As if any of us NEEDED another reason to love Jon Stewart… The Daily Show’s amused reaction to the mainstream coverage of the recent ruling that Proposition 8 (which banned gay marriage in California) is unconstitutional… YAY!
This ruling really is a great stride back from the devastating loss that we suffered when Prop 8 passed, but will likely be a stepping stone to the inevitable Supreme Court.
I’ve been a huge fan of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show since he started it up. His blend of comedy, news and viewpoint always restores a wee bit of faith in humanity with each and every viewing.
I like it. Its sweet and totally speaks to the part of me that grew up on Schoolhouse Rock. Music is a very effective tool for communicating a message to the masses. And not only is this video political, adorable and catchy, but it is also true. Why else would the state be in such a hurry to keep Perry vs. Schwarzenegger (the landmark civil rights/marriage equality case against Proposition 8 currently underway) from being forever immortalized on YouTube? They don’t want the world AND history to see California as ignorant. But its too late in the information age to keep that sort of thing from happening.
In Uncanny X-Men #509, Marvel’s not-so merry mutants were informed of a new initiative that Simon Trask and his hateful Humanity NOW! Coalition have put before the Marvel U’s California state legislature. Proposition X is a “Mutant Breeding Act” that would require all humans who are x-gene positive to undergo mandatory birth control procedures (which just sounds to me like a politically correct way to say sterilization) due to the violence possible around a new mutant birth. Keep in mind that this is violence that would NOT occur if not for organizations like the Humanity NOW! Coalition and it’s goose-stepping predecessors.
In regards to Proposition X and how it echoes the recent Proposition 8—an amendment to the California constitution that eliminates same-sex unions, Fraction said, “You know, I’ve officially become one of those writers that writes something and then—a couple of months later—it really happens. I thought only Grant Morrison and Alan Moore wrote things and then they actually occurred.” He added, “This is one of the dilemmas of writing contemporary science fiction; we started planning and writing out these stories close to two years ago. Simon Trask and Prop X had been written into our plans before I had even heard of Prop 8,” he chuckled, “Were I a California resident—that may have been different; it’s just one of those strange synchronicities.”
This issue also saw the return of Marvel’s first gay superhero – Northstar to the x-team! They may have been working on Prop X before hearing about Prop 8, but I doubt it is any coincidence that the writers chose to interrupt Northstar’s welcome to San Francisco interview with the news of Proposition X. Just as the anti-mutant hysteria present since Uncanny X-Men #1 has always been a metaphor for society’s treatment of any who fall outside the narrowly defined “norm,” I am glad to see x-parallels for the unfortunately successful (for now) anti gay marriage Proposition 8.
Election day 2008 was a roller coaster in the Castro. We took the streets to celebrate the election of Barack Obama, but we were brokenhearted when Prop 8 passed. This video is a story from the streets of the Castro about election night, the fallout of Prop 8, and the national movement for LGBT civil rights that’s being ignited through California’s struggle.
I am so glad to see that there are people of faith who do not live in fear of gays and lesbians being able to live and love completely openly and equally. The folks at Mission Gathering posted the reasons they took out the billboard here at the blog Our Hearts Are With You. They believe “God’s love and grace is for ALL people, regardless of race, creed, sexual identity, or life circumstances.” Which sounds a lot more Christian than what I usually hear from a pulpit.
Mission Gathering Christian Church is sorry for the narrow-minded, judgmental, deceptive, manipulative actions of those who took away the rights and equality of so many in the name of God.
The San Diego billboard is sparking discussion from both sides of the fence. Depending on whose blog you are reading you might find it called a “wonderful outreach” or a Church selling out Christ to make a buck.
The church was founded by a group of young adults who say they wanted “to embody God’s grace to the emerging/postmodern culture they were a part of.” It’s affiliated with The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which has approximately 723,000 members throughout North America and is the denomination Ronald Reagan was baptized in. So, despite having a Facebook page and a podcast that includes titles like “Sexuality & Spirituality: Sex, Lies and Craigslist”, the apologetic Christians sit squarely within the mainline Protestant tradition.
