I fail to share the optimism here about the future of gay rights in Amerika. Gay people will never be accepted by the majority of Amerikans, regardless of what the pollsters may hear to the contrary, and on a more focused note, Obama has already made it clear that the three major political goals of gay people --- the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and either a Constitutional amendment or Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage --- simply are not going to happen on his watch.
If, as I greatly fear, the Obama becomes a failed president, like Carter, and is succeeded by an overtly fascist President, then the gay rights movement will be stopped dead in its tracks, right then and there.
And then we must never forget that we have only ten or fifteen years before the entire planet suffers an ecological collapse, a Great Dying, in the course of which most of the Earth’s inhabitants will perish. Anybody’s rights then will become moot as the bottom line question becomes: can the human race itself survive?
I fail to share the optimism here about the gay rights movement.
Stonewall - Forty Years After
Moderator: Super Moderators
I fail to share the optimism here about the future of gay rights in Amerika. Gay people will never be accepted by the majority of Amerikans, regardless of what the pollsters may hear to the contrary, and on a more focused note, Obama has already made it clear that the three major political goals of gay people --- the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and either a Constitutional amendment or Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage --- simply are not going to happen on his watch.
If, as I greatly fear, the Obama becomes a failed president, like Carter, and is succeeded by an overtly fascist President, then the gay rights movement will be stopped dead in its tracks, right then and there.
And then we must never forget that we have only ten or fifteen years before the entire planet suffers an ecological collapse, a Great Dying, in the course of which most of the Earth’s inhabitants will perish. Anybody’s rights then will become moot as the bottom line question becomes: can the human race itself survive?
My pessimism about the future is complemented by my pessimism about the past. The gay rights movement was one of the last countercultural civil rights movements in Amerika: if the gays had waited just three or four years longer before igniting a Stonewall-type incident, there is a very good chance that the gay rights movement never would have gotten off the ground in the first place. Beyond that, the gay rights movement has never properly defined its place vis-à-vis the other civil rights movements (e.g. the black and feminist movements), and it had never managed to take a clear stand on the biggest political issue of our time, the fascist subversion of the Constitution and its ecological destruction of the planet.
Carter’s election in 1976 was actually a disaster for the gay rights movement, since it led many gays to believe that the revolutionary phase of the struggle for gay rights was now over and that mainstream politics could take over the rest of the load. This turned out to be a fatal error of judgment, especially since Carter's Presidency marked the end, rather than the beginning, of an era in Amerikan History. The current fascist reaction to gay rights began in the summer of 1977, the very first summer of Carter’s Presidency. By November of 1978 Harvey Milk was assassinated (a major signal to the gay community, if ever there was one), and less than a year later, gay men in New York City and San Francisco were starting to show signs of Karposi’s Sarcoma and other immuno-deficient diseases (an outbreak whose origins have never been properly explained, let people say what they wish to the contrary). And then, finally, in November of 1980, the Amerikan people terminally set themselves on the road to ruin by electing Ronald Reagan President of the United States.
The gay civil rights movement has always been a hit-n-miss affair, and the amazing thing is that it has been able to do as much as it has over the past forty years for the rights of gay people. But in the last years of the tottering Amerikan Empire gay people are entirely too important as imperial slaves: they are desperately needed by the fascist ruling class as victims and scapegoats in a way that neither women nor minorities can be forced now to be. And there is neither enough time nor strength of will within the gay community to overturn that situation.
At least, such is how things appear to me. If I turn out to be surprised (as I earnestly hope that I will be), then I will be the first to admit my delighted dismay in my lack of foresight...
If, as I greatly fear, the Obama becomes a failed president, like Carter, and is succeeded by an overtly fascist President, then the gay rights movement will be stopped dead in its tracks, right then and there.
And then we must never forget that we have only ten or fifteen years before the entire planet suffers an ecological collapse, a Great Dying, in the course of which most of the Earth’s inhabitants will perish. Anybody’s rights then will become moot as the bottom line question becomes: can the human race itself survive?
My pessimism about the future is complemented by my pessimism about the past. The gay rights movement was one of the last countercultural civil rights movements in Amerika: if the gays had waited just three or four years longer before igniting a Stonewall-type incident, there is a very good chance that the gay rights movement never would have gotten off the ground in the first place. Beyond that, the gay rights movement has never properly defined its place vis-à-vis the other civil rights movements (e.g. the black and feminist movements), and it had never managed to take a clear stand on the biggest political issue of our time, the fascist subversion of the Constitution and its ecological destruction of the planet.
Carter’s election in 1976 was actually a disaster for the gay rights movement, since it led many gays to believe that the revolutionary phase of the struggle for gay rights was now over and that mainstream politics could take over the rest of the load. This turned out to be a fatal error of judgment, especially since Carter's Presidency marked the end, rather than the beginning, of an era in Amerikan History. The current fascist reaction to gay rights began in the summer of 1977, the very first summer of Carter’s Presidency. By November of 1978 Harvey Milk was assassinated (a major signal to the gay community, if ever there was one), and less than a year later, gay men in New York City and San Francisco were starting to show signs of Karposi’s Sarcoma and other immuno-deficient diseases (an outbreak whose origins have never been properly explained, let people say what they wish to the contrary). And then, finally, in November of 1980, the Amerikan people terminally set themselves on the road to ruin by electing Ronald Reagan President of the United States.
The gay civil rights movement has always been a hit-n-miss affair, and the amazing thing is that it has been able to do as much as it has over the past forty years for the rights of gay people. But in the last years of the tottering Amerikan Empire gay people are entirely too important as imperial slaves: they are desperately needed by the fascist ruling class as victims and scapegoats in a way that neither women nor minorities can be forced now to be. And there is neither enough time nor strength of will within the gay community to overturn that situation.
At least, such is how things appear to me. If I turn out to be surprised (as I earnestly hope that I will be), then I will be the first to admit my delighted dismay in my lack of foresight...
Last edited by joequinn on 06-24-2009 08:59 AM, edited 1 time in total.
"Fuggedah about it, Jake --- it's Chinatown!"
