I'm a hockey fan. A big one. I could go on and on about why I think my Buffalo Sabres could make a run this year, but I'll skip that for now.
When I was a kid, several Sabres were my favorite people on planet Earth. Cooler than the Power Rangers. Dominik Hasek. Michael Peca. Rob Ray. I followed their every move and watched every game I could. I can honestly say I looked up to them.
Earlier this week, Philadelphia Flyers player Wayne Simmonds called New York Rangers forward and marriage equality advocate Sean Avery a "f-cking faggot."
Now, when Lakers player Kobe Bryant did this a few months ago, the NBA swiftly verbally disciplined him and handed him a $100,000 fine. Kobe apologized. A model of a mistake and a correction.
This case? The NHL comes up with a lame excuse about how it wasn't verified by the refs and Simmonds glosses over what he did. Thing is, video can be found below:
Unless he was using a different language, it's clear evidence of what he said.
RT @couragecampaign Fight homophobia in sports! Tell @NHL to discipline Wayne Simmonds. Sign here: bit.ly/pOD4AP
This stuff matters. Why? Google Wayne Simmonds and you'll see this is on ESPN, USA Today, Huffington Post. There are kids watching who don't think calling someone "faggot" matters. There are parents watching who think it's no big deal for their kids to use that kind of language. Culture and sports set a tone. ESPN's Johnette Howard gets it right in this piece looking at the history here. The NBA set the bar. The NHL isn't living up to it. For all the impact of "It Gets Better" videos, it would be nice to start with the source of the bullying and get it right from the start, wouldn't it?
Being a Christian doesn't mean you're a homophobic miscreant. My sister is a pretty devout Christian who believes people have a right to be who they are, gay or straight. However, there's a dark shroud that covers some members of the extreme religious right. I simply don't understand the hatred they feel towards the gay community. I know it can make you some big bucks via the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell route and they blamed 9/11 partially on the gays so I guess the the cash is enticing to some.
When trying to figure out where presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) gets her stringent, anti-gay views, you only have to look as far as her husband. Dr. Marcus Bachmann, who has described himself as his wife’s “strategist,” runs a Christian-based counseling center in Minnesota that has been rumored to offer reparative treatment for those looking to “ungay” themselves.
Just last summer, Dr. Bachmann explained his position on homosexuality while offering theoretical advice to parents concerned that one of their children was gay.
BACHMANN: We have to understand: barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. Just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to go down that road. That’s what is called the sinful nature. We have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings from moving into the action steps…
And let’s face it: what is our culture, what is our public education system doing today? They are giving full, wide-open doors to children, not only giving encouragement to think it but to encourage action steps. That’s why when we understand what truly is the percentage of homosexuals in this country, it is small. But by these open doors, I can see and we are experiencing, that it is starting to increase.
Let's educate them straight. That's the ticket. If the MSM reports on this I'd look for Michele to say she doesn't share the exact views of her husband and she shouldn't be judged by his words. Only we have her words and actions on her anti-Gay agenda:
Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, who will officially announce her run for president Monday, said today she would support a federal constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and woman, thereby overturning New York's new law legalizing gay marriage.
In 2003, after the Massachusetts Supreme Court issued its famous ruling permitting gay marriage, Bachmann proposed an amendment to the Minnesota constitution banning gay marriage — despite the fact that the state legislature had already passed a law making same-sex unions illegal. Even the politicians who were sufficiently gay-phobic to have passed the original anti-marriage law were floored by the brazen pointlessness of Bachmann's bill. "It's unnecessary, it's redundant, it's duplicative," said Assistant Senate Majority Leader Ann Rest.
She's long held these views and seems to have worked harder in the Minnesota legislature at passing anti gay initiatives than she ever did on any bill since being elected to Congress.
We've reported previously about how Republicans in Montana's Legislature, completely overrun by some of the most extremist of all the Tea Party elements, have been going nuts this session, passing a variety of bills that have been so obviously unconstitutional and frivolous (not to mention downright insane) that last week the Democratic governor felt compelled to make a very public display of his vetoes -- with a branding iron.
But the problem isn't merely with the legislation they're passing. There's also a problem with the legislation they're refusing to pass.
