A Few Words About Club Q

 There have been so many mass murders in this country and they all weigh heavy on my heart, especially those where school children have been gunned down. 

But when the LGBTQ community is attacked it wounds a different place in my heart. 

It brings back memories (and the feelings that go along with them) of all our community has gone through from before Stonewall and Gay Lib and the AIDS crisis and Marches on Washington and Matthew Shepard and Pulse and the personal struggles of every one of us. 

I thank the person(s) who stopped the murderer at Club Q. In some existential sense, in that moment, that person(s) saved all of our lives. 

I cry easily these days. What is happening to our world? I am old and I fear for those younger than me. 

Peace.

I Love This Guy

 I wish he'd run for president again.

Worse Everyday: Pence's "christian rabbi’ Ignores Shooting Victims to Pray for Republicans

With all due respect for the victims of anti-Semitic violence in Pittsburg, their families, their loved ones and the entire community, I post this entry:

I watch the news every day and I am generally expecting, (and my expectations are always met),  more outrageous news from the current administration.

All the blogs I read are commenting on the news, expounding on the outrageousness and stupidity and dangers and illegalities, and atrocities of the administration and its supporters.

So I have pretty much given up blogging about it myself, as others do a good job and, well, who reads this blog anyhow?

But every once in a while there is a story that really gets under my skin. This is one of them:

Link: Article on Pence's "Christian Rabbi"   (Be sure to read the Twitter comments in the article)

and here: LGBT Nation

Who knew there were "christian rabbis" trying to convert Jews?

And that one would be invited pray for republican candidates days after the shooting at the Synagogue in Pittsburg, rather than pray for the dead?

The height of insensitivity gets higher every day with this arrogant, ignorant, self-serving administration. Hubris beyond the definition of hubris.

I fear Pence (who is calculating and fanatic, if not outright evil) is inherantly more dangerous than our president (who is merely a stupid, arrogant, narcissistic puppet).

I Guess This Is A Bright Spot In The Week's News

Matthew Shepard's ashes were interred this week at the National Episcopal Cathedral.

A bright spot because the interment is not only fitting and respectful, but it also serves as a strong message to all fundamentalist christians that they do not speak for all people of faith. Especially in view of the fact that Matthew's parents legitimately feared that any grave or memorial site would very likely be vandalized.

That is a sad commentary on the state of our world.

Over the past twenty years we LGBT folks have seen so much progress: we've won Supreme Court victories, we've gotten marriage equality, we've had LGBT celebrities come out, we see sympathetic, multi-dimensional and mainstream LGBT characters on TV and in movies. We've gotten the sense that we've arrived, that we are not only tolerated, but accepted and even admired; that the world we live in has become safer and more enlightened and that our country's values have evolved.

UNTIL the new wave of hatred, intolerance and bigotry arrived on the heels of this current president's campaign, beginning in June of 2015.

The floodgates were opened further on election day 2016, when many of his supporters felt that their hateful opinions were given legitimacy and they became hell-bent on un-doing and destroying everything that Mathew Shepard and the LGBT community had fought for and achieved.

It is just inconceivable how we have arrived at this place.

It is wrong and discouraging that we should have to see our fortress being dismantled piece by piece, or that we should have to fight the good fight all over again.

And all those allies and friends sometimes really don't seem to fully get it. There is danger afoot in this administration and among it's rabid supporters. Stay vigilant.

We will not be shaken, we will be strong. Stay strong my friends, stay strong.

Needed A Little Pride This Week

What a depressing news week it was...what am I saying, what a depressing 20 months of news it's been.

So I got the butt in gear and went to Santa Fe Pride. A small, (compared to Albuquerque's 15,000) but uplifting event to give me that old familiar invincible feeling of community, camaraderie, and pride.

I have marched, waved flags, protested at the Supreme Court, written letters, been on the evening news, done workshops, facilitated groups and written a memoir - all in the fight for visibility, coming out and attaining our civil rights.

Why do we need PRIDE events? To remind us where we've been, what we've achieved and to energize us to never go back.

I Must Ask Leon Why BLM Rangers Weren't There

Refusing To Provide Medical Care Based On Religion Is Unacceptable

This is a very strong statement by a gay pediatrician against the new Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom in the US Department of Health and Human Services.

The government under the current administration, rather than protecting the rights of all to non-judgemental health care, is cow-towing to the fringe element of the religious right who blindly support him despite his very questionable ethics.

Read the article here.

Cory Booker passionate speech during Senate hearing

Our Lives Matter - People Just Don't Get It

Russ's comment inspired a poster which I posted on Facebook:

Of course people had to remind me that ALL LIVES MATTER. I was even reminded that ANIMAL LIVES MATTER. Which inspired this response:

PEOPLE WHO JUST DON'T GET IT!
Lets not lose sight of the fact that there exists a deep seated abhorrence of homosexuals in our society and in most religions, including Western and Eastern Christianity, Orthadox Judaism, Islam and others. 

