In defense of hate speech, or what do you have against lima beans Les?

A recent poll suggests we as a country believe hate is on the rise. Rasmussen Reports’ study suggests the recent shooting at the Holocaust Museum and the assassination of a late term abortion doctor are likely contributors to the general feeling tensions are on the rise.

Public policy seems contradictory to that for the LGBTQ community. Barney Frank has introduced a version of ENDA that includes the Trans community. Seven states have legalized gay marriage. The Obama administration has made a nod towards benefits towards same-sex partners. It would seem that we’re gaining acceptance more and more.

But there always seems some backlash. The two incidents noted above aside, we had our own look at bald-faced bigotry when the Neo-Nazi’s showed up to protest Pride. There protest merely succeeded in making the event a success for the GLO organizers. But the hate-mongers' message was not missed.

Hate is still alive and well.

Attempts to quell the hate abound. Local lawmaker Sara Lampe has worked, so far unsuccessfully, to pass anti-bullying legislation. There are also many who wish to pass laws banning hate speech. The argument is we stop the hate speech before it escalates into violence.

I’m afraid it isn’t that simple. Stopping hate-fueled speech won’t stop the hate. The root cause here is the hate not the speech. That hate is going to exist whether the haters are silent or the loudest bigots on the block.

Let’s pretend for a minute I hate lima beans. Ok, no pretending, I REALLY hate lima beans. And I bitch all the time about what a scourge on the vegetable world lima beans are and how I’d like to burn every field that produces lima beans. Governor Nixon hears my rants and decides I’m a danger to Missouri’s farmers and passes a law that I’m not allowed to even say the word lima bean. That may shut me up, but it certainly won’t make me quit hating lima beans, or avoiding lima beans or even smashing them when I think no one is looking. In fact, it’s liable to make that behavior worse.

Yes those signs and words the Neo-Nazi’s brought to our Pride hurt and were hard to hear. But I’m glad they showed up. I’m glad they showed their faces. I’m glad I was able to look them in the eye. Because like it or not, now they can’t hate in a vacuum where we’re just a bunch of faceless fags.

Further, knowing they are around helps all of us to be vigilant. More importantly, law enforcement knows they are around. There were several of those young men whose FBI portfolio was created or got fatter that day. And at the very least, the speech gives them a vent for the vitriol they feel. While that vent isn’t enough for some, it’s enough for most.

This country has a long-standing tradition of allowing, accepting and even encouraging dissent, even when that dissent is difficult to hear. Dissent is the sincerest form of patriotism because without a flow of ideas, good and bad, this country may as well cease to exist. In a nation that is for the people, of the people and by the people there are going to be a wildly diverse collection of ideas and opinions. And those are surely going to clash from time to time.

More on the whole Amazon debacle

Most people aren't buying Amazon's "Glitch" excuse. The whole mess created a firestorm on Twitter. It started as #amazonfail and graduated to #glitchmyass. The resulting furor has caused a public relations nightmare for the gigantic etailer.

With all the shouting, it's been hard to make sense of it all. Jane does a pretty good job of pulling it all together.

Point 1: This is not a one-off mistake. According to a post at Teleread.org, books with sexy content have been targeted by Amazon before. Craig Seymour, author of “All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.,” was deranked in February. When questioned about this, Amazon claimed that it was adult content being intentionally filtered out. On April 10, 2009, Mark Probst, noticed that Gay romance authors Erastes and Alex Beecroft’s books from Running Press were deranked. On April 11, 2009, hundreds of GLBT books, including Probst’s own book, The Filly, were deranked. Amazon gave Probst the same response that certain content was deemed adult and thus filtered out of searches and lists. On April 12, 2009, all hell broke loose when the Twitterverse picked up on the deranking of gay, lesbian, erotic and feminist books. But to be clear, this started as far back as 2008. It’s just now come to a head.

There are numerous other points in the article and it really is quite thought provoking. Head there before posting your next Tweet. ;-)

Bullied to death

An 11 year old boy from Springfield, MA committed suicide last week after countless taunts that he was gay. In fact, Carl Walker-Hoover didn't identify as gay but his mother found him hanging by an extension cord after she'd repeatedly appealed to her son's school to do something about the abuse.

From the ABC NEWS article:

Carl's suicide comes about a year after California eighth-grader Lawrence King was shot and killed by a fellow student in his classroom for supposedly being gay.

In response, GLSEN has launched a multipronged education campaign to fight the use of anti-gay language and bullying.

Its annual Day of Silence, started at the University of Virginia in 1996 with 150 students, has now grown to more than 7,500 middle and high schools nationwide. Participants draw attention to LGBT issues by not speaking for a day.

Since October, GLSEN (Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) has aired thousands of public service messages, "Think Before You Speak," to reduce the use of the slur, "That's so gay."

"When you are in elementary school, one of the first things you learn is the feeling of hurt when you are called 'gay' or 'fag,'" said Presgraves. "It doesn't matter if you are gay or straight. The term 'gay' has become synonymous with "uncool."

"The expression 'That's so gay' is one of the most heard in school, and students recognize it as derogatory," he said.

Carl would have turned 12 on this year's Day of Silence, April 17.

While Carl didn't identify as gay, studies indicate suicide rates among LGBT teens are higher than their heterosexual peers. Suicide rates among kids Carl's age are lower, but are reportedly on the rise.

Locally, Springfield Representative Sara Lampe has been actively working towards anti-bullying legislation.

Amazon saga continues: Hacked?

The plot gets even messier. A hacker is now claiming he exploited Amazon's own software to create the Big Gay Debacle. From Gizmodo:

Okay, maybe Amazon is off the hook. The well-known troll Weev is claiming that he's actually responsible for Amazon's sudden surge of LGBT prudishness. Which Valleywag says actually makes sense.

