Philadelphia cop taped using anti-gay slur

A Philadelphia cop is in hot water for a videotape where he extorts a driver and uses anti-gay language. The video (see below) of Officer Matthew Zagursky is making the Internet rounds.  According to Philly.com, it was taped last week during a traffic stop.

Instead of giving the driver a ticket, Zagursky offered the driver, and passenger, a deal. They could buy two tickets to fundraiser that pays college tuition for the children of officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty. The tickets cost $30 (€26).

‘Either you buy these or I take your car, ’cause it’s unregistered,’ the officer says.

The money is exchanged. The nine-year veteran wonders about the driver’s ‘faggot ass wipers.’ The driver, who at the moment is only going by ‘Rob,” says they are pink because his grandmother is a breast cancer survivor.

The officer is not impressed, insisting the driver looks like a ‘fruitcake.’

Zagursky is on administrative duty pending an Internal Affairs Bureau review.

Commissioner Charles Ramsey blasted the officer’s behavior.

‘No part of that video is good, Ramsey said, according to Philly.com ‘It’s just bad all the way around.

‘He used the tickets as a lever to not do his duty,’ Ramsey continued. ‘That’s extortion. Whether or not it’s criminal is a decision above my pay grade.’

The post Philadelphia cop taped using anti-gay slur appeared first on Gay Star News.

James Withers

www.gaystarnews.com/article/philadelphia-cop-taped-using-anti-gay-slur/

A Grandmother on Wedding Cakes

Aaron and Melissa Klein, the owners of Sweetcakes by Melissa, were ordered by Oregon state officials last month to pay $135,000 in damages after they declined to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple…

[The bakers] decided this week that they wanted to let gays and lesbians know that, despite ideological and theological differences, they love and care about them. The husband and wife duo baked 10 cakes… and mailed them out [with an explanatory letter] to gay rights groups on Wednesday.

— The Blade, 8/20/15

Sixty-one years ago, my mother made my wedding cake — a buttery white fruitcake with creamy icing. She assembled tiered cake pans, candied citron and pineapple, white raisins and blanched almonds, and then baked the layers over several days. Decorated with holly (Christmas wedding), the finished cake leaned like the tower of Pisa. But it was perfect, a labor of love from Mother to us. She even kept the top layer in her freezer for our first anniversary.

Over time, she made the recipe for my sisters’ and brother’s weddings, and for our children’s, until, in her late seventies, she forgot salt in one and decided she shouldn’t make more.

Were she still living, she would have rejoiced in the June Supreme Court ruling legalizing same sex marriages. And no doubt would have dreamed of making a wedding cake for her openly gay grandson, our son, when the right man comes along.

The Blade‘s article about the Kleins’ sending cakes to gay rights groups — not wedding cakes; eight inch rounds with red hearts on top saying “We really do love you!” — and their reasons for it reminded me of how special the cake my mother made us was. And how special all wedding cakes are.

As the mother of a potential gay groom who doesn’t bake, the owners of Sweetcakes by Melissa would no doubt have declined my order for a wedding cake on the grounds that same sex marriage is contrary to their faith. So I fully understand how the lesbian couple reacted when the Kleins declined their request.

At the same time, even though I don’t subscribe to their theology or the resulting actions, given the effort Mother put into our wedding cake, I see how the Kleins didn’t wish to put energy into a cake for an occasion they couldn’t otherwise support. For all of us with strongly held beliefs, living those day-to-day is often a struggle. So I can respect them for striving to live theirs, troubling as their decisions — and others similar — are to me.

We who hold contrary beliefs must also live our own. Which is why the couple sued and the court levied a fine. And why I am writing this.

My son and other LGBT people did not choose to be who they are any more than I chose to be me. In my faith terms, we are each as God intended and all equal in His sight.

Therefore, for me, refusing to bake some wedding cakes from religious conviction is not the real issue. Rather, it manifests deeper questions:

Is America, as we state it to be, truly a country built on the declaration that all people, whatever their race, gender, religion or orientation, are created equal and thus deserve the same dignity and respect?

Or, given our similarly central proclamation of freedom to practice our religious beliefs, are we, through the proliferation of so-called Religious Liberty protection laws, reverting to a society that permits discrimination by some of us against others of us because our particular faith “dictates” we may if the others don’t look like us, love as we love, or share our beliefs?

Like many Americans, the Kleins are too young to have lived, as I have, in an earlier America. An America none of us should forget:

One that, because of laws and customs purportedly based in theology (think: Biblical references to Ham) and the happenstance of being born with white skin, justified the superiority of people like me. Consequently, I could sit at the Woolworth’s counter and be served a chocolate ice cream soda or an egg salad sandwich. But Coloreds (the term in the ’40s) couldn’t. Where I could use the nice rest room and drink from the water fountain, both clearly so labeled. And they couldn’t. Or sit on the main floor of the movie theater while they had to sit in the balcony. Where I, but not others, could walk in public parks in California that had signs declaring: “Dogs and Filipinos (or Chinese) Not Allowed.”

Or an America where a world-renowned black contralto could give a concert in Springfield, Missouri, but not be accommodated in a first class hotel. My mother, who belonged to the NAACP, invited her to stay with us. For several days, she did, much to the ire of our neighbors.

Or an America that fostered anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage — Asiatics and Caucasians on the west coast, Negros and whites in the South. Or laws making sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedrooms illegal.

