The Tennessee Schools Cooperative has been using an internet blocking service to exclude LGBT educational websites. The ACLU has given them until April 29 to show good faith in a plan to restore access to the educational sites or face legal action. Sites blocked include: Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, Human Rights Campaign, Marriage Equality USA. Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry,The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and Dignity USA.

Having gay issues websites blocked at schools while allowing access to anti-gay propaganda sites should leave parents wondering what other social issues the State sponsored censorship has distorted towards the extreme right.

In a paper entitled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” the Department of Homeland Security deliniates the threat of right wing hate groups to the stability of the nation. But we knew that!

“Paralleling the current national climate, rightwing extremists during the 1990s exploited a variety of social issues and political themes… such as abortion, inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage. During the 1990s, these issues contributed to the growth in the number of domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups”. (Emphasis mine.)

No wonder. “Under the obamanation presently entrenched in the White House and his demonic entourage…,” writes a poster on a popular mainstream religious forum.

The Homeland Security document forewarns the political and social backlash of the recent election:

“Rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda, …..”

Again.

We knew that.

The Family Leave Insurance Act of 2009 will amend the Family and Medical Leave Act to provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave benefits to workers who need to care for an ill domestic partner or child of a domestic partner, in addition to family members hitherto recognized under FMLA.

Under the new law, once passed, benefits provided by such forward thinking companies as Eastman Kodak, Imation Corp, and Hewlett-Packard, will become available to the rest of the nation.

I have among my toys an item called the Chelsea Filter, from the time when I was a jeweler. It is a round object resembling a small magnifying glass and it contains a flat disc of dark green glass. Of course if one views something green with it, a green sapphire, for instance, it looks like a shadow. Most emeralds appear as shadows. The exception is the Muzo emerald that appears bright red. Now If I went about my life with Chelsea Filters in my eyeglasses I could spend my life never seeing anything green except the occasional Muzo emerald.

Let’s say my sin is green.

Now my neighbor goes about his life wearing rose colored glasses. His sin is rose colored. And yes of course he sees green so he is quite certain that he sees my sin. But since he sees it through rose colored glasses he doesn’t see it as green. So he doesn’t see my real sin. He sees his perception of it.

I, too, see his sin but since I’m looking through green glass so I don’t see its rose color, I see it a different way.

We are both about to throw stones at one another when we stumble upon the Muzo emerald. I say “stumbled” because it is huge.

Because of the presence of chromium in this particular emerald I see it as bright red. To me it is the same color as my sinful neighbor. To him it looks the color of me. We are no longer willing to start casting stones but rather to run from the thing as fast as possible.

But then our Guardian Angels smack us each on the back of the head and our glasses fall off.

We realize that we have discovered the most valuable emerald in the world, board the plane out of Bogata, and live in great wealth, as comrades, after all.

The Family Life Network in Uganda held a three day conference on March 5-8 inviting noted American homophobes to share their hate. In Uganda being gay is a crime and those convicted of the crime of homosexuality are jailed. Dr. James Nsaba Buturo, the Minister of Ethics and Integrity, seeks to broaden the scope of crimes covered. Executive Director of Family Life Network Stephen Langa has proposed legislation that would force those convicted of the crime of homosexuality into Reparative Therapy.

For those of you unfamiliar with Reparative Therapy it falls into the same category of theories as Flat Earth and Creationism. Its proponents purport to have the ability to change sexual orientation. Most of the organizations that support these views have a veneer of Christianity.

Scott Lively founder of Abiding Truth Ministries participated in the conference. Afterward he was quoted as saying:

“I don’t think under the circumstances homosexuality should be decriminalized in Uganda since it seems to be the only thing stopping the international “gay” juggernaut from turning Uganda into another Brazil.”

Mr. Lively is the author of The Pink Swastika, a book that suggests that the Holocaust was orchestrated by gay people. He shared the spotlight with Caleb Lee Brundidge, of Extreme Prophetic Ministry in Phoenix, Arizona and Don Schmierer, of the “ex-gay” organization, Exodus International.

My head is still reeling and I’m trying to catch my breath. I guess I’d better start applying to colleges. He wants every citizen to go back to school. I wonder if this means I can hang out at coffee houses and smoke Afghani hash. Um, sorry. But that’s what college meant back in the day.

Groovy!

I’m waiting for the transcript to be published before I say too much.

Did he really say he was going to cure cancer????

I haven’t heard these Utopian dreams since the summer of ‘72.

Wow. Clean energy that is renewable and sustainable, health care reform (this year!), everybody gets an education. I don’t know what I sucked in but I’m afraid to exhale.

I think I can make it now. The pain is gone. Happy Fat Tuesday everybuddy. It’s a bright sun shiny day:

I knew it was gonna be a good day when my roux didn’t burn and my gumbo wasn’t too spicy.

I don’t understand why the good folk at the Sun are surprised that the residents of Mount Vernon are giving this project a thumbs up.

Homeless Shelter planned for 620 Fallsway

Opposition to this should be expected from some business owners and political types that are well connected to the real estate community. The proximity of homeless folk inevitably effects property values, true. But property value is just a number in a ledger, so who cares?

I guess it matters if you’re a real estate developer or investor. And guilt by association might attach to a politician beholdin’ to such as them. It might matter to a fat-cat banker whose Cheshire grin fades at the thought of collateral losing its liquidity. But for those of us who live here because it is culturally, economically, and sexually diverse it matters little. We plan to stay.