This has spilled over even to non-believers in our society. Civil Laws have been based on this abhorrence for years. For years! 

The fact that I and other LGBT persons have to be vigilant in certain crowds and in certain parts of this country even today, attests to the degree to which we have been hated, despised and discounted and dismissed, not to mention done violence to. 

Yes, all lives matter, but on Sunday, June 12 in Orlando, Florida, LGBT LIVES MATTERED as did LGBT dead and wounded. 

STOP MINIMIZING THIS FACT. 

Not everyone has had to live in a society where their love was called "the love that dare not speak its name", where men and women were arrested for "fraternizing" or dancing in pubs and bars, where people were fired from their jobs if they were discovered to be gay or lesbian, where LGBT partners were denied the right to visit a loved one in the hospital, where the likes of Matthew Shepherd was strung up on fence to die, where families could legally confiscate the estates of sons and daughters they once disowned and leave their dead child's partner penniless, where LGBT individuals could have their heads bashed in just for being seen leaving a gay bar, where 49 of us could be slaughtered in Orlando. I could go on... 

What this tragedy is about is not guns or automatic weapons, though those issues have been rightly highlighted. It is about the deep-seated, visceral hatred of homosexuality and any other sexuality that is not hetero-normative. 

No other minority is, by virtue of their existence, considered EVIL and sinful. LGBT's have been labeled evil, sinful, disgusting, and worse by religious leaders. We were called heretics and burned at the stake - the likely origin of the word "faggot" as in "throw another faggot (wood bundle) on the fire." THEY PICK AND CHOOSE WHICH BIBLE OR TORAH OR QURAN PASSAGES TO THROW AT US WHILE IGNORING "LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR" OR ADMONITIONS AGAINST WEALTH. 

This is what gives bigots and sexually conflicted individuals PERMISSION to KILL. 

Permission to kill those who threaten their strict, myopic, black-and-white world-view. 

YES, PERMISSION TO KILL. 

People who call themselves "pastors" or "preachers" and heads of religion-based organizations, many of them so-called-christians are, at this moment, calling for executing gays and lesbians. They are rampant on the internet. Nut-jobs? Maybe. But there are people who take them seriously. 

And even the "nice" Catholics and Lutherans and Episcopalians, and Presbyterians, and AMEZionists, and Evangelicals, and Seventh Day Adventists and Mormons and Greek Orthodox so many other "nice" christian denominations that are not calling for outright execution have contributed to this culture of name-calling and judgement and moral condemnation.

This is the background in a nutshell of the world that has engendered and fostered and reveled in hatred and discrimination toward LGBT/sexual minorities. 

Yes, people. You who cannot stand the fact that we are asserting our rights to live and to love and to exist in dignity along side everyone else. People WHO JUST DON'T GET IT!

Anger, Anguish, Grief and Sadness

Summary from my Facebook page:
MOURNING THE DEAD IN ORLANDO FLORIDA. AND OUR THOUGHTS ARE WITH THE WOUNDED. OUR HEARTS ACHE FOR LOVED ONES AND THE FAMILIES OF THE DEAD AND WOUNDED.

ENOUGH VIOLENCE, ENOUGH HATRED, ENOUGH INTOLERANCE. ENOUGH!And I would add so much gratitude for the brave men and women, both civilians and professionals who assisted the wounded without regard for their own lives and safety. Truly heroes.It is time for ALL religious leaders to condemn hatred and violence toward Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Persons WITHOUT RESERVATION AND WITH CREDIBLE ACTION.


IT IS TIME TO LEAVE BEHIND LEVITICUS and CORINTHIANS and HEBREWS, and the rest of the biblical poetry, AND STOP PERSECUTING US. ENOUGH!

This heinous act may have been inspired by a distorted version of Muslim teaching, but there are distorted versions of Christianity and other religions that inspire hate and violence toward us as well.

Religions MUST figure out theologies or philosophies that are compatible with our inherent dignity as human beings, with our civil rights and with civil respect or THEY SHOULD HOLD THEIR PEACE (i.e. shut up).

We cannot allow religious extremists or even religious conservaives to define the dialogue or the laws or the culture of this diverse nation. ENOUGH!

It is not ENOUGH to PREACH "LOVE"

If religious leaders and other people of faith who have not yet realized that their teachings are dangerous and hurtful, then

THEY ARE JUST AS RESPONSIBLE FOR THESE TRAGIC DEATHS as the gunman. AND THE NRA and all the Republican legislators who they've bought.

BLOOD IS ON THEIR HANDS AS WELL.

Watching news coverage almost non-stop, I am just so outraged that this could happen, especially in view of all of the bullshit that we've been going through since we got marriage equality. And yes the availability of guns is a big issue, but people must realize that people shooting a gun, nay an assault weapon, generally have a target and the belief that LGBT people are evil makes us an easy, convenient and expendable target. I am outraged and angry. I know I will probably cry a river when the reality hits over the next week, with funerals and outpouring of grief. But right now, ENOUGH!