An interesting video about the first night of the Stonewall Riots by a then 21-year-old witness to them:
http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/ ... fault.aspx
The most interesting line in the interview: "That night is a moment, that night is a monument. But, at the time, we didn't know what it was." Neither did the crowds who stormed the Bastille in 1789 or the Winter Palace in 1917. Out of such chaotic, sordid beginnings do great historical events mark their rise, a reflection that occasionally chills me...
http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/ ... fault.aspx
The most interesting line in the interview: "That night is a moment, that night is a monument. But, at the time, we didn't know what it was." Neither did the crowds who stormed the Bastille in 1789 or the Winter Palace in 1917. Out of such chaotic, sordid beginnings do great historical events mark their rise, a reflection that occasionally chills me...
"Fuggedah about it, Jake --- it's Chinatown!"
And hey, get this, oh-you-dreamers, Seymour Pine, now 89 years old, the cop who commanded the eight-person squad that raided the Stonewall Inn on 28 June 1969, still says that the raid was the right thing to do:
http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid92968.asp
Note, by the way, how he mentions that the raid was inspired by the bar's Mafia connections, among other things. And note his final words in the article: "We never would have done something without supervision from the federal authorities and the state authorities. They were involved with this just as well as we were.”
I really do think that what happened that night at the Stonewall Inn had a lot to do with the activities of that first openly fascist summer in Amerikan History, activities inspired by the collusion of the Nixon Administration, the Mafia, and the f**kin' capitalist pigs of Wall Street. But then we never will know for sure, will we?
http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid92968.asp
Note, by the way, how he mentions that the raid was inspired by the bar's Mafia connections, among other things. And note his final words in the article: "We never would have done something without supervision from the federal authorities and the state authorities. They were involved with this just as well as we were.”
I really do think that what happened that night at the Stonewall Inn had a lot to do with the activities of that first openly fascist summer in Amerikan History, activities inspired by the collusion of the Nixon Administration, the Mafia, and the f**kin' capitalist pigs of Wall Street. But then we never will know for sure, will we?
"Fuggedah about it, Jake --- it's Chinatown!"
And lookie here at what I found! The Village Voice has reprinted the articles by Smith and Truscott about the first weekend of rioting that almost got The Village burnt to the ground by a gay mob:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-06-24/ ... f-rioting/
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-06-24/ ... f-rioting/
"Fuggedah about it, Jake --- it's Chinatown!"
Let’s see… Where were we?
The Genovese family was blackmailing, particularly through stolen and untraceable securities, the well-heeled Wall Street junior executives who were showing up at the Stonewall Inn to dance their asses off after a long hard day of raping the American people and, who knows?, perhaps to pick up a little weed or blow and maybe even some young piece of rough trade for the night. The New York Police Department knew about the blackmail ring, particularly about those delicious securities, wanted a bigger cut of the action, and double-checked with their higher-ups in the Nixon Administration on the Federal level and in the Rockefeller Administration on the New York State level before they decided to spring their trap on early Saturday morning, 28 June 1969. What else could possibly have been going on at this time, huh?
This.
In 1994, Dr. Leonard Horowitz --- a figure well known to the Coast to Coast audience --- published Deadly Innocence: Solving the Greatest Murder Mystery in the History of American Medicine. In it he published some information that a military investigator by the name of Zears Miles and a lawyer by the name of Theodore Strecker had uncovered by means of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. This information concerned portions of testimony that were delivered at a Congressional Hearing before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations on Tuesday, 1 July 1969. The testimony of Charles L. Poor, the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Development, was printed in the Congressional Record, but the far more interesting testimony of a certain Dr. MacArthur, the Deputy Director of the Department of Defense, was not, at least not until Miles and Strecker had uncovered it and until Horowitz had published it twenty-five years later.
And what did Dr. MacArthur say to the Subcommittee that was too damaging to print in The Congressional Record?
This.
“Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease… It is a highly controversial issue and there are many who believe such research should not be undertaken lest it lead to yet another method of massive killing of large populations. On the other hand, without the sure scientific knowledge that such a weapon is possible, and an understanding of the ways it could be done, there is little that can be done to devise defensive measures. Should an enemy develop it there is little double that this is an important area of potential military technological inferiority in which there is no adequate research program.” To which Dr. MacArthur added that the program could be completed within five to ten years at a cost of no more than ten million dollars. And 1979, ten years after Dr. MacArthur’s testimony, was the year in which “gay cancer” first made its appearance in New York City and San Francisco. And as we all know very well, thereafter the band played on…
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13247914/0308 ... -GSH202003
What Dr. MacArthur could not have told the subcommittee, for perfectly understandable reasons, was that the American military already was in possession of such a biological agent, albeit in a rough, unfinished state, as a result of its desperate program earlier in the decade to counteract the carcinogenic properties of the SV-40 rhesus monkey virus contained in the Salk polio vaccine that had been given to millions of children between 1955 and 1962, a program in which Dr. Alton Ochsner, Dr. Mary Sherman, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Judyth Very Baker had been deeply involved in the summer of 1963. One of the unfortunate side-effects of trying to counteract the SV-40 virus in the Salk polio vaccine was an unintentional “sexing up” of the Simian Immunological Virus (SIV), another virus in the same vaccine, a virus that the military quickly found to be highly effective in disabling the human immune system and triggering a whole range of immuno-suppressive diseases. Ah, but we were not to know about that until 1999 when Sixty Minutes, choking in the clutch out of fear of the consequences of becoming the Sunday Night bearer of real bad news, allowed Ed Haslam to contact Judyth Very Baker and to start the process that led up to the publication of Doctor Mary’s Monkey in 2007.
And so it goes… But what really bothers me is that the Congressional testimony took place right on the fifth day of the Stonewall riots. I can just imagine the military and their Congressional accomplices smiling a real wide, s**t-eatin’ smile during the hearings as the light went on in their wicked minds and they realized that they had finally found the disposable population upon which they could test their biological agent…
Oh, the horror of it!
The Genovese family was blackmailing, particularly through stolen and untraceable securities, the well-heeled Wall Street junior executives who were showing up at the Stonewall Inn to dance their asses off after a long hard day of raping the American people and, who knows?, perhaps to pick up a little weed or blow and maybe even some young piece of rough trade for the night. The New York Police Department knew about the blackmail ring, particularly about those delicious securities, wanted a bigger cut of the action, and double-checked with their higher-ups in the Nixon Administration on the Federal level and in the Rockefeller Administration on the New York State level before they decided to spring their trap on early Saturday morning, 28 June 1969. What else could possibly have been going on at this time, huh?
