Category Archives: news

Weekend Update 1/30/2016 – Making things beautiful edition

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Support the #HarlemNoHate campaign
Support the #HarlemNoHate campaign
Not all of the good stuff makes it into Friday Links each week for various reasons. And sometimes more information about something I did include comes in afterward. Yesterday I included a link to a story about the hateful church of the hateful pastor David Manning and the fact that they haven’t paid utility bills in a long time. The GayWrites tumblr has a fantastic update:

Remember Atlah Worldwide Church in Harlem? The church that wrote “Jesus Would Stone Homos” and other anti-LGBT messages on its marquee?

They have racked up over a million dollars in unpaid bills, and now the building is up for public auction. The Ali Forney Center, which houses about 107 homeless LGBT youth in New York City, is ready and willing to make an offer, buy the space and convert it into an LGBT homeless youth shelter – if we can help them come up with the money.

The church owes more than one million dollars ($1,000,000) in various bills, mostly water and sewer bills. This is in addition to tens of thousands in fines the church has been assessed for various permit violations. While Pastor Manning personally has federal liens totaling $355,000 for non-payment of federal taxes on his personal income, plus $28,000 in back taxes to New York state, and about $30,000 in other collections. (Who would have ever predicted that someone who has spent time in prison in two different states for burglary, robbery, and larceny would, when he became a hate-spouting preacher, cheat on his taxes?)

The Ali Forney Center is a charity that provides shelter, support, education, and nourishment to homeless youth with an emphasis on providing safe spaces for queer homeless teens. You may remember that at least 40% of homeless teens are on the street because their families rejected them for being gay, lesbian, bi, or trans. The center happens to have one of its locations near the church, and the church has organized anti-gay rallies outside the center on more than one occasion.

They need to raise about $200,000 to be a serious contender in the foreclosure auction. They’ve raised about 20% of that since announcing this yesterday. If you can donate, please do!

Donate to the #HarlemNoHate campaign today!

In completely unrelated news: you’ve probably already read about a bunch of the Oregon Militia members being arrest this week: WTF Just Happened to the Oregon Militia, Explained. The federal charging indictment is very simple and conservative: they are simply charging them with conspiracy to interfere with a federal employee completing their duties, and the charge is full of public quotes from the militia members that make the case pretty open-and-shut.

Ursula Vernon did a very funny sum-up of the situation on Twitter, which someone has kindly storified so you can go read it in order. It is funny and worth the read: Here’s what I don’t understand about the Oregon militia, and because I’m me, I will use Star Wars as a metaphor…

The only quibble I have with her metaphor is this: the justification that the Oregon militia (and all the rest of the sovereign citizen crackpots) use for their actions is not the equivalent of referring to an ancient document from the Old Republic as if it were binding law on the Empire, it is more like referring to the some words that Jar-Jar Binks is rumored to have muttered in his sleep and claiming that those words are binding laws on the Empire.

I’m glad that this thing hasn’t turned into a massacre, and it’s sad that one of the idiots reached for his gun (it’s really clear in the video that’s what he did) while facing a bunch of feds who were trying to arrest him. Notice that no one else was shot. I hope once the grand jury is convened that they also charge this idiots for violating the native american archeological site and claiming on youtube they were going to sell the artifacts. That will get them some serious, and well-deserved prison time.

I hope the hold-outs give themselves up so that the refuge managers, the Audubon Society, local ranchers, and the Burns Paiute Tribe and other actual stakeholders in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to get back to work.

Confessions of an eye-rolling homo

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1012031_619704901401542_1221490736_nThere’s a “story” on Breitbart entitled “SJWs Are Purging Politically Incorrect Sci-Fi Authors From Bookstores” that several people pointed me to that is so wrong and so laughable that I was going to include a do-not-link to it and do a little dissecting. But I don’t have to do most of the dissecting, because Jim C. Hines has done that part for me: Fact-Checking for Dummies. And Breitbart. The tl;dr summary: a “journalist” at Breitbart takes a single comment off of a post on the sci-fi blog File 770 and represents the comment as a news story claiming that bookstores in Toronto are removing books from their shelves written by Sad Puppies because of pressure for Social Justice Warriors.

It’s a comment, not an actual post. And even as a comment it is presented as an anecdote, “Last month someone told me…” Finally, others have gone to the bookstores in question and confirmed that books written by the specific authors mentioned in the comment are still on the shelves available for purchase. So, the entire premise of the op-ed piece on Breitbart is false.

But there’s more to it. The op-ed mentions specific authors who supposedly have been purged for making homophobic remarks, and then gets all upset claiming that several of those authors have done no such thing. Breitbart grudgingly admits the John C. Wright has made a statement about homosexuality being an aberration, but that barely qualifies! None of the others have said anything homophobic at all!

