Produced by Jesse Freeston.

Eve, who asked that her real name and age remain confidential, spent two years in prison. During her time behind bars she was raped and contracted HIV. Upon release, she was forced to register in the state’s sex offender database. The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license. “I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status on the database stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.”

Now Eve is one of nine plaintiffs fighting the law in a federal civil rights complaint that advocates hope will finally put this official discrimination to an end.

This legal action comes in the context of increased scrutiny from the federal government over the conduct of the New Orleans Police Department. A US Justice Department investigation of the NOPD, released today, found “reasonable cause to believe that patterns and practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas,” including “racial and ethnic profiling and lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) discrimination.”

Punishing Women

Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons. As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution, including requiring those convicted to register as sex offenders in a public database. Advocates say the law has further isolated poor women of color in particular, including those who are forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night.

In 2003, the Supreme Court outlawed sodomy laws with its decision in Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling should have invalidated Louisiana’s law entirely. Instead, the state has chosen to only enforce the portion of the law that concerns “solicitation” of a crime against nature. The decision on whether to charge accused sex workers with a felony instead of Louisiana’s misdemeanor prostitution law is left entirely in the hands of police and prosecutors.

“This leaves the door wide open to discriminatory enforcement targeting poor black women, transgender women, and gay men for a charge that carries much harsher penalties,” says police misconduct attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie, a co-counsel in a new federal lawsuit challenging the statute.

A media-fueled national panic about child molesters has brought sex offender registries to every state. But advocates warn that, across the U.S., these registries have been used disproportionately against African Americans and other communities of color, and are often used for purposes outside of their original intent. Louisiana, however, is the only state in the U.S. that requires people who have been convicted of crimes that do not involve minors or sexual violence to register as sex offenders.

In 1994, Congress passed Megan’s Law, also known as the Wetterling Act, which mandated that states create systems for registering sex offenders. The act was amended in 1996 to require public disclosure of the names on the registries and again in 2006 to require sex offenders stay in the public registry for at least 15 years.

Megan’s Law was clearly not targeted at prostitution. However, Louisiana lawmakers opted to apply the registry to the crimes against nature statute as well, and at that moment started down the path to a new level of punishment for sex work. “This archaic law is being used to mark people with modern day scarlet letter,” says attorney Alexis Agathocleus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, another party in the lawsuit.

People convicted under the Louisiana law must carry a state ID with the words “sex offender” printed below their name. If they have to evacuate because of a hurricane, they must stay in a special shelter for sex offenders that has no separate facilities for men and women. They have to pay a $60 annual registration fee, in addition to $250 to $750 to print and mail postcards to their neighbors every time they move. The post cards must show their names and addresses, and often they are required to include a photo. Failing to register and pay the fees, a separate crime, can carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

Women and men on the registry will also find their names, addresses, and convictions printed in the newspaper and published in an online sex offender database. The same information is also displayed at public sites like schools and community centers. Women — including one mother of three — have complained that because of their appearance on the registry, they have had men come to their homes demanding sex. A plaintiff in the suit had rocks thrown at her by neighbors. “This has forced me to live in poverty, be on food stamps and welfare,” explains a man who was on the list. “I’ve never done that before.”

In Orleans Parish, 292 people are on the registry for selling sex, versus 85 people convicted of forcible rape and 78 convicted of “indecent behavior with juveniles.” Almost 40 percent of those registered in Orleans Parish are there solely because they were accused of offering anal or oral sex for money. Seventy-five percent of those on the database for Crime Against Nature are women, and 80 percent are African American. Evidence gathered by advocates suggests a majority are poor or indigent.

Legal advocates credit on-the-ground organizing and the advocacy of the group Women With A Vision (WWAV) for making them aware of this discriminatory law. WWAV, a 20-year-old New Orleans-based organization, provides health care and other services to women involved in survival sex work. “Many of these women are survivors of rape and domestic violence themselves,” says WWAV executive director Deon Haywood. “Yet they are being treated as predators.”

Plaintiffs Tell Their Stories

Ian, another plaintiff in the legal challenge to the Crime Against Nature statute, was homeless from the age of 13, and began trading sex for survival. When an undercover officer approached him and asked him for sex, Ian asked for money. “All I said was $50,” he says, “And they put me away for four years.”

In prison, Ian was raped by a correction officer and by other prisoners, and like Eve, he contracted HIV. Now, he says, potential employers see the words “sex offender” written on his ID and no one will hire him. “Do I deserve to be punished any more than I’ve already been punished?” he asks. “I was 13 years old. That’s the only way I knew how to survive.”

Hiroke, a New Orleans resident and another plaintiff in the suit, spoke on a call set up by advocates. “I had just graduated from high school and was just coming out as transgender,” she says. Hiroke was arrested and convicted while still a teenager. As she began to describe her experience, Hiroke’s voice began to shake. “I was being held with men in jail at the time…” she began. Then there was silence on the line. Holding back tears, she then apologized for being unable to continue.

The Louisiana legislature recently passed a reform of the Crime Against Nature statute, but for the vast majority of those affected, the change makes little to no difference. Although the new law takes away the registration component for a first conviction, a second conviction requires 15 years on the registry, and up to five years imprisonment. A third conviction mandates a lifetime on the registry. More than 538 men and women remain on the registry because they were convicted of offering anal or oral sex, with more added almost every day.

The legal challenge to the Crime Against Nature law, called Doe v. Jindal, has been filed in Louisiana’s US District Court Eastern District on behalf of nine anonymous plaintiffs. It was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, attorney Andrea J. Ritchie, and the Law Clinic at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. The anonymous plaintiffs include a grandmother, a mother of four, three transgender women, and a man, all of whom have been required to register as sex offenders from 15 years to life as a result of their convictions for the solicitation of oral sex for money.

• This article first appeared here.

Featured prominently in liberal media outlets like the New York Times and The Advocate, Sheng claims that the pictures “underscore the silence permeating the unsung heroism of gay and lesbian military personnel.”  Undoubtedly, there is something subversive about these images, especially the few that depict the emotionally charged interaction of same-sex couples in which both partners are in uniform.  However, they also do insidious political work.  By fully domesticating their subjects’ military service — that is, by removing it from the context of American imperial power — the photographs preempt conversations about the problematic relationship between U.S. militarism and the politics of liberal integration.

Let me be clear.  DADT is a draconian policy whose repeal should be welcomed.  It is unacceptable that the Department of Defense, the nation’s largest employer, continues to fire people for coming out of the closet.  In an era in which the poverty draft is swelling the ranks of the U.S. military with young adults who would have probably pursued other employment if given the option, taking DADT off the books is a priority.  But Sheng’s photographs, like the vast majority of liberal critiques of DADT, go well beyond the argument for equality in the workplace by embracing a rhetoric of lesbian/gay patriotism intended to ingratiate the movement to American warhawks.

In a typical story on Sheng’s work, ABC News notes that ‘Samuel’, one of the anonymous service members who posed for the photo series, “loves his work [in the military].  He believes in his work.  The only aspect of military life Samuel does not believe in is the current law.”  Of course, one is left to wonder whether the soldiers and sailors like Samuel, who are so invested in a more humane workplace within the military, have given much thought to aspects of contemporary U.S. ‘military life’ such as the torture of racialized ‘enemies’, the murder of civilians, and the decimation of local economies and infrastructure.

Radical LGBTQ activists like Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore have already pointed to the very limited upside of the seamless integration of lesbians and gays into an institution tasked with the oppression of queer communities and communities of color abroad.  What I want to add to Sycamore’s critique is an analysis of how Sheng’s photographs offer an extremely deceiving vision of the relationship between sexual politics and the U.S. military.  I hope that such an analysis will emphasize the need to situate an endorsement and celebration of the repeal of DADT within a broader network of concerns among the radical left.

There are several alarming aspects of these images.  The first is the cleanliness and sterility of the homes, apartments, and hotel rooms that serve as the backdrop.  These living spaces are absolutely immaculate, almost clinical (and certainly a far cry from the homes that my fellow sailors and I maintained when I was in the navy).  With such pristine backgrounds (not to mention uniforms), it becomes very difficult to imagine the pictured soldiers and sailors as agents of death and destruction rampaging through the Middle East or Central Asia.

In Sheng’s photographs, their military service is critiqued solely within the realm of the private sphere.  Thus, their personal struggles within the military are implicitly prioritized above their active and enthusiastic participation in global conquest.  With this in mind, it seems odd that Sheng remarked to a journalist at Southern California Public Radio that “the invisibility of these wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan], as well as our lack of recognition towards everyone in the military and their efforts, became a powerful inspiration for the work.”  If anything, war is entirely invisible from these images.

This invisibility seriously limits the emotional content of the pictures. Take, for example, the many images of soldiers and sailors with their heads in their hands, frozen in poses of palpable anguish.  It is easy to imagine any number of reasons why we might see troops in such a pose: the violent death of a comrade, the guilt over participating in war crimes, or a divorce prompted by months of separation.  But recognition of these possibilities is blocked when the subjects inhabit spotless scenes of domestic order.  In other words, when the world around a soldier — gay or straight — is so neat and tidy, the only suffering we can easily associate with their experience is the internal torment generated by a sexual identity deemed unworthy of patriotic service.

Nor do the photos of lesbian and gay service members posing with their hands as if they are holding a gun rectify the aforementioned absence of war.  Similar to the image of ‘Grace’, a female soldier jumping playfully on her bed, the make-believe guns transform the subjects into innocent children who few would dare to imagine pulling the trigger with an ‘insurgent’ in their crosshairs.  Sheng’s own description of the work emphasizes this narrow representation.  As a recent piece from CNN.com explains, “Sheng said he hopes his photographs open eyes to the way the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy affects closeted service members who are fighting and dying for their country.”  Clearly, the way that ‘fighting and dying for their country’ itself affects the service members (and others) is not at issue for the artist.

Mainstream liberals who have been pressing for a repeal are likely to object that, in the words of one commenter on the Bitch Magazine story featuring Sheng’s photos, “sure, militarization is problematic but that is not what this piece is about.”  At best, this is naïve optimism about the potential for standard liberal equal rights discourse to operate independently from American militarism.  As scholar Melanie McAlister has aptly pointed out, since Gulf War I a central component of the media strategy used by the U.S. military and political establishment to legitimate its ‘humanitarian intervention’ abroad has been the emphasis on the ‘multicultural’ makeup of America’s troops.  According to McAlister, images of American power projected by a multicultural fighting force in advertisements and other representations have “provided the mandates for that power: the diversity of its armed forces made the United States a world citizen, with all the races and nations of the globe represented in its population.”

Moreover, as journalist Lila Rajiva has explained, claims of facilitating feminist liberation of Iraqi and Afghani women have become important rhetorical pillars of U.S. justification for its continued interventionist strategy in the ‘war on terror’.  In other words, there is a relationship between mainstream rights discourse and the contemporary configuration of American militarism.  Claiming the contrary is tantamount to an endorsement of ‘humanitarian imperialism’.

Ultimately, the danger behind work like that of Sheng is that it suggests that the repeal passed by Congress this weekend marks the final round of struggle.  It encourages liberal adherents to sit back and bathe themselves in self-congratulation for supporting the integration of the military, when, in fact, the task at hand is building more meaningful dialogue and cooperation between the LGBTQ, anti-war/militarism, and anti-austerity movements.  The inclusion of openly lesbian and gay service members who otherwise support the military’s role in underwriting American power abroad will not change the fact that the brutalization of foreign ‘enemies’ so often takes shape around an assumed equivalence between homosexuality and depravity (one need only recall the well-publicized photos from Abu Ghraib to confirm this connection).

Moreover, the repeal in no way addresses the de facto conscription (and isolation from radical queer politics) of more and more impoverished youth from the LGBT community who see the military as their only viable path to economic survival.  With these things in mind, we must recognize that Sheng’s photos are not the type of activism we need.

Have you seen the pics in the National Enquirer? The man is nothing but scared skin and bones. Greed is good he said, then bullied his way to the top only to bring the whole thing crashing down with him. Says money never sleeps? Well, it doesn’t weep for the wicked either, even for those who think themselves winners, till we all fall down.

Greed is good? Why would anyone ever want to teach the idea that greed was good to a population which is supposed to live together? Why did we, the population in question, not question whether we wanted to believe it? How could we be taught to believe greed was good when it is the same thing as when that bully back in the first grade took your money and got away with it because he was so strong and he was so mean? Why have we been taught, as grown-ups, to think of that guy as the good guy?

No matter how much I love my country, no matter how many colored lenses I look through to try and reread the past in a better light, no matter how hard I try to not cringe at the present, I still am left having to say this: America is not a land of the free. It is a land of the slave, where the richest 74 make more than the poorest 19 million. A land not “of,” “for,” nor “by” the people, except as allowed by the plutocrats’ corporate interests. As for the rest of us, bullied and worked and worried to death in chains we don’t even see. America has always been a country where the bullies ran things for their own interests while the rest of us suffered for their whims. This is just another of those times where the rich have got the upper hand and are reaching for our throat.

And then we were told we were supposed to love it and honor its tradition of might making wrong sound righter in the after-fact, no matter how bloody the moment might be. We’ve been sold that it was OK to terrorize each other to get what we wanted; it was the right way to treat each other and the others of the world as long as you waved a flag to sanctify the whole process when you were done. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the impact of bullying in America. Taken as a whole, the role of the bully as a metaphor for America is a terrible topic to behold.

Over the last few weeks I have looked into the face of the topic of “Bullying in America” and it has beaten me down. Like the time last year when I watched Michael Moore’s Capitalism twice in rapid succession and then was too depressed to write, much less laugh, for six weeks. As I contemplated how much power bullies actually have in our society, I became overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem and my probable lack of impact by wielding merely a couple of punch-lines and a few thousand words. Like climate change, and the plutocratic tyranny that runs our world like its marionette, this “battling the bullies” column is probably another case of too little, too late.

