Proposal became too watered down, some activists said

By Carlos Sadovi | Tribune reporter

November 19, 2008

The piece is from Keith Olberman on MSNBC the other night and it runs just over 6 minutes. I think he did a pretty good job for someone who has no vested interest in the issue.

Much love,
Tammy

Join the Impact – Protest Prop 8 on November 15th!
This is a NATIONWIDE PROTEST/MOVEMENT | Fight H8 - http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/?t=anon
Event Info Type: Causes – Protest
Network: Global
Time and Place Date: Saturday, November 15, 2008
Time: 1:30pm – 4:30pm
Location: Nationwide
Street: Your City Hall – Check the Site for Locations- http://jointheimpact.com/

DescriptionTHIS IS A NATIONWIDE EVENT – ALL US STATES HAVE AT LEAST 1 PROTEST LOCATION!
http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/?t=anon for Locations
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Be part of the next Civil Rights Movement – Be part of history – Join the National Protest / March for Equality on November 15th!
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WE NEED VOLUNTEERS! Now is your chance to be a “community organizer”! Go to the website and post if you are willing to volunteer to help get out the word in your city. We need 3 or 4 dedicated volunteers in each town to contact the clubs and organizations in your area and to print/distribute flyers to get a turnout in your town.

This is not a California issue. This is an issue of equality across America. Stand up and make your voice heard. Visit the website www.jointheimpact.com.

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SATURDAY NOV 15TH -
10:30AM WEST COAST
11:30AM MOUNTIAN TIME ZONE
12:30PM CENTRAL TIME ZONE
1:30PM EAST COAST
PRINT OUT THE SIGNS – TAKE THEM TO THE PROTEST

Prop 8 Protest: A Call to the LGBTQ Community, Friends, & Family

I’m sure all would agree that with the election of Barack Obama, this week has been one of amazing wins in the world of equality! Still, Tuesday night was a bitter-sweet celebration. We came together to witness the first black man who will become our president, yet watched in sadness as Florida, Arizona, Arkansas, and California all voted down equal rights for all citizens. Pundits and bloggers alike have put their focus on Proposition 8, trying hard to find an explanation for the anti-gay wins in the face of a huge swell of support for equality elsewhere. Some have blamed the voters, others blame religious groups, and even others blame the LGBTQ community for not being able to mobilize on a larger enough scale. And you know what? There is truth in each argument.

As a community, we have to admit to the fact that we are polarized in various ways. Honestly, I’m not sure what community isn’t and I believe that our polarization is proof to our humanity – we are no different than anyone else, regardless of color, creed, or sexual orientation. Still, our polarization has hindered us from mobilizing as one strong voice. We all come together in the month of June to celebrate Gay Pride, but few of us are even aware of why Gay Pride exists. Gay Pride is a celebration to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Many say that the Gay Rights Movement began in 1969, which means that we are still a young movement and have accomplished a great deal in such a short amount of time. The generation that fought for us in 1969 deserves our gratitude and respect. This is a generation of amazing people who fought for our ability to hold hands in the street, to speak out against hate, to dance to our own “thumpa thump”, witness television shows with a queer cast, and come together in the streets celebrating for an entire month! This is the generation that opened the doors for us to even have a conversation about gay marriage, and this is the generation that deserves our help and our voices now. On June 27th, 1969, this generation came together in protest, jumping from closets, taking to the streets, and mobilizing in ways this country had never seen before! And what happened? The country was forced to respond. The Queer identity was forced onto the front pages and coffee tables of people’s worlds and people had to once and for all accept that we are human too!

Now, almost 40 years later we NEED to come together again. We need to show this nation that we are ONE LOUD VOICE THAT DEMANDS TO BE HEARD! We need to be one organized unit. Our gay pride shouldn’t be something we celebrate one month out of the year. Our gratitude towards the ones who came before us shouldn’t be ignored and wasted away with one party after another. We beg to be given a right that requires responsibility and commitment, yet we, as one strong community, have not proven to this nation that we deserve to be taken seriously! The gay pride parade has become a great party, but it has lost the memory of Stonewall and therefor given the nation another reason to cast us aside as irresponsible. It’s time we come together for debate, for public recognition, and for LOVE! Let’s move as one full unit, on the same day, at the same hour, and let’s show the United States of America that we too are UNITED CITIZENS EQUAL IN MIND, BODY, SPIRIT AND DESERVING OF FULL EQUALITY UNDER THE LAW!

On the steps of your City Hall on November 15th at 10:30am PST / 1:30pm EST, our community WILL take to the streets and speak out against Proposition 8 and all of the other pro-equality losses that we have faced in our lifetimes, in our parents’ lifetimes, and for many generations before us. WE CAN’T DO THIS ALONE! WE NEED YOUR HELP! We need organizers in every major city to work with us and get out the protest! I know you’re all tired from all of the work you’ve done for this great election year, but I’m asking for one more push! Let the country hear our voices together. Let them see that we are a strong, adamant, and powerful community that deserves equal rights, and CAN’T BE DEFEATED!

