Subscribe to Breaking NewsWithers: What do with anger over Prop 8?
Out of all the verbiage yesterday about the California Supreme Court’s decision, Dan Savage struck the best note.
“But we have to remember that this is a long game and, despite this setback, we are winning. We’re going to hear a lot about Prop 8 today, and the fight to overturn it, but let’s not forget about Prop 22.”
A mere 9 years ago when California voters gave their opinion on marriage between same sex couples, they answered with a resounding no. With the Proposition 8 vote, the nays were not as loud. Yes a loss is still a loss (and spare us any quips about how being close only counts in horse shoes), but we are winning this argument. Right now Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Iowa are states where same sex marriage is a reality, and anyone who says they could have predicted that nine years ago is a lying liar. The polls all point in our favor. As Savage noted, even our enemies know their time is up. All of this needs to be held on to as we handle yesterday’s decision. Is it right that the struggle for rights is such an laborious process? Nope, but we live in the real world. Not some made for TV movie where stuff is figured out in two hours.
Now for those who left notes here and at other places, talking weak noise about how the revolution won’t be televised, it’s war time now, let’s go burn down a few churches, etc., etc.: please do me a favor? Keep quiet while adults are talking. You keyboard revolutionaries are punks or plants from the other side (which makes you something else but I can’t use that word). Always ready to quote something from the movie X, but never willing to follow your own advice about murder and mayhem. Grow a pair you sham revolutionaries. If you are sooooooo convinced it’s war time, stop leaving notes here and do what you say needs to be done. I promise to write you letters as you serve time with other prison fools.
For the rest: anyone got a protest story from yesterday to share? Go at it.
John,
“And I know exactly who you are. You’re the black man hiding in the basement during true civil rebellion while your brothers are getting killed to resist oppresion, and then emerges to preach peace on the internet, you f***ing pacifist piece of s**t.”
When you grow up or have something coherent to say, please let me know. Then we can have a conversation.
Be well Mr. Revolutionary!
Sincerely,
James
Everyone – Despite what some people are suggesting, please don’t resort to violence. Passive resistance is also impacting, and can be more persuasive in the long run. Sarcasm aside, let’s all write actual letters to the White House and our Congressional deligates. We DO have power in our citizenship and voices. Yell, scream, shout, write, go in person to complain. Do not resort to violence – that ultimately denigrates our resistance.
What strikes a cord in regards to peaceful protest is that it serves to illuminate the violence one is protesting against. Everyone knows that people don’t stand out in the streets, march and voluntarily go to jail unless something is very wrong in our society.
Prop 8 is violence against a minority group because its say they can not be a part of society and serves as an attempt to strip away the human dignity from the individuals of the Group and cast their lives into the shadows of dark bars, drug abuse, homelessness and fear of rejection and physical abuse.
If we keep marching with that same feeling of fierce commitment that would lead one to battle(or burn a church) but, instead let it lead us to love…all the world will see the violence being cast against good people for no sensible reason and it will not stand.
The anger can get you to the street but locking hands with love will get you down the street to a win. I will see you all on the street again.
I doubt everyone here is “talking noise” but I see lots of noise every time I come here. Internet courage is what I like to call it.
If you want to go out and blow up churches, go right ahead but please don’t do it in my name.
I do like Veronica Onassis’ idea of drag queens taking over a morman church though. They’d pee in their magic underwear
“You keyboard revolutionaries are punks or plants from the other side”
Lemme get this straight: A man who assumes an online pulpit is directing those who are genuinely pissed and have righteous anger to continue the same failed path, keep financing others lawyers and don’t do anything that would actually give the heteros cause for concern beyond waving peace signs is actually calling those who’d feel no remorse dropping napalm on treacherous politicians and theocrats “plants for the other side” and punks.
Mr. Withers, if your blog were appear on the show Jeopardy, the question would be “What are things a committed coward would say?”
It’s pacifist, party-line schills like you that were driving people to the polls to elect an even bigger traitor to the White House than DOMA-DADT Clinton and you did it with your eyes wide open. Now you actually have the balls to tell the people your propaganda misled into this debacle to pipe down and play nice.
So lets take a good look at what your tactics really are:
As a black man, you know goddam well that blacks were not taken seriously by the government until your prime pacifists career was cut short with a bullet to the head in Tennessee. His followers saw first hand that pacifism wasnt working and promptly took to leveling the cities brick by brick. In the same fashion, when Rodney kings attackers were exonerated, again, Los Angeles burned and the police were re-tried in federal court , found guilty, and only after over 50 deaths, 2,200 + injuries and over a billion dollars in financial losses. And lets not forget the dozens killed in the Watts riots.
So just who the f**k are you to be telling millions of people to chill out?
Where should I start: the 2/3s of black voters who were stampeded into the voting booths to repeal same-sex marriage? How about the candidate your ilk endorsed who invited an open homophobe to his inauguration, dismissed every gay candidate from potential meaningful positions in cabinet and is now telegraphing his hesitance to actually follow though on his explicit pledge to end DADT?
And just what are your protests anyways? Safely premeditated, choreographed parades with a bucket every 100 feet to suck in money for someone elses lawyer to fail as long as it takes to buy another vacation home?
Have you actually stopped to SEE what hetero America is watching on TV when they report a “protest”? Gays in bright festive colors telling a camera what a “disappointment” it is with a smile on their face. People laughing. Cheering. DANCING! Its not a protest, its a goddam street party.