But here we go anyway –

Thanks to the recent Anti-bullying week media blitz, half the liberal media, and CNN in particular, throughout the whole month stayed semi-focused on another, slightly different, bullying story — a fresh twist on the continuing tale of the ever-running spate of homosexual teen suicides. Five in One Week and all with plenty of photos. The sad stories and glam photos were rolled out like a poor little black-clad emo parade to celebrate our indifference. Each story told a tale of bullying, of a struggling gay kid hounded to the point of choosing death to end the life of torture.

The favorite one for the media to glamorize was Tyler Clemente, a first semester freshman at Rutgers who literally died from the humiliation of getting outed live via the Internet while doing it with a man in his dorm room. Back in my day somebody might’ve passed a note, nowadays there’s live streaming. Clemente later jumped off a bridge. Buddies promptly claim it was just a prank, and they were just playing. That’s what the bullies always say. Oh, those crazy college kids! It was all just supposed to be in good fun, right?

Now it just so happens that the conjunction of all this gay-bashing is particularly unnerving at this particular time when the Right is ratcheting up its marketing of their own homophobia as a selling point. CNN’s coverage of the apparent wave of teen suicides was a good chance for America to realize what teachers have been telling folks for years. It’s true: our schools are so over-run by social issues we are at a point where it seems it is hard for almost anyone to learn almost anything except for a faulty bare basics of survival: shut up and keep out of the bullies’ way. The cult of bullying has not only weakened our schools, but is dominating our politics and destroying our economy, eating us from the inside with our very own greed.

Teachers may try to work against this social structure that dominates our kids’ worlds, but we can only go so far because the same attitude we try to extinguish in them is the one that dominates their parents’ world. But it is clear the teachers are not winning, and the longer the GOP controls the discussion the less likely they are to be able to do so. Why do they keep telling me greed is good? Why would anyone want to build a society that would operate this way?

Of course, if one wants to be a bully, the current crisis must seem like a field day. Bullies like to keep their victims hungry and sick and ignorant and scared. And aren’t those the four major points of the GOP agenda? End social services, abolish Obamacare, defund education, mass detentions for suspected aliens or terrorists and a theocracy for all. Wrap it up in ribbon and we’ll call it the free market, though everyone I know is a slave to it.

Some say this election could make or break the future of our country right before our very eyes. Some say the Tea Party takeover could be a cover for a fascist coup. I am one of those people. Naomi Wolf was laughed at two years ago when she warned us about the upcoming End of America. But I wasn’t among the laughing.

And as I see the news this month, it feels as if the pinscher is closing. So much of the current increasing bigotry and oppression is based on the rhetoric of racial politics, or sexual politics, or religious politics, or litigious politics; but it’s all just excuses for those who wish to use force to feel free to do so. I mean, come on — everyone knows it’s gay to call someone a faggot, duh. But folks do it anyway ‘cuz it’s so funny, right? And if you don’t think so, you must be queer.

Take the case of the “pretending to be the governor” of Arizona, Jan Brewer, who is hoping to get “re-elected” to that office. Have you seen this train wreck some call a woman? They could use any five minutes of her debate footage as an IQ test. Forget about the whole “laughing at her over her 16 seconds of dead ‘drunk, er, i mean, deer in the headlights’ silence” thing. The times when she’s speaking are way more incriminating. Just listen to any five minutes of Jan Brewer speaking. ANY five minutes. If some silly voter still finds anything attractive about that woman — her words, her attitude, her ideas, or her looks, that person is probably not even intelligent enough to even be capable of the complicated series of tasks involved in completing the process of voting.

Jan Brewer who bumbled into office, mumbled and bungled her way through the job of appearing to only suck a little; who the GOP hated till she got behind SB-1070 and now she’s the little “Jan that can!” THAT Jan Brewer, the bully. Though she’s not the worst of them, it says a lot about Arizona that Brewer is the odds on favorite. But what does she do when her opponent (Terry Goddard) begins to gain a little traction in the polls due to her own ineptitude at fear mongering and personal inability to speak English as if it were her own native language? Then she simply calls him gay. It’s so typical and so tiring and so predictably GOP. It’s all typical bully behavior. No wonder folks die and the society suffers.

But back to the news because the annual anti-bullying week this year was a news anomaly. Somehow five teen suicides of actual bullied-to-death homosexuals made it into the news in the same week. Understand there are thousands of teen suicides each year, so five in any given week is, in fact, a given. Five in one week? Five that they counted. The synergistic media magic beauty part was that this particular week also happened to be the kick-off of National Bullying Prevention Month and, as if by magic, America suddenly, briefly, almost actually cared that kids are getting tormented to death. A growing epidemic finally got its fifteen minutes in a news cycle.

But only after it promised to be forgotten in time for the next news cycle. Though in the meantime, the stats are indeed staggering. Every day one hundred and eighty-six thousand bullied victims don’t even go to school because of the harassment. Each year about 40% give up on school and thousands give up on everything entirely.

Yes, yes, I know, that is just a few more tears in the ever flowing stream. This is just that old “same as it ever was” epidemic tale of bullied victims who always were, and still are, pummeled relentlessly from sea to shining sea, despite the martyrdom of St. Matthew Shepard. Though nobody is willing to lay out a current and complete statistic, the most common figures you can find say the teen suicide rate tripled from the 70s to the 90s, and has, since then, only continued to grow. Suicide has become the 4th most common cause of death in kids 10-14, the 3rd for 15-20 and 2nd most common for 20-25. About 12 out of every 100,000 teens will kill themselves and as many as twenty-five times that number will try.

Our children torment and tease each other every day in every way one can say “you’re gay!” and still they get away with it. Nobody wants to be the baby who wimps out and couldn’t handle a little “playfully” doled out misery. It is the one gift most kids prefer giving. And nobody is supposed to complain because hurting each other is so much fun. Meanwhile most adults look away because they are closet-bullies themselves. It’s the one way the right’s not afraid to come out of the closet. That is the society our children live in. And then we wonder why they do not learn?

Well, as their teacher, I can tell you your kids are learning plenty. They know how to “kill,” “maim,” and belittle their enemies and/or opponents in most major gaming media. They know how to turn a phrase till it cripples and when to relish the sight of pain in others. They know exactly which muscles to twitch when they fake lunge at each other to get that maximum scare effect, which buttons to push to best piss off the world.

And where do the bully-kids learn it? From their Tea Party Lovin’ parents, of course, who bully them around the house all night, so they can bully their fellow kids around the playground all day. Meanwhile they don’t know where Poland is, why the water cycle matters, what a noun is or what a verb does. And neither do their parents. But both generations know how to push their way to get what they want, don’t they? By bullying, of course. It’s the American Way. Babies raising babies and with nobody playing parent, no one learns why it’s bad to be bad. Whether or not you agree that that’s where we came from, it appears to be where we are headed.

Take my current favorite bullying exploit, told in many places, but most engagingly in Josh Holland’s AlterNet article, “Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work — Firefighters Let Family’s House Burn Down Because Owner Didn’t Pay $75 Fee.” Wanna see what that whole “smaller government” thing Sarah Palin loves looks like? Here you go:

It’s the case of a Mr. Gene Cranick of Obion County, Tennessee. The Republican run local government voted to keep taxes low by not operating the county-wide fire department. Firefighting is, you know, one of those basic kinds of government services most Americans say they see as the bare minimum of what they’d expect to get when they pay their taxes. Instead, in addition to country taxes residents in rural Obion County were required to pay a separate $75 fee for fire service.

Long and short of it, Cranick hadn’t paid. The fire broke out in some barrels near his home, then crawled across the field as a brush fire, until it engulfed his home. Cranick watched his life be destroyed in slow motion. He tried to be a responsible citizen and went after the fire with his own resources, but his garden hose just couldn’t handle it. It was a time when he needed his government. And they refused him.

The firefighters came and did nothing as they watched the fire leap from the barrels to his house, utterly destroying it and killing the household pets. Throughout that whole infernal process, and even beforehand, while he was on the phone with 911, Cranick repeatedly tried to pay the fee. But the firefighters just stood by, though eventually they did bust out their hoses when the next neighbor over’s property was threatened. He had paid the fee. They were good loyal Republican firemen, one and all, Tea Party pure.

The firemen knew that the pure beauty of the American “Free Market” system is that capitalism means the only reason to save another person from misery and devastation is if you are going to make some money. Cranick just had to learn the lesson is all, it was nothing personal, just following orders.

To stand idly by and watch a person’s whole life be destroyed when it is in your power to stop it, to listen and not lift a finger while three dogs and a cat are burned to death right in front of you, this is the height of bullying. These are the people we’ve let put themselves in power.

And it is just one of a series of incidents, an epidemic of incidents of bullying across the board. Wall St.’s destruction of America is bullying. The battles over gay rights and abortion: basic bullying. Our foreign policy reduces down to US being the biggest meanest kid in the 5th grade over and over again.

Over and over again, the right-wing call for businesses to breathe free, free from the oppression of government’s supposedly bullying regulations. Over and over the people looking out for our safety, our government, gets cast as a bully and we rally to condemn the bad old “gub’mint,” then remove the cage we use to contain the wild beast we call the free market, and every time we try this, it bites us in the ass. With the Treasury being Goldman Sachs territory, and Wall Street and the insurance industry purchasing congressmen wholesale; everywhere you look bullies are shaping our commerce and every time you look, someone else is getting screwed.

And it’s a vertical monopoly: Bullies Uber-Alles every time and everywhere. Our culture? Movies of violence or cruel comedy, television of barking political attack dogs and “reality TV” that banks on humiliation. Hate screamed rock and thugged up rap. The problem is our society has evolved into a bully society, the intentional product of a bully brained government. This is in no way me trying to pretend this is some strictly recent aberration, or that America hasn’t always been a bully.

Ask the Powhatan, the Algonquian, the Seminole, the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Chinese, the Irish, the Hindi, the Black. Ask Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Korea. Sure, in foreign policy we have often been bullies and splendidly bastardly about it besides. Ask Mexico or ask the people of Guatemala what they think of the US right now that it’s been revealed we once used their country as our own little secret real world STD experiment. And when we were too busy being bullies by ourselves, we trained others to do our bullying for us at the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. School of the Americas. What a wonderful sounding name for a place that offers classes in anesthesia-free knee cap removal and comparative genital electro-conductivity.

But until now America at least wanted to pretend we were above barbarity, that we were the good guys. Nowadays, it’s just might makes right. At least in the recallable past, the government and pols, our business leaders and role models, tried at least to appear to be in favor of protecting the weak from the brutish. Now they are all so bald-faced about it.

Take any day from last month’s Democracy Now headlines and one can weave the tale of how the bullies shape our lives. 10/11 sounds good. You can trace the tales of the bullies from story to story. Now that it is coming out that not only did our beloved financial institutions fraudulently raise housing prices so high everyone went broke, then bust, then they bilked us out of billions in bailouts; and then took homes away from four million families. Not only that. Now it turns out that the mass foreclosures they have used to throw our citizens into the streets in pursuit of their corporate profits are also based on fraud. Foreclosures were robo-processed with rewards for the agents who could forge due process the fastest.

As of yet we don’t know how many families were falsely thrown into the street, but instances have shown up in several states and all fifty are currently investigating. Meanwhile the head of Countrywide agrees to paying millions in fines for his misbehavior and joins the long list of banks and big businesses quietly agreeing to fines. Like we needed their permission to hold them accountable for screwing us after having been caught again, caught red-handed bullying the American public. And we have to let them do it because that’s what keeps free enterprise free: the right of the rich to rape the poor.

These are the banks we were told were too precious to our country to risk collapse. These are the banks we loaned money to like a friend. Screwing us over all over again. Defrauding America at every single juncture in this sorry sequence of events. Several state governments have intervened and around the country, folks are calling for a national moratorium on foreclosures. But the federal government says, ‘no, can’t risk hurting our precious banks’ precious bank profits.’ Translation: because the banks are bullies and we don’t want the bully to get mad. Wall Street’s a bear when you piss off the bull.

Meanwhile another 95,000 lost their jobs. As the rich consolidate their capital, there is not enough left for pay checks it seems. And the list of bullies bloodying the public just goes on. Remember, these are just the stories from a single day.

Next up, NY gubernatorial candidate and bestiality fan, Carl Paladino, joined the right wing wannabe-governors’ gay-basher band wagon with the aid of some Jewish religious leaders, who  wrote Paladino an anti-gay script, which he not only read but  defended in separate interviews. Paladino might simply be throwing red meat to his red state fans; but the rabbis were declaring precious principles of their faith. Once again, the supposed god of love apparently hates fags. Odd that those Jewish religious leaders must’ve never heard that it was wrong to persecute people for being different.

Speaking of oppressions Paladino’s rabbis might’ve heard of how about that Ohio GOP congressional candidate, Rich Iott, who out and out unmasks all pretenses of right wing pretensions about their intentions and simply dresses the part of a Nazi Waffen SS officer, the guys who operated the camps. His website recounts their exploits so lovingly it is hard to tell whether he’s recruiting re-enactors or promoting their resurgence.

This is, of course, followed by a bit on the fact Israel is now demanding loyalty oaths as their next step towards a final solution for their Palestinian problem. Then two stories of US foreign follies of bully-dom with a Syrian man mistakenly imprisoned for seven years in Guantanamo Bay and the latest faux pas of one of our Latin American graduates of the School of the Americas, the aborted coup attempt in Ecuador.

