” such beliefs were.)

How Not to Sound Like a Creationist to a Trans Person.

Fred Phelps, Founder of God Hates Fag Church, Is Dead. My grandma taught me to only say nice things about the dead. “He’s dead. How nice.”

RIP, Fred Phelps: Your Legacy Is Not What You May Think.

When An Arkansas High School Tried to Silence a Gay Student, He Spoke Even Louder.

Power Lines Look Like Terrifying Bursts of Light to Animals.

Scientists Discover Why Dark Chocolate Is So Good For You In Most Delicious Research Project Ever.

Geek Girls Night Out: Truth Hurts. And I’m not just linking to it because Joi, the author, is a friend. I’ve written about a similar topic myself.

Harlem parents counter hate sign with support for LGBT youth.

Kylie Minogue – Sexercize:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

I’m not a morning person

life, , ,

quickmemes.com
…and no talking!
My morning wake-up routine is not what most people would call typical. The clock radio turns on first, softly playing NPR’s Morning Edition for an hour before the earliest I would need to get up. The entire purpose of the hour of news is to ease me into the idea of waking up. Some mornings I lay there, half asleep, listening to the news. Most mornings I’m sleeping, but more lightly than if there wasn’t the radio going.

Then the first alarm goes off. Continue reading I’m not a morning person →

A den of thieves

news, Uncategorized, , , ,

shutterstock.com
Always check the dictionary.
It was reported some weeks ago (on a Christian news blog), that Mars Hill megachurch had spent about $210,000 to place a book written by their head pastor, Matt Driscoll, on the New York Times Bestseller list. Several people had been suspicious when the book first made the list, since it shot onto the list the first week after it was available, and then completely dropped off the list never to return the very next week.

The church emphatically denied everything, calling the allegations ridiculous. Doing such a thing was antithetical to their mission.

The original accusation was soon corroborated when someone got hold of the contract (which outlined the procedure) from a particular marketing firm that does this on a regular basis for religious books. And more evidence began piling up, including allegations of crates of the book gathering dust in church storage rooms, and so forth.

And then, suddenly, the church admitted it:

While not uncommon or illegal, this unwise strategy is not one we had used before or since, and not one we will use again. The true cost of this endeavor was much less than what has been reported, and to be clear, all of the books purchased through this campaign have been given away or sold through normal channels. All monies from the sale of Pastor Mark’s books at Mars Hill bookstores have always gone to the church and Pastor Mark did not profit from the Real Marriage books sold either at the church or through the Result Source marketing campaign.

In other words, having insisting that they would never do such a dishonest and immoral thing, when they admit they did do it their excuses are that everyone else does it, it isn’t technically illegal, they are never going to do it again, the “true cost” isn’t as much as people say, and they gave the books away, so no harm. Oh, and the pastor didn’t profit from this unwise thing they did which they had swore up and down they had never done.

At a later point the statement commends the pastor for enduring these false accusations with grace. Except, of course, that they are totally not false.

This pastor has demonstrated, again and again, that he is one of the world’s biggest attention whores. So whether he actually made any money from it was never the point. The point was to be able to brag that he was a New York Times Bestseller writer… which (until now) had been plastered all over the church web pages, his personal web page, his twitter profile, on every single press release the church had issued since it happened, on posters for their various conferences and seminars, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Over the weekend a non-apology letter has surfaced, where he spends a lot of time explaining how the pressures of trying to fulfill the mission that god has repeatedly called him to do forced him to do things he’s not proud of. He never says what any of those things are, though he did say things like, “my angry prophet days are over” and “I must learn to be humble.”

It’s hard to take the humble comment, or the apology, seriously when every other sentence is some kind of bragging about his calling from god, what a humble man he is, how he doesn’t deserve all the talent that god has given him, and so on.

Besides the blatant contradiction between first claiming that they never paid to manipulate a bestseller listing, then admitting they did it, they’ve lied many times before. I wrote before about their press release that (while equating all gay people with people living with AIDS) lied about working with the Lifelong AIDS Alliance. They issued several clarifications that just compounded the lie as the Alliance denied any relationship. No one from the church even called the Alliance to get basic volunteering information until after about the third clarification statement.