This.
In 1994, Dr. Leonard Horowitz --- a figure well known to the Coast to Coast audience --- published Deadly Innocence: Solving the Greatest Murder Mystery in the History of American Medicine. In it he published some information that a military investigator by the name of Zears Miles and a lawyer by the name of Theodore Strecker had uncovered by means of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. This information concerned portions of testimony that were delivered at a Congressional Hearing before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations on Tuesday, 1 July 1969. The testimony of Charles L. Poor, the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Development, was printed in the Congressional Record, but the far more interesting testimony of a certain Dr. MacArthur, the Deputy Director of the Department of Defense, was not, at least not until Miles and Strecker had uncovered it and until Horowitz had published it twenty-five years later.
And what did Dr. MacArthur say to the Subcommittee that was too damaging to print in The Congressional Record?
This.
“Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease… It is a highly controversial issue and there are many who believe such research should not be undertaken lest it lead to yet another method of massive killing of large populations. On the other hand, without the sure scientific knowledge that such a weapon is possible, and an understanding of the ways it could be done, there is little that can be done to devise defensive measures. Should an enemy develop it there is little double that this is an important area of potential military technological inferiority in which there is no adequate research program.” To which Dr. MacArthur added that the program could be completed within five to ten years at a cost of no more than ten million dollars. And 1979, ten years after Dr. MacArthur’s testimony, was the year in which “gay cancer” first made its appearance in New York City and San Francisco. And as we all know very well, thereafter the band played on…
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13247914/0308 ... -GSH202003
What Dr. MacArthur could not have told the subcommittee, for perfectly understandable reasons, was that the American military already was in possession of such a biological agent, albeit in a rough, unfinished state, as a result of its desperate program earlier in the decade to counteract the carcinogenic properties of the SV-40 rhesus monkey virus contained in the Salk polio vaccine that had been given to millions of children between 1955 and 1962, a program in which Dr. Alton Ochsner, Dr. Mary Sherman, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Judyth Very Baker had been deeply involved in the summer of 1963. One of the unfortunate side-effects of trying to counteract the SV-40 virus in the Salk polio vaccine was an unintentional “sexing up” of the Simian Immunological Virus (SIV), another virus in the same vaccine, a virus that the military quickly found to be highly effective in disabling the human immune system and triggering a whole range of immuno-suppressive diseases. Ah, but we were not to know about that until 1999 when Sixty Minutes, choking in the clutch out of fear of the consequences of becoming the Sunday Night bearer of real bad news, allowed Ed Haslam to contact Judyth Very Baker and to start the process that led up to the publication of Doctor Mary’s Monkey in 2007.
And so it goes… But what really bothers me is that the Congressional testimony took place right on the fifth day of the Stonewall riots. I can just imagine the military and their Congressional accomplices smiling a real wide, s**t-eatin’ smile during the hearings as the light went on in their wicked minds and they realized that they had finally found the disposable population upon which they could test their biological agent…
Oh, the horror of it!
Last edited by joequinn on 06-24-2009 04:31 PM, edited 1 time in total.
"Fuggedah about it, Jake --- it's Chinatown!"
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Shirleypal
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I am watching The Times of Harvey Milk and crying as I do everytime I see it, I am still so angry after all these years
that Dan White got away with the Murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone
Moscone–Milk assassinations
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(Redirected from Moscone-Milk assassinations)
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San Francisco Examiner's front page for November 27, 1978The Moscone-Milk assassinations were the killings of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk, who were shot and killed in San Francisco City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978. White was angry that Moscone refused to re-appoint him to his just-resigned Board of Supervisor's seat, and that Milk heavily lobbied against the re-appointment. Milk was (according to Time magazine) "the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet," leading to speculation from within the LGBT community as well as media and political circles that his assassination was a hate crime. These events also accelerated the political career of Dianne Feinstein, one of White's allies on the Board, who became mayor of San Francisco and eventually U.S. Senator for California.
White was subsequently convicted of voluntary manslaughter, rather than of first degree murder. The verdict sparked the "White Night Riots" in San Francisco, and led to the state of California abolishing the diminished capacity criminal defense. It also led to the urban legend of the "Twinkie defense," as many media reports had incorrectly described the defense as having attributed White's diminished capacity to the effects of sugar-laden junk food
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone-Mi ... ssinations
that Dan White got away with the Murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone
Moscone–Milk assassinations
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Moscone-Milk assassinations)
Jump to: navigation, search
San Francisco Examiner's front page for November 27, 1978The Moscone-Milk assassinations were the killings of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk, who were shot and killed in San Francisco City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978. White was angry that Moscone refused to re-appoint him to his just-resigned Board of Supervisor's seat, and that Milk heavily lobbied against the re-appointment. Milk was (according to Time magazine) "the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet," leading to speculation from within the LGBT community as well as media and political circles that his assassination was a hate crime. These events also accelerated the political career of Dianne Feinstein, one of White's allies on the Board, who became mayor of San Francisco and eventually U.S. Senator for California.
White was subsequently convicted of voluntary manslaughter, rather than of first degree murder. The verdict sparked the "White Night Riots" in San Francisco, and led to the state of California abolishing the diminished capacity criminal defense. It also led to the urban legend of the "Twinkie defense," as many media reports had incorrectly described the defense as having attributed White's diminished capacity to the effects of sugar-laden junk food
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone-Mi ... ssinations
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Shirleypal
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Watching thousands upon thousands of Gay and Straight people marching down Market St. to City Hall in silence, holding candles and tears streaming down there faces is still heart wrenching to this day. I didn't live in the Bay Area when this happened but everytime I went to the Castro or Moscone Center this came to mind..
As a result of Harvey's murder it was the beginning of Gay's coming out on a large basis.
As a result of Harvey's murder it was the beginning of Gay's coming out on a large basis.
