The Jewish leaders were infuriated by Stephen’s accusation, and they shook their fists at him in rage. But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed steadily into heaven and saw the glory of God, and he saw Jesus standing in the place of honor at God’s right hand. And he told them, “Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing in the place of honor at God’s right hand!”

Then they put their hands over their ears and began shouting. They rushed at him and dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. His accusers took off their coats and laid them at the feet of a young man named Saul.

Saul was one of the witnesses, and he agreed completely with the killing of Stephen.

[...] So Ananias went and found Saul. He laid his hands on him and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road, has sent me so that you might regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Instantly something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he got up and was baptized. Afterward he ate some food and regained his strength.

Saul [also called Paul] stayed with the believers in Damascus for a few days. And immediately he began preaching about Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is indeed the Son of God!”

All who heard him were amazed. “Isn’t this the same man who caused such devastation among Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem?” they asked. “And didn’t he come here to arrest them and take them in chains to the leading priests?”

Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic

Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.

GWB's 2004 Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter’s questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.

Mehlman’s leadership positions in the GOP came at a time when the party was stepping up its anti-gay activities — such as the distribution in West Virginia in 2006 of literature linking homosexuality to atheism, or the less-than-subtle, coded language in the party’s platform (“Attempts to redefine marriage in a single state or city could have serious consequences throughout the country…”). Mehlman said at the time that he could not, as an individual Republican, go against the party consensus. He was aware that Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief strategic adviser, had been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.

Mehlman acknowledges that if he had publicly declared his sexuality sooner, he might have played a role in keeping the party from pushing an anti-gay agenda.

“It’s a legitimate question and one I understand,” Mehlman said. “I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally.” He asks of those who doubt his sincerity: “If they can’t offer support, at least offer understanding.”

Mehlman is the most powerful Republican in history to identify as gay.

Sometimes our worst enemies become our greatest advocates.

Keep that in mind as you debate whether we should accept Mehlman’s help, or the help of other high-profile anti-gays who come out of the closet in the coming years.

(P.S. Mike Rogers still has a 100% perfect record. When he says someone is gay, they’re gay.)

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The most frustrating part of the fight for LGBT rights is that many people, both inside and outside the community, view it as a grab bag of issues. It isn’t. It’s One Issue with many moving parts, and it really doesn’t matter to me where we succeed first. The work will continue until the One Issue is completed, because in truth the One Issue is more than the sum of its parts.

There’s a reason LGBT people suffer depression and anxiety so much more often than straight people do. There’s a reason we’re twice as likely to suffer PTSD. There’s a reason our youth are three to seven times (depending on environment) more likely to die by suicide.

It’s no coincidence that our statistical 5-10% of the nation’s youth make up 20-40% of all homeless youth, that LGBT homeless youth are 56% more likely to abuse alcohol than straight homeless youth and 76% more likely to have been sexually assaulted.

Solving the One Issue has the side effect of bringing people back from the edge. That’s the real reason the fight is so important. It’s not about me getting married (I won’t) or joining the Marines (it is to laugh). It isn’t about me not getting a job because I’m a fag or being politely turned down for a loan or being turned away from a restaurant or being told my blood is tainted.

It’s about people knowing that they exist, that their lives are real and important, that their government won’t assault them, and that it actually considers them in the same way it considers their parents and siblings and friends. That One Issue is the keystone to all the others.

The U.S. government is, right now, today, harming us with its codified discrimination because people in the majority approve of it. I want that harm to cease, quite selfishly, because I’m one of those people being harmed and I know a lot of other people who are being harmed. And though it irks me to no end, I suppose I shouldn’t think too poorly of people, even those who think they’re our allies, for not wanting it to change badly enough because of their own selfishness.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m going to shut up and bow my head until that far off, imaginary, never-to-come day when people in the majority have everything they want and decide it’s okay to finally make the government stop harming people.

No sir.

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The ruling contains 80 findings of fact and a conclusion of law which finds that Prop 8 violates both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

Like most people on both sides of the issue, I expected Judge Vaughn Walker to rule in our favor. There was, after all, a veritable mountain of evidence from the plaintiffs and a striking lack of credible evidence from the defendants. He surprised me, though, by ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional because of due process and equal protection. I expected one or the other, but never both. (Truth be told, I audibly gasped when I saw that.)