Then was the story of Glenn Beck’s disciple, Byron Williams, who went out to shoot up the Tides Foundation to teach us all a lesson and ignite his revolution. Instead he just shot up the California State Police cars in his effort to rid the world of the bad guys. Way to train ‘em, Glenn!

Stuck somewhere in the middle was this shocker of an item: “In what’s been described as the world’s biggest day of climate action, over 7,000 rallies and events were held Sunday in 188 Countries. The “10/10/10 Global Work Party” was organized by 350.org to urge people across the globe to do something in their city or community that will help deal with global warming.” Which is the only time I ever heard about any of that. Why is this the only new source talking about an international event so massive it makes the idea of a Tea Party party, even one as lavish as Beck’s big bash at the Lincoln Memorial, seem paltry?

Well, the truth is we won’t hear about it in the mainstream because you aren’t supposed to be interested. As an American news story that topic’s officially DOA. Climate Change deniers have won the day on that one. American rich won’t give up the profits and the rest of us intend to stay too damn comfortable to ever willingly give that up for the rest of the peasants around the world. They have to do what we say anyway. After all, we are the bully.

The last story of that night was about a dead John Lennon and some awards in his name on what would have been his 70th birthday, if he hadn’t been shot down by a bully.

Of course, you can go through most any day and find stories of the bullies getting ever more brazen: Alaska reporter handcuffed by GOP candidates private guards who had to be rescued by the police. Rand Paul’s boys stomp on MoveOn.org. And Stephen Broden, a GOP Congressional candidate in Texas, who says the GOP should just hold a violent revolution if they don’t get what they want through election. On tape, in a sermon. That’s right, this guy’s a minister. If that guy is the example of the folks spreading the word, it’s small wonder they know neither right from wrong, nor the true spirit of the god of love that they say that they love. Perhaps their god isn’t meant to be man’s friend but his shield.

Welcome to the Jungle. “Kill Teams” collecting fingers for trophies in Afghanistan, Wikileaks revealing our own recounting of torture and mass massacre in Iraq. America is no longer among the 20 least corrupt countries of the world in Transparency International’s annual index. Now we’re 22nd and the countries we’ve been destroying and/or mismanaging for the last couple of decades, Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, are among the absolute worst.

Or for me the story with the scariest bully face, the GOP candidate who most exemplifies what appears to be the new face of the GOP, former marine and admitted murderer, Ilario Pantano. While some will say Amy Goodman’s good liberal authorship can spin some stories, you couldn’t possibly distort the facts in this case to make them more hideous. They are bad enough as they are; and no one is disputing them.

A Tea Party-backed congressional candidate in North Carolina is facing scrutiny for having killed two unarmed Iraqis while serving in Iraq. The candidate, Ilario Pantano, has said he has no regrets about fatally shooting the two at point blank range after detaining them near Fallujah in April 2004. Prosecutors later alleged that Pantano intended to make an example of the men by shooting them sixty times and hanging a sign over their corpses that read “No better friend, no worse enemy.

Pantano did not deny hanging the sign or shooting the men repeatedly after stopping their vehicle at a checkpoint. He admitted to emptying one magazine of bullets into the Iraqis, then reloading and firing thirty more rounds. Despite his admission, the military cleared Pantano of wrongdoing in 2005. He’s now in a tight race with Democrat Mike McIntyre in North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District.

Did you catch that last line? “Tight race”? The people of North Carolina like this sort of thing? How is there hope for America when the people want to elect cold blooded killers to their Congress? And who are the people behind him?

Raw Story elaborates about the support Pantano has been able to get. “Pantano has been able to raise almost $1 million for his campaign. He has received endorsements from the Veterans In Defense Of Liberty, the North Carolina Chapter of Eagle Forum, far-right blogger Pamela Geller, and a number of other conservatives.”

Is this where we’re headed? Recently long time Fascism watcher, Sara Robinson, published her latest report on the ever-threatening “totalitarianism-creep” factor in the upcoming elections, “Fascist America: Is This Election the Next Turn?” and asked, “are we there yet”? Her result? Maybe.

Robinson recognizes the work of Robert Paxton as the authority in the field of studying the process a democracy goes through as one collapses and crumbles into fascism. As she often does, Robinson quotes him extensively. Paxton identifies three final warning signs to awaken citizens to the soberingly real possibility our country is sliding past the point of no return. which an emerging fascist regime has too much power to be stopped:

“1. Are [neo- or proto-fascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?”

Yes, yes, yes in all three cases. We’ve let this virus grow inside us and now it’s eating us whole. No matter which way the elections fall, we are all going to lose. If they land even the slightest advantage, then like they did with Clinton, like they did with Carter, the GOP will bully Obama to exhaustion and everyone will suffer while nothing gets fixed.

That’s the best case scenario. If, somehow, the Dems retained some power, you can predict all kinds of retaliation. Bullies aren’t good with being told no. As Sharron Angle notes they’re ready to resort to “Second Amendment remedies.” Are we about to devour ourselves?

Bye, bye, Gordon Gecko. Greed is good, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Thanks for the cancer. Now we’ve all got it. We’re all bullies. It’s the American Way. And just like you, this might be our curtain call.

George Orwell once predicted the future would be a boot smashing a human face. Forever. I fear the future is here –

The event was organized by a new coalition, One Nation Working Together, which is supported by some 400 groups, primarily led by the two labor federations, AFL-CIO and Change To Win/SEIU, and the NAACP. The rally was addressed by a couple of dozen speakers, mostly from supporting liberal advocacy organizations.

A constant theme reiterated by the union leaders who spoke was the need for jobs — the absence of which is probably one of the main reasons a number of voters who went Democratic in the presidential election may not vote in November. Among these leaders, and a sign of the strength of labor at the rally, was AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry, UAW president Bob King, AFT chief Randi Weingarten, NEA President Dennis Van Roakel,  and CWA’s Larry Cohen.

President/CEO Ben Jealous of the NAACP told the crowd — which included a large proportion of African Americans — that “We’ve come too far to turn back now,” evoking the long struggle for equal rights. “We’ve got to go home and ask our friends and ask our neighbors to vote. Get up off the couch and get out and vote November 2.”

Up to 2,000 chartered buses — largely financed by the unions — brought participants to the demonstration from the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states. Others arrived by car, commercial bus, railroad and planes from as far away as the West Coast.

The crowd reached its height around 2:30 p.m. when it extended from the Memorial along each side of the long Reflecting Pool to the end. The attendance was not as large as the August 28 right wing “non-political” religious manifestation organized by TV personality, Glen Beck, but the two events were so different in character that comparing size determines nothing.

The historic rally and its feeder marches in Washington October 2 had several pluses accompanied by minuses, the most important being these two:

• The unity achieved at the rally between the working class, people of color and progressives in various social advocacy groups is very important in terms of the political struggle for needed progressive social change in the United States.

However, the rally’s singular purpose was to increase the popular vote for Democratic candidates in the November 2 Congressional election and local offices, not to build an independent liberal/progressive/left coalition to agitate for needed  programs that go beyond the limited possibilities of the Obama Administration’s center/center right political agenda.

• Rally speakers supported a number of relatively progressive policy initiatives, including a massive and comprehensive jobs program, advancement of civil rights and liberties, immigration reform, education reform, and union rights to mention a few. This was a major liberal event and were it the actual intention of the Obama Administration to fight for such initiatives, it would be transformational.

However, not one of the speakers criticized the Obama Administration’s failure to seriously embrace many such programs or to mount the political fight required to attain even watered down versions, blaming everything on “The Party of No.” Even the Blue Dog  conservative Democrats in Congress were off the hook.

Clearly, the administration’s weak jobs program has fallen far short of  making a significant dent in unemployment, which remains around 10% officially and 17% unofficially. Its anti-foreclosure efforts have failed. Civil liberties are being eroded because of White House decisions. Immigration reform is piecemeal. Education reform, based on President Obama’s $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” initiative, is actually opposed by the two teacher unions that so strongly support the Democrats. The labor movement’s main legislative goal —Employee Free Choice Act — can’t even be introduced in Congress, in part because of conservative Democrat opposition.

One of the reasons the Democratic Party may lose a more than usual number of House and Senate seats in the midterm contest is that a number of 2008 Obama voters are disappointed that the Democrats didn’t fight harder and compromise less for “the change they believe in.”

It appeared that President Obama’s massive escalation of the Afghan war, extending the fighting into western Pakistan and Yemen, and continuing the occupation of Iraq would also be unchallenged by the speakers — despite the fact that the majority of Democratic voters are against the war — until Harry Belafonte shattered the silence.

Charging that “the wars that we wage today in far away lands are immoral, unconscionable and unwinnable,” the famous musician, social activist and civil rights leader  delivered a stunning denunciation of a top Obama Administration priority. The crowd seemed momentarily taken aback by this sharp criticism of Obama’s wars (though the president’s name was not mentioned) and the reception was somewhat muted, though at the finish, just after he said “let us put an end to war,” he received prolonged applause.

Could it be that rally leaders were unaware Belafonte intended to deliver a strong antiwar message? His speech was the highlight of the afternoon as far the peace movement and left were concerned.

The only other reference to the military — aside from some patriotic comments to the troops — was Jesse Jackson’s call to “Cut the military budget,” but even Defense Secretary Gates says that. The rest of Reverend Jackson’s talk was essentially “vote Democratic” in November because “The president can’t bear this cross alone.”

One of the more moving presentations was by outspoken progressive Marian Wright Edelman, founder/president of the Children’s Defense Fund, who sharply criticized politicians that promote “massive tax giveaways to the rich when 50% of our children are living in poverty,” and called for increased education funding.

Van Jones, a well known environmental and civil rights activist and an expert on “Green Jobs,” noted that  “We can empower America by looking up for our sources of energy instead of looking down,” referring to wind and solar power. Reverend Al Sharpton earned applause when he declared: “We bailed out the banks. We bailed out the insurance companies. Now it’s time to bail out the American people.”

The only Congressman to speak was Chicago immigrant rights advocate Democratic Representative, Luis Gutierrez, who declared: “The Latino and immigrant struggle is a continuation of the civil rights struggle in this nation. There would be no Cesar Chavez without Dr. Martin Luther King, no Sonia Sotomayor without Thurgood Marshal and no Roberto Clemente without Jackie Robinson.”

The absence of Democratic Party leaders and office holders on the podium as endorsers or rally officials was intentional. Rally leaders did not wish to convey the impression that One Nation Working Together was simply organizing a campaign event to elect a fairly unimpressive collection of center/center right office holders and a small minority of liberals.

The Democrats are worried that independent voters, young voters and liberal supporters who voted Democratic in 2008 are not going to come out in large enough number to prevent the Republicans from making major gains in the House and Senate. A good proportion of these voters are disappointed in the Obama Administration’s performance over the past two years, including some union workers who voted for the Democrats in the last election.

One Nation has positioned itself as independently promoting a relatively liberal agenda and is asking Democrats — who are told that the only obstacle to real progress is the GOP and the dreaded Tea Party — to vote in sufficient number to make it possible for the Democratic members of Congress to score major victories in the next two years. The disinclination of many of these politicians to consider aligning with center/center left progressive programs is notorious.

This event cost the union movement plenty. Most of the buses allowed union members — and in some cases the general public — to travel free. Our New York State United Teachers-sponsored bus from New Paltz cost a paltry $20 to D.C. and back for non-union riders, in return for which we received a bagged breakfast, dinner snack, a blue and orange AFT jersey proclaiming One Nation Working Together plus a $5 round trip metro fare to and from the Lincoln Memorial.

Charter buses began arriving in the huge parking lot of RFK Stadium starting around 9 a.m. on what turned out to be a day of blue skies, sunshine and comfortable temperatures. Up to 700 buses were said to be coming from New York State alone. According to local union sources buses brought perhaps 1,000 demonstrators from the Upper Hudson Valley cities and towns of Albany, Amsterdam, Latham, Schenectady, Saratoga and Troy and 500 from Mid-Hudson Valley communities of Kingston, New Paltz, Middletown, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Fishkill and Beacon. An unknown number took other transportation.

Thousands more probably would have attended the Washington event but there were serious bus problems in Boston, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and on Long Island. Through a mix-up, some  scheduled buses never arrived to pick up passengers, and some got to the nation’s capital just about in time to return home.

Many buses, including ours, arrived too late to attend the scheduled 11 a.m. antiwar feeder march from 14th St. and Constitution Ave., where there were two speaking platforms, one organized by United for Peace and Justice and the other by the United National Antiwar Conference. After a while both groups agreed to use the same stage. In addition there was a Socialist Contingent nearby. When the three groups marched together to the Memorial there were about 500-600 people, we’re told.

Some Union contingents, each wearing their own colored t-shirts, marched in separate  feeder marches.

A number of peace and left wing groups attended the rally but not all marched, including several socialist and communist organizations which carried their own signs in the crowd and distributed leaflets and free publications. The ANSWER antiwar coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) handed out a great many large yellow and black peace posters on sticks with a photo of Martin Luther King that predominated in a large part of the rally where we were situated, and hundreds of demonstrators took them home on buses that evening. The Party for Socialism and Liberation decided to charge a donation for their paper, Liberation, and sold 1,200 copies.

This was a positive aspect of the way the One Nation event was organized. Antiwar and socialist or communist groups were welcomed to join the rally just like every other group, to arrange feeder marches of their own, to set up tables, distribute literature, and to become one of the hundreds of endorsers if they wished.

The Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America and the International Socialist Organization were among the endorsers, though most left organizations did not wish to be associated at that level. It has not always been this way in union or liberal dominated events, when the left has often been discouraged from attending or excluded. Hopefully it’s a new trend. Of course, the left was not invited to speak at the main rally, and didn’t expect to be.

