Fred Phelps, the Prophet Who Turned Into a Clown

By David Weigel

Fred Phelps, the longtime leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, is dead. He’d been ailing for days, giving his critics—a group that includes most of humanity—plenty of time to write obits and judge whether he was a tragic figure or an accidental gay rights hero.

We can agree on this: He was hilariously stupid, and stupid people provide good copy. For a generation, ever since his flamboyant “God Hates Fags” signs went viral (before there was even a modern Internet for things to go viral on), journalists would explore Phelps’ sad little world and bait him. Michael Moore, after Roger and Me but before the Oscar, set the standard for Phelps-trolling by hiring a “sodom-mobile” to trail him around.

The video now looks quaint. Moore reported it in the years before Lawrence v. Texas, when states still could enforce sodomy laws, and the sodom-mobile went on a road trip to find victims. Decorated with signs like “US out of My Anus” and “Sodomy on Board,” the bus eventually made it to Topeka, where Phelps himself was finishing an interview about Matthew Shepard’s murder and his decision to protest the funeral.

“Every fag group in the country was using that boy,” said Phelps. “He’s in hell now.”

 

Phelps never figured out what to do with the media. They’d dutifully write up his press releases and talk to the politicians who (successfully) passed a ban on protests of military funerals. But when they encounterd the church itself, its arguments were so arcane and bigoted that its members inevitably came off as buffoons. Louie Theroux figured this out when he visited the compound for a BBC special.*

 

Phelps retreated from the spotlight, but the next generation of his family changed up the media strategy. They realized how brittle they looked and how easily people could score points on them. So they made fun of themselves, with parody songs like “God Hates the World,” rewriting pop culture as a twisted endorsement of the church’s theory that God would wreak judgment on those who tolerated sodomy.

 

This generation of Phelpses and fellow travelers is divided, and a few media outlets were fooled last week when a faction that’s turned against them (but captured an official-looking Twitter account) claimed that the church would protest Fred Phelps’ own funeral. Still, the church will endure, growing more desparate for media attention, in a country that long ago stopped seeing them as threatening as started recognizing them as clowns.

Susanne Atanus, Who Blames Gay Rights For Tornadoes, Wins GOP Nomination For Congress

The Huffington Post  | by  Samantha Lachman

Posted: 03/19/2014 1:52 pm EDT Updated: 03/20/2014 11:59 am EDT

A Republican candidate who believes that God dictates weather patterns and that tornadoes, autism and dementia are God’s punishments for marriage equality and abortion access won the GOP nomination to challenge Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) in the Chicago-area 9th Congressional District.

Susanne Atanus, of Niles, Ill., garnered 54 percent of the vote in her Tuesday win over David Earl Williams III.

“I am not in favor of abortions, I am not in favor of gay rights,” Atanus told the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper, in January.

She blamed natural disasters and mental disorders on recent advances in LGBT equality and legal abortions.

“God is angry. We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions,” she said. “Same-sex activity is going to increase AIDS. If it’s in our military, it will weaken our military. We need to respect God.”

Atanus also reached out to the Windy City Times, an LGBT publication, in an attempt to explain her views.

“Everybody knows that God controls weather,” she told the news site in January. “God is super angry,” she added. “Gay marriage is not appropriate, and it doesn’t look right, and it breeds AIDS.”

Jack Dorgan, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, and Adam Robinson, chairman of the Chicago Republican Party, both condemned Atanus’ comments and distanced the party from her candidacy.

Trying to Protect My Family

Dear Prudie,

Several years ago I dated a woman named “Rhonda” for three months. I broke up with her after her sister “Amy” revealed to me that Rhonda was born “Ron” and showed me ample evidence. When I confronted Rhonda about her being a transsexual woman, she broke down and confessed that she was going to tell me, but only after we had been intimate! (Luckily we hadn’t been yet.) It wasn’t her transsexuality that ended the relationship, but her deception; I am not a transphobic person. Rhonda took the breakup badly and stopped speaking to Amy, and on top of that their parents took Rhonda’s side and accused Amy of trying to ruin Rhonda’s life out of jealousy. Later, Amy and I began dating and eventually married. Her parents refused to attend the wedding as a show of solidarity with Rhonda, despite Amy’s attempts to reconcile with all of them. Now we are expecting our first child and Amy’s parents have expressed tentative interest in being a part of their grandchild’s life. I, however, want these people to have nothing to do with my child or my wife. They are a toxic influence and their enabling of Rhonda’s deceptive behavior is appalling to me. My wife disagrees. How can I help her cut ties with these horrid people?