Rachel Maddow spent three segments on Thursday night discussing Judge Walker’s decision, and one the following night marveling at the decided lack of reaction from the Religious Right. I’ve embedded all four below.

David Boies, one of the attorneys leading the case against Prop 8, spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Fransisco Thursday night. In this clip he discusses the history of state-sanctioned, codified anti-gay discrimination and the outlook of this case.

Then there were the Sunday talk shows. David Boies faced off against Family Research Council‘s Tony Perkins on Face the Nation. (You may recall last year when Mr. Perkins wanted the US to side with GWB’s “Axis of Evil” against gays.) Boies took Tony to the woodshed on this one by doing what most TV pundits are trained not to do: He called Tony a liar and then proved it.

Meanwhile, former Solicitor General Ted Olson, the other lead attorney on the case, had a must-see interview on FOX with Chris Wallace. Olson bluntly challenged Chris on his rhetoric and righted the discussion to the true issue at hand.

(Side note: Kudos to MSNBC on their video embedding. CBS and FOX are leagues behind them with the absolute worst embedding capabilities I’ve seen.)

Finally, Jon Stewart talked about the media reaction to Judge Walker’s ruling on the best newscast around, The Daily Show.

So yeah. It was an important week. We have a long way to go, and it’ll extend at least into 2011, but this will go down as a historic decision for the cause of civil rights.

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The attention to detail on those nooses is almost impressive.

(Photo by Alice Hoenigman for Bilerico.)

And remember the interview Arisha Hatch of Courage Campaign‘s NOMTour Tracker got with Larry Adams, the man who made that sign?

You know what I wonder?

I wonder why those three people, including at least one NOM staffer (popped collar guy), who interrupted the interview to tell Larry not to talk to Arisha didn’t just look her in the eye and tell her that Larry’s pro-genocide stance is wrong.

Doesn’t that seem weird to you?

I’m left with the logical conclusion that they didn’t have a problem with what he was saying; they just didn’t want him to say it on camera. They know that having that kind of hate on film reveals NOM’s true goal more honestly than most people would find acceptable.

(In the days since the Indianapolis rally, NOM accounts of the day have carefully steered clear of Larry Adams and his sign, even as outside groups have called for NOM to repudiate the message of genocide.)

By the way, my case is only strengthened when you consider NOM’s reaction to calls for genocide on their facebook page last month. When confronted with people openly advocating the mass murder of gays, they just said “bite your tongue” instead of telling the offending supporters to take a hike.

Make no mistake, Larry’s sign tells what NOM is all about: Making gay people disappear from society, even if it means killing us. The proof is starting to mount up. The only question is how long it’ll take for people to understand that.

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Mr. Woodhouse,

In response to your request for a small donation, I must unfortunately reiterate what so many others have said in the last few months. The Democratic party will not see one penny from my pocket until and unless substantial gains are made in the field of LGBT rights.

In 2008, the LGBT community helped give you the White House, the House of Representatives, and a super-majority in the Senate. What we’ve discovered is that there is little difference between a Democratic-led government and the Republican-led government of five years ago. Instead of taking a clear and decisive pro-civil rights stance, you thanked us by running the other way and choosing ***anything*** but LGBT civil rights.

• You punted repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, with a compromise that doesn’t actually repeal anything, has yet to be voted on in the Senate or signed by the President, and reportedly is being considered for veto by President Obama.
• You’ve put off the Employment Non-Discrimination Act until it’s logistically unlikely this year, with Speaker Pelosi characterizing the bill as “controversial” rather than rallying Democrats around this clear issue of civil rights.
• Repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act isn’t even being considered, no matter how many times President Obama says he’s “urged” Congress to do so.
• Ending the discriminatory anti-gay blood donation ban has been discussed and rejected with no real push from the DNC to follow the science and penalize risky sex rather than responsible gay men in monogamous relationships for thirty years.
• Bids to institute state-wide marriage equality have failed in part because of the lack of leadership and funding from the DNC, most notably in Maine last year.
• Even a bill to offer safety to all school children has failed to find congressional footing because members of Congress get squeamish at the bill’s specific mention of LGBT kids who are many times more likely to be bullied, depressed, isolated, and suicidal than their straight peers.