Right wing websites and blogs howled with red-baiting denunciations about the presence of the left October 2, which was actually quite small — but since they already call Obama a “socialist” and believe the Democratic Party is a front for a Bolshevik conspiracy it’s not a big deal.

To sum up: The various liberal groups that gathered in Washington for the One Nation rally are a positive factor on the political landscape, mainly because of their working class, multinational and progressive orientation.

Unfortunately their heightened political consciousness remains to be developed vis-à-vis (1) the inherent political limitations of the Democratic Party to which they are presently wedded; (2) their acceptance of a restrictive, closed circuit two-party system extending from the center to the far right without a mass left entity; and (3) their adherence to “lesser evil” politics that insures that “evil” in one guise or another is the only result.

Lastly, the notion of “one nation” sounds good, even inspiring, and entirely useful in the present situation. But most of us know that in reality the U.S. remains, in effect, two nations: one representing the interests of the minority — the big corporations, big banks, big stockholders, and big money that tend to rule; and the other the interests of the great majority — the working class, middle class and lower class that tend to be ruled.

The real issue is which “nation” does one support, and out of that support help to create one real nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

This is the time for activists to turn up the heat and press Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration to keep their promise and pass ENDA this spring.

The bill has wide support–there are 199 co-sponsors for the legislation in the House of Representatives, including six Republicans. In the Senate, there are 46 co-sponsors.

But passage in the Senate is expected to be difficult. For one thing, the Republican bigots are escalating their rhetoric against what, disgustingly, they call the “bathroom bill,” as Sherry Wolf reported at SocialistWorker.org:

While polls show that 89 percent of the population support workplace equality for LGBT people, fear-mongering and transphobic stupidities are being spread and echoed by right-wingers. Now that it is less palatable to openly discriminate against lesbians and gays, transgender people have become the primary targets of the cultural cretins…

One widely circulated form letter to congresspeople on Congress.org states, “The thought of my child or grandchild in a bathroom with a transgender (sic) is repugnant to me.” Tellingly, this note doesn’t even modify the adjective transgender to refer to an actual person–as if “a transgender” is some alien species and not a human being who deserves respect and equal treatment.

But there’s a further problem–16 Democrats in the Senate have yet to sign on to ENDA. The Democrats have enough votes to not only pass the bill, but avoid a filibuster if they get all their senators to support it.

The Democrats have no excuse for not passing ENDA now. Our movement needs to call them out publicly on this and demand that they “put up or shut up.”

LGBT activists are getting organized to push the issue of ENDA into the spotlight.

In April, members of the GetEQUAL group disrupted and were escorted out of a House Committee meeting after they called for action on the legislation. At the May 1 demonstrations for immigrant rights, many LGBT grassroots groups organized contingents to march in solidarity with immigrants and their native-born allies and to raise their demand for an all-inclusive ENDA.

Other groups, including Western Mass. Equality Across America, of which I am a member, are planning protests in support of ENDA, as well as organizing for the Harvey Milk Week of Action to demand full federal equality for LGBT people.

Rep. Barney Frank, the openly gay Democratic member of Congress who said that the 200,000-strong National Equality March was a “waste of time at best,” called Get EQUAL’s ENDA action a “stupid thing to do.” He wants activists to stick to formal channels, and call and meet with their representatives, asking them nicely to support the basic civil right to not be fired on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Politicians are aware of this issue and why it matters to us. Those who don’t support ENDA or who drag their feet do so because they calculate the political costs of inaction as less than those of action. It’s up to us to change the terms of this equation, and that will take more than phone calls and polite visits. We have to act now before ENDA dies again, as it has every time since it was first proposed in the 1990s.

When you lobby a politician, they can tell you anything they want in private, and it’s nearly impossible to hold them accountable unless you’re a major donor who can use campaign contributions as leverage. Instead of lobbying in private, we need, through protest and direct action, to call out representatives and senators in public and demand they make a public stand on ENDA.

More than small acts of civil disobedience, we need to build a broad movement that includes the active participation of large numbers of people. That’s a real possibility on this issue given the hundreds of people who attended recent Equality Across America conferences in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., not to mention the quarter of a million who marched on DC last October.

Barney Frank and other Democrats say they’re “working hard,” and Obama claims he’s a “fierce advocate” for LGBT rights. But they need to tell us what they’re doing and why ENDA isn’t a top priority for Democrats.

What does it mean that Barack Obama is a “fierce advocate”? He has said numerous times that he supports repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”–in his State of the Union address, he said he’d repeal it this year. Yet behind the scenes, he’s been less than committed.

To get a sense of what “fierce advocacy” really looks like, consider what Obama did when it came to getting “antiwar” Democrats in the House to vote for funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in June 2009. The war funding bill passed with only 30 of 256 House Democrats voting against–20 “antiwar” Democrats switched sides and voted to fund the wars.

If they were acting as “fierce advocates” for the LGBT community, Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress would do what it takes, and not prioritize war over equality. It’s up to us to force their hand and not let them get away with paying lip service to our cause while they drag their feet and toss us crumbs.

What you can do

Find out more about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and how to get involved in the campaign to pressure Congress at the ENDA Now Web site.

Get involved with local events around the Harvey Milk Day week of action as well as the movement for LGBT equality at the Equality Across America Web site.

For that matter, Walgreen’s is also gay, along with Home Depot, and the entire Presbyterian and Unitarian Universalist Church. In fact, according to the wide ranging assortment of corporate sponsorships backing the crowds and displays at this year’s 30th Annual Pride Day parade in Phoenix on April 17th, being gay is as American as well … the Bank of America.

Unofficial police figures estimate that the crowd for the long-running multi-day Phoenix Pride event at Indian School Park would be over 30,000 and did not dispute that spectators along the parade route and/or participating in the parade that morning exceeded 5,000. When you are talking economies of that scale, many a business is willing to try bi-.

Like Starbucks, there’s a gay on every corner these days and he is not checking out your butt, merely questioning your sorry fashion sense. But the Starbucks at this year’s Pride Day had a guy in a Star Wars storm trooper suit, gave away free coffee, and raised funds to build a water well in Uganda. You know, Uganda? The country where the American right-wing has sent lobbyists to attempt to convince the Ugandan government to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death. If that’s the kind of courage that comes from being queer, I hope we all get gay.

And the morning of the Pride Day parade it seems like it — like all of Phoenix could be happy and gay all at once. For a small town reporter in a pink shirt carrying a moderately clever but clearly heart-felt sign, my first trip to a Pride Day parade had me walking with a mince and I was definitely gay to have finished the parade route with only moderate chaffing.

Dozens, I’m serious, dozens of people queer as folk jumped out of the crowds that lined the parade route to get their picture taken with my sign that read, “With Liberty and Justice for All” in rainbow color painted by children.

And I wore the pink shirt to identify with Phoenix Code Pink, which also must be gay. If not, they’d call it “Phoenix Code Some Super-Butch Color to Appear Exaggeratedly Macho.” If Code Pink’s stated agenda, “Troops coming home from all wars” is gay, then I’m gay for that.

These days over on the Tea Party end of the American Main-street there is a lot of talk about a gay agenda. But that morning the closest thing I saw to gay agenda was when these two schedules stuck together front to back.

The queer nation mentality, however, was widely displayed on parade. No wonder the right-wingers were worried. They want to do ridiculous things like love their children unconditionally, dress outlandishly, and love unlimitedly. They wanted to throw darts, hug a lot, and listen to dance music. They wanted to end wars. They wanted to wear fashion disasters that did not involve blue, white, and red — with stars.

And I will tell ya, after some of the train wreck fashion statements I gasped at picketing the Glen Beck rally at the Jobing Arena the week before, I am clear that being around all that gayness left me feeling a lot happier. Glen Beck and his crowd are decidedly not very gay. In fact, they’re not happy at all. And they have reason to be worried and not that the soap gets slippery in the shower sometimes. Turns out that despite all his strident pandering, and all their saber rattling, the newest New York Times poll only gives the Tea Party 18% of the electorate.

Over at Beck’s rally the people yelled at me that “we need to the kill the commies,” when they read my protest sign for the Beck event that read “Insure Domestic Tranquility/Provide for the Common Defense/ These are the Real American Values.” The continuing effrontery and foolish arrogance displayed in a typical encounter with a tea partier has me wondering if the reason the 18th century minded White American males are fighting tooth and nail against change is because they have every right to be afraid of revenge? That they know they have acted like jerks?

On the other hand at the Pride Day Parade, people I didn’t know kept running up to me, hugging me and yelling, “Happy Pride!” On Pride Day, this supposed sexually deviant LGBT sin-fest, the worst that happened was I got lei-ed by a family of three, complete with bicycle built for two, who carried signs that read, “We love our children unconditionally,” with hand-rain bowed Os. Their 6 year old’s sign said, “I love my Gay sister and brother.”

You choose.

No. Glen Beck’s behind the times. It’s no wonder America has gone gay, just like America is already Black and is next to swiftly turn Hispanic. In the land where Manifest Destiny once meant a Christian god meant Indian murder and everyone took it in the shorts, at the 30th annual Pride Day parade both the cowboys driving the Wells-Fargo stage and the Navajo Indians (as represented by Ms Indian Transgender, 2010-2011, Kristel Lee) were merely having fun together (some of the best “being gay” to be had and all). And I bet you already thought of biker clubs and classic car clubs were gay? Well, at the Pride Day, the crowd of those types of guys were truly jolly; though you may not want to say, “Hey, gay guy we love you!” to every biker or car nut you see.

Still all joking aside, like the shirt on the chest of my favorite drag king, Fox Malone, read, “Queer rights are civil rights.” Or the sign carried by a member of PFLAG: “I hope one day my children will live in a world or acceptance without feeling afraid or rejected.” I feel the same way about my kids and they’re straight. That’s as American as loving a hotdog or a slice of pie. The sticker the Stonewall Democrats distributed that day best crystallized the meaning of the morning in three words: “Equal Means Equal.”

Of course, when it comes to buying a part in a long-time big time annual downtown pageant that dares to dream all Americans have equal rights and are not only tolerated, but embraced, lots of folks are ready to buy in to selling some dreaming. Gay America is bought and sold America just like everything else these days, except with cuter models.

Macy’s has long backed parades with big balloons, but generally not with this many fishnet hose on so many of the men who held the strings. But if you don’t believe me, check my Facebook photos. (That’s right, I’m inviting you to friend me and check my pics of pecs and pickled people in every color of the Rainbow and generally several at once on a sunny Saturday morning in Phoenix.)

On Pride Day, however, corporate and academic America simply see Americans and their dollars in action. Bank of America’s gays’ green spends just as gaily as at US Airways’ or at ASU. ASU Gay? A fact the folks from U of A have been rumoring about for years. And, just saying, there has got to be some joke available about juxtaposition of the words “gay” and “Cox” (as in Cox Cable, yet another corporate sponsor); but I am sure you have already thought of some.

New Orleans’ Black and transgender community members and advocates complain of rampant and systemic harassment and discrimination from the city’s police force, including sexual violence and arrest without cause. Activists hope that public outrage at recent revelations of widespread police violence and corruption offer an opportunity to make changes in police behavior and practice.

On a recent weekday evening, a group of transgender women met in the Midcity offices of Brotherhood Incorporated, an organization that provides health care and fights the spread of HIV and AIDS in low-income Black communities. When the conversation turned to the police, the mood in the room turned to outrage, as each woman had a story of harassment and abuse. Tyra Fields, a health worker who facilitates the meeting, told a story of being arrested without cause one night as she walked into a gay bar. “They never give us a reason they are arresting us,” she says, explaining that being Black and transgendered is often enough reason for arrest, generally on prostitution-related charges.

A young and soft-spoken transgendered woman named Keyasia tells a story of being persecuted by police who followed her as she walked down the street, rushed into her apartment, and arrested her in her own home. “Within the last four or five months, I’ve been to jail eight or nine times,” says Keyasia. “All for something I didn’t do. Because I’m a homosexual, that means I’m a prostitute in their eyes.” Expressing the frustration in the room, she adds, “I want to go to the French Quarter and hang out and have cocktails just like everyone else. Why can’t I?”

Diamond Morgan, another of the women, says she has faced a pattern of harassment from police that begins, she says, “Once they discover my transgender status.” She says she has been arrested and sexually assaulted by police and by employees of Orleans Parish Prison, who are part of New Orleans Office of Criminal Sheriff. She details her own personal experience of assault, and those of friends, adding that Orleans Parish Prison is a site that many women she knows speaks of as especially abusive. She says that sexual assault of transgender women is common at the jail, and other women in the room agree.

Tracy Brassfield, a transgender sex worker activist also attending the meeting, has dedicated herself to fighting against discrimination. Originally from Florida, Brassfield moved to New Orleans because she fell in love with the city. “But when I got here,” she says, “I started running into problems with the police.” These problems included what Brassfield calls deliberate harassment from officers who she says are targeting Black transgender women not because of any crime they’ve committed, but just because of who they are. “They say, you’re transgendered, you’re a fag, you’re a punk, you’re going to jail,” she says.

Brassfield decided to fight back and organize: “I was raised in an activist family,” she says. “I know my civil rights.” She has contacted local social justice and legal advocacy organizations such as Women With A Vision, Critical Resistance, the ACLU of Louisiana, and the Orleans Public Defenders, seeking allies in her struggle. She has also reached out in the community of transgender women. “My thing is put it out there, get it exposed,” she explains. “This is not just about me, this is about everyone.”