First, you unite under a rainbow flag as an emblem of solidarity, perhaps the most intimidating, formidable symbol of serious consequences ever concocted since the white flag. Then you proceed to mass produce this schlok merchandise and have an entire crowd waving the very thing that the mainstream watching associates with a childs crayon set in front of cameras.
If thats not enough, institute pink as the color of resistance, the very color that screams pussy to everyone who sees it and inculcate it as a fashion statement. Next have people dancing and laughing in front of cameras while iterating peace and love on sign after sign so that the majority that is COUNTING on peace to remain complacent and expressly does not give two s**ts about your love can see it repeatedly.
AND YOU WONDER WHY NO ONE TAKES YOU SERIOUSLY?!?
Mr. withers, Ive been watching this a very, very long time, and Ive seen how your elitist cult of cultures have commercially denigrated our youths identities for decades now so that they are brainwashed into believing that being homosexual is somehow predicated on being a pussy that will bawl through lawyers whenever cornered, but never have the balls to fight. This is ironically why we have to count on the lesbians to get anything done because you cant get most of the men to do more than write a check or even pay attention to an issue unless you print your argument directly on to a picture of a cock. So it takes no great leap of intuition to understand why most same-sex marriages are lesbian because they as a majority apparently have an actual personal, emotional investment in its success.
You call the ones “cowards” who are ready to actually send a message to hetero America that there are consequences to civilization as they know it when you legally instituting subjugation of a class. So who are you?
I don’t think you and your attorney-reliant, pacifist promoting, castrated kind are “plants” for the opposition.
I f***ing know it. I’m not blind.
And I know exactly who you are. You’re the black man hiding in the basement during true civil rebellion while your brothers are getting killed to resist oppresion, and then emerges to preach peace on the internet, you f***ing pacifist piece of s**t.
The National March on Washington will likely be on October 10th.
It will be on the ballot in 2010. The protests yesterday, today in LA and the big one on Saturday in Fresno will give people something to remember when they go vote.
It’s not necessary to destroy anything. We just have to be visible. Protesters were arrested, but for peaceful resistance, locking arms and blocking traffic. People don’t have to get hurt and nothing need be destroyed to get a “211 people were arrested” headline.
I think a mob of angry drag queens should invade a Mormon temple and shred the place in little pieces. That is how I want to vent my anger.
What a sanctimonious ass you are.
Top down legislation or judicial victories are nice but the only change that lasts comes from the ground up. The only way to combat fear and ignorance is with knowledge and to paraphrase Barney Frank: “Stop preaching to the choir and go out and change someone’s mind.” Live your life openly and respectfully and go into places you aren’t totally comfortable. Staying in our ghettos is easy. Opening a conversation with someone who disagrees with you isn’t easy but a one on one dialog with a person who hates you in their fear and ignorance is the only way to change their mind. And yeah, one conversation won’t make a different but I had a job to do with my partner in western Virginia and when the people twigged that we were not only gay but a couple the atmosphere became chilly. We did our job and by the end of the week when we finished up the chill had begun to leave the room and a conversation began. Most of the people spouting off about us don’t know what they’re talking about and are only repeating the words that make them feel comfortable. Get out of your comfort zone and change someone’s mind.
HERE’s the Plan folks: Help all you want, please.
“The battlegrounds will not be in San Francisco or West Hollywood but in places like Fresno, the geographic center of California where proponents of same-sex marriage will hold their first high-profile event Saturday.
Starting with a 14.5-mile march in Selma – the Fresno County town with the same name as the Alabama city iconic to the 1960s civil rights movement – and ending with a rally in Fresno, the event foreshadows efforts by same-sex marriage advocates to branch into middle America-like regions of interior California where opponents of Prop. 8 did little outreach last year.
Organizers hope to reach Latinos, faith communities and African Americans, constituencies into which they previously failed to make in-roads. Their approach aims to blend slain San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk’s put-a-human-face-on-the-issue activism with Barack Obama’s neighbor-to-neighbor organizing.”
WE Have to Win for the Families….Real Gay Families.
In their ruling, the California Supreme Court stated anyone could have their rights taken away. From page 9 of the ruling,
Laying down and playing dead (the campaign against 8, lead by Geoff Kors, opted not to show any gay people in their ads because it might bring out people to vote against our rights) so lets start taking away other people’s rights.
How come those “POLL numbers in our favor” don’t prove correct?
Do you ‘live’ your life based on “polls’? Funny thing is that never a pollster has asked me any questions in 50 yrs.. guess the “polls” miss quite a few, eh?
Love the title…except you fail to give any suggestions on “what to do with anger over prop 8″… You claim that grown ups are talking, yet your article is the equivalent to sitting down while giving yourself a colon screening. Even if people are only talking about “war time”, they need the outlet, not your disdain. And in case you didn’t know, outrage like this is not only typical, its necessary Before you decide to claim a spot at the grownup table, read this first.
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
Frederick Douglass, 1857
Kinda funny a grown man telling people with passion to stay quiet.
People with passion probably made it ok for your life thus far. I know passionless people are the ones hurting our lives now.
But gay men and lesbians aren’t involved in the same issues, you prove that with every sentence you construct. Weren’t you recently writing about enjoying prison with some large man? People were imprisoned for your rights. People died for your rights. But I guess that was only ok when it was for you?
Time for a Queerllion March on Washington!