So no. You will not get my money, you will not get my time, you will not get my voice, and you will not get my vote until you show me that you consider my rights as important as yours.

Candidates who have shown leadership for these completely reasonable LGBT demands retain my support and vote, but until I see substantial leadership and not excuses from the national party, my response remains the same:

NOT. ONE. CENT.

Cordially,

Matthew D. Algren

For far too long, Democrats have viewed LGBT people as nothing more than a committed source of funding and a reliable voting bloc. It’s time to teach them that we’re more than that.

Take the pledge.

Here’s why.

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Brittney Hansen: We need this injustice to stop but the only way to do so is to put ALL gay people on an island with a weekly drop of food and supplies and let them all die off. We dont have to deal with them and they dont have to deal with us.

On Monday, Good As You’s Jeremy Hooper published a killer post concurring with me that Louis Marinelli III can reasonably be identified as an agent of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). To use Marinelli’s term, he is a “NOM Strategist,” and his rhetoric is wildly off-message for NOM.

Now that someone with a higher profile than mine has called Marinelli and NOM out on the connection, Marinelli’s been trying to hide what he’s been saying for the last few months since NOM aligned themselves with him. A few hours after the post went up, most of the group’s youtube videos, including the ones I embedded here in early May, joined the group’s twitter account on the scrap heap.

What was Marinelli trying to hide? I’ll let Jeremy tell you:

So once we had that confirmation that Mr. Marinelli is, in fact, in NOM’s inner circle, we started considering all of the eye-opening things that he had seen Marinelli tweet over the past few months. And frankly, we were shocked. Because in addition to the “gays have shorter life spans” one, there was a retweet that declared all gays to be single. There was the time that Mr. Marinelli said that Peter LaBarbera and his fringe “Americans For Truth” group merely “tell the truth about homosexuality.” There was the determination that marriage equality is “a mockery and a hijacking of the civil rights movement.” There were times when he flat-out called us an abomination, citing Leviticus. There was this one: “Deviance” describes actions or behaviours that violate cultural norms – homosexuality is far from a cultural norm. Therefore, it is deviant.” And this: “Homosexuality and gay marriage are wrong and harmful to society.” And this: “#iaintafraidtosay that there shouldn’t be any recognition of homosexual relationships because that is saying that homosexuality is OK.” There was this one, accompanied by a smile: “What they do is blantantly [sic] immoral. :)” There were times when Mr. Marinelli compared our unions to that which might exist between a sterile brother and sister. And other times when our very character was assaulted: “#nevertrust activists of the homosexual agenda – they are deceitful people who care only about themselves and not what’s best for society.” And so on and so on.

After Marinelli tried to erase evidence of that paragraph and more, he took to his group’s facebook page and made this request (link to the thread and a screencap from about 2:00 AM EST):

Protect Marriage: One Man, One Woman: No hate speech, no derogatory comments against homosexuals. Show your support for one man, one woman marriage. That’s what this page is about. If you’ve got something negative to say, bite your tongue. Just play nice, please.

A good suggestion, even if Marinelli was just trying to save face because people were connecting him with NOM. But as I showed you at the top of the post, it’s nigh impossible to rein people in after you’ve spent so much time and effort teaching them how to, you know, go nuts with hate speech and derogatory comments.

By the way, Marinelli’s been actively involved on the NOM facebook page since this message was posted, and that usually includes deleting posts that he considers off-message. And yet we have Brittney Hansen showing the world what she’s learned from NOM Strategist Louis Marinelli III.

Brittney Hansen: We need this injustice to stop but the only way to do so is to put ALL gay people on an island with a weekly drop of food and supplies and let them all die off. We dont have to deal with them and they dont have to deal with us.

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Last post, I talked about the Malawi couple that had been jailed, convicted, and then pardoned by their government. Tiwonge Chimbalanga (known as ‘Aunt Tiwo’) had gone missing and there wasn’t much word on her husband, Steven Monjeza.

Since then (several weeks ago, actually), a story surfaced that answered some of the questions.

The good news is that Aunt Tiwo turned up and nothing was said about her disappearance. Either the source I cited had bad information or (more likely) she had just gone underground for a few days to process this ordeal.