 

Dear Trying,
So much for sisterly solidarity. Yes this is a tale of bad judgment, but if Rhonda erred by omission, Amy’s sin was one of commission. She collected a dossier on Rhonda and presented it to you, meddling in her adult sister’s private life. You are stuck on the fact that you feel misled by Rhonda, so let’s examine that. There are no hard and fast rules about what one is obligated to tell a potential sexual partner, beyond the necessity of alerting them to one’s communicable disease status. You were slowly getting to know Rhonda, and I think two people looking for a serious, intimate relationship are obligated to divulge facts about themselves in a timely way that a reasonable person would feel deceived not knowing. For example, revealing that one had been married previously, or has children, or can’t have biological children, or has a significant medical condition. I think being transgender falls in this obligation-to-disclose category. I know that what to tell and when is an issue of debate in the LGBT community, so for perspective I spoke to Jennifer Finney Boylan, author ofStuck in the Middle with You, a memoir of her transition from being a father to a mother. She agrees that where intimate relationships are concerned honesty in general is best, but when to reveal that one is transgender is a choice made by that individual. A generation ago, she says, transgender people were told by their doctors to erase their pasts and live a stealth life, which caused a lot of anguish and meant people traded one secret for another. Today, she says, some trans people who have had reassignment surgery assert they simply had a birth defect that was corrected, and therefore their past is nobody’s business. Boylan does point out, however, that in the age of the Internet trying to keep the fact of a gender change hidden can become a terrible, and hopeless, burden.

But above all, Boylan noted the violation committed when Amy decided to out Rhonda, a revelation that was not hers to make. I hope you can understand how Amy’s act cleaved her family and shattered her relationship with her sister. Now that you and Amy are about to have your in-laws’ first grandchild, you’re asking for my help to undermine any chance this family might find some way forward. It’s you, however, who has to examine whether the presence of Rhonda makes you so uncomfortable that you would prefer to demonize your in-laws and sever them from your child’s life. It is you who has become the toxic influence. And as Boylan points out, now that you and Amy are about to become parents, think about how you would react if your own child turned out to be transgender, which might help you better understand all your in-laws.

NY Times article states “Homosexual” is perjorative

The trouble with writing about how a minority community “feels” about a given term or phrase is that, invariably, some members of that community will not, in fact, feel that way. Such was my experience with “The Decline and Fall of the ‘H’ Word,” a New York Times weekend Fashion & Style piece that revealed that gay and lesbian people now find the word homosexual to be “pejorative.” In the article, the noted gay historian George Chauncey went so far as to tell reporter Jeremy W. Peters that the term was analogous to “colored,” a clearly offensive word that only unreconstructed grandmothers still use with reference to African-Americans. With all-due-respect to Mr. Chauncey, I must confess dissent: My own gay feelings about the word are pretty much in line with the Times’ you-think-this-but-you’re-wrong definition—“A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but innocuous enough.” And, as a member of The Community in Question, I’m willing to grant you—a well-intentioned, LGBTQ-friendly reader—permission to use homosexual when the occasion calls for it.

A few reasons: For starters, let’s not get in the habit of letting the overseers at GLAAD, on whose authority this article hinges, rescind access to words that really are innocuous. I am very happy for those folks to police truly offensive, defamatory speech, but homosexual—which, as a noun in common usage, means a person who is attracted to their same sex (like me!)—just doesn’t reach that level. We can agree that the word has a certain old-fashioned coolness to it, but so what? Lesbian is drawn from ancient Greek and used to essentially mean “lady sodomite” (not nice), and, in any case, some contexts are better served by a bit of remove from the familiarity of “gay dude.”

It’s true, as the Times piece points out, that homo-haters like Rush Limbaugh and Antonin Scalia deploy homosexual as an othering device, pronouncing it in the same sort of latex disdain that I wear when dealing with words like objectivism or Rush Limbaugh. But, come on: In those kinds of mouths, gay is going to come out the same way—and do we really want to let them determine what we can do with ours?

I say no, but that’s a matter of strategy that we can debate. To bring more weight to the subject, Peters quoted U.C. Berkley’s George P. Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics, who observed that gay and lesbian do not “use the word sex,” while homo-sex-ual does. Additionally, the latter contains “homo,” which, while being a prefix that means “the same,” is also sometimes used derogatorily. For Lakoff, the whole word is a dog-whistle for homophobes (can we still say that?) who want to make same-sex sex seem icky.

But isn’t this a matter of perspective? One of my main struggles as a homosexual has been challenging the tendency of many straight people to treat my partner and me as “roommates” or “good friends,” when, in fact, we have sex. Gay sex. Regularly. Ifhomosexual can help remind them of that important, definitional, politically crucial fact with less effort on my part, I say it’s a plus, not a minus.

While the Times article notes that “scholars expect the use of the term to eventually fall away entirely,” it doesn’t really consider the problems that loss could cause. It’s worth noting that gay has contested meanings as well, and by my definition of that word—which, very generally, has far more to do with a historically and geographically specific constellation of aesthetic tastes, artistic styles and modes of relating than with genitals—there are far fewer gay people around these days than there are homosexuals. But again, that’s my definition, and I’m not terribly interested in enforcing it on anyone. This point is that just as homosexual doesn’t suit everybody, gay, at least by some measures, isn’t all-fitting either. Given that fact, it’s probably best to avoid declarations on the subject altogether and to let people name themselves—that was, after all, the point of liberation in the first place.

When Pro-Marriage Becomes Anti-Gay

A long-term same-sex couple in Oregon, on May 9, 2007. Does this picture violate your religious beliefs?