I dread the upcoming week, not for the 50 funerals, not for the tears and sadness that will pour out as we are faced daily with the reality of the tragedy in Orlando, but for what is sure to be the twisted rhetoric from politicians and pundits who will try minimize the fact that this massacre was an act of hate aimed specifically at the LGBT Community. Some are already trying to hijack the conversation to make it about anything but violence toward the LGBT Community. We will not let the fact that a significant culture of outright hatred and bigotry toward LGBT persons, most often nourished by religious fundamentalism of various stripes, gives permission for people who share those sentiments to express their hatred more and more vehemently and to perpetrate violence to us. We must NOT let them get away with hatred in the guise of "religious freedom" nor should we ever, ever, let hateful rhetoric overshadow our love. Because the LOVE THAT DARED NOT SPEAK ITS NAME HAS DARED TO DO SO and WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED.

http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/editorials/2016/06/13/easy-weapon-access-lgbt-hate-made-orlando-masacre-possible/85813508/

Mourning The Dead

MOURNING THE DEAD IN ORLANDO FLORIDA. 

AND OUR THOUGHTS ARE WITH THE WOUNDED. 

OUR HEARTS ACHE FOR LOVED ONES AND THE FAMILIES OF THE DEAD AND WOUNDED. 

And I would add so much gratitude for the brave men and women, both civilians and professionals who assisted the wounded without regard for their own lives and safety. 

Truly heroes.

ENOUGH VIOLENCE, ENOUGH HATRED, ENOUGH INTOLERANCE. ENOUGH!

It is time for ALL religious leaders to condemn hatred and violence toward Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Persons WITHOUT RESERVATION 

AND WITH CREDIBLE ACTION. 

IT IS TIME TO LEAVE BEHIND LEVITICUS AND and CORINTHIANS and HEBREWS, and the rest of the biblical poetry,

AND STOP PERSECUTING US.

ENOUGH!

This heinous act may have been inspired by a distorted version of Muslim teaching, but there are distorted versions of Christianity and other religions that inspire hate and violence toward us as well. 

Religions MUST figure out theologies or philosophies that are compatible

 with our inherent dignity as human beings, with our civil rights and with civil respect or 

THEY SHOULD HOLD THEIR PEACE (i.e. shut up). 

ENOUGH! 

We cannot allow religious extremists or even religious conservaives to define the dialogue or the laws or the culture of this diverse nation. 

ENOUGH! 

It is not ENOUGH to PREACH "LOVE"

If religious leaders and other people of faith who have not yet realized that their teachings are dangerous and hurtful, then 

THEY ARE JUST AS RESPONSIBLE FOR THESE TRAGIC DEATHS as the gunman. 

AND THE NRA and all the Republican legislators who they've bought.

BLOOD IS ON THEIR HANDS AS WELL.

WARNING! DANGER AHEAD!

This keeps happening in Republican controlled State Legislatures. They will try anything to turn back LGBT equality and LGBT rights. Now Mississippi!

See JMG here

Yes, I'm also on an "expose North Carolina bigotry" binge. I could be telling you about the wind storms in New Mexico or the Sunday brunch at San Marcos Cafe. Or about the Community Garden in Cochiti Lake or about Leon's job at the Mini-Mart.

But NO, I'm really pissed at the NC legislature and governor. They are backwards thinking bigots in the guise of "Protector of Women in Bathrooms"

A Sign I Can Imagine Being Posted In Pro-LGBT North Carolina Businesses: "We Do Not Serve Bigots Based On Deeply Held Religious Beliefs and You Can't use Our Rest Rooms Either"

The Keep NC Safe group is utterly ludicrous:

See JMG here

From the Huffington Post: A transgender man in Georgia summed up his thoughts on North Carolina’s controversial House Bill 2, the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, which blocks cities from allowing trans people to use public restrooms that correspond with their gender identity.


James Parker Sheffield, 36, sent a clear and direct message to North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory with a snapshot and a simply-worded tweet on March 23.

@PatMcCroryNC It's now the law for me to share a restroom with your wife. #HB2 #trans #NorthCarolina #shameonNC pic.twitter.com/4b4OdmfmeN

— James P Sheffield (@JayShef) March 24, 2016

And there's this:

North Carolina's Anti-Gay Tourism Commercial from Funny Or Die

North Carolina - I Can't Believe I'm Posting About This State Again!

From the editorial board of the New York Times:

 "By promoting the ludicrous idea that transgender women are inherently dangerous, the law endangers citizens who are already disproportionately vulnerable to violence and stigmatization. Transgender men go largely unmentioned in bathroom bill debates, but that could change. James Parker Sheffield, a transgender man with a beard, exposed the foolishness of the law in a tweet to the governor. “It’s now the law for me to share a restroom with your wife,” he wrote, attaching a photo of himself. North Carolina could face serious economic repercussions from the law. It can expect a backlash from leading employers, a potential cut in federal education funding and lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the law."

 

North Carolina's Anti-Gay Tourism Commercial from Funny Or Die