Meanwhile, Steven has succumbed to the intense pressure from his government, family, friends, and culture. He has rather suddenly announced that he is scheduled to marry a woman. Whether money is involved in this arrangement is anybody’s guess. Regardless, Steven is doing his best ex-gay impression to regain his place in society.

Oh, and he says that this whole gay thing is false. He was kidnapped by some sneaky homosexuals who got him liquored up and made him do sex in orgies and whatnot, but he’s not gay. I want to be mad at Steven, but I can’t help but understand his decision, offensive as it is. The pressure to conform was intense, and he’s just trying to survive.

Aunt Tiwo only found out about the upcoming sham marriage through the press, by the way. She seems to be taking it in stride, at least publicly.

Is this the end of Aunt Tiwo and Steven’s story? I can’t help but feel that another shoe is waiting to drop, and I’m hoping it’s not a deadly one. Looking past the couple and their relationship, it’ll be interesting and perhaps a bit scary to discover the effect of this ordeal on the LGBT community in Malawi.

One thing’s for sure: It’s getting harder and harder, even on an international scale, to put people back in the closet. Even when they do retreat, is anyone even fooled by their slap-dash gunpoint retractions?

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A gay couple in Malawi sentenced to 14 years in prison for “unnatural acts” was pardoned Saturday shortly after Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations met with that country’s president.

“These boys committed a crime against our culture, our religion and our laws,” President Bingu wa Mutharika said at a news conference in Lilongwe, the capital, before adding that he nevertheless was ordering the couple’s unconditional release on “humanitarian grounds.”

In announcing the pardon, the president emphasized that he was not condoning gay marriage. “It’s unheard of in Malawi, and it’s illegal,” he said.

The news of the couple’s release has been greeted by (most) of the world as an unexpected blessing, whatever the political reasons. Both were beaten in prison, and Chimbalanga was refused medical attention in prison, so their conviction was clearly a death sentence.

Steven Monjeza (left) and Tiwonge Chimbalanga (right)

But as most of us guessed, this is not the end of Tiwonge and Steven’s story. From the same New York Times article:

Late Saturday, Ms. Chimbalanga, who has said she considers herself a woman in a man’s body, and Mr. Monjeza were released from custody.

The police escorted Ms. Chimbalanga back to her home village in the remote hills of Thyolo District. She stayed for a reunion with family members, and planned to return to Blantyre early Sunday.

“I’ve been under so much emotional stress that I need to find somewhere to rest,” said Ms. Chimbalanga, speaking by cellphone through an interpreter. “I still want to marry Steven. But I don’t know what he is thinking any more. We’ve been through so much.”

She said: “I think it is going to be hard to stay in Malawi. I am afraid of what people might do to us. We probably need to seek asylum in some other country. Is there a place for us? I don’t know.”

Tiwonge Chimbalanga was reported missing two days after that interview. The Zambian Watchdog (an apparently reputable news source based in neighboring Zambia) filed this report Tuesday evening.

One of Malawi, gay partner pardoned by President Bingu wa Mutharika from a 14 year jail, Tiwonge Chimbalanga also well known as ‘Aunt Tiwo’ is reportedly missing.

Chimbalanga was released from prison on Saturday after President Bingu wa Mutharika pardoned the gay couple on “humanitarian grounds”.

Malawi Prison chief, Macdonald Chaona told Nyasa Times that Aunt Tiwo was taken to her home village in Thyolo on Saturday night, some 36 kilometers from Blantyre, after being released.

But since her release, Aunt Tiwo has been at large.

Her brother-in-law, Maxwell Manda, who works at the High Court, said he had not seen Aunt Tiwo and pointed out that she wanted to leave Malawi upon her release.

“I have not seen her. I don’t know where she is. But she wanted to leave the country after the being released,” said Manda.

Her uncle, village headman Chimbalanga said Aunt Tiwo arrived in the village at 9pm on Saturday but since then she has not been seen around.

Let’s hope that either this report is wrong or Tiwonge is safely out of the country. The comments on that article are a horrific example of the violent environment in which she finds herself.

* The question of Tiwonge Chimbalanga’s gender identity has been cause for discussion throughout LGBT blogs since this story broke. If you look closely you’ll see that I avoided personal pronouns altogether in my first post on the Malawi couple. I also refrained from referring to the couple as gay, since that might not strictly be the case.