San Diego has been arguably the epicenter of the Prop 8. protest movement, with over 25,000 people marching in the streets in last week’s “Day of Impact Protest“– the largest group anywhere.
I myself am a lapsed Catholic (raised churchgoing but gave it up first day away from home at college – it was never anything for me but a place to think – I got the same level of meditation while mowing the lawn), but I do like to hear that there are people who believe yet still have the ability to think for themselves.
Colt Studios puts some muscle into the fight for marriage equality…
Colt Studios has released new online ads featuring their hunks Devlin, Carl Hardwick, Luke Garrett and Gage Weston brandishing signs against California’s Proposition 8 (which banned gay marriage in the state). And, what’s more, the studio’s advocating that sites put up their banners and link them to Join the Impact, the group that organized last week’s nationwide rallies against Prop 8.
The photos below are some of the multitude of protest signs held aloft proudly in front of San Francisco’s City Hall… courtesy of my favorite guy, popapathy.
I love that here in San Francisco when there is a Prop 8 protest at City Hall as part of a National Day of Protest it is with the blessing of the city. Although the crowd was estimated at around 7500 people, I saw none of the racial hate speech or out of control rowdy types or overzealous police that I’ve read about at previous protests in other locations.
It was a beautiful and peaceful event with inspirational chorus of supportive speaking voices of all creeds and racial backgrounds.
Wednesday November 19th, from 7-9pm, at the SF LGBT Community Center (1800 Market – at Octavia) a “Community Forum is being held to address the issue “How can we better build bridges between the LGBT Community and communities of color.”
More than 4,000 people showed up in Manhattan for what gay-rights activists were calling a national day of protest, with other rallies taking place across California and in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Fargo, N.D., and other cities, most put together by person-to-person efforts across the Internet.
In San Diego, a crowd estimated by police at 20,000 and by organizers at 25,000 demonstrated against Prop. 8, while in Los Angeles police said between 10,000 and 12,000 people marched peacefully though the downtown area. Smaller protests were held in cities and towns across the state.
Another high point was comedian Wanda Sykes coming out as a pissed off gay-married lesbian Saturday at a the Las Vegas Protest… and without arranging for the customary “Yep I’m gay” People Magazine cover. She announced they pissed off the wrong group of people and she is damn right.
This appears to be the season of Prop 8 protests so in case you are looking for some nifty signs YOU could hold up high while chanting or taunting some magic underwear clad Mormons out to impose their religious judgment on a neighboring state…
Melissa Etheridge and her partner beam their opinion to the Oprah Winfrey Show. Thanks Oprah! Stand your ground Melissa! – I’d like to see you take that not paying taxes thing to the test – wish I had the ball to do that – but I wouldn’t last 2 minutes in prison, so I’ll probably keep paying despite the lack of equal rights. Now if there were a few million of us telling them to screw themselves and pay for their own shit, I might be bolder…
Posted in Journal on 11/10/2008 07:06 pm by fanboi
I know there is alot of talk about the record numbers of African American California voters who showed up in droves to elect Barack Obama (YAY!) and eliminate my legal right to marry a member of the same sex (BOO!).
I want to say that do not misdirect your anger. I’m hearing news of No on 8 protesters verbally abusing random African Americans with hate speech (yes THAT word). NOT COOL PEOPLE! That is the exact opposite of what needs to be done. By sinking to that level not only do you step right into the image that may have made that person vote Yes on 8 (and likely an image spoon fed them by a pastor or other “person of faith”) but also you never know you could be yelling at an African American, straight but supportive or flaming homosexual NO on 8 voter. SHAME ON ANYONE WHO DOES THAT!!!!!!
We need to reach out to the people who were lied to by the Mormon Church – make them realize the underhanded way they were tricked. There are many people who voted for Prop 8 who wouldn’t have had they truly seen the parallels between African American and LGBT quests for civil rights. We may not be the first group of people to kick around under cloak of faith and feel good about it, but GOD WILLING we will be the last.