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Shirleypal
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I must say that I am surprised that nobody has remarked on the astonishing coincidence (if it be coincidence at all) that the major documentary proof that the U.S. military was working on an AIDS-like virus as a biological weapon occurs during a Congressional hearing that takes place right in the middle of the Stonewall Riots. I myself was stunned at the coincidence, as a matter of fact...
Here you have gay people finally standing up for themselves in literally the last good year in which they could do so (1969), and right at the very moment when they do so, the means to kill them all off in a plausibly deniable way is discussed less than 200 miles away.
If this be coincidence, then it is a malefic coincidence. But then the entire history of post-war Amerika has been nothing more than a long day's journey into night. You might not believe so, and there was a time when I most assuredly did not believe so, but what we believe does not alter one whit that which is...
And regarding the Moscone-Milk murders...
I do not think that we really understand what happened there. Although many people would like to cover the connection up, the fact of the matter is that Mayor Moscone knew Jim Jones real well and worked with him closely on many projects before he fled to Guyana --- and mass suicide. It is commonly realized now that Jonestown was quite possibly an MK-ULTRA experiment and that Jim Jones himself was a CIA contract agent. The Moscone-Milk murders, following so very closely upon the Jonestown Massacre, have never struck me as an accidental coincidence. And if both operations were CIA-orchestrated, then it is no surprise, no surprise whatsoever, that Dan White got off so lightly with his "Twinkie defense."
Even in terms of post-war gay history, we don't know a damn thing about what has been going on in this country for the past two-thirds of a century. Not one damn thing...
Here you have gay people finally standing up for themselves in literally the last good year in which they could do so (1969), and right at the very moment when they do so, the means to kill them all off in a plausibly deniable way is discussed less than 200 miles away.
If this be coincidence, then it is a malefic coincidence. But then the entire history of post-war Amerika has been nothing more than a long day's journey into night. You might not believe so, and there was a time when I most assuredly did not believe so, but what we believe does not alter one whit that which is...
And regarding the Moscone-Milk murders...
I do not think that we really understand what happened there. Although many people would like to cover the connection up, the fact of the matter is that Mayor Moscone knew Jim Jones real well and worked with him closely on many projects before he fled to Guyana --- and mass suicide. It is commonly realized now that Jonestown was quite possibly an MK-ULTRA experiment and that Jim Jones himself was a CIA contract agent. The Moscone-Milk murders, following so very closely upon the Jonestown Massacre, have never struck me as an accidental coincidence. And if both operations were CIA-orchestrated, then it is no surprise, no surprise whatsoever, that Dan White got off so lightly with his "Twinkie defense."
Even in terms of post-war gay history, we don't know a damn thing about what has been going on in this country for the past two-thirds of a century. Not one damn thing...
Last edited by joequinn on 06-25-2009 10:08 AM, edited 1 time in total.
"Fuggedah about it, Jake --- it's Chinatown!"
A 1988, privately published, book by Michael Meiers, entitled Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence, has supplied me with a lot of information concerning the relationships among Jim Jones, George Moscone and Harvey Milk between the spring of 1975 and the fall of 1978. Here’s the gist of what Meiers found out:
People assume that Moscone and Milk must have been close political allies, because they both were murdered by Dan White on 27 November 1978. Nothing could be further from the truth. Moscone and Milk were serious political rivals, and Moscone knew that Milk was planning to run for Mayor of San Francisco in 1979, a job that Moscone had no desire to lose and a job he knew was Milk’s for the taking in the wake of his spectacular success combating Proposition 6 (aka the Briggs Initiative) in 1978. And, as I shall tell, beyond this rivalry was based, in large measure, on the widely disparate nature of the political support behind the two men.
When Harvey Milk and his lover and future campaign manager Scott Smith moved to San Francisco in 1972, Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple already was a political fact of life there. And San Francisco, hard as it may be to believe, was quite a repressive place culturally at the time. Gay behavior was a felony then in California as a result of its 1872 Crimes Against Nature Law, a law that the California Assembly and Senate consistently refused to repeal and that Governor Reagan swore that he would veto even if they did repeal it. In fact, a restaurant or a bar could lose its liquor license for serving a drink to an openly gay person. Thus, when Milk ran for the first time for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973, his campaign did not focus merely on gay rights: even more dangerously, it focused on wresting political control of the city from the powerful real estate developers to community groups. Milk lost badly, cleaned up his act (a move that annoyed many of his gay supporters for a number of reasons), and got ready to try again in 1975.
But things had changed a great deal in California since 1973. For one thing, Reagan was gone from the Governor’s Mansion, and the progressive Jerry Brown had been elected by the people of California to succeed him. Taking advantage of Reagan’s departure, California Senate Major Leader George Moscone and California Assemblyman (and future San Francisco Mayor) Willie Brown pressed for the repeal of the Crimes Against Nature Law. With the tie-breaking support of Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, the California Senate overturned the law by a vote of 21 to 20, after which the Assembly soon followed suit. Following upon the success of this repeal effort, Moscone declared himself a candidate for the Mayoralty of San Francisco, a move in which he was strongly supported by the Peoples Temple. Indeed, many say that Jim Jones helped to make Moscone the Mayor, since tales of Peoples Temple voter fraud were endemic throughout San Francisco in the wake of the election.
Moscone, needless to say, was very grateful to Jim Jones. In March of 1976 Moscone appointed Jones San Francisco’s Human Rights Commissioner, and on 24 January 1977 Moscone secured Jones’s election as Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority, an enormously powerful political position. Both Moscone and Brown were frequently seen at services of the Peoples Temple in 1976, and in September of 1976 Moscone brought Jones into contact with Rosalyn Carter, who was present in San Francisco to open her husband’s campaign headquarters there. Jones made a strong impression on Rosalyn Carter, with whom he kept in close touch for the next nine months or so, and he also became close to Vice-Presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Indeed, there is some reason to think that the Carter-Mondale campaign used Jones as an unofficial conduit to Cuban President Fidel Castro, whom Jones visited twice, the first time in October of 1976 and the second in December of 1976. The Carter-Mondale Administration was so impressed by Jones’s performance that Mondale supposedly offered him the Ambassadorship to Guyana, where Jones was already building Jonestown. But before anything could come of this offer, New West magazine published its major expose of the Peoples Temple in July of 1977. Jones fled immediately to Guyana, on 2 August 1977 he called Moscone to resign his Chairmanship over the San Francisco Housing Authority.
