you were wrong cabinet sanchez: Unacceptable.

This post is going to be a collection of this month's stories of gross persecution of homosexuals. This all started this week with Sally Kern and her statements this week. Regardless of your stance on homosexuality, these positions & actions in the following media items are unacceptable and terrifying. The following stories are the end result of legislators like Kern that would move us to a fundamentalist-fascist theocracy. You see it with Ultra Orthodox Jews, with Islamo-fascist Muslims, and many theocrats in America would move us in this direction. I can't get over how disgusting this type of religious bastardization is. We're sadly almost desensitized to statements like Kern's when coming from fundamentalist pastors like Falwell, Swaggert, Dobson, or Hagee but that has to stop and it must be taken seriously because real life people are listening to them and it is bleeding into real life action. Thanks to Kern we can hear what some of the people we've elected to be our voice actually believe. Oklahoma and the rest of America regardless of your stance should send a message to Kern and others like her and remove her from office. This is unacceptable.

In your government:

[please forgive the cheesy photo slideshow attached to the video and just listen to the audio]

In a private address to supporters, Oklahoma State Representative, Sally Kern talks about how 'The Gays' are indoctrinating our children at age two, and are "the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam." Oh and also gayness is a cancer that spreads just like life-threatening toe cancer.

Kern also has advocated as a Rep in the past for an advisory board to ban books in school libraries that teach other faiths, are positive towards homosexuality, or teach evolution and the scientific method. Nice. Crazy-Ass Kern is Texas university-educated and married to a Baptist minister in OK City. Go figure. Terrorism is alive and well in Oklahoma and this time it's not in the form of an explosion at a government building but in the rhetoric of one of its own governors.

"Every thinking citizen of this country should write to Rep. Chris Benge, Speaker of the House for the Oklahoma House of Representatives asking for censure of this terrorist. Free speech is not a license to incite hate and violence, and sadly that is what this ugly oration is all about. Today, in regions all over this country where ignorant people actually accept these stupid lies as having some basis in fact, school-aged boys and girls who may appear a little more feminine or masculine than Sally thinks is appropriate are going to be terrorized by peers who listen to this crap because their parents listen to this crap. And that's just for starters. This type of terrorism is the genesis of all hate crimes from name calling to murder.

George Bush may have had one thing right. The war on terror begins at home. But instead of profiling innocent Americans simply because of their ethnic background, maybe we should start profiling elected officials who make speeches without any academic or factual merit as a means to exploit and manipulate their uneducated constituents. If Oklahoma is where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, perhaps a big gust will sweep Sally Kern out of office and to a place where she can no longer promote hate, violence and bigotry." -kirk snyder

Full Transcript & Speech: http://www.equalrightsproject.com/

EMAIL: sallykern@okhouse.gov

Abroad:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7290330.stm
http://www.cnn.com/CNNI/Programs/middle.east/blog/2008/03/gay-iranian-man-pleads-for-asylum.html

An 19-year old Iranian who dared identify as gay nervously awaits a court ruling that he says could lead to his execution. “Mehdi” was studying English in Britain, when he says he learned his boyfriend back in Tehran had been arrested, charged with sodomy and hanged in 2006. But before the boyfriend was killed, Mehdi says, authorities forced his partner to name past lovers.

Days later, Mehdi’s family claims, Iranian police showed up at their Tehran family home with an arrest warrant. In an asylum claim submitted to Britain’s Home Office, Medhi said if he returns to Iran, he too would be executed.

Britain’s Home Office didn’t buy it. It turned him down – then Mehdi fled for Canada before British officials could deport him to Tehran. But he was stopped by border police in Germany and sent to the Netherlands.

He now sits in a Dutch detention center, where he waits for a judge to decide whether to grant him asylum, or carry out a British extradition request to send him to the U.K.

The British Home Office says it does not believe that homosexuals in Iran are routinely persecuted purely because of their sexuality.

Human rights groups say otherwise, citing that Iran's record is particularly shocking, having executed possibly thousands of gay men since the Islamic revolution. And in these cases Iranian controlled media reports fabricate official charges to reduce any public sympathy for the accused or to mask the killings.

In your backyard:

Nathan Feldman, 30, said Slavic protesters have shoved him and spit on him at gay-pride events. Feldman said he lost his job at a jewelry store after a Ukrainian co-worker discovered he was gay and lied to get him fired. That wasn't all. A vandal scrawled graffiti on a trash dumpster outside his apartment: "Nathan Feldman, Die for AIDS."

Satender Singh, 26, One punch was all it took. One punch to forever divide. One punch to kill a young man.