It's startingly simple: It doesn't take very many votes at all to get a product flagged as "inappropriate" and booted off the rankings. He says he created a script that generated a list of product IDs for every gay and lesbian book on Amazon. From there, he just needed a whole bunch of people to flag the books as inappropriate, which wasn't hard, because simply getting someone to go the URL of a successful flag would count as another one. Using an invisible iframe on popular websites owned by friends and a group of "third-worlders" he hired to register accounts, he generated enough votes to de-list gay and lesbian books en masse.

Lending credence to his claims, Valleywag notes that the "flag as inappropriate" feature is currently disabled. Free reign for inappropriate books! [Livejournal via Valleywag]

Off the hook? I'd say NOT. While being anti-gay is bad, having a major e-tailer site be THAT vulnerable to attack is even scarier. The bigger story here may not be that Amazon.com is anti-gay but that they denied being the victim of a nasty online attack.

Amazon says glitch not discrimation

While many of us are still scratching our heads over Amazon.com's decision/snafu/glitch that removed sales rankings from LGBT titles, the mystery seems to almost deepen.

From Publisher's Weekly:

A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove "adult" titles from its sales rankings. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a "glitch" had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new policy regarding "adult" titles. As of Monday morning, a number of titles affected by the glitch were still without sales rankings. No one at Amazon was available this morning to discuss when the problem might be fixed or what caused the glitch.

For most of the weekend on Twitter, in conversations with the hash tag "#amazonfail," users were discussing the fact that the e-tailer was removing the sales rankings for books that it deemed featured "adult" content. Many readers, and writers, decried the fact that Amazon appears to be removing the sales ranking for titles that feature gay and lesbian characters and/or themes.

The director of the Erotic Authors Association, who goes by the pen name Erastes, told PW that many of her members "noticed their titles had been stripped of their sales rankings" on Amazon. One, Mark Probst, contacted a customer service representative at Amazon and wrote about the exchange on his blog. Probst wrote that the Amazon rep responded to his inquiry by saying that "'adult' material" is being excluded from appearing in "some searches and best seller lists" as a "consideration of our entire customer base."

Whatever the cause, titles like James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain are among the those that have lost their sales ranking. Bloggers aren't buying the glitch explanation and some are calling an Amazon boycott, but the fact that such a wide range of titles have lost their rankings suggest that whatever Amazon may have been trying to do went haywire

.

So first they told an LGBT author, the reason the titles were disappearing was they wanted to hide "adult" content from younger customers. When the furor broke out they changed their story to say a "glitch" caused the problem.

Searches conducted by yours truly are now turning up LGBT titles but the rankings situation has yet to be resolved. I've yet to decide how to feel about this, large companies often have problems where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, but I'd be lying if I said I don't buy the sudden switch in story.

Amazon.com relegates gay titles to porn status

Nope, not a joke. Tell everyone you know and for heaven's sake don't use Amazon until they change their stupid policy:

See this gizmodo article.

Amazon in it's infinite wisdom has decided that LGBT books are now "adult" content. What this means is not only do LGBT books not show up in the best seller lists, but a search for homosexuality in their search function only turns up anti-gay titles.

Folks this is definitely NOT ok. Danielle Steele titles, which are often VERY steamy, are still in the regular searches but a book on lesbian parenting is now considered porn by the geniuses at Amazon.

Fighting Prop 8

Arguments went before the California Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8 Thursday. California’s gay marriage ban is being closely watched by Gay Rights Advocates and opponents alike. Interviewed on NPR Thursday morning, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom remarked that Prop 8 is dangerous because it took away rights from the 18,000 gay and lesbian couples married while gay marriage was legal in the state.

Newsom asserts that is a dangerous precedent to set, "If in this country a simple majority of people can start stripping away the rights of a protected class in the minority, that's a pretty alarming thing," Newsom said.

The backlash to Prop 8 was swift. Gay Rights Advocates protested loudly, and when the listed of donors to supporters of Prop 8 was published, the protesting and boycotting got specific.

Donors interviewed were shocked when their businesses that had thriving gay client bases suddenly dried up and picketers showed up. Once person even said he was surprised because they previously had good relations with gay customers.

To which I can only reply, “Really.”

Major donors to campaigns are always reported. This is not new. And if you expected to support something that controversial and not show up in the news you’re just about too dumb to breathe.

There are a lot of gay folk in California. They also have good deal of disposable income. Sadly they didn’t spend it working to defeat Prop 8, but at least they’re voting with their dollars now and probably in a way that is far more detrimental to gay rights opponents.

Everybody run, the homecoming queen is in DRAG!

I’m proud to announce that my alma mater did something so uncharacteristically liberal I nearly fainted. Well, let me back up, liberal for the time I was there. I suppose now it’s no big deal.

To wit, George Mason University elected a man as their homecoming queen. Junior Ryan Allen, a self-professed drag queen, was elected homecoming queen by Mason students earlier this month. And as you can see from the photo he makes a fetching young lass.



When I attended Mason, it was a staunchly conservative school. In fact, I wrote an article for the student paper there when the Gay and Lesbian student union was vandalized. Amazingly, even in an area as large as Metropolitan Washington, DC it was still hard to be gay in the early 90s.

I was very much in the closet then. I didn’t understand half the things I was thinking and feeling. Seems perhaps my college was having a similar identity crisis?

Now, if the Yahoo article is to be believed, gold ol’ GMU has gotten right progressive in it’s values. The Republican student quoted didn’t even seem too phased. Better still the school’s publicity wonk characterized the institution as being “very comfortable” with the election of Allen.

Mason, you’ve come a long way baby.