Vince Gill Confronts Westboro

Country megastar Vince Gill, raised a good Baptist boy in the depths of Oklahoma, confronted picketers from Westboro Baptist Church (who are not really Baptists, but a single clan of fanatics) outside the Kauffman Center, his concert venue in Kansas City, Missouri, this past Sunday. The picketers were protesting at his concert because he and wife Amy Grant, another singing star, are "adulterers" according to the Bible. Via Towleroad:



Way to go, Vince! He's a good man.

Here are Gill and Grant discussing their initial friendship and later marriage in a Larry King interview from 2008:

From Russia with Love

 

 

 

Okay, this story and these pictures just made your Head Trucker lose it, totally. Groups of gays and lesbians and the rest of the LGBT community gathered quietly all across the vast extent of Russia yesterday, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, to take pictures and thank the world for its moral support as the Putin government grinds down upon them. Stop whatever you are doing right now and go scroll down the page at Americablog, and look at those signs and those faces.

Event coordinator Natalia Tsymbalova explains in a Facebook message:

We, Russian LGBT people and their allies, would like to thank all the people around the world who support us and express their concern about the events in our country in hope of making a difference and pulling Russia out of a tightening medieval darkness.

To show that global support and solidarity are very important for all of us, we organized in response an acknowledgment action "From Russia with Love."

We did not plan this flashmob as an action to attract public attention. It was a friendly get-together to make a photo-shoot in the open. Our posters did not carry political information: we just wrote words of gratitude without even indicating to whom and for what: those who we are sending our smiles and thanks to, will understand it anyway.

Despite police’s nervous attention and a few attempts to disrupt us, we are glad that we were able to finish our action and send our friends abroad our deepest gratitude – this is the least we can do now. Thank you for your support and solidarity! Spasibo!

A tightening medieval darkness, exactly. And all of our gay brothers and sisters there are trapped like rats - as surely as the Jews were in Nazi Germany. 

The Jews in Germany and other Western countries at that time had enjoyed full civil rights and political equality for a century or more - but nobody went to war to save the Jews, or lifted a finger to stop the persecution of them.  Most countries, including our own, even refused to take as refugees the few Jews who could get out of Germany before the war started.

And nobody will go to war to save the gays, if it comes to that. No, they are trapped and completely at the mercy of their own dictatorial government and fanatical neighbors - whipped into a frenzy of hate by American evangelists who have toured around Russia, spreading every possible lie and stirring up violence.

You can protest and boycott all you want - but what concrete good will any of it do, really?   History, including our own recent American history, has shown time after time that governments set upon a certain course of action simply don't care what happens in piddling little demonstrations in other lands, or even in their own, which are easily enough dispersed and ignored.

What terrible things may befall our gay brothers and sisters as the shadows fall, I can hardly bear to think. It breaks my heart.  And yet there they are in these lovely snapshots, framed forever in sunlight and tranquility, smiling at us, heads yet held high with hope - bearing witness to the world.

God bless them.

French Parliament Approves Marriage Equality

Socialist deputies applaud in the National Assembly today
following passage of the same-sex marriage bill.

Antigay demonstrator hurls a missile at police during a protest
following the vote in Parliament.

The French National Assembly approved the final passage of a same-sex marriage bill today by a vote of 331-225, along party lines, making France the 14th nation in the world to approve marriage equality nationwide. President Francois Hollande's Socialist Party swept into power last year with a promise to enact the law, which recent polls have shown is favored by by 55%-63% of the population.

However, rightwing activists, with the support of France's Catholic hierarchy and American antigay groups like NOM, have made an issue of the adoption rights which marriage would allow to gay couples, equating it to "the murder of children," along with the familiar rhetoric about "traditional family values." In recent months, they have led massive, sometimes violent demonstrations against the law in the streets of Paris.   After tonight's vote, protesters decrying "Socialist dictatorship" once again clashed with police. Gay haters are also circulating messages of "Death to Gays" and "Homosexuals Must Be Killed" on Twitter. The conservative UMP party, which has used the marriage law to regain some support among voters, now plans to appeal the law to France's Constitutional Court, which has the power to disallow the law before it comes into effect (unlike the American Supreme Court), but analysts say there is little likelihood of that occurring, and same-sex couples may be able to marry starting in June. Since 1999, France has offered civil unions, called PACS, to both gay and straight couples; straights made up more than 95% of couples getting "PACS-ed" in 2010. However, the PACS provides significantly fewer rights than marriage, and does not allow gay couples to adopt.