Send this post to everyone! We have one week and must react to the pro-hate votes cast against us! Let’s help our LGBTQ friends, families, neighbors, and each other to IMPACT this country with a demand for our basic human rights! Join the cause, join the voice, and JOIN THE IMPACT!
November 15th
1:30 PM East Coast
10:30 AM West Coast

Click here to Join the protest on Nov. 15

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Thousands of protesters took to the streets Saturday to protest passage of a measure banning gay marriage, authorities said.Between 8,000 and 10,000 demonstrators began marching through central San Diego at noon, according to police Sgt. Diane Wendell. The event lasted about 90 minutes and was peaceful, with no arrests.It was the largest of several marches that followed Tuesday’s passage of Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages and overturning the state Supreme Court decision that legalized them in May.

About 5,000 people turned out Saturday evening for a Prop. 8 protest in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. No incidents were reported at this protest or at the candlelight vigil that took place in Laguna Beach.

On Friday, tensions flared at a vigil at Palm Springs City Hall when a supporter of the gay marriage ban carrying a plastic foam cross clashed with protesters, according to The Desert Sun. The crowd ripped the cross from her hands and stomped on it. Police made no arrests.

About 2,000 people gathered in Long Beach Friday night and there were three arrests. A thousand people also marched Friday in San Francisco.

In Salt Lake City Friday night, a crowd of about 2,000 chanted “Separate church and state” and waved rainbow flags outside the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which encouraged its members to work to pass the amendment by volunteering their time and money for the campaign.

By JESSE McKINLEY and LAURIE GOODSTEIN

SAN FRANCISCO — A giant rainbow-colored flag in the gay-friendly Castro neighborhood of San Francisco was flying at half-staff on Wednesday as social and religious conservatives celebrated the passage of measures that ban same-sex marriage in California, Florida and Arizona.

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

Jennifer Briz, left, and Kristina Haas leave City Hall in San Francisco on Wednesday after a clerk refused to marry them.

 

The latest on the 2008 election results and on the presidential transition. Join the discussion.

In California, where same-sex marriage had been performed since June, the ban had more than 52 percent of the vote, according to figures by the secretary of state, and was projected to win by several Californian news media outlets. Opponents of same-sex marriage won by even bigger margins in Arizona and Florida. Just two years ago, Arizona rejected a similar ban.

The across-the-board sweep, coupled with passage of a measure in Arkansas intended to bar gay men and lesbians from adopting children, was a stunning victory for religious conservatives, who had little else to celebrate on an Election Day that saw Senator John McCain lose and other ballot measures, like efforts to restrict abortion in South Dakota, California and Colorado, rejected.

“It was a great victory,” said the Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego County and a leader of the campaign to pass the California measure, Proposition 8. “We saw the people just rise up.”

The losses devastated supporters of same-sex marriage and ignited a debate about whether the movement to expand the rights of same-sex couples had hit a cultural brick wall, even at a time of another civil rights success, the election of a black president.

Thirty states have now passed bans on same-sex marriage.

Click here for entire article

October 11, 2007

Ky Dickens remembers watching Freaky Friday as a seven-year-old in Hinsdale and praying to God that one day she’d find herself in the body of a boy, just long enough to kiss a girl. At 13 she got obsessed with the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, watching Idgie and Ruth’s romance unfold almost daily. Dickens didn’t come from a very religious family—her father is agnostic; her mother took them to a local Lutheran church only on holidays—but she was still scared to tell them she was lesbian. And when she tried to come out, at 16, it didn’t go so well. “Mom, is there anything I could tell you that would make you disown me?” she asked. “And she said, ‘Well, yeah, you could tell me that you’re gay.’ She said it like, ‘Dinner’s ready.’”

Dickens’s first choice for college had been UCLA—she’d made videos since she was 14 and wanted a career in film—but her mom put her foot down. California, she said, was “that place for fruits and nuts.” Dickens thought, “If I can’t move to California, where can I go where I can be totally gay?” She settled on Vanderbilt University in Nashville; her idea of the south was based on characters like Idgie and Ruth and To Kill a Mockingbird’s tomboy Scout. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says. “Vanderbilt was the epitome of southern conservative culture. I joined a sorority, I was a long blond-haired Tri Delt, and I dated the lacrosse captain.” When she came out in the last semester of her senior year, “it was so scandalous the story ran in the Vanderbilt Hustler. The newspaper. The school newspaper!” Now Dickens, who’s 29 and lives in Andersonville, is making a documentary about homosexuality and organized religion inspired by the “Bible abuse” she came up against there.

At 20 Dickens decided to start her adult life “honestly” and tell someone she was gay. She let the cat out of the bag during a class trip to Florida. “I told the person with the biggest mouth, her name was Hope, ‘I need to tell you something . . . ’ And then a day or two later all these southern girls were like, ‘Wait a second now. Do you have a crush on me? . . . Why not? Am I fat? Am I ugly?’”

