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Archive for the ‘LGBT Rights’ Category

Still Think Mormons Weren’t the Driving Force Behind Proposition 8?

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Of course though there’s evidence abound they’re denying it left and right, and crying persecution because we have the audacity to call them on it. But just look at this lovely “thank you” they received from a RW blogger.

Proposition 8 would not have passed if it had not been for LDS (Mormon) money and manpower. For their hard work as participants in the process, this small religious group received some of the worst attacks of the political season. They were demonized and stereotyped by opponents of Proposition 8 and sometimes by the mainstream media.
…..

People who spearhead a campaign to eradicate the constitutionally guaranteed rights of others–especially those who aren’t even in their own state–should have the personal fortitude to stand up to the responses they get (outside of violence, which I do not in any way advocate or condone). Or to put it another way, Ye reap as ye sow.

That aside, did you catch that first sentence? Here it is again in case you missed it.

Proposition 8 would not have passed if it had not been for LDS (Mormon) money and manpower.

That’s right. Without the Mormons and their targeted, multimillion dollar anti-gay campaign of propaganda we’d still have our marriage rights. They might as well have invaded our homes, ransacked them and torn up our marriage licenses. It would have been more honest than what they actually did.

Needless to say I don’t want to hear any more claims that the Mormons didn’t do anything and that The Gays are unfairly targeting them. The Mormons are getting open backslaps from the RW for spearheading the effort to eradicate our rights. Their protests that they didn’t do it ring very, very hollow in the face of that.

 

Join the Impact in San Jose, Get a Free Button!

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Tomorrow morning at the San Jose Join the Impact event my wife and I will be handing out free buttons while supplies last. A variety of designs will be available including CIVIL RIGHTS OR CIVIL WAR, No on Proposition 8, the very popular CAN I VOTE ON YOUR MARRIAGE NOW?, and No on H8.

Once you get to City Hall look us up and get your button!

 



 

Proposition 8. On Boycotts and Protests.

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Proposition 8 passed by a small margin on November 4th. Since then LGBT people and many supporters have been understandably angry. We’ve been protesting and boycotting those who contributed to the eradication of the constitutionally guaranteed right of same-sex couples to marry here in California.

Not surprisingly the bigots are crying persecution. The nasty gays are targeting us they cry. Funny how they don’t seem to think they were targeting us when they were engaging in a multimillion dollar campaign to eradicate our rights.

Those hateful gays are trying to ruin our businesses! They’re engaging in extortion! Really? Why don’t the RRRWers consider it “trying to ruin businesses” or “extortion” when they boycott businesses like McDonalds, Ford and Volvo because they dare to provide benefits to LGBT people or (gasp) advertise to us?

She does not have the right to do what wants with her earned money? (said of a business owner who donated to Yes on 8 and is now being boycotted). Of course she does, but so do we. And we have every right to not give our money to people who are going to turn around and use it against us. People who are going to use it to eradicate our rights. Let business owners who engage in bigotry get their money from other bigots.

Others claim we have no right to protest. We should be good fags, sit down, shut up and listen to the mob that has spoken. One man said, Let’s move on. I always told my children that once a rule was made, you have to abide by it. I think it should be the same in this circumstance. I’m guessing he’d never been on the losing end of a proposition that eradicated a significant fundamental human right.

And of course we’re being hateful anti-religious bigots by speaking out against the religious groups that spearheaded the campaign to strip us of our rights. They didn’t do this out of hatred, mind you, they did it out of love (so they tell us over and over like trained robots). I wonder how convincing they’d find it if I banned their religion–not out of hate mind you, but strictly because I loved them and wanted to do what was best for them. Oh, and the children. Somebody must think of the children.

Nonetheless, by protesting what is a distinctly unfair and cruel situation we are merely engaging in our First Amendment right to Free Speech and Assembly. That’s one thing we haven’t been stripped of by the bigots–yet. No doubt that will be on the next ballot.

Until then, we boycott and protest. If bigots want to spend money to eradicate our rights they need to get it from people other than those they’re trying to harm. And they’re going to have to listen to us while they’re doing it.