The legislature's inaction was not, it turns out, another non-priority falling off the too-long to-do list. Rather, it's homophobic lawmakers subtly suggesting that homosexual acts should still be outlawed, the Supreme Court—and equal rights in general—be damned. In fact, at least one lawmaker, Rep. Ken Peterson, R-Billings, an attorney, argues that the archaic law may still apply in certain situations.
Which situations? According to Peterson, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, there are at least two prosecutable offenses—felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. One is the "recruitment" of non-gays. "Homosexuals can't go out into the heterosexual community and try to recruit people, or try to enlist them in homosexual acts," Peterson says. He provides an example: "'Here, young man, your hormones are raging. Let's go in this bedroom, and we'll engage in some homosexual acts. You'll find you like it.'" Peterson hasn't actually seen this happen, he says, because "I don't associate with that group of people at all... I've associated with mainstream people all my life."
The other offense, in Peterson's legal opinion, is the public display of homosexuality, since he believes the Supreme Court's decision only applies to private acts behind closed doors. Being gay in public, he says, is a wholly different matter:
"In my mind, if they were engaging in acts in public that could be construed as homosexual, it would violate that statute. It has to be more than affection. It has to be overt homosexual acts of some kind or another... If kissing goes to that extent, yes. If it's more than that, yes."
Peterson says the law in question, which was ruled unconstitutional in 1997, still has merits. He says the Montana Supreme Court's decision had a narrow scope limiting prosecution only in private settings.
"I feel the law can still have some potential application," he said Friday, "I don't think it was repealed with the Grayson case, anyone that says it was repealed hasn't read the case and doesn't understand the case."
He says gays and lesbians can and should be prosecuted for overt sexual acts in public, and for "recruiting" members of the straight community.
However, he also tried to claim that he did not say something that he in fact plainly said:
Sometimes I feel like I write the same story over and over again, but just substitute another name. A Conservative Pastor named Grant Storms, who made a career out of attacking Gays in the French Quarter was arrested on charges that appear to make him one sick man.
The Rev. Grant Storms, the Christian fundamentalist known for his bullhorn protests of the Southern Decadence festival in the French Quarter, was arrested on a charge of masturbating at a Metairie park Friday afternoon. Storms, 53, of 2304 Green Acres Road in Metairie, was taken into custody at Lafreniere Park after two women reported seeing him masturbating in the driver's seat of his van, which was parked near the carousel and playground, a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office report said.
The first woman told deputies she was taking her children to the playground and parked next to the van at about noon. As she was walking around her own vehicle, she noticed the van windows were down and the occupant was "looking at the playground area that contained children playing, with his zipper down...," the report said. The woman noted that he was masturbating and quickly ushered her children out of her car. She told a second woman, who walked to the van and also spotted the man masturbating, the report said. The second witness told deputies that the driver saw her and tried to conceal the zipper area of his pants with his hand...
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Storms told deputies he was having lunch at the park when he decided to urinate using a bottle instead of the restroom, the report said.
Deputies booked him with obscenity. Bond was set at $5,000, but he was released from the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center in Gretna on Sunday because of jail crowding.
Storms could not be reached for comment on Monday.
A self-styled "Christian patriot," Storms led a small West Bank congregation called The Reformer Church and for 10 years hosted "The Reformer Radio Show" on WSHO. Storms has railed against the Roman Catholic church, calling it "satanic" and "demonic."
He is especially known for arming followers with bullhorns, Bibles and picket signs to protest Southern Decadence, the three-day gay festival held in the French Quarter during Labor Day weekend. Storms grabbed national attention in 2003 with his failed attempts to shut down what Southern Decadence organizer Chuck Robinson called a peaceful festival that celebrates gay and alternative lifestyles. read on
Bill O'Reilly tells his audience that being part of the Family Values team makes it harder for Republicans to live up to their Conservative, right wing religious platform and that's why so many fall. Yea, that explains hanging out in front of a park and jerking off.
NEW ORLEANS — The conservative pastor known for his condemnation of the Southern Decadence Festival was tearful and apologetic Tuesday in discussing his recent arrest. …
Storms said in a news conference Tuesday that he was not watching the children, but he did have his hand in his pants. He apologized to those he has hurt, and he said he was sorry for targeting Decadence, an annual gay festival in the French Quarter.
Storms said he is seeking help for a problem with pornography, which he called a recent issue. He also said he is not living at home — he held the news conference from a motel — and he asked for the media to respect his privacy.