But I wish Whoopi had at least one informed person on stage to talk to about Proposition 8. Barbara Walters (who is just to damned old to be on our side – what is she 190?), Sherri Shepherd (googling her name with the word stupid” gives you 125,000 results) and evil Stepford bible thumper Elisabeth Hasselbeck all sound like they have sucked down a lot of Mormon kool-aid. I wonder how differently this would have gone if Joy Behar was present?
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t the wording of the CA Supreme Court’s ruling allowing Gay Marriage specify that they meant legal weddings, not church weddings. If that is the case all this talk of priests being jailed for refusing to perform gay marriages is just so much scare tactics bullshit.
The eyes of the nation and the world are on San Francisco as thousands of demonstrators marched down Market Street in San Francisco on Friday night to protest the passage earlier this week of Proposition 8, which “eliminated” the recently won rights of gays and lesbians to marry.
and here is another petition (scroll waaaay down). I will add any further petitions on the subject so stay tuned.
Then share the petition link with 2 like-minded friends and have them tell 2 friends, and so on. This needs to happen! Are there no laws against “tax-exempt” religions organizations donating money to political causes? Isn’t that a DIRECT breach of the supposed protective barrier between Church and State??? If they want to pray against us and preach against us that is one thing – but once they spend one tax-free dime on any kind of political initiative and they should lose that special status.
A friend and reader sent me a link to this petition asking the IRS to Review the 501(c)(3) status of The Church of Latter-day Saints (The Mormons). I signed immediately. I’ve been calling for this since I found out they not only contributed OVER 10 MILLION TAX FREE DOLLARS to the campaign, but also pressured their own congregations to give til it hurts and even threatened businesses that had donated to No on 8.
Upon reading the following excepts from the IRS’s tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations, I think the Mormon Church may have some trouble holding onto their tax-exempt status. So please sign and tell your friends. I really want this to bite them in the ass big time.
Section 501(c)(3) describes corporations, and any community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literacy, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition (but only if no part of its activities involve the provision of athletic facilities or equipment), or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals, no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual, no substantial part of the activities of which is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation (except as otherwise provided in section (h)), and which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distribution of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.
Substantial Lobbying Activity
In general, no organization, including a church, may qualify for IRC section 501(c)(3) status if a substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence legislation (commonly known as lobbying). An IRC section 501(c)(3) organization may engage in some lobbying, but too much lobbying activity risks loss of tax-exempt status.
I was at the San Francisco candlelight vigil on the steps of city hall and it was inspirational. It was my first vigil and I NOW know that you have to bring a dixie cup. Cops made me put out my candle because it was dripping. Do you think they would have knocked me to the ground and beat me with a club had I refused?
What happened at the LA vigil is just shameful. I hope something good can come of all this brouhaha. A least it should fan the fires and inspire other minorities who led past fights for their civil rights to see the parallels between our struggles. Civil rights are civil rights and a blow to the head is a blow to the head. Some are saying the Marriage Equality struggle calls for nothing less than Stonewall for a new generation.
Here is an insightful article from Time.com about the Success of Proposition 8. So good I felt the need to repost it here in its entirety. But you can still the original article here. It points out the strengths and weaknesses of both campaigns and hopefully we can learn something for next time… Because there will be a next time. Each generation is more and more in support of marriage equality so its really just a matter of time until gays can grow up without feeling stigmatized by a society that feels justified in relegating any minority group to second-class status by “eliminating rights”.
I’d like to thank each and every one of the volunteers who tried to spread the word and I’m so sorry that the damned Mormons and their ilk were able to parlay their tax-free bag of dirty tricks into a tiny majority.
By John Cloud – Thu Nov 6, 2:30 am ET
Nov. 4 may have been a joyous day for liberals, but it wasn’t a great day for lesbians and gays. Three big states – Arizona, California and Florida – voted to change their constitutions to define marriage as a heterosexuals-only institution. The losses cut deep on the gay side. Arizona had rejected just such a constitutional amendment only two years ago. It had been the first and only state to have rebuffed a constitutional ban on marriage equality. In Florida, where the law requires constitutional amendments to win by 60%, a marriage amendment passed with disturbing ease, 62.1% to 37.9%.