Harvey Milk was well aware of Jim Jones’s increasing clout within San Francisco politics during 1975, and he was careful not to antagonize the Peoples Temple. He had started wearing a jacket-n-tie at his political appearances, and he was careful to secure union support for his second run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. (He did this by organizing a boycott of Coors Beer in the Castro District’s gay bars after the Coors Corporation had refused to allow its employees to unionize.) But even these concessions to mainstream political reality were insufficient. Moscone won the Mayoralty in November of 1975 with Jim Jones’s support, while Milk failed again. But Moscone could spot a rising star on the political horizon, so he appointed Milk to San Francisco’s powerful Board of Permit Appeals. Harvey Milk, it seemed, was on his way.
But this Moscone-Milk accord lasted just five weeks. Milk was disturbed by the Moscone-Jones alliance, one that supported the hegemony of the San Francisco real estate developers, and he felt that he needed to fight it. He declared his candidacy for the 16th District of the California State Senate, a position which Moscone and Jones had promised to political insider Art Agnos. Moscone promptly fired Milk from the Board of Permit Appeals, and the Peoples Temple put Milk on its enemies’ list. San Franciscans still speak of the 1976 State Senate race as “Milk vs. the Machine,” a race in which Milk was heavily outgunned. In the first place, Milk was far less powerful politically in 1976 than he had been a year earlier. Most of his union support had abandoned him after the 1975 election (although he still had the Teamsters and the Fire Fighters behind him), and many of his gay supporters turned against him for his support of mainstream, non-gay political issues. And Milk most assuredly feared the wrath of the Peoples Temple. Milk always used to warn his campaign workers: “Make sure you’re always nice to the Peoples Temple. If they ask you to do something, do it, and then send them a note thanking them for asking you to do it. They’re weird and they’re dangerous, and you never want to be on their bad side.” But Milk was on their bad side, all the same, and when Peoples Temple member Sharon Amos asked Milk to let one of her assistants pick up 30,000 copies of Milk’s campaign literature, Milk immediately gave her everything that he had, only to learn that it had been destroyed upon receipt. The outcome of the election was never really in doubt, and Milk lost by 3,600 votes out of a total of 33,000 cast: the black neighborhoods controlled by Jim Jones were instrumental in securing the margin of victory for Art Agnos.
However, prospects brightened immediately for Milk when San Francisco voters approved a measure in 1976 that called for the district-wide, not city-wide, election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. This electoral sea-change automatically made Milk the odds-on favorite to win the 1977 election, which, of course, he did. But by this point Milk was engaged in a crusade against Proposition 6, which was sponsored by State Senator John Briggs and which would have prevented the hiring of gay teachers for the California school system. Condemning the Christian fundamentalists as “the New Nazis,” Milk did everything in his power to fight Proposition 6. Indeed, at the Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco in June of 1978, Milk spoke against the proposition at the San Francisco Civic Center before a crowd of 375,000, fully aware that he could be shot the moment that he opened his mouth. Milk did such an outstanding job discrediting the Briggs initiative that, by election day, only the Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan and (most ominously) the Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs’ Association supported it. When Californians rejected Proposition 6 and San Franciscans elected him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk became a national figure. And he capitalized, immediately, on his national clout. He started working on a Gay Rights March on Washington scheduled for Independence Day 1979, and even his former rival Art Agnos confessed that Harvey Milk was the odds-on favorite to become Mayor of San Francisco in the 1979 election.
But while Milk’s supporters were jubilant, Milk himself was profoundly apprehensive. He knew that he had antagonized the Peoples Temple and that only Jones’s sudden flight to Guyana in the summer of 1977 had made his easy victory possible. He could clearly see America’s drift to the right, and he knew that he had but fought a holding action against Proposition 6 in 1978. For a year Milk had worked manfully as the Board of Supervisors, trying, unsuccessfully, to wrest control over the city from Dianne Feinstein and her real estate developers. But the election of 1978, which signaled Reagan’s immanent arrival two years later even as it signaled the defeat of Proposition 6, plunged Milk into despair, and there is absolutely no question that, during the last three weeks of his life, he knew that he was a marked man.
Milk’s obsessive preoccupation with politics had ruined his relationship with Scott Smith, and thereafter, Milk had become a lover of the highly unstable Jack Lira. Shortly after the election, Lira hanged himself in his apartment, ostensibly out of feeling neglected by Milk’s incessant political activities. Milk never said anything to challenge the popular view that Lira’s death was a suicide, but in private, he was by no means sure. As he told a prospective new lover by the name of William Wiegardt just a week before he died, “You’ve got to remember, Bill, you’re in the direct line of fire. If I get killed, you can get killed too. Somebody could walk through the door and blow both our brains out.” Beyond that, Milk began to put his affairs in order legally, and dictated a famous addendum to his political will: “Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash every closet door in the country.” And on 27 November 1978 Dan White shot both Milk and Moscone at San Francisco City Hall.
Was Dan White a crazed lone gunman? Was he a posthumous instrument of Jim Jones’s vengeance, killing Moscone for failing to halt Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation of Jonestown and killing Milk for being a enormous threat for the current fascist reaction? Or was White an instrument of CIA as part of its post-Jonestown mop-up procedures? I don’t know, but I am surprised by the power that Jim Jones wielded in San Francisco up to the summer of 1977. Even Harvey Milk was afraid of him and went out of his way, to his loss, not to antagonize him. And Milk’s death, coupled with the emergence of AIDS in 1979, was the start of a concerted cultural attack against gay people from which the gay rights movement, so powerful between 1969 and 1978, has never recovered. A cultural attack which is just as strong in 2009 as it ever was.
People assume that Moscone and Milk must have been close political allies, because they both were murdered by Dan White on 27 November 1978. Nothing could be further from the truth. Moscone and Milk were serious political rivals, and Moscone knew that Milk was planning to run for Mayor of San Francisco in 1979, a job that Moscone had no desire to lose and a job he knew was Milk’s for the taking in the wake of his spectacular success combating Proposition 6 (aka the Briggs Initiative) in 1978. And, as I shall tell, beyond this rivalry was based, in large measure, on the widely disparate nature of the political support behind the two men.