Here’s where my eye-rolling begins. Wright hasn’t merely said that homosexuality is unnatural. Wright has said, “I have never heard of a group of women descending on a lesbian couple and beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons, but that is the instinctive reaction of men towards fags.” In fact, he’s said several variants of that: “…the natural reaction of real men confronted by fags is to beat them to death with axhandles and tire-irons.” For a while it was his go-to joke. Until midyear last year when he went through his blog and purged most of the occurrences of that particular phrase. He also rewrote a passage where he had said, “I feel no more personal animosity toward lesbians or other sodomites than I do to termites, but when they invade my house, it’s time to exterminate.” He changed it to instead compare the artist and the writer of The Legend of Korra to termites for the crime of representing two women in love in the final episode of the series, and that artists and writers who positively portray homosexual characters are the ones who deserve to be exterminated. And somehow he thinks that is less homophobic.

But Hines’ take-down of the Breitbart article falls short on a couple of points, so I want to deal with those.

The Breitbart op-ed, as I mentioned, claims that none of the other named “politically correct” authors have ever made any homophobic statements. That’s not true, at all. Brad Torgersen has said things such as: “we didn’t decide that homosexuality is wrong, God did”

No matter how sincerely held a religious belief is, it can still be bigotry. Bigotry is obstinately holding onto a belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. Medical science has concluded that homosexuality is not a matter of choice, it is an innate trait. That’s a fact. Sin has to be a matter of choice, that’s part of sin’s theological definition. Innate traits cannot be sins. Torgerson and Larry Correia (another author Breitbart insists isn’t homophobic, despite repeated statements that “homosexuality is a dangerous lifestyle choice”) and their friends are perfectly within their rights to insist—contrary to the facts—that homosexuality is a matter of choice, yes. But that they do so for religious reasons doesn’t change the truth that the belief is a bigoted one. They are anti-gay bigots.

And more importantly, straight people, like the author of the Breitbart piece, don’t get to decide what I or any other queer person feels offended about. We get to own our own feelings. As Irish drag queen and gay rights activist Panti Bliss said:

“I have been lectured to by heterosexual people about what homophobia is and about who is allowed to identify it. Straight people have lined up—ministers, senators, barristers, journalists—have lined up to tell me what homophobia is and what I am allowed to feel oppressed by. People who have never experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown into prison or herded onto a cattle truck, it is not homophobia, and that feels oppressive.”

I could spend a little more time using Google and the Internet Wayback Machine and I would not be surprised if I could come up with similar statements about gay people for each of the other authors that Breitbart thinks have been purged from Toronto bookshelves. I say that because I vaguely recall reading statements from all of them along those lines. And I’m sure that it is a bit hypocritical of me, after lambasting Breitbart for failing to fact-check, not to finish the job.

But unlike Breitbart, I’m not being paid to report things. It took me only a few minutes on Google for each author to find two homophobic Torgerson quotes and four homophobic Wright quotes and a couple of Correia’s homophobic statements. It takes a little longer to track down old blog posts that some of those guys have deleted or revised after the Affair of the Melancholy Canines became big news last year. Frankly, it is exhausting having to constantly re-explain to people that there really are bigots out there still trying to silence, oppress, denigrate, or deny rights to queer people. They can make their off-handed, unproven attacks in seconds, and it takes us much more time to fact-check them and track down the evidence.

So I’m going to stop here and just roll my eyes once again at the straightsplaining and the false accusations and the bigot apologists. And frankly, even rolling my eyes is more effort than the haters deserve.

Edited to add:  the original draft of this included a digression about the fact that stories like the Breitbart op-ed are intended, among other things, to stir up animosity toward queer people and our supporters. Just as all that talk about how sinful or unnatural homosexuality is—it is intended to stir up hatred, while claiming to be the opposite. That’s why I included the Stephen Fry quote and graphic originally. Haters want other people to agree with them and hate us, too.

Weekend Update 1/22/2016 – He made sure that it wasn’t a mass shooting, all right

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This one happened Thursday night, but I didn’t see the story until midday Friday, after I’d posted yesterday’s Friday Links, which is why I didn’t include it: Woman seriously injured in Renton theater shooting.

So, a bunch of people were sitting in the theatre, about 20 minutes into Michael Bay’s latest atrocity, that Benghazi movie, when a drunk guy is seen fumbling with a pistol and it goes off, striking a woman in another row, putting her in critical condition. Then the drunk guy flees the theatre, throwing the ammo clip in a trash can on his way out. Ninety minutes later, a man called the police to report that his 29-year-old son was “distraught” because he dropped his gun in a theatre and thinks he might have hurt someone. Police come and arrest the 29-year-old, who they decline to identify, but note that he has a concealed weapon permit. The victim, meanwhile, has been hospitalized and her condition has been upgraded to “satisfactory.”

This particular multiplex is one that I’ve actually been to, as it’s local to me (the third time we saw the Star Trek reboot was in this theatre, for instance), so there were a number of stories on local blogs and outlets. One that I read yesterday, but haven’t been able to find again, quoted a witness inside the theatre who saw a guy several rows ahead of him pull the gun out, which prompted the witness to slip his phone out of his pocket and quietly turn it on, fearing the worst. This witness insists that the guy never dropped the gun, but appeared to be playing with it, and definitely didn’t have to stoop down to pick anything up off the ground after the gun went off as he fled.