And then there was California. Gay strategists working for marriage equality in this election cycle had focused most of their attention on that state. Losing there dims hopes that shimmered brightly just a few weeks ago – hopes that in an Obama America, straight people would be willing to let gay people have the basic right to equality in their personal relationships. It appears not.
The California vote was close but not razor-thin: as of 10 a.m. P.T., with 96.4% of precincts reporting, gays had lost 52.2% to 47.8%. Obama did not suffer the much-discussed “Bradley effect” this year, but it appears that gay people were afflicted by some version of it. As of late October, a Field Poll found that the pro-gay side was winning 49% to 44%, with 7% undecided. But gays could not quite make it to 49% on Election Day, meaning a few people may have been unwilling to tell pollsters that they intended to vote against equal marriage rights.
Gays are used to losing these constitutional amendment battles – as I said, Arizona was the only exception – but gay activists cannot claim they didn’t have the money to wage the California fight. According to an analysis of the most recent reports from the California secretary of state, the pro-equality side raised an astonishing $43.6 million, compared with just $29.8 million for those who succeeded in keeping gays from marrying. The money the gay side raised is surprising for two reasons: first, the cash-Hoover known as the Obama campaign was sucking down millions of dollars a day from the nation’s liberals. Many gays expected it to be difficult to raise money to fight Proposition 8 and its plan to outlaw same-sex marriage from Democrats eager to give to Obama and to the outside 527 groups supporting him. As recently as August, one of the nation’s top gay political givers told me that he expected the gay side to raise no more than $25 million.
But a series of high-profile Hollywood donations, as well as a frantic, nationwide push for gays to get out their checkbooks, turned out to be quite successful in the short term. East Coast gays had been lulled into inaction by the Oct. 10 Connecticut Supreme Court decision granting gay couples the right to marry – a decision that hadn’t required gays to write a single check. But gay people in Los Angeles and San Francisco cajoled and shamed their Eastern friends into opening their wallets. Thousands of California gay couples got married in the past few weeks, and I didn’t see a single invitation to a gay ceremony that didn’t include a plea to donate to the pro-equality campaign in lieu of buying wedding gifts.
Still, even though gays were fighting to preserve a basic right, it was the anti-equality side in California that seemed to have the most fervor. A symbolic low point for the gay side came on Oct. 13, when the Sacramento Bee ran a remarkable story about Rick and Pam Patterson, a Mormon couple of modest means – he drives a 10-year-old Honda Civic, she raises their five boys – who had withdrawn $50,000 from their savings account and given it to the pro-8 campaign. “It was a decision we made very prayerfully,” Pam Patterson, 48, told the Bee’s Jennifer Garza. “Was it an easy decision? No. But it was a clear decision, one that had so much potential to benefit our children and their children.”
You could argue that marriage equality has little to do with children, but Patterson seemed to speak to Californians’ inchoate phobias about gays and kids. On the Friday before the Bee story appeared, a group of San Francisco first-graders was taken to city hall to see their lesbian teacher marry her partner. Apparently the field trip was a parent’s idea – not the teacher’s – but the optics of the event were terrible for the gay side. It seemed like so much indoctrination.
That news came around the same time the pro-amendment forces were running a devastating ad showing a self-satisfied San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom shouting wild-eyed at a rally that same-sex marriage was inevitable “whether you like it or not.” The announcer then said darkly, “It’s no longer about tolerance. Acceptance of gay marriage is now mandatory.” Many fence sitters were turned off by Newsom’s arrogance; blogger Andrew Sullivan attributed mid-October polls against the gay side to the “Newsom effect.”