Photo by Craig Mitchelldyer/Getty Images

For the last week, several writers with diverse views on gay marriage—Ross Douthat,Mark Stern, Conor Friedersdorf, Henry Farrell, Rod Dreher, Damon Linker, and others—have been debating the case of Elaine and Jon Huguenin, the New Mexico photographers who were found guilty of discrimination for refusing to take pictures of a same-sex commitment ceremony. On Friday I joined the debate on Friedersdorf’s side, arguing that the email exchange in which Elaine Huguenin declined to photograph the ceremony showed no ill will.

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Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right. Follow him on Twitter.

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Huguenin said she had no problem photographing gay clients; she just couldn’t participate in a same-sex marital ceremony, since marriage, in her view, could only be between a man and a woman. I disagree with that view. But because her policy was not anti-gay beyond the context of marriage, I concluded that it was not inherently bigoted.

But I didn’t feel comfortable with the limited information we had about the Huguenins. To me, the most important thing in a case like this one is to grapple with the real-life complexity of the story. So I asked the lawyers in the case for a transcript of the 2008 hearing in which the Huguenins explained themselves to the New Mexico Human Rights Commission.

Last night I read the transcript. It taught me something interesting: The Huguenins might not be entirely on the same page.

Both spouses say their opposition to same-sex marriage is based on the Bible. Jon quotes Matthew 19:4 and Genesis 2:24, which say a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. Those verses are specific to marriage. Jon doesn’t quote Leviticus 20:13, which says it’s an abomination for a man to have sex with another man. But if his objection to gay marriage is based on this kind of Bible-reading, it’s highly plausible that it extends to homosexual behavior in general.

Elaine doesn’t quote Scripture. She just cites the Bible as her basis for believing “that marriage is between one man and one woman.” And she distinguishes between gay relationships and gay marriage. At one point, her attorney, Jordan Lorence, reads from the 2006 email exchange in which she declined a request from the plaintiff, Vanessa Willock, to photograph Willock’s lesbian commitment ceremony. Lorence notes that Willock asked Elaine Huguenin, “Are you saying that your company does not offer your photography services to same-sex couples?” In her email reply, Huguenin rephrased the question: “Yes, you are correct in saying we do not photograph same-sex weddings.”

In the hearing, Lorence asks Huguenin, “Why did you put it that way?” She responds:

I just felt like I needed to rephrase it, because the original was to “same-sex couples.” But, you know, if somebody has a same-sex preference, like a same-sex sexual orientation, then, you know—again, I don’t have a problem, you know, shooting portraits, whatever. But it’s just the … the weddings, the messaging-the-wedding-has part of it, I declined.

Willock’s attorney, Julia Sakura, cross-examines Huguenin:

Q: So, in this email, you declined your services to Ms. Willock. Is that correct?

A: Yes, correct.

Q: And you did so because it was a same-sex relationship, is that correct?

A: No. For a same-sex wedding.

Maybe Elaine Huguenin would refuse to photograph a gay couple in a nonmarital context. But at no point in the hearing does she say that. Again and again, she confines her objections to marriage.

That’s not true of Jon Huguenin. Under Sakura’s cross-examination, he goes further:

Q: You just testified that … [y]ou would take a picture of two women from a different country if they were very heterosexual-looking. Is that correct?

A: Not [heterosexual]-looking. I said we wouldn’t take a picture, regardless of their sexual preference, if the image implied that, you know, if they were holding hands or showing affection and implying that something other than one woman and one man in marriage is okay. …

Q: I believe your example was two women from a different country, if they were heterosexual—you used that term—and they were holding hands, you would take that picture.

A: We would not take that picture.

Q: You would not? Why is that?

A: Because the message of the picture communicates—regardless of the sexual orientation of the people in the photo—the message of that communicates something other than what we believe marriage should be. …

Q: What you’re saying is, even outside the context of a traditional wedding, if it were merely two women holding hands, and it did not convey a message that you believed, then you would not take that picture? Is that correct? … What you’re saying is, just two women holding hands, you would not take that picture, because it may convey a message that you do not believe in, even if that picture was just two women holding hands?

A: I can’t answer you absolutely … but if that picture was taken, and the message could be construed or conveyed—or we felt it was being conveyed—as support for anything other than one woman and one man in marriage, then we would not take that photo.

Throughout this exchange, Sakura is pretty clear that she’s not talking about a wedding photo. She’s talking about two women holding hands outside that context. And Jon Huguenin’s answer is that he wouldn’t take the picture “if they were holding hands or showing affection and implying that something other than one woman and one man in marriage is okay.” He wouldn’t take any picture if “the message could be construed or conveyed” as supporting gay marriage.

If I understand him correctly, Jon Huguenin is saying that any overt display of homosexual affection could be construed as endorsing same-sex marriage, and therefore he reserves the right to refuse to photograph any such display.

From my reading of the transcript, I wouldn’t call the Huguenins bigoted or hateful. But they’re certainly ignorant—they refer to homosexuality as a preference, lifestyle, and choice—and their ignorance seems to explain their misguided belief that gay marriage is some kind of cultural illness that can be managed by sending the right “messages.”