 

NO MORE MR NICE GAY


 

Join the Impact Alert. Be Prepared.

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

It appears some of our godly, peace loving, sweet, Mormon friends are planning violence toward people who attend the various Join the Impact events. It wasn’t good enough for them to eradicate our constitutionally guaranteed right to marry, they want to harm us for engaging in our 1st Amendment right to speak freely and to assemble.

MormonMason
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post Today, 09:16 PM
Post #24

Brings Forth Plants
*****

Group: Members
Posts: 3221
Joined: 28-September 07
Member No.: 7377

Bring on the persecution…lock and load, baby! My years supply of Ammo is ready…!

MormonMason

This post has been edited by MormonMason: Today, 09:21 PM

BTW, don’t bother trying to “dissapear” that post guys. I have a screen capture.

For my LGBT friends and supporters. Be prepared. Not all Mormons have ill intentions, of course, but we have no way of easily discerning which ones do.

 

Mormons and the Truth Behind Proposition 8.

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

They keep claiming that the Mormon church wasn’t officially involved in the Yes on 8 campaign. Oh, no, the church had nothing to do with the systematic effort to eradicate our legal, constitutionally guaranteed right to marry.

Bull.

VOTE IT UP!

Let’s see them try to lie their way out of this one.

 

Keith Olbermann on Same-Sex Marriage

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Hat tip Ebon.

Text of Olbermann’s statement can be found here.

 

Mormons. They’re Not Just Violating Our Rights. They’re Targeting Jewish People Too. Who’s Next?

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Mormons are so intent on forcing their religion on others they aren’t content with making illegal (or at least very difficult to get) things they disapprove of like alcohol and same-sex marriage. They are engaging in grievous violations against freedom of religion by posthumously baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims despite repeated requests that they stop. They’ve even broken promises they made to stop. So much for honesty and trust.

Ernest “Ernie” Michel has had it. For 14 years, the now 85-year-old Holocaust survivor has been leading a quiet and cordial charge to ensure that victims of Nazi terror aren’t posthumously baptized by members of the LDS Church.
But on Monday, he and other survivors gathered at The Center for Jewish History in New York to publicly denounce what they said is an ongoing practice by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and, in doing so, end discussions. The group came together exactly 70 years after Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” a German pogrom during which Nazis ransacked Jewish synagogues, homes and businesses, killed more than 90 Jews and
Jewish representative Ernest Michel, right, meets LDS representative Elder Todd Christofferson during a 2005 meeting with LDS leaders to discuss the LDS ritual of baptism of the dead. (Paul Fraughton/The Salt Lake Tribune) deported up to 30,000 others to concentration camps.
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LDS Church officials, who met with Michel just one week ago, say they are sorry the relationship seems to have ended this way and feel the church’s work and intentions have been misunderstood.
Michel, of New York, is the honorary chair for the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which he said has about 180,000 members.

His connection to this issue began as a fluke. He’d seen an article in a Jewish newspaper in the mid-1990s about one Holocaust victim who’d been posthumously baptized by Mormons. So he wrote to then-LDS Church President Howard W. Hunter, seeking an explanation.

He never did hear back from Hunter, but Sen. Orrin Hatch, whom Michel had copied, did respond. In a two-page letter, Hatch explained that this practice was “done out of love for Jewish people,” Michel remembered. “I got that, and then I got suspicious.”
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“My mother and father were killed in the Holocaust for no other reason than they were Jews,” he said earlier. “How can the Mormons victimize them a second time and falsely claim their souls for eternity?”
Over the years, Michel has had many meetings with LDS Church officials, all of them “very pleasant,” he said.
In 1995, he saw progress when the church promised to remove Holocaust victim names from its International Genealogical Index (IGI) and send out on First Presidency letterhead a reminder that proxy baptisms are intended for one’s own ancestors.
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“This has gone on year after year - names given, taken off the list, more names go in. I call it the ‘unstoppable revolving door,’ ” Radkey said from her New York hotel room. “Purging the names isn’t what the Jews want. They want the baptisms to stop.”
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Radkey said hundreds of names, mostly Dutch Holocaust victims, have made the church’s master list in the past few months. Some recently discovered records used to do proxy baptisms even had the words “Auschwitz” or “Polish death camp” on them, she said.
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Respect our religious beliefs! the Mormons cry. Yet they refuse requests to stop forcing their religion on people–even after they’re dead. After spending $20 million on the Yes on 8 campaign and campaigning vociferously to eradicate our marriage rights the Mormons claimed, “We were only defending our deeply held religious beliefs–why are they being targeted?”. How do they not see the irony of legislating their religion on others then crying “persecution!”?