In a follow-up report, police say that the suspect claims he got his gun out because he was afraid there might be a mass shooting, and he wanted to be ready: Police: Suspected theater shooter brought gun to movie fearing mass shooting.

Well, good on him! The usual definition of a mass shooting is a single shooting event in which four or more people (not counting the shooter) are shot or killed. By shooting only one person, this guy successfully made sure that it wasn’t a mass shooting, I guess.

There’s a whole lot I could say about this, but they all go down the rabbit hole of the topic no one can be rational about. So, let’s limit it to a couple of questions:

  • First, why are they protecting this idiot’s identity? Seriously, no one is a stronger believer in the Presumption of Innocence in our justice system than I am, but why do they keep withholding his name? He has been booked into jail. That’s a matter of public record. I could understand if we were talking about an underage suspect, because we treat juvenile defendants differently under the legal principle of Diminished Responsibility. This shouldn’t apply here, right? He’s 29 years old. The victim’s name and face have been plastered all over the place, including naming the hospital where she’s being treated. Why is the shooter’s identity being withheld? Maybe he hasn’t been formally arraigned, yet? I don’t know, but it seems weird.
  • Why did throw away the ammo clip? I get that he apparently was intoxicated. Maybe you can attribute all of his stupidity to the alcohol impairment, though I have more than a few quibbles with that. But even in the intoxicated mind, what is the point of throwing away the ammo clip? It’s he gun barrel that is likely to be used as evidence against him, right? We all understand how they match bullets to guns: it isn’t by the clip, it’s the barrel that the bullet was fired through. I’m genuinely curious.

The only silver lining I see to all this is, if he’s found guilty of felony assault, this idiot won’t be allowed to legally own guns any more.

While we’re on the topic of local idiots: Judge Rules Eyman Measure Unconstitutional. Tim Eyman is a local con artist and professional Initiative Sponsor (literally, that is the only way he’s made any income for many, many years), whose main target is taxes. Though ten years ago he took a detour into anti-gay territory and filed a referendum intended to repeal the state’s laws protecting discrimination based on sexual orientation. He literally showed up at press conference announcing the anti-gay referendum dressed in a pink tutu and thought that was a clever stunt. He switched to a Darth Vader costume for his actual filing of the initiative after the tutu evoked much criticism. That particular initiative failed to get enough signatures to even qualify for the ballot.

Hateful annoyance and perpetual iniative-sponsor Tim Eyman filing his anti-gay referendum when he took a break from his eternal assault on the state's general fund in 2006.
Hateful annoyance and perpetual iniative-sponsor Tim Eyman filing his anti-gay referendum when he took a break from his eternal assault on the state’s general fund in 2006.
His schtick of getting voters to pass limitations on taxes and the ability of the legislature to raise them have usually succeeded at least temporarily, though they are often thrown out as unconstitutional. This one is a great example. Washington’s constitution sets up relatively easy initiative and referendum processes (the signature threshold to get them on the ballot is very low, there is only one specific court that is allowed to rule on whether an initiative meets the definitions to go on the ballot before hand, so they can’t be tangled up in a long appeals process before the people get to see them), but there are some limitations. Initiatives must adhere to only one topic, for instance. And referendums to repeal a law have to turn in their signatures within a certain number of days after said law is signed by the governor.

The constitution is also very clear on the process of amending the constitution: all amendments must originate in the legislature and be passed by a two-thirds majority of both houses before being submitted to the public for a simple majority vote. The constitution explicitly forbids constitutional amendments to be made through the initiative process.

This particular measure was essentially an act of extortion: if the legislature does not place a constitutional amendment requiring any future increase in taxes to pass with a two-thirds supermajority, then the current sales tax would be lowered, resulting in a loss of about $8 billion dollars in the next fiscal year. Voters, some of whom are eternally eager to believe that they can get all the state services they require without any taxes to actually pay for them, passed it, of course. But the judge ruled that the initiative is unconstitutional in two distinct ways: 1) it doesn’t adhere to one subject, being about both an amendment to the constitution and the current level of sales tax, and 2) it attempts to start a constitutional amendment through the initiative process, which the constitution clearly forbids.

One of the things that really annoys me about Eyman and his eternal initiatives (he’s already raises $1.2 million to put more on the ballot this year), is that he doesn’t even have to appeal this ruling. The state attorney general is obligated to appeal the ruling, and to defend the initiative (which every legal expert agreed was unconstitutional for the reasons the judge cited) all on the taxpayer’s dime. Meanwhile Eyman keeps rolling in the dough running more of these things up the flagpole.