The more acute problem, legally, is that Jon Huguenin’s claims go well beyond Elaine’s. In the name of avoiding anything that could be perceived as promoting same-sex marriage, he seems to be asserting a right not to take any picture of a gay couple being gay. Imagine a photographer telling you that he’ll do your portrait but won’t take a picture of you doing anything heterosexual: no kissing, hugging, holding hands, or even meaningful glances. That’s more than a doctrine of marriage. It’s a denial of who you are.

Elaine Huguenin’s position, noxious as it is to many people, can be accommodated in a decent society. I’m not so sure the same is true of her husband’s. Refusing to photograph someone with the person she loves—indeed, with anyone she might love, given her orientation—is oppressively broad. It’s suffocating. It rejects too much of her, too much of what she can’t change. If the Huguenins recognized homosexuality for what it is—an orientation, not a choice—they’d understand that.

US Evangelical Forces at work in Uganda – and Pro LGBT protestors

By Robin Abcarian

March 14, 2014, 8:08 p.m.

Eventually, the idea that it’s OK to be against gay marriage because of your religious beliefs is going to seem as silly as opposing interracial marriage because you weren’t raised that way.

Eventually gay marriage will be as normal as interracial marriage, which, don’t forget, was  illegal in many states until 1967.

Even conservatives, despite the pronouncements of party elders, are coming around.

Last week at the CPAC conference, the generational divide was on vivid display. Ben Carson, 62, a surgeon who is popular with the tea party, told his audience: “Of course gay people should have the same rights as everybody else. But they don’t get extra rights, they don’t get to redefine marriage.”

And Sarah Palin, 50, delivered a robust defense of “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robinson, 67, who was briefly suspended by A&E in December after spouting to a magazine reporter about the evils of homosexuality. (“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman … and those men.”)

It’s pretty clear that the young conservatives coming up after Carson and Palin do not exercise themselves too much over gay marriage and gay civil rights. In some circles, gay marriage is even being described as an intra-party “wedge issue” for Republicans.

But some Christian evangelicals, having basically lost the fight at home, have exported intolerance overseas.

On Friday, the editor Tina Brown, who has reinvented herself as a conference impresario, hosted a luncheon for about 200 women in Beverly Hills featuring conversations with a number of international women activists as part of her “Women in the World” series.

Speakers included Clare Byarubaga, a gay Ugandan activist, who discussed the draconian anti-gay measure signed into law last month by Uganda President Yoweri Museveni. When the law was first proposed, it was dubbed “Kill the Gays,” as it called for the death penalty. The new law calls for up to 14 years in prison for homosexuality.

Byarubaga was joined by American filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, whose 2013 “God Loves Uganda” correlated the explosion of homophobia in Uganda to the missionary work of American evangelical megachurches. After Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was overthrown in 1979, American missionaries poured into the country, building schools, orphanages and hospitals. And of course, spreading their interpretation of the gospel. This Guardian story explores the phenomenon.

Williams singled out American pastor Scott Lively, who has called himself the “father” of Uganda’s anti-gay movement. Lively is president of the Massachusetts-based Abiding Truth Ministries, which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2009, he spearheaded an infamous conference in Uganda that helped inspire the country’s current homophobic fervor.

(At least three American evangelicals, including a representative of the now-defunct Exodus International were there. This New York Times story elucidates their role in helping poison the atmosphere against gays, despite their denials.)

Just as in the U.S., where gay rights have been used so often as a wedge issue between the parties, there is a convenient political component at play in a place like Uganda.

“This is a dictator using the gay community as a scapegoat,” Williams said. “Museveni is up for reelection in 2016, so this is kind of a smart political move on his part to distract the public from the real issue, which is corruption and survival, and focus it on a vulnerable population. Everyone in Uganda is frustrated, so they can take out their frustration on the LGBT community.”

In January, a federal judge in Massachusetts allowed a lawsuit filed against Lively by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of a Ugandan gay rights group to proceed. The suit contends that Lively, who has also written a book claiming the Nazi movement was inspired by homosexuals, has aided and abetted crimes against humanity by encouraging the persecution of Uganda’s gay minority.

“That’s about as ridiculous as it gets,” Lively told the New York Times in 2011. “I’ve never done anything in Uganda except preach the Gospel and speak my opinion about the homosexual issue.”

http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-when-american-christian-evangelicals-export-hate-not-love-20140314,0,3968884.story#ixzz2w13ByGW3

Disney’s Animated film “Frozen” Draws conservative fire

By Oliver GettellMarch 12, 2014, 4:43 p.m.

“Frozen,” the hit Disney animated musical about a girl who tries to save her kingdom and her ice-powered sister, has become the latest Hollywood movie to rile conservative commentators, with one pastor criticizing the film for indoctrinating homosexuality and bestiality in children.

On the talk show Generations Radio, Kevin Swanson and his co-host, Steve Vaughn, took Disney to task for “leading the charge” in promoting a “pro-homosexual” agenda in “Frozen.”