Sorry, this story is sickening, but their hypocrisy must be covered. Too many of these gay bashers and phony Christian Patriots are given a big platform to pollute our airwaves with hate and filth.
There are small evils and big ones. Focus on the Family is, in my view, a big one. Besides promoting child-beating as a method of keeping your little darlings in line, they are the most homophobic people on the planet. Dobson (even though he is no longer affiliated with them in an official capacity) made a point out of doing everything he could possibly do to make gays and lesbians look like Satan.
As kids head back to school, conservative Christian media ministry Focus on the Family perceives a bully on the playground: national gay-advocacy groups.
School officials allow these outside groups to introduce policies, curriculum and library books under the guise of diversity, safety or bullying-prevention initiatives, said Focus on the Family education expert Candi Cushman.
"We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled," Cushman said.
Public schools increasingly convey that homosexuality is normal and should be accepted, Cushman said, while opposing viewpoints by conservative Christians are portrayed as bigotry.
In case you haven't seen what happens when children are taught that homosexuality isn't normal and shouldn't be accepted, let me introduce you to the story of Lawrence King.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is feeling bullied by gays. Not because they want equal protection under the law, not because they object to institutional discrimination against them, but because, well...they act gay.
Doesn't this seem a little bit similar to those folks who look illegal? Rep. King thinks they do it to entrap good people into discrimination lawsuits and things.
If people wear their sexuality on their sleeve, then they want to bring litigation against someone that they would point their finger at and say “you discriminate,” it is an entrapment that is legalized by the ENDA Act, it appears to, and its a violation of the individual rights of employers to, at their own discretion, decide who they want to hire and who they want to fire. We don’t need more federal mandates. And we surely don’t need a political statement, and that’s what this is, too. This is the homosexual activist lobby taking it out on the rest of society. They are demanding affirmation for their lifestyle. That’s at the bottom of this.
OH, that must be why axe murderers don't wear bloody rags on their sleeve. They don't really care much about affirmation for their lifestyle. Or serial killers. They probably don't either.
I mean, come on. This is about as stupid, ignorant and wrong-headed as it gets. What I pull out of King's little rant is that he thinks gays are second class citizens, they're united in some kind of subversive plot to distract us all from matters of concern to their own agenda, and if they'd JUST KEEP THEIR DAMN GAYNESS IN THE CLOSET IT WOULD BE JUST FINE.
You know what? People who make stupid statements like King's are usually in the closet themselves and hate their own reluctance to come out. People are people. I don't care who they love, sleep with, have coffee with or work with, as long as they add something to this collection of human beings we call society.
More fundamentally, because they ARE people and they ARE citizens they are entitled to equal protection and treatment under the law, because that, Rep. King, is what being true to the Constitution really means.
And while we're on the subject of stupid comments about being gay, can someone please explain to me why the question of Elena Kagan's sexuality is relevant to her qualifications for the Supreme Court? (Yes, I *am* looking over at Andrew Sullivan)
Be gay, look gay. Be gay, look straight. Be gay, be single. Be gay, be married. But please, whatever it is, let it be an individual's choice.
This is just an odd story all the way round, but made odder by the notion that the failing Newsweek is actually being read at all. On a web-exclusive op-ed on April 26th, entertainment writer Ramin Setoodeh opined that while straight men could convincingly pass for gay in various entertainment projects, gay men are not convincing playing straight.
For decades, Hollywood has kept gay actors—Tab Hunter, Van Johnson, Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, etc.—in the closet, to their own personal detriment. The fear was, if people knew your sexual orientation, you could never work again. Thankfully, this seems ridiculous in the era of Portia de Rossi and Neil Patrick Harris. But the truth is, openly gay actors still have reason to be scared. While it's OK for straight actors to play gay (as Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger did in Brokeback Mountain), it's rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse. De Rossi and Harris do that on TV, but they also inhabit broad caricatures, not realistic characters likes the ones in Up in the Air or even The Proposal. Last year, Rupert Everett caused a ruckus when he told the Guardian that gay actors should stay in the closet. "The fact is," he said, "that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the ... film business." Is he just bitter or honest? Maybe both.