Pastor Mark has made too many misogynist and anti-gay sermons over the years to list, though I am particularly fond of both his sermon that compared wives to waterboarding, as well as the times he explained that his wife has to ask his permission if she wants to get her hair cut. Besides the dozens of times he’s made fun of, mocked, and otherwise denigrated effeminate men, there’s also his famous assertion that masturbation is clearly an act of homosexual sin.

And let’s not forget that several Christian news sites and scholars have been slowly demonstrating that large proportions of all of the pastor’s books are plagiarized from other, more obscure, Christian authors.

Driscoll commands a megachurch, which is a bunch of large congregations that meet in several locations around the region. His congregation tends to be younger and more well educated than the typical evangelical crowd. I’ve never really understood the appeal, particularly since he is so transparently egotistic. I understand why he, and the other leaders keep doing what they’re doing. Jesus himself had something to say about people like them:

“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said to them, ‘It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.'” — Matthew 21:12-13

As ye sow…

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funny-pictures-blog.com
What goes around…
It’s being reported that Fred Phelps, Sr, founder of the ‘God Hates Fags’ Westboro Baptist Church, has been excommunicated from his own church, is isolated in a hospice facility in Topeka, and the family members now running the church have banned all the family members who left the church from visiting to make their good-byes.

All of the reports point back to the same announcement on Facebook from one of Phelps’ sons, Nate (who fled the cult at 18 years old back in 1976, has since come out as atheist, and has spent many of the last decades working in favor of LGBT rights). A few people have called Nate and other excommunicated family members to confirm a few facts: the senior Phelps was excommunicated from his own cult last August, and he’s currently a patient at the Midland Hospice Center in Topeka.
Continue reading As ye sow… →

You wanna talk about blarney?

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www.irishqueers.org
Irish heritage should include all of the community…
The fight continues over the banning of openly gay groups to march in both the New York City and Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Back in the 1990s the non-profit groups that put on each parade re-organized in order to proclaim the parade a religious (Irish Catholic) processional in order to keep the legal right to exclude people despite anti-discrimination laws. And that’s fine.

The troublesome question has been ever since then, why do non-irish and non-catholic elected officials march in a religious processional? And more importantly, why are police and firefighters allowed to march in uniform?

The last point is particularly important. It has long been the consensus opinion (and has even been accepted as a statement of fact at the federal appeals court level), that allowing the police to participate in uniform in a discriminatory rally or parade gives ordinary citizens the impression that the police department (and the entire justice system) endorses the bigoted message of said event. When police participated in Anti-segregationist Marches in the past, it had a chilling effect on the minority communities. People in those communities became even more reluctant to call the police to report crimes, afraid to cooperate with police in the investigation of crimes, et cetera. All one has to do is to watch the video of nearly an entire contingent of cops in uniform marching in the St. Patrick’s day parade a few years ago all flipping off a small group of gay protestors standing along the parade route to understand what kind of message that conveys.

The new mayor of NYC decided not to march in this year’s parade (as did the mayor of Boston). The NYC mayor instead participated in the St Pat’s For All parade earlier in the month. Note, that article mentions a deal that was being worked out for one gay group to march in the Boston parade, but that deal has since been rescinded.

The mayor has declined to try to forbid NYPD officers from marching in uniform in the bigots’ parade, claiming it is a free speech issue. Except, the courts ruled long ago that because marching in uniform creates the impression that the city endorses a discriminatory message, that the city’s responsibility to serve all citizens equally trumps the rights of the cops. They can’t forbid the cops to march, they can’t forbid the cops to march with banners and signs that say they are cops, but they can forbid them to march in uniform.

The sad thing is that, since gay rights groups have been lobbying these city governments to ban the uniforms from the parade, parade organizers and their apologists have squawked loudly, claiming that doing so would be discrimination!

This coming from the people who created new religious non-profit corporations to sponsor the parade for the explicitly stated purpose to discriminate. It’s all well and good to discriminate against gay citizens, but Saints Preserve us if you suggest that maybe the police department shouldn’t endorse such a thing…

Fears of a white homo devil

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thenewcivilrightsmovement.com
Can you feel the godly love oozing from the sign?
Just when we thought it was safe for us gay guys to go out in public, Pastor Manning from New York is now reminding his co-religionists that gay people should be stoned to death, because “stoning is still the law.” In the same sermon (which he has posted on youtube), he refers to the notion that god is love as a teaching from Satan. I kid you not!
Continue reading Fears of a white homo devil →