Swanson and Vaughn referred to posts by Steven D. Greydanus for the National Catholic Register and Gina Luttrell for the liberal PolicyMic — the former of which critiques “Frozen’s” alleged gay message (the commentators agree with this one) and the latter of which celebrates the movie’s progressiveness (the commentators use as further evidence of the film’s messaging). Neither Swanson nor Vaughn has seen the movie.

PHOTOS: Movie scenes from Disney’s ‘Frozen’

As the posts note and Swanson and Vaughn reiterated, the character of Elsa is born different from other people — in this case with cryokinetic powers — but ultimately accepts who she is. Further, Elsa doesn’t have any male suitors (as her sister does), and elsewhere in the film there is a very brief moment, involving a male character saying “Hi, family” to a male adult and several children, that some viewers have interpreted as a reference to a pair of gay parents.

“I’m not a tinfoil hat conspiratorialist,” Swanson said on the show, “but you wonder sometimes if maybe there’s something very evil happening here. If I was the devil, what would I do to really foul up an entire social system and do something really, really, really evil to 5- and 6- and 7-year-olds in Christian families around America? … “I would buy Disney. If I was the devil, I would buy Disney in 1984, that’s what I would have done.”

The co-hosts also suggested that the film promotes bestiality, since the character Kristoff has an “unnatural” relationship with his pet reindeer.

Last week, in an interview with Big Issue, “Frozen” directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee were asked about the film’s purported gay undertones (no mention of bestiality), but they left it open to interpretation.

“We know what we made,” Lee said. “But at the same time I feel like once we hand the film over, it belongs to the world, so I don’t like to say anything, and let the fans talk. I think it’s up to them.”

PHOTOS: Box office top 10 of 2013 | Biggest flops of 2013

She added: “Disney films were made in different eras, different times, and we celebrate them all for different reasons, but this one was made in 2013 and it’s going to have a 2013 point of view.”

The “Frozen” controversy is the latest incident demonstrating the fraught relationship between Hollywood and conservative Christian audiences. In recent weeks, some in the faith-based community have expressed skepticism about the upcoming Paramount movie “Noah,” based on the biblical story of Noah’s ark.

In February, producers of the movie “Son of God,” based on the History Channel miniseries “The Bible,” acknowledged that they edited out scenes with the devil to avoid a controversy about the actor who plays Satan resembling President Obama.

And in January, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences drew criticism after disqualifying the Oscar-nominated song “Alone Yet Not Alone,” from the little-seen faith-based film of the same name, over violating rules about campaigning. The winner? “Let It Go,” from “Frozen.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-christian-radio-frozen-gay-agenda-20140312,0,5118956.story#ixzz2voECvuUg

Anti LGBT Rhetoric

Editor’s note: John D. Sutter is a columnist for CNN Opinion and head of CNN’s Change the List project. Follow him on Twitter,Facebook or Google+. E-mail him at ctl@cnn.com.

(CNN) — One backward notion that has been used to differentiate the 1960s Civil Rights movement from today’s struggle for LGBT equality in the United States is the idea that gay people are somehow “invisible” and can hide who they are.

This, in theory, makes them immune to discrimination.

“How do you know who to discriminate against …?” Iowa Rep. Steve King asked in an interview that was rebroadcast this week by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert.

I wish that, too, was satire, but King went on in the March 3 interview with a TV station in Des Moines to explain that characteristics that aren’t “specifically protected in the Constitution” must be “immutable,” meaning “a characteristic that can be independently verified and can’t be willfully changed.”

The insinuation there is that a person’s gayness must be verified for that person to be protected from discrimination. (Keep in mind that a person’s religious freedom is protected by the U.S. Constitution, and religious beliefs are not always permanent and identifiable visually). Or that, because LGBT people can’t be readily branded as gay, they don’t deserve special protections under the law.

Logical conclusion: Gay-labeling laws!

John D. Sutter

Colbert, bless him, went on to instruct his viewers to mail photos of themselves proving their gayness to King’s office address, which is 2210 Rayburn Office Building, Washington, DC 20515. (Don’t send anything pornographic, but I think that stunt is pretty hilarious).

All of this comes up in reference to the so-called “gay Jim Crow” bills that are popping in up in several states, most recently in Mississippi. These bills vary, but the undercurrent is that some religious groups want protection so that they could, in some instances, deny services to LGBT people based on their religious beliefs.

That’s outrageous, obviously, as even Arizona’s hyperconservative governor, Jan Brewer, realized when she vetoed one such bill in her state late last month.

Mississippi’s bill already has been toned down some, but activists say the current version is still discriminatory.

I’m not that interested in the politics of these laws. What’s more important are the sentiments — fear and ignorance, it seems to me — that drive this legislation.

These sentiments may seem isolated, but they’re not.

The reality is that gay people, especially in sometimes-hostile states like Mississippi, which I visited last year to report on LGBT rights, spend a lot of their time trying to cover up who they are because they fear discrimination. And they fear discrimination not because they’re litigious but because they see discrimination all around them, all the time, even in 2014 America.

It shows up in comments like those from King, in comments from friends and family, and, most crucially, in America’s broken legal protections for LGBT people.