Weekend Update 1/16/16: Wrong on so many levels

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The elderly woman sporting a dress, pink lipstick and matching earrings (left) has been identified as the local senior center's middle-aged male van driver David Robert
Screenshot from the Guardian article, pics from Latino Public Radio and Facebook. Click to embiggen.
As always, some really interesting (or hilarious or both) news always pops up after I post my Friday Links which I think shouldn’t wait until next week but this time it’s an extra special doozy: Rhode Island city official resigns after forcing a man dress up in DRAG as old woman for a photo op at a senior citizen center. I think Talking Points Memo first broke the story yesterday, but the Guardian has the most comprehensive version. Go, read it, then come back, because this is just too hilarious.

The story I linked mentions the official defending herself on Facebook by re-posting something a friend wrote. Jezebel has the full text of the defense. Here’s the best part:

It is just like Sue to protect the seniors she served. I commend her for thinking of the safety of the frail seniors. It was 26 degrees last Tuesday and slippery by the snow pile (which was a prop as there was no snow)! Knowing Sue, I’m sure she was also thinking of the possibility of putting a “real” senior in harm’s way should someone recognize that person and go to their home to take advantage of them. I commend Sue and the staffer for putting safety first!

Anyone who attends PR events knows they are staged. Political press events are often staged; ribbon cuttings; ordinance /law signing ceremonies; to name a few. In politics campaign ads are staged with the perfect demographic representation in the mix. How is this any different?

First, comparing this to a campaign ad brings in a really big difference: campaign ads are paid for by private money raised by the candidate’s election committee. The salaries of all the city employees involved in getting this event together are paid for by tax payers. That’s a big difference. Yes, press conferences and photo ops are staged, but there’s a difference between people who may hate each other’s guts smiling for the camera because they all support the program or event in question, and people pretending to be someone they aren’t.

The photo op didn’t need a senior citizen for it to work. The kids shoveling snow, even if it was staged snow, got the idea across. I’ve even seen similar press events myself where the official doing the talking said something along the line of, “We haven’t had much snow this week, so we had to gather some up to show you how it’s going to work.”

To me, it’s a combination of all the bad decisions in this:

  • pressuring or asking an employee to dress in drag
  • thinking that a middle-aged man in bad drag is the way actual older women look
  • literally putting a label on the middle-aged man in drag that says “senior home resident” – If it had actually been a resident, they wouldn’t have put a label on her! No one else in the photo op is wearing a label. Why should there be a label on her?
  • claiming this was to protect the real senior home residents from either the cold, or slipping, or harassment?

A bunch of teen-agers shoveling snow in front of a building that actually is a senior citizen home and already has a gigantic sign identifying it as such is all the photo op needed. People would have gotten the idea. This was just a lot of really dumb decisions that added up to no real benefit for anyone.

And maybe it’s because I have friends who are trans and non-binary so I spend a lot of time thinking (and being irritated) about the ways people think of drag and queer and trans and women’s issues, but this whole thing skeeves me out on that level, too. The bus driver hasn’t been identified as gay, but you can see from the pictures the Guardian come up with of him that even if he isn’t, a lot of people probably assume he is. So this turns into “ask the fag to dress up as a woman—he must know how, right?” situation.

This situation is wrong on many, many levels, not the least of which is anyone trying to cast the person who made all these decisions as the victim.

Weekend Update 12/26/2015: Boxing Day links

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Some explanations of Boxing Day.
Some explanations of Boxing Day, how it is celebrated, and so on. (click to embiggen)
It’s December 26, the Feast of St. Stephen, which most people in this country only vaguely know about because of the song:

“Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even;
Brightly shone the moon that night, tho’ the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight, gath’ring winter fuel.”

…which most people think is a Christmas song, but was originally simply a traditional song, and was more likely to be sung at Easter and Lent than Christmas.

Today is also Boxing Day, a confusing holiday for many, including the country of its origin. It used to be a day for wealthy people to give boxes of clothes and such to their servants. Don’t confuse it with the modern concept of a gift, though—the clothes in question where those that had belonged to and been worn by the employers. The servants didn’t necessarily keep the clothes themselves, but rather turned around and sold them. Before cheap mass manufacture of clothing became the norm, clothing was handmade and if you weren’t well off you couldn’t afford new clothes. You purchased hand-me-downs. And the custom of giving cast-off clothing to servants became so entrenched that it was virtually a contractural obligation.

I do like the description of the modern observance I’ve seen of, “You spent Boxing Day at the pub celebrating with your friends because you spent Christmas with the family.” My Boxing Day is going to include driving to another town to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens a second time with a different set of friends. So I guess that counts.

Yesterday I did more-or-less my usual weekly collection of links: Friday Links (Ho! Ho! Ho! edition), and as usual after the post had gone up, I came across a few more interesting stories that either relate to things I posted yesterday, or it doesn’t make much sense to wait until next week to link to them, such as Cards Against Humanity Just Blew Everyone Away With This Open Letter. Wow. Paid time off is something that lots of people in the world never get, even in the alleged wealthiest nation on the planet. It would be nice if more people who have the resources thought about that. It’s nice to see someone at least trying to set an example.