Most actors would tell you that the biographical details of their lives are beside the point. Except when they're not. As viewers, we are molded by a society obsessed with dissecting sexuality, starting with the locker-room torture in junior high school. Which is why it's a little hard to know what to make of the latest fabulous player to join Glee: Jonathan Groff, the openly gay Broadway star.[Nicole: shown in the video above dancing with co-star Lea Michele] In Spring Awakening, he showed us that he was a knockout singer and a heartthrob. But on TV, as the shifty glee captain from another school who steals Rachel's heart, there's something about his performance that feels off. In half his scenes, he scowls—is that a substitute for being straight? When he smiles or giggles, he seems more like your average theater queen, a better romantic match for Kurt than Rachel. It doesn't help that he tried to bed his girlfriend while singing (and writhing to) Madonna's Like a Virgin. He is so distracting, I'm starting to wonder if Groff's character on the show is supposed to be secretly gay.
Setoodeh also had some bitchy things to say about the newly openly out Sean Hayes in his turn as the male lead in Promises, Promises on Broadway, something his co-star, Kristin Chenoweth, took great umbrage at and wrote a slamming letter about. Ironically, Setoodeh is gay himself, which adds a particularly self-loathing aspect to the article. Understandably, people were upset at Setoodeh's article and wrote in vociferously, to which Setoodeh responded somewhat disingenuously:
Over the weekend, I became the subject of a lot of vicious attacks. I received e-mails that said I will be fired, anonymous phone calls on my cell phone and a creepy letter at my home. Several blogs posted my picture, along with a link to my Twitter feed. People commented about my haircut, and that was only the beginning. I was compared to Ann Coulter and called an Uncle Tom. Someone described me as a "self-hating Arab" that should be writing about terrorism (I'm an American, born in Texas, of Iranian descent).
But what all this scrutiny seemed to miss was my essay's point: if an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet today, would we still accept him as a heterosexual leading man? It's hard to say, because no actor like that exists. I meant to open a debate—why is that? And what does it say about our notions about sexuality? For all the talk about progress in the gay community in Hollywood, has enough really changed? The answer seems obvious to me: no, it has not.
Call me sensitive, but slamming gay actors for being "queeny" and "unconvincing" doesn't lend itself to a in-depth or enlightened discussion Setoodeh claims he wanted. Now Glee creator Ryan Murphy has called for a boycott:
The most recent addition to the carnage is from Glee creator Ryan Murphy, who has written an open letter calling for the boycott of Newsweek until an apology is issued. In it, Murphy says, “This article is as misguided as it is shocking and hurtful.” He condemns Newsweek as well for their publishing the article in the first place saying, “Would the magazine have published an article where the author makes a thesis statement that minority actors should only be allowed and encouraged to play domestics? I think not.” Murphy then extended an invitation to Setoodah to visit Glee’s writers room, see how they do things, and to take home a copy of Glee covering Madonna’s Open Your Heart , calling it “a song you should play in your house and car on repeat.”
To avoid Constance McMillen bringing a female date to her prom, the teen was sent to a "fake prom" while the rest of her class partied at a secret location at an event organized by parents.
McMillen tells The Advocate that a parent-organized prom happened behind her back — she and her date were sent to a Friday night event at a country club in Fulton, Miss., that attracted only five other students. Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn't much to keep an eye on.
"They had two proms and I was only invited to one of them," McMillen says. "The one that I went to had seven people there, and everyone went to the other one I wasn’t invited to."
Last week McMillen asked one of the students organizing the prom for details about the event, and was directed to the country club. "It hurts my feelings," McMillen says.Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. "They had the time of their lives," McMillen says. "That's the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn't have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom]."
What a despicable place to live in. Are these people actually Americans? The cruelty TeH adults inflict on TeH Gays is very sad. American Exceptionalism, indeed.
Itawamba Agricultural High School student Constance McMillen is a hero. She's paid a tremendous cost at the age of 18, no less, for standing up to the bigotry in her hometown over this debacle of attending the school prom with her girlfriend.
How many of our professional gays have put themselves on the line for equality like this? Not to take away from the work orgs do, but it's acts like Constance's that show how one individual can expose and challenge ignorance and fear. The average gay person living in flyover country is bolstered by courageous efforts to simply be treated equally in a hostile environment. It's a sobering thought that she stood up to fight against an ENTIRE TOWN. No one stepped in to tell her about the fake prom, not even any of her peers. That's immense peer pressure to avoid any support of TEH GAY at any cost in Fulton, Mississippi.
She lost, but she actually won - respect and support from around the country, as well as legal help from the ACLU. She didn't back down or hide.
Video Clip O' Fun: Da Ali G Show 