When Harvey Milk and his lover and future campaign manager Scott Smith moved to San Francisco in 1972, Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple already was a political fact of life there. And San Francisco, hard as it may be to believe, was quite a repressive place culturally at the time. Gay behavior was a felony then in California as a result of its 1872 Crimes Against Nature Law, a law that the California Assembly and Senate consistently refused to repeal and that Governor Reagan swore that he would veto even if they did repeal it. In fact, a restaurant or a bar could lose its liquor license for serving a drink to an openly gay person. Thus, when Milk ran for the first time for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973, his campaign did not focus merely on gay rights: even more dangerously, it focused on wresting political control of the city from the powerful real estate developers to community groups. Milk lost badly, cleaned up his act (a move that annoyed many of his gay supporters for a number of reasons), and got ready to try again in 1975.
But things had changed a great deal in California since 1973. For one thing, Reagan was gone from the Governor’s Mansion, and the progressive Jerry Brown had been elected by the people of California to succeed him. Taking advantage of Reagan’s departure, California Senate Major Leader George Moscone and California Assemblyman (and future San Francisco Mayor) Willie Brown pressed for the repeal of the Crimes Against Nature Law. With the tie-breaking support of Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, the California Senate overturned the law by a vote of 21 to 20, after which the Assembly soon followed suit. Following upon the success of this repeal effort, Moscone declared himself a candidate for the Mayoralty of San Francisco, a move in which he was strongly supported by the Peoples Temple. Indeed, many say that Jim Jones helped to make Moscone the Mayor, since tales of Peoples Temple voter fraud were endemic throughout San Francisco in the wake of the election.
Moscone, needless to say, was very grateful to Jim Jones. In March of 1976 Moscone appointed Jones San Francisco’s Human Rights Commissioner, and on 24 January 1977 Moscone secured Jones’s election as Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority, an enormously powerful political position. Both Moscone and Brown were frequently seen at services of the Peoples Temple in 1976, and in September of 1976 Moscone brought Jones into contact with Rosalyn Carter, who was present in San Francisco to open her husband’s campaign headquarters there. Jones made a strong impression on Rosalyn Carter, with whom he kept in close touch for the next nine months or so, and he also became close to Vice-Presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Indeed, there is some reason to think that the Carter-Mondale campaign used Jones as an unofficial conduit to Cuban President Fidel Castro, whom Jones visited twice, the first time in October of 1976 and the second in December of 1976. The Carter-Mondale Administration was so impressed by Jones’s performance that Mondale supposedly offered him the Ambassadorship to Guyana, where Jones was already building Jonestown. But before anything could come of this offer, New West magazine published its major expose of the Peoples Temple in July of 1977. Jones fled immediately to Guyana, on 2 August 1977 he called Moscone to resign his Chairmanship over the San Francisco Housing Authority.
Harvey Milk was well aware of Jim Jones’s increasing clout within San Francisco politics during 1975, and he was careful not to antagonize the Peoples Temple. He had started wearing a jacket-n-tie at his political appearances, and he was careful to secure union support for his second run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. (He did this by organizing a boycott of Coors Beer in the Castro District’s gay bars after the Coors Corporation had refused to allow its employees to unionize.) But even these concessions to mainstream political reality were insufficient. Moscone won the Mayoralty in November of 1975 with Jim Jones’s support, while Milk failed again. But Moscone could spot a rising star on the political horizon, so he appointed Milk to San Francisco’s powerful Board of Permit Appeals. Harvey Milk, it seemed, was on his way.
But this Moscone-Milk accord lasted just five weeks. Milk was disturbed by the Moscone-Jones alliance, one that supported the hegemony of the San Francisco real estate developers, and he felt that he needed to fight it. He declared his candidacy for the 16th District of the California State Senate, a position which Moscone and Jones had promised to political insider Art Agnos. Moscone promptly fired Milk from the Board of Permit Appeals, and the Peoples Temple put Milk on its enemies’ list. San Franciscans still speak of the 1976 State Senate race as “Milk vs. the Machine,” a race in which Milk was heavily outgunned. In the first place, Milk was far less powerful politically in 1976 than he had been a year earlier. Most of his union support had abandoned him after the 1975 election (although he still had the Teamsters and the Fire Fighters behind him), and many of his gay supporters turned against him for his support of mainstream, non-gay political issues. And Milk most assuredly feared the wrath of the Peoples Temple. Milk always used to warn his campaign workers: “Make sure you’re always nice to the Peoples Temple. If they ask you to do something, do it, and then send them a note thanking them for asking you to do it. They’re weird and they’re dangerous, and you never want to be on their bad side.” But Milk was on their bad side, all the same, and when Peoples Temple member Sharon Amos asked Milk to let one of her assistants pick up 30,000 copies of Milk’s campaign literature, Milk immediately gave her everything that he had, only to learn that it had been destroyed upon receipt. The outcome of the election was never really in doubt, and Milk lost by 3,600 votes out of a total of 33,000 cast: the black neighborhoods controlled by Jim Jones were instrumental in securing the margin of victory for Art Agnos.
However, prospects brightened immediately for Milk when San Francisco voters approved a measure in 1976 that called for the district-wide, not city-wide, election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. This electoral sea-change automatically made Milk the odds-on favorite to win the 1977 election, which, of course, he did. But by this point Milk was engaged in a crusade against Proposition 6, which was sponsored by State Senator John Briggs and which would have prevented the hiring of gay teachers for the California school system. Condemning the Christian fundamentalists as “the New Nazis,” Milk did everything in his power to fight Proposition 6. Indeed, at the Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco in June of 1978, Milk spoke against the proposition at the San Francisco Civic Center before a crowd of 375,000, fully aware that he could be shot the moment that he opened his mouth. Milk did such an outstanding job discrediting the Briggs initiative that, by election day, only the Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan and (most ominously) the Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs’ Association supported it. When Californians rejected Proposition 6 and San Franciscans elected him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk became a national figure. And he capitalized, immediately, on his national clout. He started working on a Gay Rights March on Washington scheduled for Independence Day 1979, and even his former rival Art Agnos confessed that Harvey Milk was the odds-on favorite to become Mayor of San Francisco in the 1979 election.