Over the course of several editions of Friday Links I’ve posted a couple of stories about some of the Gay rights organizations that have closed down their operations or re-tooled during the last year. There have been a lot of others. It makes sense, just as the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell five years ago made the mission of organizations that were focused solely on allowing gay and lesbian military personnel obsolete, the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality has left those groups whose only missions was marriage equality redundant. A lot of people have lamented these closures, correctly pointing out that there is still a lot of inequality in the laws, and plenty of legal and cultural battles to fight, yet. While it is true that part of the reason for the closures is that most of their donors figure the fight is won, so why donate, that isn’t all that’s happening: Gay Groups Are Not Shutting Down, They Are Clearing the Way for the New LGBT Agenda.

That headline is a bit misleading on two counts. First, yes, several specific organizations are literally shutting down. I get that what the author means is that most of the people involved are moving on to different groups to focus on the next steps in the fight. The other inaccuracy, IMHO, is that idea of the next steps being a new agenda. Maybe the specific battles seem new and different, but the agenda has been for a long, long time quite simply: full equality regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, et cetera, and nothing less. Marriage equality was a significant step because of the thousands (literally) of legal rights that our society ties to marriage (with no other way to obtain those legal protections), as well as the cultural step of recognizing that queers do love, their love matters, and it is the same love non-queers experience. But it was merely another step toward that goal of full equality. And there is still a way to go, including the simple step of securing the right to marry (and everything it entails) against the attempts to limit that right or take it away outright.

The battle isn’t even really new. As Alvin McEwan has pointed out several times, the lies and the tactics used against us have been the same for decades (at least), they just get tweaked and repackaged as social attitudes shift.

Enough about that! Today is also the third day of Christmas. Though most people think that Christmas is all over, so if I don’t want to wait eleven months to get this two things in, now’s my last chance: The Real Attack on the Spirit of Christmas — 2015. It’s the people who scream mostly loudly about the War on Christmas who are actually trampling all over the religious teachings of the man who they claim is the reason for the season. And: Hank at Vlogbrothers talks about why Christmas (and the Holiday Giving Season) often come under such significant fire (from apparently all sides).

Finally, the band Radiohead has given everyone on interesting seasonal gift: Last year we were asked to write a theme tune for the Bond movie Spectre. Yes we were. It didn’t work out, but became something of our own, which we love very much. As the year closes we thought you might like to hear it. Merry Christmas. May the force be with you. I’ve embedded it below. If that doesn’t work, click the previous link to go to their Bandcamp page and give it a listen.

Happy Boxing Day! May the Force be with us, every one!

Weekend update 12/12/2015: Man(un-)splainin’

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Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant (http://www.courant.com)
Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant (http://www.courant.com)

Yesterday I posted a link to some racist comments Supreme Court Associate Justice Scalia made about student admission policies of colleges. There is much that could be said, but this writer puts it best: Dear Justice Scalia: Here’s what I learned as a black student struggling at an elite college. It always amazes me how blind people can be to the ongoing social, economic, and educational effects that generations of racism has baked into the system. And how blind so many of us who aren’t people of color can be to the many advantages, encouragements, and other boosts we have received at every step of the way. But Miss Betty Bowers put it best:

In other news: A few weeks back I included in the Friday Links an article about the Associated Press’s investigation into cops who lost their badges because of sexual misconduct: AP Investigation Finds Approximately 1,000 Officers Lost Their Licenses During the Last Six Year for Rape, Sodomy and Other Sexual Assaults. It you haven’t read that article or a related one a couple of highlights beyond the headlines: only 41 states were able or willing to answer the AP’s questions about this. A few states don’t have a central repository for tracking which people are authorized to act as police or those who have had that license taken away. A few states that do claimed that there had been no such cases in the last six years, but then the AP turned up news stories in those states reporting specific cops who had been drummed out of the force for rape.

Anyone paying attention to police misconduct cases knows that there’s a tendency for the other cops to cover up or excuse even the most egregious behavior of their comrades, so it shouldn’t surprise us that some states claim they haven’t had this problem when there is clear proof that they had. Still, the most amazing thing happened this week: a jury actually convicted a cop of 18 of the 30-some charges of rape or related crimes filed against him: Sobbing Former Cop Daniel Holtzclaw Appears to Mouth ‘How Could You Do This’ at All-White Jury That Convicted Him of 18 Counts of Rape. Note that his defense is that the 13 women who testified against him are all lying. Never mind the DNA evidence, he’s a cop and we shouldn’t believe these women and girls.

He literally told the 17-year-old before he raped her the first time that no one would believe her because she was black and had a juvenile criminal record!

That’s enough of the bad news: I want to end this on a positive note. And here’s one: Calgary parents update mom’s tattoo to support their transgender son. Go look at the before and after pictures of the tattoo! And read the story. It’s so wonderful when parents are supportive of their trans kids!

Weekend Update 11/29/2015: You’re kidding me, right?