Why should any respect be shown to people (or to their beliefs) when they show not one iota of respect to others or to those people’s beliefs? When they go to such extensive lengths to impose their religion on others they simply go too far. The First Amendment promises Freedom of Religion, and these individuals are violating it in the worst possible way.

At tonight’s vigil my wife held a sign that said We Will Not Submit to a Mormon Divorce on one side. On the side that wasn’t facing the camera the sign said We’re All Mormons Now–Whether We Like It Or Not . And that seems to be their ultimate goal. To make us all Mormons–whether we like it or not.

 

Protect Marriage. Protect Children. Prohibit Divorce.

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Hat tip Good As You.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Sign the petition to ban heterosexual divorce. Do it for the children.

 

Proposition 8 Vigil in San Jose. We Made the News Again.

Monday, November 10th, 2008

I’m a bit too tired to go into a detailed analysis of the event but you can watch the News 7 video (Number 2 of 2) for their take on it. I’m holding the sign that says We The People : Gays Need Not Apply on one side and Official Second Class Citizen on the other. My wife is holding the sign stating We Will Not Submit to a Mormon Divorce. If a copy gets posted on YouTube I’ll add it here.

 

Tradition. Values. Marriage.

Monday, November 10th, 2008

On November 4 California voters passed Proposition 8 by a margin of 52.3%-47.7%. Arizona voters passed Proposition 102 56.4%-43.6% . Florida’s Amendment 2 passed 62.1%-37.9%. Proponents of all three measures insisted they were merely standing up for what they believed in, defending tradition and upholding moral values.

I find that hard to believe. You see, when I was growing up I was taught about American history. I learned about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Founding Fathers and so on. I was told about the values this nation was founded upon.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It says there all men. I don’t see any exceptions or exclusions. But maybe somebody put them there in ultra-fine print or invisible ink and failed to inform me.

And the Constitution. I don’t recall anything in there that excludes certain people from enjoying the rights it bestows upon citizens, particularly in the Bill of Rights. In fact the Constitution has amendments that specifically mention that certain groups, who have historically been denied rights, are assured full equality.

Oh,yes, I learned a great deal about how various groups were hideously mistreated over the short course of American history. Slavery and segregation, Chinese people being used as virtual slave labor to mine and build the railroads, Japanese internment camps, the subjugation of women, various immigrants being relegated to the worst class status, etc. But we eventually realized the error of our ways and did what we could to correct things (save for certain bigots who will never learn and need to be relegated to the lunatic fringe of society).

It was in large part because of what I learned that I majored in Psychology and worked 20 years in Human Services. I had decided that I wanted to help people–to make their lives better. I wanted to undo the wrongs and set things right.

Tradition and values. To me tradition and values mean life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They mean individual personal freedoms and responsibilities. The things this nation was built on, or so I was told for decades.

Now I’m being told–at least by the RRRW–that traditional values means regulating the lives of others to the Nth degree. It means making them live by your chosen religious beliefs even if you have to use force of law to do it. It means proclaiming one group the arbiter of what marriage, family, spouse, values and even morality are, then allowing them to dictate those definitions for the entire nation. It means letting millions of men, women and children be left out in the cold because the whims of the intolerant reign.

Sorry. That’s not my America. My America had values and morality. The only question is if it’s lost forever, or if it will finally reclaim itself from the quagmire.