But while Milk’s supporters were jubilant, Milk himself was profoundly apprehensive. He knew that he had antagonized the Peoples Temple and that only Jones’s sudden flight to Guyana in the summer of 1977 had made his easy victory possible. He could clearly see America’s drift to the right, and he knew that he had but fought a holding action against Proposition 6 in 1978. For a year Milk had worked manfully as the Board of Supervisors, trying, unsuccessfully, to wrest control over the city from Dianne Feinstein and her real estate developers. But the election of 1978, which signaled Reagan’s immanent arrival two years later even as it signaled the defeat of Proposition 6, plunged Milk into despair, and there is absolutely no question that, during the last three weeks of his life, he knew that he was a marked man.
Milk’s obsessive preoccupation with politics had ruined his relationship with Scott Smith, and thereafter, Milk had become a lover of the highly unstable Jack Lira. Shortly after the election, Lira hanged himself in his apartment, ostensibly out of feeling neglected by Milk’s incessant political activities. Milk never said anything to challenge the popular view that Lira’s death was a suicide, but in private, he was by no means sure. As he told a prospective new lover by the name of William Wiegardt just a week before he died, “You’ve got to remember, Bill, you’re in the direct line of fire. If I get killed, you can get killed too. Somebody could walk through the door and blow both our brains out.” Beyond that, Milk began to put his affairs in order legally, and dictated a famous addendum to his political will: “Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash every closet door in the country.” And on 27 November 1978 Dan White shot both Milk and Moscone at San Francisco City Hall.
Was Dan White a crazed lone gunman? Was he a posthumous instrument of Jim Jones’s vengeance, killing Moscone for failing to halt Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation of Jonestown and killing Milk for being a enormous threat for the current fascist reaction? Or was White an instrument of CIA as part of its post-Jonestown mop-up procedures? I don’t know, but I am surprised by the power that Jim Jones wielded in San Francisco up to the summer of 1977. Even Harvey Milk was afraid of him and went out of his way, to his loss, not to antagonize him. And Milk’s death, coupled with the emergence of AIDS in 1979, was the start of a concerted cultural attack against gay people from which the gay rights movement, so powerful between 1969 and 1978, has never recovered. A cultural attack which is just as strong in 2009 as it ever was.
Last edited by joequinn on 06-25-2009 01:15 PM, edited 1 time in total.
"Fuggedah about it, Jake --- it's Chinatown!"
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Shirleypal
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I must say that I am surprised that nobody has remarked on the astonishing coincidence (if it be coincidence at all) that the major documentary proof that the U.S. military was working on an AIDS-like virus as a biological weapon occurs during a Congressional hearing that takes place right in the middle of the Stonewall Riots. I myself was stunned at the coincidence, as a matter of fact...
Joe I do not beleive for one minute it was a coincidence, have you read Tom Bearden's book AIDS: Biological Warfare, it spell it all out..extensive information in that book on Tesla also...if you haven't read it Joe please do..
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Shirleypal
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Shirleypal
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Turning "I dos" into "you can'ts"
November 28, 2008
LOS ANGELES — Dianne Feinstein is not sure she'll ever be able to watch the movie "Milk," even though she's in it.
There is 1978 footage of a stricken Feinstein in the opening minutes of the new Gus Van Sant biopic of Harvey Milk, her colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the first openly gay elected official in American history. (Sean Penn soars as Milk.)
"I was the one who found his body," the California senator told me last week, en route from the airport to her San Francisco home. "To get a pulse, I put my finger in a bullet hole. It was a terrible, terrible time in the city's history."
The movie, chronicling the rancorous California fight of gay activists against church-backed forces in the '70s to prevent discrimination against gays, is opening amid a rancorous California fight of gay activists against church-backed forces to prevent discrimination against gays.
Milk was gunned down by Dan White, who had served on the board with Milk and Feinstein. White, an Irish Catholic former policeman and Vietnam vet, opposed Milk's equal-rights initiatives for gays. He resigned and immediately wanted his seat back, a move Milk helped persuade the mayor, George Moscone, to reject. White climbed through a City Hall basement window with a loaded gun and shot down Moscone and then Milk. (In the infamous "Twinkie defense," White argued that junk food had stressed him out.)
I asked Feinstein, who became mayor after the tragedy, if she would see the movie.
"It's very painful for me," she replied. "It took me seven years before I could sit in George Moscone's chair. It took me a long time to talk about it. I was only recently able to talk about it."
This month, gays who supported Barack Obama had the bittersweet experience of seeing some of the black and Latino voters who surged to the polls to vote Democratic also vote for Proposition 8, which turned gay "I dos" into "You can'ts." About 20,000 gay couples had exchanged vows before Proposition 8 passed, backed by a coalition that included Mormon and Catholic opponents.
Now that donor information can be found online, gay activists have called for boycotts of anyone who contributed to the law's passing, from businesses small (El Coyote restaurant in L.A., where Sharon Tate had her last meal and Fabio and George Clooney nearly came to blows) to large (ski resorts and Park City, Utah, theaters where Sundance movies are shown).
Feinstein felt sure that gays who have been married in the state since June are still married. "You can't redact it," she said. "You can't blot it out. It's so intrinsic to the Constitution that you cannot remove it by a vote of the people."
Jerry Brown, the California attorney general who is also featured in the archival reels in "Milk" from his days as governor, agreed: "I believe those are valid," he told me, saying that he will argue in the appeal before the state Supreme Court that there cannot be "a retroactive invalidation of these marital contracts."
Brown harked back to the defeat of the Milk-era Proposition 6, which sought to root out gay teachers from California public schools. ("If it were true that children mimic their teachers, we'd have a hell of a lot more nuns running around," Milk says in the movie.)
"Any time you take an issue that has such deep feelings connected to it and you frame it in terms of a political initiative," Brown said, "you drain out some of the anger and convert it to an issue that people can approach in a more reasonable, open-minded way."
Feinstein agreed: "I think as more and more people have gay friends, gay associations, see gay heroism, that their views change."