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Pastor Manning's church sign last August after a judge found the church guilty of five zoning citations. Note the church didn't win, they lost, lost, lost, lost, and lost. But Manning has never been known for speaking truth of any kind.
Pastor Manning’s church sign last August after a judge found the church guilty of five zoning citations. Note the church didn’t win, they lost, lost, lost, lost, and lost. But Manning has never been known for speaking truth of any kind. (Click to embiggen)
I’ve written more than once about Pastor David Manning and his frequently homophobic, hateful, lying, and violence-advocating church sign in Harlem. He’s in the news this week for a couple of reasons. There was a Love Not Hate protest outside his church, and he and some of his supporters came out and kept yelling incoherently about faggots. Seriously, it’s like he has a form of Tourette’s Syndrome that forces him to say “faggot” and other anti-gay slurs multiple times in every sentence. He and his church are also in the news because of zoning violations that have now added up to more than $11,000 in fines. And yes, the church sign is part of the issue, but it is only one of five violations.

The pastor’s church building is covered by a Historic Landmark Preservation Ordinance. As such, any renovations, remodels, or alterations have to be approved by the Landmark’s Preservation Commission. The church has never, ever applied for such permission, and in the last several years has erected the sign upon which they keep posting hateful messages, they removed ornamental ironwork from another part of the building, they removed a second floor balcony, they added an exterior door, and they added a marble fence. Not only did they fail to apply to the Landmark Preservation Commission, they didn’t attempt to get ordinary building permits for any of these alterations.

Way back in May of 2013, the Landmark Preservation Commission issues a warning letter about the violations. The church ignored it. Last March, after many attempts for nearly two years to get the church to respond, the city issued a citation. The church ignored that. The church continued to ignored numerous notices until finally last August when the pastor presented his defense to a judge. Said defense consisted of the claim that other churches have broken the same law, but no one cites them because they don’t put homophobic messages on their sign. He’s being persecuted for his beliefs, you see. The judge didn’t care, found them guilty of five violations, ordered the church to pay $1,850 in fines, and ordered them to work with the appropriate agencies to bring the building into compliance.

The church then changed their sign (as pictured above) to read: “We won, we won! Have a nice day you damned homos.” They didn’t win. Not one of their arguments was accepted. The judge ruled against them on every count. I guess that because he didn’t order a wrecking ball to destroy the whole building that very day, they decided that meant they won. I don’t know.

Because they haven’t made any effort to even discuss how the building would be brought into compliance, the city has issued new citations. But since the church wouldn’t pay the $1,850, I don’t think they’re going to cough up the $11,500 any time soon. The pastor claims that the church simply doesn’t have the money for the fines. Now, given how easy it was for a pizza parlor that wasn’t even facing a boycott or fines to get anti-gay people to crowdfun hundreds of thousands of dollars (let alone the money that bakeries, wedding venues, and other businesses run by homophones have been able to raise), I find it very difficult to believe Atlah World Missions couldn’t get donors to kick in for these amounts that are quite small by comparison. I think it’s fair to conclude that they have no intention to pay, and clearly no intention to fix the building.

But they can sure spew the hate, can’t they?

Spewing hatred is what a lot of people who claim to be Christian do: . It should come as no surprise when their followers act on that hatred: Here’s What We Know About The Suspect In The Planned Parenthood Shooting And then they get all defensive when any of us point out that said rhetoric inspires people to violence: Mike Huckabee: The Anti-Abortion Movement Has No Responsibility For “Domestic Terrorism”.

And just to be clear, Planned Parenthood Shooting Wasn’t the First — And It Won’t Be the Last, “Mass shootings at Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health clinics might not be common, but violence and harassment are.”

But that’s not the only acts of terror that so-called Christians have performed in the last few weeks: Armed protesters intimidate mosque in Irving, Texas.

And: Bomb hoax and molotov cocktails thrown at Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia. “It’s enough that it would lead a reasonable person to believe, given the location of where he was, given the time, he was there at three in the morning … what he said … It would lead you to believe that this guy is doing this because we are of this religious denomination or ethnicity or combination of both.”

And also: Five arrested in plot to bomb synagogues and black churches, btw, the headline of that report says three, but this follow-up, Federal, state weapons investigations lead to five local arrests report details the subsequent arrests.

There’s also: SHOTS FIRED AT CONNECTICUT MOSQUE HOURS AFTER PARIS ATTACKS AS MUSLIMS FACE BACKLASH.

And of course: White supremacists shoot five at Black Lives Matter rally in Minneapolis.

We mustn’t forget: Dallas neighborhood on “lock-down” after 12 antigay hate crimes or Homicides of transgender individuals in U.S. reach alarming high.

So, pardon me if I have trouble feeling much sympathy for some members of the religious rightwing who claim that we are using violent tragedies to confirm a “narrative.” No, we’re too busy being victims of all this violence you’re encouraging to be worried about a narrative.