Patterns of Violence

Both local and national attention is currently being directed on the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). In recent months, the city has been rocked by revelations of police murder and cover-ups, with the justice department and FBI investigating at least eight separate cases, and signs that the federal government is headed towards a takeover of the department. Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu is engaged in a national search for a new police chief, telling reporters that the department needs “a complete culture change.”

Although the current federal investigations have not looked into police treatment of the Black and transgender community, advocates hope that the justice department will also look into these complaints.

Members of the city’s larger gay community complain about unwarranted arrests and a criminalization of sexuality, with police specifically targeting bars in the gay community. “If a gay man wants consensual sex, the undercover officer lies and says money was offered,” says John Rawls, a gay civil rights attorney who has spent decades in New Orleans fighting on these issues.

Advocates and community members also say that once gay men, transgender women are arrested for offering sex, they are more likely than others arrested in similar circumstances to be charged with a “crime against nature,” a felony charge. The law, which dates back to 1805, makes it a crime against nature to engage in “unnatural copulation” — a term New Orleans police and the district attorney’s office have interpreted to mean soliciting for anal or oral sex. Those who are convicted under this law are issued longer jail sentences and forced to register as sex offenders. They must also carry a driver’s license with the label “sex offender” printed on it. The women’s health care organization Women With A Vision has recently formed a coalition with several advocacy and legal organizations to attempt to fight this use of the sex offender law.

Stories of Abuse

Wendi Cooper, a Black and transgender health care worker, was charged under the law almost ten years ago. Although Cooper only tried prostitution very briefly and has not tried it again since her arrest, she still faces harassment from the police. She is frequently stopped, and when they run her ID through the system and find out about the prostitution charge, they threaten to arrest her again or sometimes, she alleged, they demand sex.

“Police will see that I been to jail for the charge,” she said. “And then they’ll try to have me, forcefully, sexually…One I had sex with, because I didn’t want to go to jail.”

Thinking about her experiences with police over the years, Cooper got quiet. “Sometimes I just wanna do something out the ordinary, and just expose it, you know?” She sighed. “They hurt me, you know? And I just hope they do something about it.”

In response to the allegations of abuse, New Orleans Police Department spokesman Bob Young responded, “Persons are charged according to the crime they commit.” He encouraged anyone with complaints to come file them with the department, adding, “the NOPD has not received any complaints against plain clothes officers assigned to the vice squad.”

The New Orleans Office of Criminal Sheriff did not respond to requests for comment. However, a September 2009 report from the US Department of Justice (DOJ) found that, “conditions at OPP violate the constitutional rights of inmates.” The DOJ went on to report; “Inmates confined at OPP are not adequately protected from harm, including physical harm from excessive use of force by staff.” And documented “a pattern and practice of unnecessary and inappropriate use of force by OPP correctional officers.” This included “several examples where OPP officers openly engaged in abusive and retaliatory conduct, which resulted in serious injuries to prisoners. In some instances, the investigation found, the officers’ conduct was so flagrant it clearly constituted calculated abuse.”

Abuse Starts at Young Age

Wesley Ware, a youth advocate at Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, says that harassment against those who are perceived as gay or gender noncomforming begins at a young age, and can include hostility from their parents, fellow students, and often from school staff. According to Ware, this leads many of these youths to bring weapons to school to defend themselves. “Gay and bisexual boys and young men are four times more likely to carry a weapon to school,” he says. “Of homeless youth, 50% identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Of kids in youth detention, 13% are LGBT.” Ware adds that many of these youth face an unsympathetic court, including judges who think that they will help “cure” gay youth by sending them to juvenile detention. “Ninety nine percent of the kids in youth detention in New Orleans are black,” adds Ware. “So obviously what we’re talking about is youth of color.”

“This community is facing systemic discrimination in pretty much every system they deal with,” says Emily Nepon, a staff member of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal organization that fights for transgender racial and economic justice. According to Nipon, women in this community deal with intersecting forms of oppression. “High levels of employment discrimination, housing discrimination, overpolicing, profiling that leads to higher incarceration rates, and higher levels of abuse within prisons.”

Mayor elect Mitch Landrieu calls criminal justice one of his signature issues. But will he be willing or able to try to change the culture of the New Orleans police? Advocates say change will not come easy. “You can do a million police trainings,” adds Nepon. “But, in general, that doesn’t have an impact on rampant police homophobia.”

Many advocates believe federal oversight can make a difference in these patterns of police abuse. They are also pressing for an end to the use of the Crime Against Nature statute, as well as a general shift from charging people with nonviolent offenses. Attorney John Rawls, who is generally supportive of current Orleans Parish District Attorney, Leon Cannizzaro, believes the DA understands that the current use of the sex offender statute invites discrimination.

However, adds Rawls, it will be hard to get his office to stop charging people under the statute. “People who hold powerful offices have many motives, and one of them is they love being powerful,” he says. “Prosecutors get their power from criminal statutes. The more statutes they have, the more ways they can prosecute someone, the more power they have.” If activists are going to challenge this power, they will need to utilize the current public outrage for far-reaching reforms, says Rawls.

Back at the meeting at the Brotherhood Incorporated offices, Brassfield urges women to stand up and fight back. “We need to document,” she says. “What you want to do is illustrate a pattern of harassment and abuse.” She hands out flyers and phone numbers for Women With A Vision, Critical Resistance, and a sympathetic lawyer. “We have to look out for each other,” she says. “I want to organize, just what we’re doing now. The girls got to stick together.”

Anti-reform demonstrators at the nation’s capitol yelled racial slurs against Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and two other congressmen. One demonstrator spit at Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). Several protestors yelled anti-gay slurs at Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) “I heard people saying things today that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try to get off the back of the bus,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters at the Capitol. 

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) told CNN the attacks were “contemptible.” Eric Cantor (R-Va.,) told ABC-TV that “nobody condones that at all.” John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Republicans’ House minority leader, called the incidents “reprehensible.” But he then said that the incidents were isolated and that the real issue was that “millions of Americans want no part” of health insurance reform. 

 But the racism, bigotry, and homophobia although “contemptible” and “reprehensible” were not “isolated.” They were heard from crowds who attended Sarah Palin rallies during the campaign of 2008, although John McCain specifically condemned them, and Palin only smiled. They were heard at most “tea party” rallies. They were heard at almost every anti-health care rally for more than a year.

It is true that most of the crowd didn’t resort to venomous hatred, but enough did to make it not isolated incidents of a political party that seems to have long since given up the notion of the “big tent” philosophy of inclusion, and to embarrass Republican leaders who had to issue apologies. 

 In contrast, voices of bigotry have not been heard at rallies of those who support health care reform. Perhaps, the health care bill needs one quick amendment—psychiatric care for all Americans, especially those who have sold out any principles they may have had by exposing their sputtering venomous hatred for anyone who doesn’t look, act, or think like they do.

So you can hardly fault us for being swept up in the “hope” and “change” whirlwind that blew through our country with Barack Obama’s presidency. Young folks from coast to coast turned out in droves to knock on doors, work phone banks, and register new voters. Even people steeped in radical politics, deeply critical of the American two-party system, got on board. Some volunteered for his campaign, a task in which they had never imagined themselves participating; others decided they would vote for him, despite taking previous positions that they would never participate in electoral politics; many put forth a sharply critical stance in public or print, but one-on-one, maybe after a few beers, admitted that his campaign’s energy was infectious, and they were doggedly attempting to evade the grasp of that excitement—to no avail.

I fell into the final category. I knew all the reasons to be skeptical that Obama would pull us out of the abyss created over the previous eight years (or thirty, or two hundred), but I didn’t want to believe them. This could be different, I thought during the lead-up to November 2008. And on Election Night, I added my voice to the collective cheer that rose up with 200,000 others in Grant Park in Chicago, the new President-Elect’s voice echoing towards us from the other side of the park. This is the beginning of something new, I thought to myself, something better for this country and the world.

It pains me greatly, then, to look back on the first year of Obama’s presidency and realize that my initial instincts were correct. A year in, so many of us who thought this president would be different have come to realize he’s not—and is not going to be.

So many of those doorknockers, phone bankers, and voter registration workers feel so betrayed by a man they thought shared their values. The list of betrayals is long and well-known: expansion of the war in Afghanistan, continued and expanded use of private military contractors like Blackwater throughout the Middle East, drone attacks in Pakistan, expanding the war on terror to Yemen, rewarding the crooks on Wall Street with blank checks coming out of taxpayers’ pockets, the White House’s lackluster attempts to defend the eventually scrapped public option in the Senate’s health care bill, the weak action on reversing climate change—and on and on and on.

Throughout 2008, those of us who made Obama’s presidency possible—the aforementioned energetic young people, along with poor people and people of color and LGBTQ people and feminists and many others—have been told to remain patient, and that the White House can’t fix our country’s myriad problems within one year or one term. The same liberal pundits and cabinet staffers who saturated his campaign with a vision of Obama as Messiah now try to appease disheartened citizens with a more realistic, pragmatic politics. He’s just one man, they say—don’t demand the impossible.

But the truth is, we’re not. Asking the President to throw his weight behind a strong climate change bill is no pie-in-the-sky request. Calling for a health care bill that includes a public option is far from unfeasible. Demanding accountability from the banks and insurance companies who are still afloat only after massive infusions of taxpayer dollars is not unachievable.

Far from calling for the impossible, we have kept our calls firmly within the realm of the achievable, the conceivable, the doable. Yet time and again, we’ve been told the opposite—or worse, we’ve been promised change, only to see the status quo reproduced.

This can’t go on.

We can’t keep repeating these mistakes. We can’t allow ourselves to be silenced by an inside the Beltway logic that claims the United States is not ready for any tepidly progressive change in health care or foreign policy. Obama’s first year in office should be a wake-up call to everyone, especially we young people who put so much faith in his ability to bring change to this country, that change won’t be delivered to us. We have to wring it out of those in power.

Where, then, do we go from here?

LGBTQ activists provide us with one answer. Some have called for a boycott of the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party until the White House makes good on the President’s campaign promises in favor of gay equality—mirroring the demands of October’s National Equality March that drew over 200,000 to Washington, D.C. Their fervent hope for justice denied, they now realize that an Obama presidency does not entail an automatic deliverance of equality—if the president is going to move, we have to make him.

They provide a strong example for other fighters for justice. If we’re going to get the President and the rest of the Democratic Party to act justly, they’ll have to feel the heat as we take our anger public.

There’s no way around it. Organizing to fight Obama might have sounded absurd a year ago as we watched him enter the Oval Office, our hopes high that he would soon deliver a better world. But as we look on as our dreams for a more humane and just world go down in flames over and over again, it appears to be the only strategy we have left.

The two high-power, straight male attorneys challenging California’s 2008 Prop 8 referendum that overturned marriage equality are famous as former adversaries in the Bush v. Gore 2000 presidential race decided by the Supreme Court.

Theodore Olson, a prominent conservative who served as George W. Bush’s solicitor general, and David Boies, who was Al Gore’s lawyer, have teamed up to battle the anti-gay marriage forces and aim to litigate a Supreme Court case they hope will challenge the notion that the American state has a vested interest in perpetuating second-class citizenship for LGBT people.

Their sights are set on creating a cultural and legal landmark on the order of the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education case that struck down school segregation or the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case that ended anti-miscegenation laws, thus legalizing marriages between Blacks and whites.

Whether the case will amount to anything approaching those cultural and legal turning points is impossible to predict. However, there’s no shortage of controversy and intrigue surrounding this high-profile case.

Organizations such as the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Lambda Legal initially opposed–and now grudgingly accept–the logic of taking Prop 8 to court. They fear that an expected victory in the California court will be appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then on to the Supreme Court, which “will say that discrimination against LGBT people is fairly easy to justify,” a number of organizations argued in a joint memo.

Attorneys at the ACLU, HRC and Lambda are haunted by the Court’s devastating 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick case that upheld sodomy laws until 2003. Yet it was under Bush and with the starkly conservative current crop of Supreme Court justices that sodomy laws were struck down. By contrast, these mainstream groups argue for continuing a gradualist, state-by-state strategy that could take as long as 20 years to gain equal rights.

No doubt, Justice Antonin Scalia’s written dissent to the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case overturning sodomy laws is certainly cause for concern:

Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.

The fact that such a cultural fossil sits on the nation’s highest court at all calls the institution itself–and the 98 Senators who heartily voted to confirm him–into question.

One ironic controversy of Perry is that Olson and Boies plan to argue their case partially on the dubious claim that sexual orientation is immutable, and therefore gays and lesbians should be treated as a “suspect class”–that is, in the same manner as racial minorities and religious groups.

Their right-wing opponents have curiously taken up the traditional position of Marxists and queer theorists who insist that sexuality is fluid and exists along a continuum–in order to advance the reactionary notion that gays and lesbians don’t deserve protection from the courts

It’s a problem that Olson and Boies would choose to promote an unproven biological determinist argument to gain civil rights for LGBT people. Religion is indisputably mutable, and yet nobody challenges legal protections for religious minorities. Millions have experienced shifts in their own sexual orientation or preference–and many have not. Yet civil rights should simply be a question of equal treatment under the law, regardless of the debate over the nature of sexuality.

A brouhaha has ensued over whether or not the bench trial in California–a judge will decide the case, not a jury–should be televised. Judge Vaugn Walker, who is hearing the case, has ruled that the proceedings should be taped for YouTube and made widely accessible. This is a victory against the conservatives who wanted to keep the trial closeted.

“Those who want to ban gay marriage spent millions of dollars to reach the public with misleading ads, rallies and news conferences during the campaign to pass Prop. 8,” said Chad Griffin, board president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which has amassed a multimillion-dollar war chest to fund Olson and Boies. “We are curious why they now fear the publicity they once craved.”