On a hot summer afternoon along a placid lakefront in the Sacramento suburbs, Satender Singh had come with a group of fellow Fijians to celebrate his promotion at an AT&T call center. Three married couples and Singh, a lighthearted 26-year-old, drank and hooted and danced a crazy conga line to East Indian music.

An innocent outing? Not in the eyes of the Russian family a few picnic tables away.

Andrey Vusik, 29, fresh from morning church services with his young children in tow, stared with disgust as Singh danced and hugged the other men while their wives giggled. To the Russian, Singh seemed rude and inappropriate, a gay man putting on an outrageous public display.

Angry stares led to an afternoon of traded insults. As the long day slid toward dusk, the tall Russian immigrant approached with a friend to demand an apology. Singh refused. Vusik threw a single punch.

Singh's head smacked into a concrete walkway. The joyful young man with the musical laugh died four days later of brain injuries.

Now, half a year after that angry Sunday afternoon at Lake Natoma, 15 miles east of the state Capitol, the case remains anything but resolved.

State Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said in a newspaper opinion piece that "radical fundamentalists" have pinned a bull's-eye on the gay community. "Tragically now, the threat of violence has become reality, as manifested in this murder."

A recent Southern Poverty Law Center report said many of the region's most vocal Slavic activists are followers of an international anti-gay group called Watchmen on the Walls. Formed just a few years ago, the group has established a potent presence among Slavic evangelicals in the U.S. and abroad.

Using battle-tinged rhetoric, the Watchmen have called for evangelicals to step aggressively into the political realm to fight what they see as a gay agenda threatening the traditional family.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hate16mar16,0,1929221.story

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/us/23oxnard.html

Larry (Lawrence King), 15, had said publicly that he was gay, classmates said, enduring harassment from a group of schoolmates, including the 14-year-old boy, Brandon, charged in his death. Larry asked Brandon to be his valentine and the following day the 14-yr-old came to school and shot Larry in the head.

“God knit Larry together and made him wonderfully complex,” the Rev. Dan Birchfield of Westminster Presbyterian Church told the crowd as he stood in front of a large photograph of the victim. “Larry was a masterpiece.”

'Why we can't wait'

Your vote this year has the power to save lives and will affect millions of homosexual people in this country. This is why the Matthew Shepard Act matters, and why a position against it as a Christian is not just debatable but unconscionable...

Hate crimes differ from conventional crime because they are not directed simply at an individual, but are meant to cause fear and intimidation in an entire group or class of people.
All violent crimes are reprehensible, but hate crimes require additional emphasis in the justice system because they target a whole group and not just the individual victim. A violent hate crime is intended to "send a message" that an individual and "their kind" will not be tolerated, many times leaving the victim and others in their group feeling isolated, vulnerable and unprotected. Our justice system should then be able to "send a message" right back that there are not "less than human" unprotected members of society.

The Supreme Court ruled that, "bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest." And stated that, "When the core of a person's identity is attacked, the degradation and dehumanization is especially severe, and additional emotional and physiological problems are likely to result. Society then, in turn, can suffer from the disempowerment of a group of people."

If that all seems too heady, here's the more practical component. Hate crime legislation gives federal authorities greater ability to engage in crime investigations that local authorities choose not to pursue, and allow courts to consider and present motive in cases in which it previously went unheard. It supports appeals from cases dismissed due to local bias or foul-play. There are countless cases of crimes against individuals dismissed or lessened due to bias. Take the Jena 6 story right now. Without hate crime legislation, it is often harder for victims to have recourse when justice isn't served. This is not only sensible but completely necessary and it should undoubtedly apply to sexual orientation considering that 20% of hate crimes apply to it.

The church is moving forward in many of the arenas in which it has exercised poor judgment. The Catholic church recently unveiled its list of "social" sins declaring that the individual not only sins against him/herself but also systemically against portions of society in a globalized world. Even the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention recently stated that on Global Warming that if it didn't change its stance that it would be disregarded as "uncaring, reckless, and ill-informed johnny-come-lately's just as it had during segregation and slavery and that the poor would be the first to suffer. But despite all of this understanding of implication, nearly everyone, even progressive Christian ethics groups like Sojourners are steering clear of "the gay issue" in America. Why? Why can Christian America love anyone except for their gay neighbor (or mexican one for that matter). Why do Christians in America so hate gays? Christians have to step up on this even if they don't agree with homosexuals. The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, demands care for the "other," and declares the ramifications for those who don't. Regardless of an individual's views on the issues, the church has to be out front on human rights abuses. Are murder, violence and abuse ever acceptable toward anyone? Even more fundamental: Is Love Conditional? These shouldn't be a question the church is allowing to go unanswered. You can't play neutral on this one and come out clean.