Hate is NOT a family value!!!

Posted: November 25, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Rights, GLBT Rights, Marriage Equality | Tags: , , | 27 Comments

I wanted to pass this link on from  WAPO because I think it’s got an important message in it today.  You cannot hide hate behind religion and expect people to remain silent.  We know who you are and we know what your agenda is.  You cannot hide behind a bible any more than slave owners and wife beaters can.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been an important voice in civil rights for a very long time  Today,  ” they labeled as “hate groups” several political and religious organizations that campaign against same-sex marriage and, the center says, engage in “repeated, groundless name-calling” against gays and lesbians.”
Good for them!!!

Included on the list released by the civil rights organization is the Family Research Council, a prominent and politically influential group of social conservatives. The report by the law center, which has spent four decades tracking extremist groups and hate speech, accuses the council and a dozen other groups of putting out “demonizing propaganda aimed at homosexuals and other sexual minorities.”

The report, which has sparked debate across the Internet, taps into the continuing potency of social issues, such as same-sex marriage, in American politics. Several of the groups described in the report supported a successful effort to oust state Supreme Court judges in Iowa because of a unanimous ruling last year that legalized same-sex unions.

The Family Research Council has been at the forefront of political activism against same-sex marriage. In explaining the decision to put the council on its hate-groups list, the law center highlighted comments by Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow for policy studies at the council, who told MSNBC host Chris Matthews this year that he thinks “homosexual behavior” should be outlawed.

Council President Tony Perkins, who was also named in the report, called the hate-group designation a political attack by a “liberal organization.”

“The left’s smear campaign of conservatives is . . . being driven by the clear evidence that the American public is losing patience with their radical policy agenda as seen in the recent election and in the fact that every state . . . that has had the opportunity to defend the natural definition of marriage has done so,” Perkins said in a statement.

I cannot figure out why ‘marriage’ needs defending against anything.  Any institution that’s viable will stand the test of time and public support.  The defense of marriage is not more than a horrible campaign to exclude people that don’t meet specific physical criteria defend by a bunch of narrow minded bigots.

It’s about time we label them all what they are.  They are hate-groups.  Now, if we could only get CNN and other MSM outlets to start treating them like the KKK which is another organization that tries to define its insidious form of hatred behind religion too.

The Kitty Genovese Case: A Fascinating Intersection of True Crime, Psychology, and Media Misinformation

Posted: August 2, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: GLBT Rights, psychology, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Kitty Genovese Case: A Fascinating Intersection of True Crime, Psychology, and Media Misinformation
Kitty Genovese

Kitty Genovese

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I want to thank Bob Somerby for inspiring me to do more research into this crime that I remember so vividly from my teenage years. Somerby included the following comment in a recent post about “Ceci Connollyism.”

It was all completely different back then: In the Wikipedia account, note how the high-profile Genovese case was driven along by “factually inaccurate,” “melodramatic” New York Times reporting.

Apologies in advance for the length of this post. I simply couldn’t help myself, and I hope some of you will enjoy it.

A Murder in Kew Gardens

On March 13, 1964, at around 3:30AM, there was a murder in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, New York. The murder probably wouldn’t have gotten much publicity at all if it hadn’t been for a sensational article that appeared on the front page of The New York Times, a couple of weeks later. The Times story led to groundbreaking research in social psychology and the discovery of new and counter-intuitive information about human behavior.

It was very late, very cold, and very dark when 28-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Genovese parked her car at the Kew Gardens train station after driving from Ev’s Eleventh Hour Bar in Hollis, where she worked nights as manager. When she got out of her car, she saw a stranger walking toward her. The man, Winston Mosley, 29, stabbed Genovese two times as she hurried past a bookstore on Austin Street, pehaps headed a local bar named Bailey’s to seek assistance. She called out, “Oh my God. He stabbed me. Please help me,” and fell to the ground. Winston was leaning over her to stab her again, when he heard a man’s voice calling from a window in an apartment building across the street, “Leave that girl alone!”

Winston Mosley

Winston Mosley

Startled, Mosley ran down an alley, got into his car, and backed up, ready to drive off. Lights had gone on in the nearby apartment building, but they went off again. Mosley got out of the car and again followed Genovese, who had reached the doorway of her apartment building, which was in the back of the building at 82-62 Austin Street. As she fell forward through the doorway, crying out, “I’m dying, I’m dying,” Winston caught up with her, stabbed her again, and then raped her. A short time later, a neighbor, Greta Schwartz, who had called the police after receiving a phone call from another neighbor, ran down to the lobby and cradled Kitty in her lap until the paramedics arrived.

From interviews in the neighborhoods of the two stabbing incidents, police learned that as many as 37 people had seen or heard part of the stalking and murder of Kitty Genovese by Winston Mosley, but supposedly none of them had called the police except Greta Schwartz. Read the rest of this entry »

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