How could a person expect to live free of discrimination in a country where a majority of states don’t protect gay people from being fired or evicted because of who they are? Those issues aren’t the subject of soundbites this week, but they’re equally important.

America is quick, and right, to judge the actions of countries such as Uganda and Russia, with deplorable records of persecuting LGBT people. Uganda last month passed a law intensifying criminal penalties for homosexual acts. But our judgment, as long as we continue to support discriminatory policies back home, stinks of hypocrisy.

That King would argue in 2014 that being gay is a “self-professed behavior,” and therefore one not worthy of explicit protection, is deeply troubling, but I’m comforted to know antiquated views such as that are moving toward the fringe of the discourse.

That’s true even in Mississippi, where one of these “religious freedom” bills is currently being debated and where activists have been staging demonstrations.

Gay people — verified or not — have increasingly stepped out into the public spotlight in Mississippi to tell their stories. That’s what I found when I visited the state last year.

I met a prison guard who sued his employer after he was fired, he said, because he’s gay. He won. I met lesbian couples in Hattiesburgwho marched into a courthouse and demanded marriage licenses even though they would be denied under the law. And I met brave openly gay people who live proudly in the most remote of places.

By sharing their stories, I’m optimistic they’ll eventually get through to people like King who, for now at least, seems to need some proof of their existence

Gay Bashing attack on Straight marine being investigated as Hate Crime

The attack on the straight Marine who was gay-bashed in Omaha after standing up for a friend in drag will be investigated as a hate crime.

Omaha Police said Thursday officers are investigating this incident as a hate crime. Gay rights activists in Omaha want people to know there’s nothing scary about a man in a dress. They will be hosting a rally Saturday to take a stand against hate crimes and homophobia. The rally was organized in response to an assault that happened early Sunday in the Old Market. Ryan Langenegger of Omaha, a 22-year-old straight man and Marine, said he was punched in the face after he peacefully defended his two gay friends.

The gay community considers Langenegger’s actions heroic, and is hosting a “Drag Out Hate!” rally in his honor on Saturday. “I wanted to show in broad daylight that there is nothing to fear about gay people and there is nothing disgusting about drag,” said Chad Bugge, one of the organizers of the rally. “Drag is fun and it has been the source of entertainment for the gay community for years.” Mayor Jean Stothert said in a statement that she’s been assured the Omaha Police Department is treating the incident with the seriousness it deserves.

LGBT rights around the world

Gay rights across the globe: the best and worst countries for equality

Emine Saner – The Guardian
July 31st, 2013

We have a US president who supports gay marriage, and now a pope who, if not exactly signing up to equality for all, is at least starting to talk in language less inflammatory than his predecessor. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?” he told an assembled group of journalists on the papal plane back from his tour of Brazil. Then he went on to criticize the gay “lobby” and said he wasn’t going to break with the catechism that said “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered”. Still, for a brief moment it looked like a minor breakthrough.

Then you weigh it against a raft of anti-homosexuality legislation that is coming into force in countries across the world. In Russia, gay teenagers are being tortured and forcibly outed on the Internet against a backdrop of laws that look completely out of step with the rest of Europe. In what is being described as rolling the “status of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people back to the Stalin era”, President Putin has passed a number of anti-gay laws, including legislation that punishes people and groups that distribute information considered “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”. The country also now has powers to arrest and detain foreign citizens believe to be gay, or “pro-gay”. It has led to the boycott of Russian vodka brands by gay bars and clubs in solidarity, started by writer and activist Dan Savage and taken up by bars in London.

In many African countries where homosexuality is already illegal, more Draconian anti-gay laws are being passed and violence against LGBT people is increasing.

Is there a link between growing rights in some countries and worsening or removal of rights in others? “There are really complicated links between the two. If you look at the history of the advancement of LGBT rights in the UK, every advance is accompanied by a backlash,” says Alistair Stewart, assistant director of the Kaleidoscope Trust, a UK-based organization that supports international LGBT rights. “To a certain extent that’s happening on a global scale now – the advances that are being made in some parts of the world encourage a backlash in other parts of the world. The struggle for even basic human rights for LGBT people – freedom of association, freedom from violence – becomes harder to achieve when the opponents can point to something like gay marriage, which isn’t even on the books for most of the countries we’re talking about and make the argument that ‘if we give these people even the most basic of human rights, next they’ll be asking to get married in our churches’.” Jonathan Cooper, chief executive of the Human Dignity Trust, is less sure they are related: “The further persecution is already happening.”

Gay rights around the world: the best and worst countries for equality

Equal marriage laws are being passed in several countries, but in Russia, life grows harsher each month for LGBT people. Which places are best and worst for gay rights?

We have a US president who supports gay marriage, and now a pope who, if not exactly signing up to equality for all, is at least starting to talk in language less inflammatory than his predecessor. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?” he told an assembled group of journalists on the papal plane back from his tour of Brazil. Then he went on to criticise the gay “lobby” and said he wasn’t going to break with the catechism that said “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered”. Still, for a brief moment it looked like a minor breakthrough.