Her friends were confused but generally supportive. Conservative Christians with a deep-seated belief that homosexuality was wrong, they worried that the devil had taken hold of her and that she’d burn in hell. “And then my best, best, best friend, who would go out drinking and partying with me all the time, suddenly turned holier-than-thou.” The girl’s parents led a Bible group for the Florida State Congress and she couldn’t reconcile the Bible’s teachings with her friend’s sexuality. “It completely ripped us apart. I think out of defense—maybe it was a prideful thing—that’s when I really started talking to priests, ministers, and rabbis and stuff.”

Dickens, who doesn’t practice any particular faith herself, spent two months talking with local religious leaders about homosexuality. Time and again she was told that if Jesus were alive today, the last thing he’d worry about is who was sleeping with whom. The handful of Bible passages commonly invoked to denounce gays, she was told, were often taken out of context for political purposes. This was a message she wanted to spread. “In order to survive, I felt like my only option was to change people’s minds. I thought that if they saw that their views were spoon-fed they could change.” But the timing wasn’t right. “It was still taboo. A lot of the priests said they’d talk to me when they were retired.” Seven years later homosexuality is a major wedge issue and, Dickens says, religious leaders are looking for a forum to discuss it.

Dickens, who returned to Chicago in 2002 and produces commercials at MK Films for big-name clients like Neutrogena and Coke, started work on Fish Out of Water, her first independent feature, in January 2006. Since then she and coproducer Tristan Silverman have been recording interviews with a range of religious leaders—from Methodist ministers to Scientologists—all over the country, in cities like New York and Chicago but mainly in “real America” towns like Garland, Texas, and Valparaiso, Indiana. They’re also talking with members of the GLBT community and random residents of each city, targeting barber shops and hair salons in particular, “because everybody gets their hair cut.”

“We got kicked out of a lot of hair salons,” says Dickens. “We’d break people in by asking preliminary questions like, ‘How do you feel about divorce?’ Then once we started asking about homosexuality we’d get ushered out.” A lot of people said they believed homosexuality was simply wrong. “When you asked them why they’d say, ‘Oh, it just is.’ And if you asked them to give you a place in the Bible where it mentioned that, they’d either say the whole Adam and Eve thing or Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Several religious leaders have told Dickens that many people insist on the Bible’s authority in denouncing homosexuality because that authority has been increasingly dismissed by the general population, particularly when it comes to social justice issues. “Almost always the church sides on the side of justice in major issues of debate,” Dickens says. “Martin Luther King himself was a minister.” But things get complicated when people on the other side of the debate cite passages from the Bible to defend their arguments.

In the coming months Dickens will be interviewing former members of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, a D.C.-based political think tank that aims to bring conservative Christian churches in line “with biblical and historic teachings” and puts a great deal of manpower and money into influencing legislation on issues such as immigration, welfare reform, and tax policy. The IRD itself acknowledges in its own materials that these are issues on which “there is no definitive Christian position.”

Many members of the religious community, like John Shelby Spong, a liberal theologian, biblical scholar, and retired Episcopal bishop, insist the Bible will become less valid as a tool of faith and turn more people away from the church if it’s used to build an argument for hate. “Preachers everywhere, most of the ones I talked to, are horrified that if they hold on to this that they will just keep losing numbers. Because you can’t be discriminatory and hateful and think that people are gonna want to keep walking through your doors,” Dickens says. According to a 2006 Harris Poll of 2,010 U.S. adults, only 26 percent attended weekly church services.

Dickens has hired local artists Kyle Harter and Emily Carter to create animated sequences to illustrate such points, tie together her interviews, and accompany quotations from the Bible. “Any place where I bring up religion it’s animated. Because, one, it can be boring. And, two, some of these stories are so far-fetched that animation helps you realize how far we are from the context in which the scripture was written.”

Dickens has bankrolled much of the project with her own money and through fund-raisers but estimates she’ll need about $80,000 more to finish, including editing, licensing, and legal fees. She’s applied for grants and received a couple of generous personal donations. Kristen Kaza, who is handling publicity for the film, started a monthly themed dance party at the Holiday Club this summer called Role Play to help out. The first night they raised enough to cover Dickens’s and Silverman’s airfare for their next set of interviews, with former IRD members in New York.

Dickens debuted the film’s trailer at another fund-raiser in July (it can be seen at myspace.com/fishoutofwaterfilm) and expects to wrap up work in March of next year. After that, she’ll seek screenings at film festivals and on cable and then make a traveling show of it. “I’m very lucky to have a brother who’s a complete hippie and has two Volkswagen buses and knows how to fix them,” she says. “We’re going to get one of his buses, paint it pink, and tour the film in the most conservative, small, untouched areas of this country we can find. We’re gonna put up projectors in parks, on corners, and if we get kicked out, fine, we’ll just go somewhere else. This is a real grassroots production.”

Dickens says one of the preachers she spent a great deal of time with, John Fellers, “fought his whole life in Texas on this issue.” Fellers died the day she debuted the trailer. “I received an e-mail from Laura Young, the wife of another preacher and a woman I have formed a friendship with and ended up making a producer on this film,” Dickens says. “She said, ‘He lost his fight the day you launched yours.’”