The gays were outfoxed by their opponents. In both Proposition 6 in 1978 and this year's Proposition 8, the specter of children being converted to a gay orientation was raised. Feinstein said the TV ad of Proposition 8 supporters insinuating that "gay marriage would be taught in school really hurt." ("I can marry a princess," a pigtailed girl told her mom in the ad.)
"I think people are beginning to look at it differently; I know it's happened for me," Feinstein said of gay marriage. "I started out not supporting it. The longer I've lived, the more I've seen the happiness of people, the stability that these commitments bring to a life. Many adopted children who would have ended up in foster care now have good solid homes and are brought up learning the difference between right and wrong. It's a very positive thing."
I e-mailed Larry Kramer, the leading activist for gay rights in the era that followed Milk's, to get his read on Proposition 8. (In 1983, I interviewed Kramer about the new scourge of AIDS, and he read me a list from a green notebook of 37 friends who had died.)
"DON'T WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS?" he e-mailed back, blessedly cantankerous. "I AM ASHAMED OF YOU THAT YOU HAD TO ASK ME THAT QUESTION."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/o ... 9dowd.html
November 28, 2008
LOS ANGELES — Dianne Feinstein is not sure she'll ever be able to watch the movie "Milk," even though she's in it.
There is 1978 footage of a stricken Feinstein in the opening minutes of the new Gus Van Sant biopic of Harvey Milk, her colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the first openly gay elected official in American history. (Sean Penn soars as Milk.)
"I was the one who found his body," the California senator told me last week, en route from the airport to her San Francisco home. "To get a pulse, I put my finger in a bullet hole. It was a terrible, terrible time in the city's history."
The movie, chronicling the rancorous California fight of gay activists against church-backed forces in the '70s to prevent discrimination against gays, is opening amid a rancorous California fight of gay activists against church-backed forces to prevent discrimination against gays.
Milk was gunned down by Dan White, who had served on the board with Milk and Feinstein. White, an Irish Catholic former policeman and Vietnam vet, opposed Milk's equal-rights initiatives for gays. He resigned and immediately wanted his seat back, a move Milk helped persuade the mayor, George Moscone, to reject. White climbed through a City Hall basement window with a loaded gun and shot down Moscone and then Milk. (In the infamous "Twinkie defense," White argued that junk food had stressed him out.)
I asked Feinstein, who became mayor after the tragedy, if she would see the movie.
"It's very painful for me," she replied. "It took me seven years before I could sit in George Moscone's chair. It took me a long time to talk about it. I was only recently able to talk about it."
This month, gays who supported Barack Obama had the bittersweet experience of seeing some of the black and Latino voters who surged to the polls to vote Democratic also vote for Proposition 8, which turned gay "I dos" into "You can'ts." About 20,000 gay couples had exchanged vows before Proposition 8 passed, backed by a coalition that included Mormon and Catholic opponents.
Now that donor information can be found online, gay activists have called for boycotts of anyone who contributed to the law's passing, from businesses small (El Coyote restaurant in L.A., where Sharon Tate had her last meal and Fabio and George Clooney nearly came to blows) to large (ski resorts and Park City, Utah, theaters where Sundance movies are shown).
Feinstein felt sure that gays who have been married in the state since June are still married. "You can't redact it," she said. "You can't blot it out. It's so intrinsic to the Constitution that you cannot remove it by a vote of the people."
Jerry Brown, the California attorney general who is also featured in the archival reels in "Milk" from his days as governor, agreed: "I believe those are valid," he told me, saying that he will argue in the appeal before the state Supreme Court that there cannot be "a retroactive invalidation of these marital contracts."
Brown harked back to the defeat of the Milk-era Proposition 6, which sought to root out gay teachers from California public schools. ("If it were true that children mimic their teachers, we'd have a hell of a lot more nuns running around," Milk says in the movie.)
"Any time you take an issue that has such deep feelings connected to it and you frame it in terms of a political initiative," Brown said, "you drain out some of the anger and convert it to an issue that people can approach in a more reasonable, open-minded way."
Feinstein agreed: "I think as more and more people have gay friends, gay associations, see gay heroism, that their views change."
The gays were outfoxed by their opponents. In both Proposition 6 in 1978 and this year's Proposition 8, the specter of children being converted to a gay orientation was raised. Feinstein said the TV ad of Proposition 8 supporters insinuating that "gay marriage would be taught in school really hurt." ("I can marry a princess," a pigtailed girl told her mom in the ad.)
"I think people are beginning to look at it differently; I know it's happened for me," Feinstein said of gay marriage. "I started out not supporting it. The longer I've lived, the more I've seen the happiness of people, the stability that these commitments bring to a life. Many adopted children who would have ended up in foster care now have good solid homes and are brought up learning the difference between right and wrong. It's a very positive thing."
I e-mailed Larry Kramer, the leading activist for gay rights in the era that followed Milk's, to get his read on Proposition 8. (In 1983, I interviewed Kramer about the new scourge of AIDS, and he read me a list from a green notebook of 37 friends who had died.)
"DON'T WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS?" he e-mailed back, blessedly cantankerous. "I AM ASHAMED OF YOU THAT YOU HAD TO ASK ME THAT QUESTION."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/o ... 9dowd.html
Originally posted by Kaztronic
That year also marked the parade where I got in to a bit of a confrontation with a Skinhead who was protesting the parade near St. Patricks Cathedral. The parade had momentarily stopped, and we were right alongside the protest barricades. This cute young skinhead had a sign that simply said "You are what you eat". I thought it particularly stupid, so I walked on over to the barricade (much to the horror of my friends), pointed to his sign and simply said: "Hey, what does that mean?" He responded, "it means you are what you eat - in other words you're a dickhead." I laughed and said, "Oh, so I guess that makes you a pussy", smiled at him (the look on his face was priceless) and the cop who burst out laughing and went right on back to marching in the parade, hehe
Excellent comeback Kaztronic !!!
Guess that makes me a pussy but that’s okay! That’s what I like and just like you I’m not embarrassed to admit it.
Sexual preference, Color of skin, Beliefs.
Why do they continue to separate us?
Do it in the name of peace, do it in the name of love and my vote and prayers will always be with you!
All hear few listen