In other marriage news, same-sex marriage bills advanced in the Delaware House and the Rhode Island Senate, and the Nevada Senate approved the first step in removing that state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Also, Nevada state senator Kelvin Atkinson (D-North Las Vegas), came out publicly, saying:

I know this is the first time many of you have heard me say that I am a black, gay male. . . . If this hurts your marriage, then your marriage was in trouble in the first place.

Thoughts in the Interlude

While we await this morning's Supreme Court hearing on the DOMA case, United States v. Windsor, here's some incidentally related things to refresh your mind with.

Your Head Trucker remembers seeing many signs like
this one in the legally segregated South of his childhood.
Little did he suspect that as a gay man, he would spend
most of his adult life shoved aside in just such a waiting room.

• Everyone has heard of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board, 1954. But have you ever studied it? Do you know what pro and con arguments were used at that time about racial segregation, or what reasoning the Court used in ruling it unconstitutional? Just as we saw in yesterday's hearing on the Prop 8 case, the justices were not of one mind, and had to work their way through a swamp of legal and constitutional entanglements, and considerations of original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment about equal protection and due process, in order to reach a decision - so in that sense, Brown is highly relevant reading for us today. If you like, here's the Wikipedia article, with lots of links to primary sources, as well as the actual ruling of the court. And also revealing of the mixed mood of the times, read Governor Leroy Collins's courageous refusal to sign and remarks at the end of the Florida Legislature's Resolution of Interposition, 1957, which declared (unsuccessfully) the Supreme Court's desegration order "null, void and of no force or effect in Florida."

• The more I think about Justice Alito's lame-brained demand for "scientific evidence" that gay marriage is not harmful to society, and Justice Scalia's assoholic demand to be told "when the Constitution changed" - the more my blood boils.  But do read this sweet, cooling essay by a proud daughter:  "What Makes a Family."  Excerpt:

Two gay, Catholic Jesuit psychologists raising a multiracial daughter in San Francisco: it sounds like Hollywood’s next sitcom, but in many ways my life is just like yours. When the Supreme Court hears oral arguments next week on marriage equality, I want the country to know the love that exists in families like mine, and how my upbringing is in many ways an American success story. . . .

• Or this one, in which silence is golden, which warms my heart: "Justice Sotomayor's Quiet Nod to Gay Americans."
• Check out the amusing video of a 1971 takeover of the New York City Marriage Bureau by the Gay Activist Alliance in "The Prehistory of Gay Marriage."  Even the cops seem rather jolly when they arrive on the scene - by contrast, imagine the SWAT team that would respond today.
• Compare this 1989 protest at the same marriage bureau by ACT UP, and the prediction about what would happen across the country within twenty years.
• And you'll get a kick out of humorist Andy Borowitz's little zinger:  "Scalia Furious He Has to Hear about Gay Couples All Week."
• And as a prelude to today's hearing:  "It's All About Edie."
• SCOTUSblog's review of the issues in the Windsor case:  "Will The Court Defend DOMA? In Plain English."
• And in case you've forgotten, here is a summary of the 1,138 federal rights and benefits denied to same-sex couples by DOMA.

Hollingsworth v. Perry: Arguments and Analysis

Above and below:  signs carried by demonstrators in front
of the U. S. Supreme Court building this morning as the justices
listened to oral arguments on Hollingsworth v. Perry.

From SCOTUSblog, an audio recording of this morning's Supreme Court hearing on the Prop 8 case (1 hr., 19 min.).

Or if you prefer, a written transcript here (PDF, 278 kb).  Hint:  you'll get the most out of both by reading and listening to them together.

Analysis:

1. By Tom Goldstein, editor of SCOTUSblog.

2. By Lyle Denniston, SCOTUSblog reporter.

3. By Greg Stohr at bloomberg.com:

The U.S. Supreme Court raised the prospect that it will decline to say whether the Constitution gives gays the right to marry in an argument that revealed a chasm among the justices on one of the country’s most divisive issues. A decision to back out of the case would let gay marriage resume in California, without directly affecting the rest of the country. Justice Anthony Kennedy, potentially the court’s swing vote, twice asked whether the most prudent course for the court would be not to rule. He said the case was taking the court into “uncharted waters.”