There is reason to be optimistic. Opinion has shifted positively over the past years, not least due to the outpouring of dissent since Prop 8′s passage. According to a Pew poll, 57 percent of Americans overall approve of at least civil unions, if not marriage, for gays and lesbians. The very fact that two prominent, white-shoe lawyers perceive this case to be winnable is notable. Even the conservative Cato Institute wrote a moral and legal defense of equal marriage in the pages of the New York Daily News.

Judge Walker pursued an encouraging line of questioning in the pretrial hearings when he probed the ridiculous contention by anti-LGBT lawyers that marriage is centrally about procreation. He asked, “The last marriage I performed…involved a groom who was 95, and the bride was 83. I did not demand that they prove that they intended to engage in procreative activity. Now was I missing something?”

Activists who’ve mobilized in massive numbers since the passage of Prop 8 should not wait passively as the case winds its way through the courts. As much as the judicial system attempts to appear above the political fray, it is clear that demands for equality expressed through protest and other organizing efforts have forced a fundamental shift in public–and as the Lawrence decision overturning sodomy laws shows, judicial–opinion.

The second thought I had upon reading about the Vatican’s decision was that this was the religious version of a corporate takeover. Look, says the Vatican to those disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians, your spiritual stock may be down because of the decisions of your church elders to accept all of god’s children into its flock as equals, but our church would never do such a thing. So, invest your soul with us. It’s a masterstroke of corporate raiding. Not only does the Vatican pick up some membership in North America, where its numbers have been declining for decades, but it also picks up the monies those former members of the Anglican churches give to their churches. In fact, when one considers the money, it is truly a masterstroke, since the Vatican’s most recent adherents come from the planet’s poorer continents, especially Africa. With the potential increase in relatively wealthy homophobic converts, the full coffers of the Catholic Church should increase even more.

It would be false to pretend that the entire reason for the growing disenchantment of conservative Anglicans is the election of an openly gay bishop to head the Episcopal Church in the United States. However, it is safe to say that this election was the straw that broke the proverbial camels back for those members. As the Anglican churches have grown increasingly liberal in their doctrine and approach to social justice, more and more traditionally conservative parishes and individual members have become extremely uncomfortable. In other words, the social gospel of Jesus makes certain Christians uneasy. If one considers the historical relationship of the Anglican Church to the British monarchist social order, it makes particular sense that the liberal interpretation of that gospel would make many church members question their allegiance. Like the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which has its struggle between liberal and conservative elements, the Anglican churches are undergoing a crisis. At this moment in history, it looks like the more conservative elements of the Vatican have won in the arenas where it actually has influence (leaving its position opposing imperial war and decrying poverty caused by global capitalism intact but essentially irrelevant), while in the Anglican churches it appears that the liberal elements have the upper hand.

Of course, neither of these powerful churches have the political power of the Christian faithful that align themselves with the fundamentalist churches across the United States. We are all familiar with these believers role in US elections the past few decades. When the fundamentalist churches ally themselves with the Catholic hierarchy—most often around their opposition to birth control and abortion—they can turn elections. When these two forces align themselves with the Mormon Church, as they did in California’s most recent election referendum against gay marriage, they proved the even greater power of that trinity.

It began when an openly gay judge asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean, what she thought about same sex marriage. Prejean, a student at San Diego Christian College, said that although she recognizes and accepts that others may believe in same-sex marriage, “I think I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.” That created a firestorm of publicity for the Trump-owned organization. A large minority of Americans said they supported Prejean’s opinion. A large minority said she was reciting biased lessons of intolerance; Perez Hilton, the judge who had asked the question, on his blog called Prejean “a dumb bitch.” However, several prominent gay rights activists defended Prejean’s right to her opinion.

Pageant officials had ordered all of its contestants not to mention God on their applications or at any public event. Apparently, openly believing in God could be seen as detrimental to an organization which holds its beauty contest in Las Vegas, also known as Sin City, USA. Prejean’s view about gay marriage, she later said, was based upon her religious beliefs.

Prejean was second in the Miss USA contest itself; her views may have cost her the national crown.

The Miss California organization claimed that since the pageant in April, Prejean missed scheduled events and lied about pre-pageant semi-nude pictures of her. A month after Donald Trump had strongly defended Prejean and her right of free speech, he approved the pageant stripping her crown. Prejean, who said the Pageant’s action was retaliation against her views, sued for libel.

In October, the Miss California organization countersued, claiming Prejean owes it $5,200 for what it claims is a loan it made so she could get breast augmentation. In its countersuit, the organizers and officials claimed Prejean “attempts to cast herself as a virtuous young woman and the victim in a supposed conspiracy against her.” The suit also accused her of having a “new-found notoriety [and] an inflated sense of self.” This, of course, is the organization headed by a man who beneath a blonde pompadour enjoys firing reality shows contestants. This is also an organization whose backstage manipulations could make Chicago politics or New York’s Tammany Hall organization appear to be little more than grade school cliques.

The Miss USA pageant claims its contestants are “savvy, goal-oriented and aware.” In a pompous arrogance of self-deceit it even claims that contestants “display those characteristics in their everyday lives, both as individuals, who compete with hope of advancing their careers, personal and humanitarian goals, and as women who seek to improve the lives of others.” The organization, like the Miss America contest, also requires its contestants to be single, never married, never pregnant and, apparently, never nude.

What it doesn’t require is that its contestants have natural beauty or wisdom. There are coaches to train them in voice and poise. There are coaches who train them in what questions will be asked of them, and how to respond in the most circumscribed way possible to avoid showing they have any opinions. There are coaches to tell them what bikini, ball gown, or casual wear looks best on them. There are hair dressers and makeup artists. There are weight coaches and trainers—since pageant officials and their public audience undoubtedly believe that anyone over size 4 is morbidly obese. The contestants go to suntan parlors, and slather lotions and sprays to get an even tan to pretend that they’re sun-drenched gorgeous. They use double-edge sticky tape to keep skimpy clothes from falling from almost-emaciated bodies, as well as to enhance whatever it is that needs enhancing or reducing. They get cosmetic surgery on cheeks, belly buttons, and their breasts, apparently to enhance or modify whatever genetics—or, in the case of the highly religious, whatever God—has given them.

Like any good media celebrity, Carrie Prejean has written … or co-written … or had someone else write an autobiography. This one will be published in November. The Miss California organization has just assured increased sales by publicly demanding all royalties from the book, because its stable of cookie-cutter perfect beauties can’t say, write, or do anything without its permission, even after they are dumped as employees.

Unfortunately, cosmetic surgery and breast augmentation are something it does approve.

Ron Jacobs: Hi Sherry. To begin, can you tell the readers about the March for Equality? What is the impetus behind it? Who put out the original call?

Sherry Wolf: David Mixner, who worked as an Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LBGT) liaison in the Clinton administration and Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk’s collaborator and who launched the Names Project AIDS Quilt, put out the call for this march back in June. It was met with horror and opposition from many of the more established, corporate financed national LGBT groups. However, with momentum building at the grassroots, organizations such as Human Rights Campaign and NGLTF thankfully came on board, though they do not run the organizing efforts nor are they shaping the program. This march will not be brought to you by Miller Beer or Citibank!

The (mostly) younger activists at the forefront of mobilizing this march online and on campuses and in communities are sick of the gradualist approach that has dominated our movement for years. The single demand for full equality for all LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law really strikes a chord with activists such as myself and this new generation who find the incrementalist—state-by-state, issue-by-issue—strategy of the LGBT establishment to be a failed one.

RJ: I know that in your book Sexuality and Socialism you talk about the corporatization of the Gay Pride movement and its concurrent moving away from an identification with other disenfranchised and oppressed groups in the US. What would you say is the political identity this march hopes to put forth to the people of the United States?

SW: In a sense, the initiative for this march only underscores the ramifications of my arguments in Sexuality and Socialism. No more crumbs. Enough going hat in hand to Congress and waiting for some tweak in the laws. We want it all!

I got involved in helping to organize this march because I simply find it unendurable that gay politicians like Barney Frank are among the first to argue that demanding equality for LGBT people is the third rail of American politics. This march is about seeking, essentially, to be added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and have all of our rights respected once and for all.

We will have the NAACP’s Julian Bond, UNITE Here’s John Wilhelm, young, multiracial new activists like Aiyi’nah Ford, transgender militants and myself, an unabashed socialist, speaking at this march. Though Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper will be playing and speaking, this is not a Hollywood choreographed affair—it has a shoestring budget and will give expression to this new combative mood and anti-corporate sentiment

RJ: To me, the transformation of much of the Left of the 1960s and ’70s from universal movements into a collection of smaller groups fighting their own particular oppression and for their own piece of the American pie is a big part of why the US Left is where it’s at now — where Democrats are considered socialists. Is this phenomenon (which I consider to ultimately be the result of identity politics gone wild) present in the movement for equality? How should leftists counteract this when it appears?

SW: [The first part of your question is answered above, I believe]

I travel a great deal and speak to small and large audiences from Bellingham, WA to Gainesville, FL and I think that those old school ideas are on the wane—in particular among working-class people and those not attending elite universities. The language of Identity politics persists, in a sense, because a new culture and outlook are still embryonic. But when striking Teamsters (Latino and white, all straight) attended an event in Chicago two weeks ago where Cleve Jones spoke to 250+ people about going to the march, everyone was electrified. The workers gave solidarity to our struggle and the LGBT activists are lending solidarity to their pickets. The May Day protests in many cities this year had LGBT activists carrying rainbow flags—the contingent in Los Angeles where I was that day was very well received by immigrant families.

It’s becoming clearer to more people that the old labor slogan is true: An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

RJ: As you know, I live in North Carolina. Outside of Asheville and a few of the larger cities, there exists a quite obvious homophobia. One sees it on church message boards and bumperstickers and one hears it on the radio and so-called Christian television. This intolerance is quite obvious and, as Beth Sherouse wrote quite articulately in an article that appeared in Counterpunch on August 31, 2009, the fact of this obvious hatred and fear is one reason why LBGT equality must be recognized on a national scale. In her article, she reminds the readers of the federal role in helping end desegregation. Yet, there is another side to that story. The federal government also allowed and encouraged not only segregation, but also fought attempts to roll it back for a long time. I guess my question is — while it is important that federal legislation forbidding discrimination against persons based on their sexuality be passed, how does the equality movement see any such legislation being enforced?

SW: Beth is right and after reading her piece I made it a priority to add more Southern stops on my current speaking tour. If you look at polls one year after the Virginia v. Loving case ended laws preventing Blacks and whites from marrying in 1967, only 20 percent of whites in the U.S. supported biracial marriages. We obviously can’t wait for bigots to come around before passing equal protections for LGBT people. However, it was the ongoing organizing, teach-ins, marches, rallies and even just the posture of Blacks in this country that altered the political climate.

Today, around 80 percent of all Americans—and more than 95 percent of young people—approve of interracial marriages, according to Gallup. A climate of intolerance to anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry can be advanced by students and workers—regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. All progressives must bring these issues into organizing efforts beyond the LGBT movement—inject them into union contracts, workplace organizing, budget fightbacks, campus mobilizations and immigrant defense campaigns. After all, most LGBT people ARE workers, immigrants, Black, Brown and all these other identities as well. In other words, lesbians have to pay the rent too.

RJ: In your book you insist on the need for the LBGT rights movement to link up with other oppressed groups in the US and fight for all of these groups’ freedom. I was wondering if in your organizing work for the October 11-12 March on Washington, do you see any attempts by other organizers to expand the call to all oppressed groups? Or is there a tendency to limit the organizing to LBGT people? If so, can you explain why you think this is so?

SW: We made a conscious decision not to create a laundry list of demands, but to have one single demand for equality in all matters covered by civil law in all 50 states. The veteran activists involved, myself included, want to strike while the iron’s hot. There is a spirit of struggle among young LGBT people who came of age thinking AIDS isn’t the mass killer that it is and who are waking up after Prop 8 to the fact that our rights are completely dispensable, where they even exist. We can still be legally fired, or not hired, in most states for our sexual orientation and/or gender identities.

Arizona’s governor, for example, just ditched domestic partner benefits. Ohio’s Representative, Lynn R. Wachtmann, some neanderthal from the 75th District wrote to LGBT activists, “If sexual orientation and gender identity and expression are added as protected classes, all those who do not identify themselves in accordance with this lifestyle choice will be discriminated against.” I have never been a single-issue activist in my life — I’m a socialist after all — but at some point we must unequivocally demand an end to this crap once and for all.

I’m 44, I came of age AFTER Stonewall and before Generation Twitter, I’m from the generation nobody ever bothered to name. I’ve participated in, and in some cases helped lead or initiate divestment campaigns, antiwar, anti-police brutality, pro-abortion, pro-single-payer health care, anti-budget cuts, pro-labor fights, etc. for 26 years. There’s finally a broad fight for LGBT equality and I’d be insane not to leap in with full-force and try to help make it a success.

My greatest hope out of this march is not simply that we win our demand, but that in a poetic reversal of history other struggles take a page from our initiative and mobilize to make demands of the Obama administration. The Stonewall generation had fought for Black civil rights, women’s liberation, against the Vietnam War and, for many, alongside Cesar Chavez for farm laborers for many years before they ever mobilized for their own rights. This time around, it may be possible that through a quirk of history the LGBT struggle could lead the way for others to ratchet up a fight for genuine universal health care, jobs and an end to the wars and occupations abroad.

RJ: I love it — “the generation nobody bothered to name.” Anyhow, any insights on how the organizing is going? How can people get on board and organize in their community?