Then you weigh it against a raft of anti-homosexuality legislation that is coming into force in countries across the world. In Russia, gay teenagers are being tortured and forcibly outed on the Internet against a backdrop of laws that look completely out of step with the rest of Europe. In what is being described as rolling the “status of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people back to the Stalin era”, President Putin has passed a number of anti-gay laws, including legislation that punishes people and groups that distribute information considered “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”. The country also now has powers to arrest and detain foreign citizens believe to be gay, or “pro-gay”. It has led to the boycott of Russian vodka brands by gay bars and clubs in solidarity, started by writer and activist Dan Savage and taken up by bars in London.

In many African countries where homosexuality is already illegal, more Draconian anti-gay laws are being passed and violence against LGBT people is increasing.

Is there a link between growing rights in some countries and worsening or removal of rights in others? “There are really complicated links between the two. If you look at the history of the advancement of LGBT rights in the UK, every advance is accompanied by a backlash,” says Alistair Stewart, assistant director of the Kaleidoscope Trust, a UK-based organisation that supports international LGBT rights. “To a certain extent that’s happening on a global scale now – the advances that are being made in some parts of the world encourage a backlash in other parts of the world. The struggle for even basic human rights for LGBT people – freedom of association, freedom from violence – becomes harder to achieve when the opponents can point to something like gay marriage, which isn’t even on the books for most of the countries we’re talking about and make the argument that ‘if we give these people even the most basic of human rights, next they’ll be asking to get married in our churches’.” Jonathan Cooper, chief executive of the Human Dignity Trust, is less sure they are related: “The further persecution is already happening.”

The Human Dignity Trust challenges laws to end the persecution of LGBT people around the world. “Most countries sign up to international human rights treaties. If you take Belize as an example, it has ratified all the key UN human rights treaties and in their constitution they have a right to a private life, to equality, to dignity. And so basically to criminalise homosexuality is a violation. To bring a legal challenge against that takes a very brave individual.” It has been supporting Caleb Orozco, the gay rights campaigner who launched a legal challenge to overturn Belize’s criminalisation laws. “We’re still waiting for the judgment. They said it would be out by the end of July but obviously it’s not coming now.”

Orozco’s case has prompted a backlash in Belize against him, and Unibam (the United Belize Advocacy Movement). A report last week from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the US civil rights organisation, highlighted the influence US hardline religious groups had in Belize and other countries. “Many of these American religious-right groups know they have lost the battle against LGBT rights in the US, and they’re now aiding and abetting anti-LGBT forces in countries where anti-gay violence is prevalent,” said Heidi Beirich, author of the report. “These groups are pouring fuel on an exceedingly volatile fire.”

It’s the classic missionary model, says Stewart, “where money and resources and organisation are set up in the countries that they are targeting”. It’s also worth remembering which country is responsible for the legacy of persecution faced by millions of LGBT people today. There are more than 75 countries where homosexuality is still criminalised: “Forty-two of them are former British colonies so we can see where the legacy comes from,” says Cooper. To see which countries are getting worse in terms of gay rights makes grim reading, but Stewart is cheered by the support he sees. “One of the reassuring things that has come out of the response to the Russian laws in particular is there is a growing international apprehension. One of the last great undone pieces of the civil rights movement is to address the rights of LGBT people, and there does seem to be a growing international support for change.”

Where are LGBT rights improving?

Parts of Latin America remain the standard for equality for LGBT rights. Argentina‘s Gender Identity Law 2012 allowed the change of gender on birth certificates for transgender people. It also legalised same-sex marriage in 2010, giving same-sex couples the same rights as opposite-sex couples, including the right to adopt children. Uruguay and Mexico City also allow equal marriage and adoption, and last week Colombia recognised its first legal same-sex civil union (not “marriage”).

In Asia, LGBT groups are making progess, if slowly. Last year, Vietnam saw its first gay pride rally and this year’s event will launch a campaign for equality in employment. On Tuesday, it was reported that the country’s ministry of justice has backed plans to legalise gay marriage, after the ministry of health came out for marriage equality in April.

In Singapore the Pink Dot pride rally attracted 21,000 people at the end of June – its biggest number since it started four years ago. “It’s a strong signal that Singapore is not as conservative as some think,” Paerin Choa, a rally spokesman, told Reuters. Just hours before attending the rally, Vincent Wijeysingha became Singapore’s first openly gay politician when he officially came out. The country bans gay sex, though this is rarely enforced, but in April a gay couple, Gary Lim and Kenneth Chee, attempted to get the law removed. Their case was dismissed, but they are appealing with the help of Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney general.

The Human Dignity Trust filed a suit at the European court of human rights against Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, the only place in Europe where homosexuality is still illegal, and looks likely to win.

In a letter sent to the Kaleidoscope Trust, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago expressed her wish to repeal the laws that ban homosexuality. The prime minister of Jamaica, Portia Simpson Miller, has voiced similar wishes. In June, Javed Jaghai was the lastest activist to launch legal proceedings to challenge the anti-sodomy laws (however, violence against gay people is increasing, and 17-year-old Dwayne Jones was stabbed to death last week at a party according to local media reports).