4. By Jacob Combs of Equality on Trial:

As always, Justice Kennedy is almost certainly going to be the swing vote: none of the other conservative Justices appeared anywhere close to a ruling that would declare Prop 8 unconstitutional. Kennedy’s questions on the merits were pointed and probed both sides. At one point, Kennedy pointed out that the sociological evidence about families headed by same-sex couples and whether there are any effects on children is new and not conclusive. But in the very same sentence, he mentioned that there is a specific legal injury present in the case suffered by the almost 40,000 children living in California with same-sex parents.

Continued after the jump . . .

 

We Do Campaign: Greenville, South Carolina

Greenville is a big town, but I'd advise you boys to step lively when passing through there, and not let the sun go down on you before you're way on down the road. That's why this quiet little demonstration sponsored by the Campaign for Southern Equality just takes my breath away for courage and gumption. Your Head Trucker remembers when doing something like this was near abouts worth your life down here in the Southland.

Notice how the snotty, self-righteous straight couple in line ahead of the gay gals does their best to humiliate them.

How To Crank a Revolution

Linda Hirshman, author of Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, on "What Stonewall Got Right, and Occupy Got Wrong," an excerpt:

This Sunday, as every fourth Sunday in June, the streets of New York will fill with prideful marchers celebrating Pride Month. There will be similar marches, too, in cities around the country. Sunday marks the forty-third year since the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar called Stonewall that supposedly started the modern gay revolution. The myth is that a few hundred angry people acted out in lower Manhattan, and the world changed. Maybe that’s where Occupy Wall Street got the idea that this is how it’s done.

It’s the wrong lesson. Stonewall was the product of a handful of brilliant community organizers applying basic principles of social organizing. Without them, Stonewall would have been nothing more than one of several gay-bar pushbacks in the late sixties, or another one of the non-gay street demonstrations that characterized New York in that tumultuous time. It was the dedicated strategizing of the men and women of the nascent gay movement that turned something unremarkable into the Bastille. Their achievement is a field guide to how to make a social movement, and also offers insight into why Occupy is failing.

Which reminds your Head Trucker - who naively used to think that demostrations just spontaneously happened, like meteorites or flatulence - of the time he was in D.C. for the display of the AIDS quilt in 1992, and somehow my first husband and I and our little group from the far South learned there was to be a kind of memorial concert one night on the Mall, to be followed by a silent candlelight march past the White House.  Being out-of-towners, we of course were the last ones to hear about this, and by the time we did, every store in the vicinity of Dupont Circle, where we were staying, had been ransacked and de-candled.  But we turned up anyway, and gratefully accepted some free candles a stranger was handing out, so we were able to stand and shine - even though we were so damn far away from the stage, if there was a stage, that we couldn't hear a thing but the occasional rumble of what sounded like distant thunder.

Still, we were there and we were queer and totally out in the open about it, which was a great treat for all of us.  (My husband and I walked all over the tourist parts of D.C. hand in hand, in broad daylight - what a thrilling feeling of freedom that was, something we'd never before in our lives been able to do out of doors.)  Eventually, though, the concert apparently having ended, the great crowd, like an enormous flounder, slowly began to scuddle along and pour itself onto a pavement that was headed in the general direction of the White House.  We oozed along with everybody else, proudly holding high our windproofed, Dixie-cupped candles amid the many thousand points of light flowing all around us, wrapped in a sort of speechless reverie at the thought that we were actually there in that famous place, doing these things.

What a surprise it was, then, to discover that during this supposedly silent protest march, there were lean, angry-looking guys with voices like a drill sergeant's, striding through the rows and files of marchers, eyes blazing, whipping us up into chanting "Shame!  Shame!  Shame!" as we approached 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Which I did, and I'm glad I did - we had good reason, and it was, forgive me for saying so, great fun too.

But country boy here made mental note:  Aha, this is how the world really works.

That Bor-ing Gay Agenda

Unretouched photograph of actual homosexuals caught in the act of
promoting the gay agenda

Coming soon to your town, courtesy of Randy Roberts Potts, grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts, and his boyfriend, Keaton Johnson.




Randy's Gay Agenda page is on Facebook if you want to check it out.