The red cup is already silly old news, but it’s more than a joke

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A bag of Starbucks Christmas blend and the cup from my most recent latte, both purchased Saturday.
A bag of Starbucks Christmas blend and the cup of from my most recent latte, both purchased Saturday.
The accusations about the Starbucks red cup that were recently put forward as further evidence of the so-called War on Christmas are funny and ridiculous. The entire notion of a war on Christmas is ludicrous to the extreme. Just as ludicrous as the claim that Christians are an oppressed minority in a country in which 70% of the population identifies as Christian, with about 90% of elected federal officials (not to mention every local and state level) also Christian.

But I saw an article last week which was trying to make the argument that because the whole thing was caused by a self-proclaimed YouTube Evangelist who is actually a con-man, that it was wrong for any of us to make fun of it or otherwise call it out.

Bull.

A close-up of the supposedly anti-Christmas mug. Look at the band. Snow! And how long had red and green been Christmas colors, anyway?
A close-up of the supposedly anti-Christmas mug. Look at the band. Snow! And how long have red and green been Christmas colors, anyway?
Make no mistake: Joshua Feuerstein, the guy who made the YouTube rant (which got more than 12 million views on YouTube; I haven’t bothered to try to track down how many shares the version he shared to Facebook got) makes money from his rants, such as his laughable attempt to take down evolution (that got 2 million views) and so forth. He’s the same idiot that illegally recorded the phone call where he tried to get a bakery to make a cake and write a hateful anti-gay message on it (you may recall the baker offered to make him a bible cake, one she makes many times, but leave it blank and sell him the tool to write his own message on it; even offered to give him cake decorating lessons). He’s in the business of ginning up outrage and getting people to donate money to him so he can continue to fight the good fight.

The trim on the back of the bag, why, that's foil Christmas wrapping paper much like the kind favored by one of my Great-grandmothers!
The trim on the back of the bag, why, that’s foil Christmas wrapping paper much like the kind favored by one of my Great-grandmothers!
But here’s the thing: con-men like Feuerstein don’t just prey on the idiots who gave him $20,000 to purchase a special web spycam so he could expose the anti-Christian plots of… well, I don’t think he ever said. He also apparently never bought any such camera. They also cause real harm.

At least half of the animus and most of the money raised to pass Proposition 8 in California several years ago repealing marriage equality was raised by con-men like him. Most of the money raised to mount their legal defense of Prop 8 was raised by con-men like him. Most of the money and most of the votes needed to repeal Houston’s anti-discrimination law recently was fired up by con-men like him.

The bag even has the word "Christmas" on it. The actual word. It clearly can't be a salvo in the War on Christmas because it hasn't substituted the word "Holiday" for Christmas, right?
The bag even has the word “Christmas” on it. The actual word. It clearly can’t be a salvo in the War on Christmas because it hasn’t substituted the word “Holiday” for Christmas, right?
The entire campaign in Washington state several years back to try to prevent domestic partnerships was orchestrated by two such con-men. One of them raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the campaign mostly from local donors, and then his financial filings revealed that throughout the campaign he paid directly to himself between $5,000-$20,000 every week in consulting fees for “website maintenance.” That’s in addition to paying himself a salary out of the money as the head of the campaign. The other guy, who is peddling his lies in Washington state only because Oregon’s department of revenue determined many years ago that his so-called ministry not only didn’t meet the legal definition of a church, but didn’t meet the definition of a non-profit charity, and had placed tax-liens on him for collection of back taxes. He raised tons of money, too, with all of his emails about the evil gay agenda. The problem was that the links included in those emails for donations were to his new church (we have more liberal laws for registering such things than Oregon does, and Oregon isn’t actually restrictive on that). But the church isn’t allowed to advocate for or against ballot measures.

He’s also the guy who fought all the way to the Supreme Court to try to keep the public records of who signed the Referendum petitions private, claiming that he received death threats. That prompted even ultra-conservative Justice Scalia to side with the pro-liberty forces in the case and say “participating in democracy requires a bit of civic courage.”

Both of them returned and squandered a bunch of money trying to repeal marriage equality in the state in 2012 when the legislature passed that.

The con-men themselves, whether they are internet douche bags like Feuerstein, or international hate-mongers like “Porno Pete” LaBarbera or Scott Lively or rabid anti-gay creep Brian Brown, may be in it more for the notoriety and the money, but they cause real harm. Lively, for instance, his being sued in U.S. court for crimes against humanity because of his activities resulting in the passage of “kill the gays” bills in Uganda and similar places. All of them contribute to the atmosphere of fear and hate that causes so-call Christian parents to kick their children out on the street for being (or being suspected of being) gay. They contribute to the bullying that drives 1500 children to commit suicide out of fear of being rejected by their rightwing families for being queer, gender-nonconforming, or trans. And yes, they even contribute to the mania that causes governors to try to ban refugees who are actually the victims of the terrorists that governors claim that they can only keep out by banning refugees.

They aren’t merely con-men or grifters. They’re hate-mongers and life-destroyers, too.