SW: The Web site for the march www.nationalequalitymarch.com has a dizzying array of downloadable materials. Go to the site, get the facts, post flyers, send out tweets, post it to Facebook, and by all means everyone should get themselves to the march if they can. Obama has shown that without mass pressure he won’t deliver what we need and want. This march punctuates a turning point of sorts for the LGBT struggle—people who miss out on this protest for civil rights will kick themselves afterwards. Don’t kick yourselves, just come.

RJ: Thanks, Sherry.

The most universal of these strictures, especially among religious fundamentalist and right wing political adherents is against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LBGT) population. Gay marriage — no way. Gays rearing children — no way. Equal rights for those of a non heterosexual persuasion — special privileges, not equal rights. Anyhow, you get the picture. Homosexuals are somehow not quite human and therefore do not deserve to exercise their human rights. Meanwhile, when it comes to the liberal side of the US political spectrum one hears words in support of equal rights only to be all to often followed by a refusal to support those rights when it comes to actually passing legislation.

With the brashness of the Stonewall rioters and the insight developed through keen observation and years of activism, author Sherry Wolf explores the history and theory of sexual politics in the United States in her recently published Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LBGT Liberation. Wolf begins her text with a discussion of the roots of sexual oppression. By discussing the construction of homosexuality, she addresses the complementary construction of heterosexuality and the resulting dichotomization of human sexual experience. Working from an understanding that it is capitalism that creates this dichotomy, Wolf examines the contradiction of early industrial capitalism that allowed for the autonomy of human sexual practices while demanding the stratification of those practices to make it possible for capitalism to work. Stating this theory quite succinctly — “capitalist society has transformed how people express themselves sexually yet simultaneously has aimed to restrict human sexuality as a means of social control” — Wolf begins an examination of how we arrived at the juncture we are currently at. By utilizing this contradiction, Wolf is able to turn a sharply critical eye on the successes and failures of the LBGT movement, while never forgetting that this fundamental contradiction is the genesis for a multitude of other contradictions around race and class that exist withing the LBGT and every other movement for social justice and true liberation.

An avowed socialist, Wolf does not only address the nature of sexual repression under the capitalist nations. She turns a critical eye towards those nations that called themselves socialist and breaks down the history and nature of those governments’ repression of sexuality, especially that of LBGT peoples. Noting that immediately after the Russian Revolution of October 1917 all restrictions on sexual expression were removed from the criminal code, Wolf continues her history by noting that it was the pressures of the counterrevolution and eventual leadership of Stalin that followed the heady years of the Russian Revolution that saw the rollback to traditional sexual practices being encouraged and enforced in the Soviet Union. Wolf attributes the repression of LBGT folks in Cuba and China to their essentially Stalinist nature, while noting that within the US communist movement, gays and lesbians were purged from the Communist Party, USA under similar circumstances. Despite the essentially Victorian attitudes towards sexuality in the CPUSA, the struggle against these attitudes continued inside the party and throughout the leftist movement in the US.

Because of the anti-gay sentiment prevalent in Left formations, many gays and lesbians looked elsewhere for a political understanding of their situation. Concurrently, the phenomenon of identity-based politics was gaining ground among many US activists. The essential apolitical nature of these politics was not apparent at first, yet the seed was sown. Movements supporting LBGT liberation ended up becoming focused on a single issue, and isolated from the greater political milieu. Like other left-originated movements, they found a home in academia and, instead of encouraging alliances across genders and race, they encouraged a politics of separatism and a hierarchy of victimhood. Wolf argues that although identity and queer politics did not (and can not) achieve sexual liberation, this trend in the politics of sexuality has done a lot to generate social acceptance by individuals of LBGT individuals in US society. However, they have not changed the fundamental basis of sexual oppression. Only organizing and mobilizing in the streets against sexual oppression can accomplish that.

One of the debates around homosexuality in the United States concerns whether or not biology determines one’s sexual preference. Wolf addresses this debate, pointing out its potential misuse by homophobes. If it is biologically determined, then can’t it be cured? At the same time, this argument has been used by advocates for equal rights for the LBGT population. Given the open-ended nature of this debate, Wolf presents arguments for and against, ultimately stating that it is virtually impossible to state how much of one’s sexuality is determined by biology and how much is related to other factors. She does insist, however, that it is under capitalism that the distinctions and classifications of sexuality have flourished and have been used by the ruling class to keep those they rule divided. Consequently, it is only by ending the capitalist economy that true sexual liberation can come.

Bringing the text into the heart of today’s struggle around marriage equality, Wolf addresses those critics that consider gay marriage to be a side issue. No matter what one thinks about the institution of marriage and its role in maintaining bourgeois society, she argues that it is essential leftists and progressives support the fight. In the same way that antiracists in the 1950s supported the struggle against laws forbidding interracial marriage no matter what they thought about marriage, we must support the rights of those who aren’t strictly heterosexual to marry.

Although this book looks primarily at the LBGT population, by doing so it explores the nature of all sexualities in US society, how they are influenced by that society and how their influence changes society. In addition, the growing belief that the struggle for LBGT civil rights is one of the most important struggles leftists in the 21st century should be organizing around becomes even more convincing under her tutelage. Sexuality and Socialism is the most intelligent and enlightened discussion on sexuality to come from the Left in a long time. No other work that comes to my mind explains the history of sexuality and sexual repression in the United States as comprehensively and compellingly.

For now, if you’ve been following the battle over same-sex marriage and you don’t know who the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez or Rubén Díaz are, you likely soon will.

Rodriguez, President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), and Diaz, a New York state Senator from the Bronx a Pentecostal pastor in that borough, are two key players leading anti-same-sex marriage forces in New York State.

On Sunday, May 17, while much of the “culture war” crowd was focused on events at Notre Dame University — where President Barack Obama was heartily welcomed by UND graduates and their families — things were hopping in New York City. Thousands of anti-same-sex marriage activists marched in opposition to Governor David Patterson’s gay marriage bill. The Christian Post reported that the mostly Latino crowd, which gathered at the Governor’s Manhattan office, “stretched from 35th to 40th Street on 3rd Avenue in New York City.”

At the same time hundreds of marriage-equality advocates gathered at a rally near Rockefeller Center. Speakers at the pro–marriage equality rally included New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council speaker Christine Quinn, state assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, and actors Cynthia Nixon, David Hyde Pierce, Cheyenne Jackson, and Gavin Creel.

Last week, the New York State Assembly passed the marriage equality bill by an 89 to 52 vote. According to Box Turtle Bulletin, “The Assembly voted for a marriage bill in 2007, as well. But in that vote the count was 85 to 61. And while this year’s vote only has four more ‘yes’ votes, the margin of victory increased from 24 to 37.” How the bill will fare in the State senate is anybody’s guess.

Among the leaders of the protest was Rubén Díaz who had earlier charged Patterson with disrespecting religious groups by introducing gay marriage legislation on April 16, a few days before the weeks of Passover and Easter began. As if it would have been okay on May Day!

Charisma News Online reported that at this time, Diaz has expressed near certainty that the bill will not pass in the Senate, as it “lacks the 32 votes needed to pass the measure, even though there are 32 Democratic senators.”

“I have the commitment form six Democrats that they will not vote for it,” Díaz said. “So they’re going to have to go to the Republicans if they want to pass it in the Senate. But this is a Democratic agenda, and I doubt that the Republicans would jump on board to make the Democrats look good.” According to Charisma News Online, “Even if the gay marriage bill is reintroduced every year, Díaz promises to block it. ‘I’m a preacher. I’m not only a state senator. I would not vote for that.’”

Joining Diaz at the demonstration was a coalition that included Radio Vision Cristiana International, the New York Hispanic Clergy Organization, the CONLICO network of bishops and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC).

“Radio Vision has been motivated to respond to . . . Paterson and every other elected official, to let them know that we are not sleeping and that we will not stay idle with our hands crossed while they pressure and promote marriage between persons of the same sex,” said the Rev. Milton Donato, president of Radio Vision Cristiana.

Amongst this group of pastors and politicians, Samuel Rodriquez has the highest public profile and biggest national platform. In late April, Rodriguez’s NHCLC (NHCLC) and the Hispanic National Association of Evangelicals, sponsored the third Annual Hispanic/African American Evangelical Summit in the Baltimore Metropolitan area. “With approximately 1,700 in attendance, this event establishes the gathering as the premier Black/Brown faith event in our nation. The African American Hispanic Summit served the Christian community as it provided a venue for multi-layered, cross cultural interactions,” declared Dr. Angel Nunez, NHCLC Senior Vice President and National Director of the Hispanic/Black Evangelical Alliance.

“Hispanics and African Americans stand as the Peter and John of the 21st Century American Church. We stand before the Gate called Beautiful. Our communities once again lie crippled, paralyzed and without hope. We, the Black and the Brown may not have all the silver or the gold but what we have we give; In the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth we tell our families, communities and nation, get up and walk,” stated Rodriguez.

In early May, in a post at the “On Faith” website sponsored by Newsweek and The Washington Post Rodriguez criticized President Obama for “demonstrate[ing] his brand of political correctness by acknowledging a day of prayer and simultaneously rejecting the idea that the White House should somehow commemorate the day in an official event.”

As Frederick Clarkson recently pointed out at Talk2Action, Rodriguez was a signatory to a document titled “Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values Between Evangelicals and Progressives (CLURT)”, a document aimed at establishing “common ground” between evangelicals and progressive religious.

At the anti-same-sex marriage three-hour extravaganza, Diaz told the crowd: “They accuse us of homophobia. They accuse us of being radicals . . . They accuse us of many things because they want to close the mouth of the church.”

According to Gay City News, “Diaz credited Radio Vision Cristiana, a New Jersey-based AM radio station that broadcasts religious programming, with turning out the [huge] crowd” which, organizers claimed, included representatives from 3,000 churches from the tri-state area.

“They sounded the trumpet and here we are,” Diaz said. “The sleeping giant has awakened and nothing can make him go back to sleep.”

Rabbi Yehuda Levin of Brooklyn, a longtime anti-gay activist, played the fear card to its fullest possible extent: “If this legislation passes, God forbid, you and I will be considered by the state law as bigots, as discriminating. They will take away from our religious schools the tax deductions. They will not give us any government for our schools. They will make our marriage counselors counsel homosexual couples. Our accountants will have to do taxes for married homosexual couples. Our children will be brought in school “Heath has Two Mommies” . . . The full force of the state government will come down on us like a ton of bricks. We will be outcasts.”

And, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Washington, D.C.-based lobby group, was also on hand. “The politicians are unleashing chaos on our children, on our families, and on our nation by redefining marriage . . . One thing stands in the way of this chaos — you,” Perkins told the crowd.

In between battling the homosexual menace in the U.S., hawking his notorious holocaust revisionist book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, and declaring war against the Southern Poverty Law Center for refusing to remove his Abiding Truth Ministries from its list of hate groups, Scott Lively president of “Defend the Family” — a service of Abiding Truth Ministries — has again taken his anti-gay crusade on the road.

Earlier this year, UGPulse.com reported that the Family Life Network, “has organized a training seminar to equip Ugandans with information and skills to fight what it calls spiraling promotion of homosexuality in the country.” Stephen Langa, the executive director of Family Life Network “says that Uganda is now under extreme pressure from homosexual groups to de-criminalize homosexuality,” UGPulse.com noted. “He says homosexuals in the country were boosted by a December 2008 Court victory which declared that it is unconstitutional to discriminate against homosexuals and that they should enjoy the same rights as enjoyed by other Ugandans.”

Lively, who has spoken at previous African events organized by Langa, was joined in early March at the Hotel Triangle in Kampala by Don Schmierer from International Healing Ministries and a board member of Exodus International, and Caleb Lee Brundidge, who works with a ministry that, “rehabilitates homosexuals and lesbians.”

According to Don Burroway, writing at Box Turtle Bulletin, Schmierer, “the author of five books related to ex-gay counseling” — including An Ounce of Prevention, What’s a Father To Do?, and Celebrating God’s Design — has been “quite a globetrotter lately, having traveled to Seoul, South Korea, in March of last year, as well as to the Ukraine last summer.” According to Burroway, all of Schmierer’s books “have been translated into several languages, including Russian and Ukraine.”

Brundidge is a staff member at Richard Cohen’s International Healing Foundation, “which advocates the controversial ‘holding’ or ‘touch’ therapy to cure homosexuality,” Burroway pointed out.

At the Kampala conference, Lively is quoted by Ugandan activist Kasha Jacqueline from Freedom and Roam Uganda as saying that “The gay movement is very evil and we must stop it immediately.” Lively went on:

You have a gay movement in Uganda that is operating at a high level, which you must bear in mind. This gay movement around the world has a handbook that they use and that is what the Ugandan gay movement is using now. You must be ready to stop this gay agenda. And don’t think that fighting the gay movement is the solution — you will be fighting a losing battle because this movement has come to stop humanity. They have a clear vision, mission and strategies. The only way to defeat them is to compete with them. Their movement is 70 years old and that’s why they don’t care about you. They know you will die soon and they will replace you and take over the nation. They have decided to recruit the youth.

You have a lot of work to do. Homosexuality is immoral and we cannot sit back and see immorality controlling nations. Homosexuality is equivalent to pedophilia in many ways. Homosexuals cannot control their sexual desires and behaviors. If all of us acted upon our desires and feelings then where would the world be? Families would break up because of adultery. People would continue to molest children, etc.

This is only the latest stop for Lively on what might be termed an International Hate Tour.

A few years back, Lively — whose book The Pink Swastika is still advertised prominently on the home page of Defend the Family.com — arrived in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk for a speaking engagement at that city’s Sverdlovsky Palace of Culture. “Many countries of the former Soviet Union, which had been the outposts of family values recently, have submitted to the pressure of homosexuals,” Gay Republic Daily reported Lively as saying at one of his Russian stops. Lively also noted that a gay parade that had taken place in Lithuania, and that there was an event in Kiev where the Ukrainian President stood “on one stage with George Michael, a homosexual singer, who has been caught making love in the bushes recently.”