Gays came back in some polls, but they couldn’t pull out a win. Part of the reason is that Obama inspired unprecedented numbers of African Americans to vote. Polls show that black voters are more likely to attend church than whites and less likely to be comfortable with equality for gay people. According to CNN, African Americans voted against marriage equality by a wide margin, 69% to 31%. High turnout of African Americans in Florida probably help explain that state’s lopsided vote to ban same-sex weddings.
Gays did win some victories yesterday. A new openly gay member of Congress, Jared Polis of Colorado, will go to the House in January. And thanks in part to the Cabinet, the group of [a {e}]lite gay political donors I wrote about recently, Democrats took the New York senate. The entire New York legislature is now in Democratic hands, and New York’s governor, David Paterson, is one of the nation’s most eloquent pro-marriage-equality representatives. He is also, by the way, African American. Perhaps he can help bridge the gap between gays and blacks that widened on Nov. 4.
We shall overcome. Yes We can and all that. This isn’t over.
Despite the sweeping Obama victory, the close, apparent (fingers crossed on that 4% but not holding my breath) passing of Proposition 8 severely bummed me out. I just don’t understand how someone can vote in the country’s very first African American president while in the same breath choosing to eliminate rights from a minority group. Also it REALLY chaps my ass that the Fucking Utah Mormons can poke their noses into California politics by pouring millions of their tax-free dollars into the Yes on 8 campaign. I want to see any politically outspoken Church lose it’s tax exempt status. If they want to share the hateful christian “faithful political perspective” in their sermons and homilies, fine. But the second they spend one tax exempt dime on a media campaign meant to influence politics and government that is crossing the line between Church and State.
Well that was my rant. My sweet Popapathy sent me the best letter to help put things in perspective… here it is.
Even though it’s a set back, there are mitigating circumstances that will hopefully minimize this insult to nothing more than a tiresome, expensive court showdown, a historical anachronism. because this will be appealed somehow. Don’t let it get you down. Remember:
it’s at best a sad last gasp of an entirely repudiated party and ideology.
the larger battle was won, with Obama in, the legal jeopardy is minimized because domestic partnerships (which everyone in the whole world supports apparently) protect us on so many fronts.
as an amendment, it really doesn’t change anything, we’ll still get to visit each other in the hospital.
the kids growing up now, will never support this and will change it, federally maybe.
in the perspective of recent history, it was just the late seventies that we were de-listed as a mental disorder, the nineties, when sodomy lost its sex offender felony status, and barely 2000 for the passing of widespread domestic partnership provisions.
So we’ve come far in a short amount of time, let them have some time to adjust and have this desperate act, all the better to shame them in history’s unstinting glare because eventually it will be trivial.
Proposition 8 on the November California ballot would eliminate the right for same-sex couples to marry. It’s not too late to fight back and defeat Prop. 8. Please visit www.NoOnProp8.com
On Sunday October 4th, Father Geoffrey Farrow, who has been an ordained Catholic Priest for 23 years delivered a sermon against Proposition 8 to his shocked Fresno parish. Watch a video interview with Father Farrow. (I’ll embed it as soon as I can find embed codes)
What most Catholics hear about being gay or lesbian at their parish is silence.
In directing the faithful to vote yes on proposition 8, the California Bishops are not only entering the political arena, they are ignoring the advances and insights of neurology, psychology and the very statements by the church itself that homosexual is innate.
I know that these words of truth will cost me dearly. But to withhold them would be far more costly and I would become an accomplice to a moral evil that strips gay and lesbian couples, not only of their civil rights but of their human dignity as well.
Father Geoffrey Farrow
Sunday October 4th, 2008
When asked by ABC reporter Sontaya Roseif he was gay, Father Farrow replied “It’s a secondary issue. But yes, I am. And when I was a boy I asked God please make me normal and the prayer never got answered and I realized why. Because God would’ve made somebody else he wouldn’t have made me.”
It is sad, but it is likely that will be this brave man’s last sermon. Although he did get a standing ovation from approximately half the congregation, that still leaves the other half. People of faith could use more leaders like him.
Do you think they would have knocked me to the ground and beat me with a club had I refused? 