See! Starbucks isn't the company that has substituted the generic "Holiday" for Christmas! Though the photo of holly berries is still rather festive...
See! Starbucks isn’t the company that has substituted the generic “Holiday” for Christmas! Though the photo of holly berries is still rather festive…
I must confess that I have several reasons this particular issue annoys me. I’ve written before about love of holiday coffee blends and that it was a silly tradition shared with my late partner, Ray. So I have a bit of an obsession with Christmas-themed coffee, whether it be Starbucks’ Christmas blend, Peet’s Holiday Blend, Tulley’s Holiday Joy Blend, Caffe Ladro’s Fireside Blend, et cetera.

They are all meant to celebrate Christmas, not make war on it! Rich, warm, soothing coffee is about love, not war!

I love my Christmas blends, and every year I collect a bunch. I really do go the entire month making myself Christmas Blend and Holiday Blend and Holiday Joy Blend, and so forth. It’s part of my Christmas celebration. And yes, I’m a queer guy who is a taoist married to a pagan, but every year we put up a big Christmas tree in our living room. We cover our house in Christmas lights. We send Christmas cards. We say “Merry Christmas!” to people. We are not waging a war on Christmas or Christianity.

No, the only people doing that, are the folks like Feuerstein. Con-men who are trying to turn a buck by spewing hate and stirring up fake outrage in the name of Jesus. He warned us that such evil people would come forward and claim to be acting in his name. And he told us on the day of judgment what he would tell them:

“I know you not from where you are; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity.”
—Luke 13:27

I wish we didn’t have to wait…

0000StarbucksRainbowCups

When bad things happen look for the heroes

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This is Adel Termos pictured with one of his children. Mr. Termos sacrificed himself by tackling a suicide bomber in Beirut on Thursday.
This is Adel Termos pictured with one of his children. Mr. Termos sacrificed himself by tackling a suicide bomber in Beirut on Thursday.
Really bad things are happening around the world. And not just the ones that your national media is obsessing over.

One Day Before Paris, There Was a Massive Terrorist Attack the Media Ignored “It’s not just Paris we should pray for, it is the world.”

There Is Only One Way to Defeat ISIS “We must hold accountable our Middle Eastern “allies”—the states and bankers and political elites—who persist in funding mass murder.”

Paris Was Not The Only City to Be Hit With A Terrorist Attack This Week.

This Is the Hero Who Sacrificed His Own Life to Save Hundreds From ISIS Terrorists. “…the attacks in Paris and Beirut are only the latest in a wave of terrorism that has swept the globe in recent months. Only weeks ago, a Russian airliner was downed near Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh resort in what was likely a bomb attack. In July, Egyptian soldiers killed nearly 100 militants in the Sinai during skirmishes there. Meanwhile in the Turkish capital of Ankara, nearly 100 were killed in explosions.”

Trying too hard to proclaim oppression…

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"Slow down!! Let's eat the damn turkey first!"
(MemeGenerator.Net Click to embiggen)
When my husband asked me yesterday if I heard about people being angry about Starbucks holiday cups, my first thought was that people were upset because it’s too soon to be doing Christmas stuff. No. The actual problem, according to one of those anti-whatever groups that like to get the rightwing so-called Christian base up in arms is that the plain red cups with a green Starbucks logo is taking the Christ out of Christmas: Christian evangelists claim Starbucks fanned ‘war on Christmas’ with minimalist holiday red coffee cups

Yep, the annual fake War on Christmas is underway!

I can totally see their point. I mean, past Starbucks holiday cups have featured such unmistakeable symbols of Christ as extremely abstract snowflakes, abstract peppermint candies, a winking snowman, a bobsledding dog, a squirrel begging for an acorn, and who can forget the jazzy Santa Claus? [/sarcasm]

The number of times that these folks have claimed that people are erasing Christ from Christmas by citing a derth of Santa Claus imagery just cracks me up every time. I wrote previously about how when I was a kid growing up in Southern Baptist churches Santa Claus was not considered a symbol of Christian Christmas at all. Oh, we weren’t forbidden from having Santas in our homes or visiting Santas in shopping malls or expecting presents from Santa. But it was very clearly part of the secular celebration, and not to be allowed in the church building itself. Specifically I wrote about the time that the Day Care associated with the church I attended as a teen-ager allowed the children to sing a song about Santa Claus as part of the annual Christmas event at the day care, and how a whole bunch of the church ladies were very upset about it: Up on the house top…

For some context, I should point out that most of the Baptist Churches I attended growing up (we moved around a lot because of my Dad’s job) also didn’t believe in having a manager scene inside the sanctuary of the church, unless it was an actual reenactment of the birth of Jesus being performed as part of the service. They might have a big light-up manger scene out on the lawn next to the church sign, but not inside the chruch, because that was iconography or idolatry!

Many of them only allowed a Christmas tree to be out in the social hall or the lobby, but not in the sanctuary because the tree was considered mostly a secular symbol, as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Anyway, it’s silly. And it’s so silly, that when my husband and I went shopping later in the day yesterday, I had to go to Starbucks for the express purpose of getting something in the red cup.