In Malawi, the president Joyce Banda announced in 2012 that laws criminalising homosexuality would be repealed – she has since distanced herself from that, although there has been a moratorium and there have been no prosecutions. “So it’s not just the global north where things are moving forward. In some parts of the world where you’d least expect them, things are getting better,” says Stewart.

The number of countries legalising same-sex marriage continues to grow, with Denmark, Brazil, France and New Zealand just some that joined more progressive countries that had legalised it earlier. Last month in the US, where Barack Obama publicly supports equal marriage and it is legal in several states, the supreme court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (which prevented the federal government from recognising marriages between gay couples) as unconstitutional. And of course England and Wales now has the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013.

Where are LGBT rights worsening?

In Iran, a place where homosexuality is punishable by death and you thought LGBT rights couldn’t really get worse, this year the country’s official who works on human rights described homosexuality as “an illness that should be cured”. Of course, gay rights are no better in many other Middle Eastern countries. The ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) provides a comprehensive look at state-sponsored homophobia in a 2013 report.

Gay-rights activist Yury Gavrikov is detained by riot police at a rally in Moscow in May. Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images

Two weeks ago, Eric Ohena Lembembe, was found at home in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. He had been tortured – his neck and feet broken, his body burned with an iron – and murdered. As the executive director of Camfaids, Lembembe was one of Cameroon’s most prominent and outspoken LGBT rights activists and openly gay – an astonishing act of bravery in a country where homosexuality is punishable with prison and violence against LGBT people is common and almost never investigated. Amnesty International’s 2013 report on global human rights stated even people who supported LGBT rights were being harrassed, particularly equality lawyers Alice Nkom and Michel Togue who had both received calls and text messages threatening to kill them and their children if they did not stop defending gay people who had been arrested. In June this year, Togue’s office was broken into and files and computers stolen. In March 2012, a workshop held to educate young people about LGBT issues was shut down.

Last week, two men were given prison sentences under the country’s anti-gay laws; in 2011, another man, Jean-Claude Roger Mbédé, was sentenced to three years in prison for sending a text message to another man. Men who are perceived to be gay are arrested, somtimes only on the basis of someone’s suspicions, and some are forced to undergo rectal examinations and tortured into confessing. “They have such an active prosecution system,” says Cooper. “Although prosecutions do occur in other jurisdictions, you don’t have that kind of active prosecution policy that you have in Cameroon.”

After the death of Lembembe, gay-rights groups said they couldn’t continue their work unless they are given protection by international donors who fund the fight against HIV/Aids. “We have all decided to stop our work in the field because our security is at risk,” said Yves Yomb, executive director of Alternatives-Cameroun. “We have no protection from the police and we feel that our lives are at risk.”

Sharing a border with Cameroon, Nigeria‘s anti-gay laws are becoming ever more draconian. It recently passed a bill outlawing same-sex marriage, punishable with a 14-year prison term. “Nobody in the country is seriously asking for gay marriage,” says Stewart from the Kaleidoscope Trust. “There is no reason to legislate against it, when homosexual sex is already illegal. It also has more concerning provisions that ban the formation of groups that support LGBT rights and a series of provisions that if you know a homosexual but don’t turn them in, you are aiding and abetting. That isn’t on the statute books yet but it seems likely that it will pass in some form.”

Politicians in Uganda are attempting to pass a similar bill, at one point seeking to punish homosexual relationships with the death penalty; people found guilty of being gay will now face life imprisonment, and anybody – parents, teachers, doctors – who suspects someone in their care is gay will be punished if they do not report them.

Last week, President Mugabe told a rally of Zanu PF supporters that Zimbabwe would never accept homosexuality, and that gay people were “worse than pigs, goats and birds”. There are 38 African countries where homosexuality is illegal.

In Russia, gay rights are moving further away from other European countries. In an extreme version of Britain’s section 28, a new law will punish anybody disseminating “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors expressed in distribution of information … aimed at the formation … of … misperceptions of the social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional sexual relations”. It has also failed to comply with the 2010 judgment at the European court of human rights that requires it to allow gay pride events. Violence against LGBT people is rising. In May, there was a brutal murder of a man who had revealed to “friends” he was gay. Official numbers of homophobic attacks are low, but LGBT activists say this is because attacks are not often reported, and when they are police rarely label them as such, but one poll last year of nearly 900 people by the Russian LGBT Network found more than 15% had experienced physical violence between November 2011 and August 2012.

Last week, the Pink News reported neo-Nazi groups in Russia has been luring gay teenagers to meetings, where they are forced to come out in videos that are then posted on social media sites. It reported that one victim, 19-year-old Alex Bulygin, killed himself after his sexuality was revealed.

Russia’s renewed attacks on homosexuality may be spreading beyond its borders – there are moves in Ukraine to adopt its own ban on “gay propaganda” and in May the parliament dropped a bill that would have outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation after a protest by anti-gay activists.

• This article was amended on 31 July 2013. A reference to the timing of a Belize judgment was removed.