Gay Trump Voter Learns Harsh Lesson

You cannot imagine the guilt I feel, knowing that I hosted the gathering that led to so much suffering. You cannot imagine my guilt at having been a denier, carelessly shuffling through this pandemic, making fun of those wearing masks and social distancing. You cannot imagine my guilt at knowing that my actions convinced both our families it was safe when it wasn’t.

For those who deny the virus exists or who downplay its severity, let me assure you: The coronavirus is very real and extremely contagious. Before you even know you have it, you’ve passed it along to your friends, family, coworkers and neighbors.

Tony Green thought the virus was a hoax cooked up by Democrats to ruin Trump's re-election chances. After a family gathering last month, however, 14 members of his family became infected with Covid-19, and one has died. Dallas station WFAA reports:



Read Tony's contrite account of what happened to his family in the Dallas Voice here.

One Year On: Marriage Equality USA

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

--Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority

in Obergefell v. Hodges, June 26, 2015

A year ago today, the Supreme Court made its landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, legalizing same-sex marriage throughout the United States.  What a joyous day that was, so long awaited by so many, and the beginning of many happy marriages - legal at last. Here's that day's report from NBC News:



Not the least of those happy couples rushing to courthouses across the country were Jack Evans and George Harris, who first met in 1961 and were a committed couple for over half a century, and were the first gay couple to marry in Dallas a year ago today.



Sadly, Jack passed away in a Dallas hospital last Thursday, with George at his side, but their story continues to inspire all of us who believe in the right to love whom we choose.  Here's an oral history interview they did in 2013:

Dallas Men Plan Wedding after 53 Years Together

Newlyweds Jack Evans and George Harris

As conservative and homophobic as Texas is and has been, the fact of the matter is that we gays are all over the Lone Star state, everywhere you go from big cities to suburbs to tiny hamlets in the middle of nowhere, ranches, farms, bars, churches, schools, stores, and everywhere in between.

From Dallas comes this remarkable story of a couple who have been going strong since 1961;  and today, Jack Evans and George Harris are finally getting the church wedding they've always wanted.  It won't be legal in Texas until the Supreme Court says so, but after 53 years together, they can't wait any longer.



Jack and George are the founders of The Dallas Way, a group devoted to collecting and preserving the historical record of the LGBT community in North Texas. Here, the couple participate in "Outrageous Oral," an ongoing oral history project:




Another video of Jack and George telling their fascinating stories:




Their story is a tribute to the enduring power of love. All good wishes to the happy couple.


Update: Dallas station WFAA reports on the wedding, with video:



The Dallas Morning News reported the story too, highlighting the challenge to Methodist doctrine that "homosexuality is incompatible with Scripture." Nevertheless, hundreds of guests attended, along with a dozen Methodist ministers from around the state.

What you Yankee boys and other furriners need to understand is that here in Texas, the Methodist Church is the natural choice for the better-educated and semi-liberal folks; compared to the Southern Baptists, the Methodists are almost like freethinkers. So this gay wedding - even though it couldn't be held on Methodist property - is really a sign of significant change.

You Can Help

It could have been any one of us.

Jimmy Lee Dean was beaten nearly to death five years ago by two men looking for a gay man to rob, leaving him with a smashed face and many physical problems.  Failed surgeries and the indifference of the medical profession have left him with a ruined life.  The Dallas Voice ran an article on the fifth anniversary of tbe brutal attack, but here's the story in Jimmy's own words:

On July 17, 2008 I was the victim of a hate crime in Dallas, Texas. Through the kind act of everyday people like you, I did not die that night. The criminals were stopped, prosecuted and the good people of Texas provided $50,000.00 from their crime victims fund to repair my physical damages and any phycological help that might be needed.

Problems started when I left Parkland County Hospital intensive care unit. Up to that point everything seemed to be going ok. Then After some 16 visits to the Oral Surgery Clinic, 2 surgeries and one attempted surgery that never took place and 27 visits to Parkland crisis center I am in the same phycical situation as at the crime scene.

Work done in the second surgery at Parkland Hospital has all come undone. My jaw and cheek bone are no longer attached. Teeth have never been dealt with. No one has followed up on my broken back. I have headaces every other day. My eyes are having problems. I walk with a causious gate. I get light headed all the time. I don't reallly go anywere because of the facial disfigurments and the way I look when I eat.

I never asked for what happend. It could have been anyone of us at that spot at that time.

My dreams and identity are gone along with my alillity to smell, but maybe there are medical procedures that might restore me to a point where I can have some kind of a normal life.

Nobody should have to go without needed medical treatment in this country, but you guys know the score as well as I do: if you have no money, the doctors won't even look at you. But we can make a real difference in Jimmy's life by contributing at his Indiegogo page. Please do.

It could have been you.





 Honk to Unfinished Lives.

Dallas Tobacco Madness

The Dallas Observer blog reports the powers-that-be in Dallas are having a final hearing today on an ordinance to ban smoking from just about every conceivable public place in that fair city except private homes: "bars, pool halls, parks, tobacco shops and your car if there's a kid inside or on the sidewalks or restaurant patios."