The Sun’s label of Mount Vernon as “one of the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods,” is lost on us. The only true and telling word in that phrase is “neighborhood.” Most of us live here for that sense of neighborhood that would be lost if it became all white bread, gentrified, bourgeois.

Unbridled capitalism, and the greed that it engenders, has brought our nation down to near collapse. The drug trade, at the urban level, is nothing more than laissez-faire Capitalism without the boardrooms; and that is the scourge of our city.

The homeless are not our enemy. Our enemy is the culture we have built that makes homelessness possible. The “not in my neighborhood” mentality towards the homeless is doubly offensive when it is mouthed by folk who paint themselves as liberal or progressive.

Some of the stuff that comes out of the mouths of congresspersons makes me fear for the future of America.

Most of you either know or could guess that I’m a left wing radical revolutionary from way back. I don’t have much sympathy for the bourgeois class that have led this country into financial ruin. That said, the petite bourgeoisie that inhabit the halls of congress are more to blame than the fat cats. After all, a fat cat’s job is to get fat.

On Wednesday they were grilling the CEO’s of eight of America’s top banks. Here Keith Ellison chastises the banks for lobbying. His view is that since the banks have received federal funds they should relinqiush their right to participate in the political process.

I understand Mr. Ellison’s support of the rights of workers, and I share them. Nevertheless, his view that the opposition is not entitled to lobby against it is ludicrous. I wonder what view the congressman would take if a conservative were to suggest that folks on welfare should give up the vote until they payback all the taxpayer money they accepted?

Meanwhile Congressman Joe Donnelly is whining that folks in his home town can’t borrow money to buy recreational vehicles. I understand that  Elkhart Indiana depends on the recreational vehicle industry for jobs. But let’s get real folks: They guzzle fossil fuels and they are toys. At least buggy whips, in their day, served a legitimate role in the transportation infrastructure.

Another congressional whiz kid asked the bankers questions about the Gold Standard!

Whatever they smoke in those hallowed chambers should be shared with the people. Groovy hallucinations should not be reserved for the elite.

The nominally Christian right has an uncanny ability to confuse their self-righteousness with righteousness, especially it seems, when it comes to gay folk. This is clear in the current controversy concerning the right wing challenge to California’s Political Reform Act of 1974. For over thirty years this law has required disclosure of financial donations over $100.00 to political campaigns.

ProtectMarriage.com, an organization that attempts to protect heterosexual families only, had asked the court to keep the names of donors to the Proposition 8 campaign undisclosed. Their argument being that disclosure put their financial backers at risk of reprisal. The U.S. District Court judge who heard the case was Morrison England Jr., an appointee of George W. Bush. Among other things his credits include being member of the Judge Advocate Generals Corp for the United States Army Reserve from 1988 through 2002 and he held the rank of Major.

Plaintiffs alleged that, as a consequence of their support of Proposition 8, their contributors have been subject to threats, reprisals, and harassment. They failed to show that these actions were a direct result of disclosure, however. Indeed most of the examples they reported were public and open in their opposition to gay rights. Among them were an attorney who wrote articles in favor of H8 and a Pastor who gave sermons in favor of H8, hardly folks who might suffer from financial disclosure alone.

The Judge had a similar view. “The court finds that the state is not facilitating retaliation by compelling disclosure,” he said, and he denied the request for anonymity. Contribution information is freely available on the State of California’s official website.

Meanwhile the opponents of disclosure have their panties twisted over the website eightmaps.com, that shows the same information on a Google map.

Though the information available at the eightmaps website is also available on line from the website of the Secretary of State of California, and with more detailed information than the maps, the opponents of disclosure are imagining a queer conspiracy.

The goal of the state, as clarified in Judge England’s January 29, decision to keep the records public, was to protect the interest of the citizens. He wrote that:

“…, the Court simply cannot ignore the fact that numerous of the acts about which Plaintiffs’ complain are mechanisms relied upon, both historically and lawfully, to voice dissent. The decision and ability to patronize a particular establishment or business is an inherent right of the American people, and the public has historically remained free to choose where to, or not to, allocate its economic resources. As such, individuals have repeatedly resorted to boycotts as a form of civil protest intended to convey a powerful message without resort to non-violent means.”

I agree that some of the actions of our community have been distasteful and in some cases, perhaps, unlawful. But I am not aware that those actions arose directly from financial disclosure. “Indeed, it is unclear” wrote Judge England, how “‘uninhibited, robust, and wideopen’ speech can occur when organizations hide themselves from the scrutiny of the voting public….”

A bill aimed at banning gay marriage in Wyoming has been defeated in the House last week after a mere hour of debate. Despite strong opposition and activism from the usual suspects wiser minds prevailed. Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign said, “We are grateful that the Wyoming House of Representatives stood up for equality and refused to write discrimination into the state Constitution.”

Meanwhile in Vermont the effort to legalize same sex marriage has been renewed with a broad based support that was lacking two years ago.

Here at home Gov. Martin O’Malley’s proposal to extend health care benefits to domestic partners of state employees is being well received both within and outside of the GLBT community. The Baltimore Sun estimates a cost of from one to three million dollars. That sounds like a wild guess to me. But whatever it costs we can chalk it up to the price of justice; a bargain at any price.

My suggestion: Let’s finance it by taking away the tax exempt status of hate groups masquerading as religious organizations!

Now wasn’t that easy?