Lively pointed out that in the Russian town of Omsk “homosexuals penetrated into a local university and formed their own club, which tried to breakdown” his lecture. “But I believe,” Lively went on, “that Russia will become a country, where ‘the blue plague’ will be stopped.”

A short time later, OneNewsNow, a news service operated by Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association (AFA), reported that Watchmen on the Walls (WOW) — designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group — had announced its “participation” in AFA-sponsored boycott of Ford Motor Company.”

WOW’s spokesperson is Scott Lively. According to OneNewsNow, WOW “says it will … help spread it [the boycott] to Russian-speaking countries near its headquarters in Latvia. OneNewsNow quoted Lively as saying that WOW helps “coordinate pro-family opposition to the international homosexual movement.” He added that, “the organization will promote the boycott using its network of activists in more than ten countries.”

OneNewsNow also reported that Lively maintained that the “people of the former Soviet Union’s Russian-speaking countries are among the strongest opponents of the homosexual agenda in the world, and he expects the automaker’s sales to significantly shrink once news of the boycott reaches InVictory.org, a Christian news service in those same countries with an estimated one-million readers.”

Lively co-founded Watchmen on the Walls, “a quasi-religious anti-gay hate group which calls homosexuality ‘inherently evil,’” Talk2Action pointed out in a December 2007 post. Lively’s “collaborators” include Alexey Ledyaev, the leader of the Latvia-based international New Generation Church, and Ken Hutcherson, a former National Football League player turned preacher who is the founder of Antioch Bible Church, another anti-gay enterprise located near Seattle, WA.

Hutcherson, who grabbed some headlines during this past December’s annual “War on Christmas” battle in the state of Washington, spoke at Ledyaev’s Latvian church in March 2007, according to Box Turtle Bulletin. “While there,” the Bulletin reported, “he claimed that he was speaking on behalf of President Bush, saying that the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives named him ‘Special Envoy for Adoptions, Family Values, Religious Freedom, and Medical Relief.’ When the Seattle Stranger asked the White House about it, spokeswoman Alyssa J. McLenninghen said nobody gave Hutcherson any such title or authority to speak on behalf of the White House. Hutcherson promised to prove his status by producing video of him being given the “power,” but no such proof has surfaced.”

Last year, Lively moved from Temecula, California to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he joined the New Generation Christian Center as pastor and leader of The School of Christian Activism, Talk2Action’s Laurel reported. “Interestingly,” Laurel noted, “his arrival has only been announced on the church’s Russian page, not on the English page.”

The Murder of Satender Singh

Ledyaev made news in 2007, when members of his church in California murdered Satender Singh, a 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent. At the time, Lively called the murder “unfortunate” and Watchmen on the Walls released a statement that refused to apologize for the murder. The statement insisted that the group is a “world association of men and women of all races, colors and nationalities who believe in the superiority of the natural family and marriage of one man and one woman.”

The statement noted that while the organization is “against cohabitation, divorce, abortion, adultery and other acts that undermine society on which civilization is based,” it is especially opposed to “homosexuality because this destructive practice in the evils of organized political movement and became the principal enemies of the natural family.”

Watchmen on the Walls maintained that it did not “support violence and did not condone violence.” However, it stated that it would “not apologize for the fight against homosexuality because it is inappropriate and harmful unnatural phenomenon, in both moral and physical, and psychological relationships.” The organization claimed that while “some hate homosexuals,” it is not among them. “We see homosexuals similar to alcoholics, that is, as the unfortunate people who have been held hostage by their harmful lifestyles.”

The statement extended the alcoholism metaphor saying that by “refusing treatment, they [homosexuals] are on a par with alcoholics’ right to privacy in their own dwellings. But public recruitment adherents of this way of life that is unacceptable.”

Watchmen spelled out it “task” as “merg[ing] with associates around the world and assist them in the approval of the natural family and traditional marriage, as well as the healing of homosexuals, which in this endeavor. We will help those who share our beliefs, to take key positions in education, business, government and the media around the world,” the statement warned.” The group pledged not to be cowed by critics that “believe homosexuality is normal and useful, especially journalists in Europe and America, many of whom are themselves homosexual or their active supporters.”

The statement concluded by declaring that it is “searching for the sense of cooperation between men and women in different countries and different nationalities. We do not like cowards, who, for example, dare to speak out against same-[sex] marriages, but does not dare to say that homosexuality is inherently evil. We do not need chauvinists who hate homosexuals in the same way as some people hate other races and strangers. We need a courageous and decent people who love the natural order of imams and the human family, wishing her approval, promotion, improvement and protection as the primary sources of any society on earth.”

In August 2007, one month after the murder of Satender Singh, Lively described the situation to an audience in the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk in the Russian Federation. The response from the audience was shocking, perhaps even to Lively.

Now, I’ve been working with the Russian community in Sacramento. And I want to tell you this is an example of how bad things are in the United States. Because we’ve come to a place in the United States where the homosexuals have achieved very high power. And they’ve begun to punish . . . They’ve begun to cause the political powers to punish anyone who says that homosexuality is wrong.

There was a situation in Sacramento a few weeks ago in a public park. There was a group of homosexuals and they were very drunk and one of the homosexual men was taking off his pants. And there were children in the park. And a Russian man went over to these homosexuals and he was rebuking them and there started a fight. And the Russian man punched the homosexual. [The audience starts to shout and applaud.] No, no, no, don’t . . .The man was very drunk . . . the homosexual was very drunk. He was very drunk and he fell down and he hit his head and he died. [Some in the audience start to applaud and laugh] No. . . no . . . .

Now the Russian man has been accused of murder and the FBI is seeking him. And all of the powers in Sacramento have been accusing all of the Russian community of being murderers. And the goal is to silence everyone who speaks against homosexuality. And this is a very dangerous situation because we don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved. Amen?

Lively Takes on Southern Poverty Law Center

In a recent piece titled “Help Expose the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Lively, clearly upset over the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) listing his organization as a hate group, maintained that he is “not the violent hatemonger they [the SPLC] portray me as,” and he suggested that readers go to his website to “confirm” that assertion. “After being placed on the hate list the first time,” Lively tried to get the SPLC “to remove us on the grounds that we really don’t belong there.” He discovered through a reporter’s inquiry of the SPLC’s Mark Potok, “that we were added because I am the co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party” and that he “would need to repudiate the claims of the book to be removed from the list.” Lively then states that he has “no intention of distancing [himself] from my accurate, factual documentation of the homosexual roots of the Nazi regime.”

Tired of “being smeared” and defamed on the internet by ‘gay’ apologists, Lively has “decided” that he “will not, by my silence, embolden the SPLC [efforts] to widen its attack on the pro-family movement beyond the several groups already on their ‘hate’ list (most of which as undeserving as ATM of this designation).” Lively, who is a lawyer, has decided not to sue. Instead he is embarking on a campaign “to give them a taste of their own medicine and expose the SPLC as the blindly partisan, anti-Christian hate group which it has become.” While “SPLC leaders have every right to their bigoted views . . . “they do not have the right, at the same time, to claim the status of independent, neutral arbiters of the homosexual issue.” (For more of Lively’s declaration of war against the SPLC, his fundraising plans for the campaign, and his three letters to the SPLC, go here)

Contrary to what Lively claims, Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., told me via telephone, the SPLC does not “associate Lively with violent activities.” Potok acknowledged the fact that Lively contacted the SPLC and he said that he “replied to him about how he could get off the list.” Potok pointed out that the main reason Lively is on the list is because “in our view he consciously lies about, and defames, gay people. His theory of the Holocaust is equivalent to the flat earth theory. It’s obvious to us that he has to know his allegations are completely false.”

“In fact,” Potok added, “we don’t ordinarily list groups that say homosexuality is wrong or see it as a sin; we list very few anti-gay groups. They have to be very extreme in their views. We see Lively the same way we see Paul Cameron; the two of them in our view consciously promote easily provable false defamations. They don’t seem to care at all what the truth is.”

Potok had no comment about Lively’s new anti-SPLC campaign.

On the one hand, many mainstream LGBT rights groups are attempting to rein in the street heat and radicalism of activists who continue to organize and protest in the wake of the victory of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 referendum last November.

On the other, a far smaller, yet vocal, number of left-wing activists express indifference or even contempt for the same-sex marriage movement and the growth of new groups forming in cities across the country.

How should socialists approach these challenges?

The largest and best-funded organizations in the country such as the Human Rights Campaign and statewide equality groups are looking to “Obamify” the same-sex marriage movement. As the San Francisco Chronicle explains, “Obamification” is:

[M]ore than just connecting supporters through social networking sites such as Facebook and building mile-long e-mail lists. It would involve pairing new media technology with old-fashioned, door-to-door outreach — two tactics that were not used well in the unsuccessful opposition to Proposition 8 in November, according to a report by Marriage Equality USA, an Oakland-based organization that supports gay marriage.

The leading advocates of this sort of organizing, such as Torie Osborn and Rick Jacobs, are Democratic Party campaign activists who worked in the Obama and Howard Dean campaigns, respectively. They are critical of the failed conservative methods used in the No on 8 campaign in California, and argue for tactics such as “online, grassroots activism.” Yet activism should never be reduced to clicking a mouse.

While they do, in fact, push for LGBT people to tell their own stories in some door-knocking actions — rather than hide behind euphemism-filled ads with straight couples, as the No on 8 campaign did — their use of progressive language to press for lobbying and online networking masks a narrow vision of genuine grassroots activism.

There is an occasional verbal nod toward protest and collective organizing efforts — that is, genuine grassroots organizing. But the focus is primarily on conventional legislative lobbying to appeal to state and national officials.

Currently, attorneys are attempting to repeal Prop 8′s reversal of gay marriage rights in the courts. Activists across the country are planning Day of Decision actions — either celebrations or protests, depending on the outcome. These are actions activists should aggressively promote and participate in.

Because President Obama and party leaders continue to define marriage as between one man and one woman, despite their opposition to statewide gay marriage bans, groups that remain inside the Democratic Party are more concerned about not embarrassing politicians than winning rights.

Thus, Equality California is already raising hesitations about attempting a 2010 pro-gay marriage ballot initiative in the event that Prop 8 is upheld — out of fear that LGBT activists would “look bad” or suffer another “defeat, ” according to their director Marc Solomon, speaking at an April meeting of the activist group Love Honor Cherish in Los Angeles.

It appears that as with the 2004 elections, when Democrats like gay Congressman Barney Frank told activists not to press for equal marriage, the folks they are really concerned about “looking bad” are the Democrats.

In addition, while newly formed local groups such as Seattle’s Queer Allies Coalition, New York’s Civil Rights Front and the Chicago chapter of Join the Impact have widened their agendas to include support for employment non-discrimination for LGBT people and active solidarity with labor and immigrant rights organizing, many mainstream groups assert an exclusive focus on statewide gay marriage legislation.

They are tepid or silent about demanding that Obama and Congress repeal the Defense of Marriage Act that denies all federal marriage benefits, even to married LGBT couples in states where their marriages are legal.

But activists such as Harvey Milk’s collaborator Cleve Jones argue that broader issues for LGBT rights must be fought for today. At a Camp Courage training weekend in late January — organized by the advocates of Obamafication — Jones enthusiastically called for a national LGBT civil rights movement:

It’s got to be not just marriage. It’s got to be marriage and housing and public accommodation and adoption and immigration and taxation and Social Security and military service. We want nothing less than full equality in all areas governed by civil law in all 50 states, and eventually in every country of this world. That is what we are fighting for.

Still, while thousands are taking to the streets for gay marriage and raising larger questions about LGBT oppression and how to fight it, some on the left are surprisingly dismissive.

One panel discussion at the Left Forum in New York City on April 19 — on which I spoke — was typical of this sort of ultra-left approach to the question of equal marriage rights. Called “Gay Marriage: Should the Left Care?” committed activists from Queers for Economic Justice and the LGBT youth group FIERCE attacked the gay marriage movement for making such a conservative demand.

Without acknowledging the evidence to the contrary–and there is quite a bit–they assumed that given the mainstream nature of marriage, marriage activists must not care about racism, economic injustice or taking on the systemic causes of LGBT oppression.

They are both theoretically and factually mistaken.

First, gay marriage is a reform. Like all reforms under capitalism, it leaves the structure of the system intact while alleviating a grievance — in this case, the denial of both material benefits and the desire to have LGBT relationships acknowledged as equal to those of heterosexuals.

Like the demand for unionization, under which the terms of workers’ exploitation are renegotiated — with workers gaining higher wages and benefits, but not eliminating the power of bosses — equal marriage would end some discrimination without eliminating oppression altogether.

Second, to challenge the demand for same-sex marriage for not delivering sexual liberation is a bit like disparaging the civil rights sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in the early 1960s for not eliminating racism. It sets up a false expectation for a reformist demand, and then assails it for not delivering revolutionary transformation.

At the Left Forum meeting, one married gay couple with HIV/AIDS hammered home what’s really at stake in this struggle.

Vinny Allegrini and Mark de Solla have been living with HIV/AIDS for 20 years, and were married 15 years ago in Canada. In many concrete and emotionally compelling ways, their daily struggle to keep alive and take care of each other — and have medical and state authorities respect their health care wishes — is codified by their marriage license, which they must carry with them everywhere to prove that they are not legal strangers, as they lead lives that are shaped by health care crises.

Socialists and other progressives must engage with the genuine struggle to try and shape a course that is independent of the Democratic Party establishment and inclusive of broader civil rights for all LGBT people.