Your Head Trucker has been unashamedly enjoying his smokes for over 35 years now, and he wholeheartedly believes that every man and woman ought to have at least one vice - to keep themselves humble. Way too many people make a religion out of "healthy living," and they get just as nasty and dogmatic as fundies about it. Which sucks big time, especially when it comes to crossing the bounds of civil liberties.

I don't live in Big D, so I can't vote on the matter. But here's a comment I left on that blog:

In every era, there's somebody or something that we just have to demonize. One hundred years ago, it was alcohol, Demon Rum. Our great-grandparents were so het up about the evils of drink that they kept on and kept on until they finally changed the Constitution of the United States to make the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcohol illegal everywhere in the country.

Now we look back and smugly smile at how silly they were. Yes, we know alcohol causes lots of serious problems, physical, mental, social, etc. But how many people are demanding the total eradication of alcohol from the landscape? Do you turn up your nose and make a sneering comment every time a friend of yours pops open a beer? Is anyone proposing to shut down all the bars and liquor stores "to protect our children"?

Actually, there are still some dry counties out here in rural Texas, a legacy of that hundred-year-old campaign against alcohol; but we all know the dry-county routine is just an exercise in hypocrisy, don't we?

Furthermore, a big influential group of college presidents - yeah - is now advocating lowering, not raising the drinking age. I thought we had that debate and settled it back in the 70's; lower drinking age = more auto accidents and deaths, no?

And of course, it's entirely likely that sometime in the next 10 years, certainly the next 20, we will see marijuana legalized all over the country, even here in Bible-believing Texas.

So if we get out of the self-righteous, I'm-so-pure, Health Nazi mode, we see that our own attitudes are likely very inconsistent. Hypocritical. Intolerant.

Except when it comes down to what we like. The fashionable vices. Oh then it's just okay - pot, beer, booze, you name it. Not a problem. "Leave me alone. It's my body. My sacred choice."

Yeah, well, think about that in terms of the tobacco thing, guys. Is it really necessary, especially out in the open air, or indoors where adults congregate, with big machines to sweep the air clean? Or does it just make you feel all warm and Sunday-school-righteous inside to kick somebody else's freedom into the gutter?

Is the other guy's health the real motive here? Or is it something else? I ask you.

Dallas First Baptist: The OTHER Protest

You know, I'm a believer, but I'm really tired of taking this crap off the Christianist bullies. But we don't have to take it anymore, do we?

Last Sunday, about a hundred Dallas gays and straights protested at First Baptist Church, and you can see why. According to the Dallas Observer blog,

this is the church fronted by Pastor Robert Jeffress, the author of Hell? Yes! who said Mormon Mitt Romney was a member of a "cult" and who, in September, said that
"Christians are uniquely favored by God, [while] Mormons, Hindus and Muslims worship a false god." And in the 1990s, he said that homosexuality causes "the deaths of tens of thousands every year through AIDS." He's super-tolerant. Then again, Jeffress has done quite a bit for the gay community: In 1998, while he was pastor at the First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, he protested the library's carrying such titles as Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate, which only served to make them more popular.

According to the Dallas Morning News,

Dr. Jeffress acknowledged that "Jesus never used the word homosexual." However, he said, Christ condemned homosexuality by affirming Old Testament truths and by upholding God's plan for human sexuality – "one man and one woman in a marriage relationship."

In next week's sermon, Dr. Jeffress said he will address homosexuality again, including the assertion that "God wired me differently."

(Honk to the Dallas Observer; go to their site to see a slideshow of more pics from last Sunday's protest.)

It's no surprise that the LGBT community will protest at First Baptist again this Sunday, November 16. Edge Dallas gives the details for both weekend demonstrations:

National gay rights protest. Dallas City Hall, 1500 Marilla Drive Saturday, Nov. 15, at 12:30 p.m. JoinTheImpact.com.

Protest rally about First Baptist Church of Dallas’ publicly displayed anti-gay messages. First Baptist Church of Dallas, 1707 San Jacinto. Sunday, Nov. 16, 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

BTW: The quotation from Matthew 19 in the church sign at top of this post reads like this:

Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?"

"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

Which for some Christians might seem to support a certain position on the gay thing. Ah, but here's the rest of that passage. Me, I got over letting the Bible or the Church stand between God and me years ago. God is bigger than both of them. You can draw your own conclusions on what the real point is here:

"Why then," they asked, "did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?"

Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery."

The disciples said to him, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry." Jesus replied, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."

Highway of Holiness

In case you missed it last year, here's Pat Robertson tripping out over the idea that I-35, which runs from Texas to Minnesota, is part of God's plan to recover this sinful nation from the heathen evildoers, especially teh gays. It's in the Bible! You can look it up!



That's funny; I've driven up and down I-35 many a time, and it didn't do a thing for me. Still gay as ever.

The preacher lady who says "We want a holy nation" creeps me out big time. I can just imagine what that would look like: I-35 lined with the skinned carcasses of field-dressed queers all the way.

Oh, and about the young guy in this clip who got suddenly, miraculously "healed" of his gayness right there on the street in Oak Lawn (Dallas's main gayborhood)?

He's bipolar, was off his meds. The church sent him off to ex-gay camp in Kentucky, but he got kicked out. Seems the brainwashing, um, I mean rehabilitation wasn't working too well. He's now telling folks to steer way clear of all that wacked-out bullshit, according to this report in the Dallas Voice.