Since then, I have found indications that Chimbalanga specifically identifies as female. Therefore, she will be recognized with feminine pronouns on this blog. Out of respect for Ms. Chimbalanga, I have also corrected pronouns in the news articles above.

For more of this discourse, see Autumn Sandeen’s spot-on article for Pam’s House Blend and Jim Burroway’s commentary at Box Turtle Bulletin. Be sure to read through the comments as well; there’s a fantastic and important discussion taking place.

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The clips come from Debra Chasnoff’s award winning 1996 documentary It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School, which appeared on public television stations in 1999. Click here for more clips from the film’s official home.

Based on these clips, I can’t wait to see the rest of the film. It looks like a fantastic study of how critical thinking, social skills, and tolerance should be taught. I understand why Louis is all in a tizzy (they aren’t teaching the kids to shame gay people, after all), but it’s so bizarre when you compare his commentary on youtube and facebook to what’s actually happening in the clips.

(I love how he’s “uncovered” the video. It hasn’t exactly been heretofore hidden away under lock and key, passed from dark alley to dark alley.)

I explained to them why, as a straight man, I would be interested. And I like to answer the question because I think that it pushes them to think of this as more than just a lesbian and gay matter.

That’s how their life is! They’re gay, so what? That’s how their life is; I don’t think people should be strict about them, ’cause if they were gay they wouldn’t want to be getting beat up. …or stuff… Can I go to the bathroom?

A lesbian mom said, “You may lose your job over this. Do you want to go forward?” … I’m not a flagbearer, but I felt strongly that the children in this community needed to be educated around this topic.

* For several weeks I’ve been trying to figure out if Louis Marinelli actually works for NOM. He uses their logo and certainly presents himself that way, including listing himself as a NOM independent contractor in his profile. Today I found a post by Marinelli that bears that out (see below), in this case listing him as a “strategist.”

click image for live facebook page

In addition, Marinelli claimed to be working “directly” with NOM on his group’s twitter account in March 2010. Also, he is facebook friend to both current NOM President Brian Brown and former President Maggie Gallagher according to his facebook page, and Brown is a member of his NOM page, which is different than the group’s original page listed on NOM’s blog.

And now I’m dizzy.

The bottom line is that Louis Marinelli speaks for NOM in an official capacity. (Folks at NOM, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)

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Lisa Marie Pond
1967 - 2007

So it’s a relief to be able to say that starting now, under the direction of President Barack Obama, any hospital that receives federal funding (including Medicare and Medicaid) is required to allow people to designate visitors regardless of legal relationship. Here’s the money quote from the president’s memorandum:

It should be made clear that designated visitors, including individuals designated by legally valid advance directives (such as durable powers of attorney and health care proxies), should enjoy visitation privileges that are no more restrictive than those that immediate family members enjoy. You should also provide that participating hospitals may not deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Here is the remainder of the presidential memorandum:

Janice Langbehn, Lisa’s partner, has been fighting for patient rights since Lisa’s death. Janice was on Anderson Cooper 360 Thursday night to give her reaction to the president’s action today, and said that President Obama actually called her this afternoon (from Air Force I, no less) before releasing the memorandum. Here’s the segment of the show:

We owe Janice Langbehn such a debt of gratitude. Her tireless efforts on behalf of LGBT families was unquestionably instrumental to President Obama’s action Thursday.

This is a huge step forward in the pursuit of simple human decency. But at the risk of finding the dark cloud inside this silver lining, two points:

1. This is a presidential memorandum, not an executive order. As we learned with last year’s memorandum on LGBT federal employee benefits (which haven’t yet materialized, by the way), the legal foundation for these new regulations disappears as soon as President Obama leaves office. A new memorandum by the next president will be necessary to ensure that these regulations stay in place.
2. President Obama has made a habit of going after the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to LGBT rights. This is an easy sell that everyone can relate to, but the harder paradigm-shifting battles like repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act continue to languish, with the president actually arguing against civil rights in some cases.

But put that in your pocket for the moment. Thank you Mr. President for showing the compassion and reason, as well as the leadership, to keep families together at such difficult times in their lives.

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