CRANE’s February events on Valentine’s Day and challenging the “ex-gay” ministries of Focus on the Family and Exodus International were a resounding success!
Dozens of community members — mostly youth — turned out to speak to hundreds of passers-by in Uptown Charlotte on Feb. 14. Fifty or more people attended Wayne Besen’s presentation “Pray Away the Gay” on Thursday, Feb. 19 at the Community Center. A Feb. 20 press conference led to headlines that evening on the local TV news stations. Fifty to sixty community members turned out to protest the Love Won Out conference on Saturday.
CRANE’s work in the community and with the media spawned wonderful discussion on issues of LGBT equality, faith and religion.
CRANE hopes this isn’t the end. Our planning group will be meeting to put a future plan in place. We’re all looking forward to our next great venture. We hope you’ll join us.
repost:
While we slumber, the Right attacks…
by: MauraHennessey
Wed Feb 25, 2009 at 23:01:39 PM EST
While we are slumbering complacently and waiting for Obama’s agenda for us to begin, the Right has launched its’ attack upon ENDA. Now is the time for us to start to be far more pro-active, to begin the campaign for equality in earnest. We need to march, to speak, to write, to record and to have our message and our cause in the public forum.
The Anti-Prop 8 marches and protests in the wake of our Election Day defeats earned positive notice; now is not the time to sit idly while the Right has been attacking at multiple places and on multiple issues vital to LGBT citizens.
Nor is it now the time for any LGBT Neville Chamberlains to attempt to appease the Right through negotiations that bargain away our full citizenship and true equality. Any concessions that we make, any surrender of the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the Republic but still unrecognised due to the opposition of the reactionaries will only become a springboard from which they will cut even more deeply into our very personhood.
A spokesperson for the reactionary Right made an extraordinary statement in Colorado yesterday, extraordinary in that it was a true, undisguised expression of the feelings of our opponents about us and about their ultimate plans for our fate. That fate is death, annihilation. This ought to be no surprise for anyone familiar with the agenda of the reactionaries; it was published decades ago and has been expounded upon and commented upon many times since.
We stand as a bulwark against them, some of the few Americans truly familiar with the destiny that the opponents of democracy and civil liberty would inflict upon the American Nation as a whole were they ever to gain unbridled power. Divorced and Remarried Americans, Women who exercise reproductive choice, Gay and Lesbian Americans sentenced to death by public stoning, the disenfranchisement of over 70% of the nation, an end to any realistic democracy and the imposition of the most draconian measures inflicted upon a people in the Western Hemisphere since the arrival of the Conquistadors.
MauraHennessey :: While we slumber, the Right attacks…
But like England in the late 1930’s, we are sitting back, listening to the clock mark the wasted minutes and watching the calendar mark the wasted days and weeks despite repeated warnings from some of our ranks and from our opponents who have made their intentions and agenda clear long ago. While we laugh and congratulate ourselves over the weakness of the religious extremists in Massachusetts, they are preparing to block moves in cities, counties, and states that would have brought us closer to a realistic full citizenship.
How realistic is the threat? We lost issues, major issues, in four states on the very day that Barack Obama was elected President. In four American states, a blastocyst has or will have more rights as a person than does a breathing LGBT individual. Courts refuse to dismiss “gay panic” or “trans-panic” defences, allowing us to be murdered with only inconvienience imposed upon the loathesome monsters who cull our ranks. The illness of Justice Ginsberg and the unpredictability of Justice Kennedy, along with the determined opposition of Justices Scalia and Alito, make it possible that even Lawrence hangs in the balance if challenged.
How prepared are we? Poorly, if at all. The last ENDA episode opened wide cracks in the masonry of unity that is our only hope. The trans-community, itself riven by internal dissention, mistrusts the LGB leadership after the Munich-like attempts to buy an ENDA by accomodating social prejudice and propitiating our oppressors. Secular LGBT’s resent the devil’s bargain made to exempt large portions of America from respecting our equality upon ‘religious grounds.’ Feminist Lesbians are daemonised by trans-people, and separatist Lesbians continue to deny the identity of the trans community. Conservative G/L’s, seemingly insulated from major discrimination by money and position, remain self-hypnotised by their pleasant dream of convincing reactionaries and Domionists that they are somehow different than the rest of us and undeserving of our fate.
By and large, we remain addicted to the opiate provided by press releases from our representative organisations that we are making progress, that our power increases, that things are going well. Our radicalism was quelled by the hesitant leadership of our community who were frightened by the prospect of a backlash that came anyways propelled by fictitious stories as much as they are frightened of the prospect of the movement changing suddenly from lobbying genteely and unseen over cocktails to an in-the-streets demands and visibility tactic.
Meanwhile, the Right is on the move and on the attack. They are likely banking upon the prospect of either a worsening of the economy or an inadequate degree of recovery possibly coupled with an act of terrorist on American soil to provide the emotional leverage to take back both houses of Congress on the Federal level while playing upon sexual and racial prejudices on the local level.
It is easy to dismiss the Right as extremists who will scare off the public. Lies, though, will decrease the fear of them and increase the fear of us, and lies have been their stock in trade throughout their war upon us.
We still have time to act, but no time to waste. The public needs to hear from us, see us, and learn the truth of our dreams, our desires and our cause. For in the end, we have common cause with any freedom loving American. We fight to protect that freedom, a freedom that the religious reactionary Right has been conspiring to destroy for nearly forty years. We fight to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against dangerous ideologues, Domionists and would be tyrants…..but only if we can awake finally from the self-satisfied slumber and fight.