The civil rights movement, fired by outrage at racial violence and Jim Crow and by belief in God-given human equality and the theoretical promise of that for all Americans, gained momentum as I entered adulthood following World War II. College students sat-in at food counters. Rosa Parks and many others walked rather than riding in the back of the bus. And Americans — black and white, clergy and laity — preached, sang, went to jail, filed lawsuits, wrote outraged letters and took to the streets (with most of the rest of us aghast at TV images of local police forces attacking peaceful demonstrators).

This exercise in democracy galvanized many of us, cost lives and generated a congressional battle over conflicting ideologies and religious beliefs and what it meant to be an American.

As a result, the Civil Rights Act became law in 1964. Beyond outlawing segregation and discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, it specifically cited facilities serving the general public. The Act’s Public Accommodations section mandates open access to public businesses — hotels, restaurants and retail stores. The broader meaning of it and later court decisions invalidating miscegenation and anti-sodomy laws go beyond race to such simple matters as wedding cakes.

Whether they like it or not, businesses like Sweetcakes by Melissa — or florists or caterers whose owners agree with the Kleins that same-sex marriages are contrary to their religion — fit that definition. As I understand it, the law doesn’t deny individuals the right to believe their faith’s teachings. Or limit their freedom to act accordingly in their private lives. But it means, nonetheless, that as proprietors of businesses open to the general public, they may not deny services to particular categories of customers.

Such proprietors do have options. They can commit civil disobedience and discriminate: Refusing to bake a wedding cake for some people but not others is just that. We have a well-established history of civil disobedience in this country. Engaging in such actions, however, also has consequences. Choosing that path means accepting that risk, including facing lawsuits and fines.

They could put their money where their religious convictions are and refuse to make wedding cakes (or cater, photograph or do flowers for weddings). Period. Not for anyone. Or decide to change their line of business. Or, they could be led to bake wedding cakes for all.

Which returns us to the Kleins and their cakes. As quoted by the Blade, Melissa said: “We wanted to have the cake represent freedom…” Noting that she believes gays and lesbians should be free to live as they choose, the article reports her as adding: “But I also feel like I should have the right to live the way I want to, and that should be my choice.”

As a nation, we have struggled since our founding to find the balance between personal freedom and respecting the equality and dignity of others. The Civil Rights Act with its Public Accommodation statute we fought for half a century ago and the legal decisions since guaranteeing other freedoms to marry and have those marriages respected throughout the United States are a critical piece of that balance.

Melissa Klein undoubtedly means what she says kindly, both about her faith and in the letter accompanying the cakes. But perhaps she doesn’t appreciate how I reacted as the mother of a gay rights activist who might have received them.

The love she professes for gays and lesbians strikes me as conditional: They may live as they want, providing they don’t act on what she has, the right to marry, or at least don’t ask her to bake for the occasion. Likewise, the cakes are second best under the circumstances. Delicious I am sure, but not wedding cake.

Conditional love and second best cakes are not good enough for my son. Or anyone else’s LGBT children either. That isn’t equality or respect.

This and other Grandmother blogs will be included in a forthcoming book to be published by Red Mountain Press in 1916

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Silencing the Screaming Queens: Roland Emmerich's 'Stonewall' and the Erasure of Queer Rage
Although I grew up over 2,000 miles from New York City and was born more than 20 years after the Stonewall uprising, this moment in history has profoundly influenced my understanding of what it means to be queer.

I come from small-town Southern Alberta, the type of place where cattle-branding parties are eagerly anticipated social gatherings, and getting stuck behind a slow-moving tractor is a perfectly reasonable excuse to be late for school. Gayness was seen as an exotic urban sensation rather than a universal human reality. So, when I realized I was gay in ninth grade, the queer world seemed an almost mythical place, a far away land. The Stonewall riots, with their pantheon of queer heroes and ensemble of repressive villains, represented the most compelling story of that distant gay world.

Whenever I had time alone, I would flick on the family computer and read about the heroes of those tumultuous six nights in the summer of 1969. I learned about legends: Stormé DeLarverie, the butch lesbian who goaded the angry crowd by fighting off a crowd of baton-wielding policemen; Sylvia Rivera, the Puerto Rican trans woman who threw one of the first bottles to protest the cops’ physical abuse of the arrested drag queens; Marsha P. Johnson, the African-American street queen who led a crowd of queers and misfits into clashes against the police. These and many other tired, angry, and frustrated queers who eschewed respectability in the name of a greater responsibility, spat in the face of mainstream society, and showed me that it’s possible to be queer, proud, and strong.

But when I finally visited the site of the riots for the first time last June, I was underwhelmed.

I had just begun my ethnographic research on queer youth homelessness in New York City, and had managed to persuade one of my research participants, a 25-year-old black trans woman named Jessie*, to take me to the site of the original Stonewall Inn. Together, we sat on one of the bony wooden benches in Christopher Park, silently studying the pale acrylic statues that commemorated the riots of 1969. And I felt empty. The site communicated none of the rage, frustration, and passion I envisioned when I thought of Stonewall. It recognized none of the uprising’s real-life heroes, instead exuding a sense of decorum that masked the riots’ intensity. In fact, if I hadn’t known better, I might have assumed that Stonewall had been nothing more than a quiet, peaceful protest. After several minutes Jessie shuffled her feet awkwardly and looked at me.

“I don’t know why you wanted to see it.”

Now, much as Christopher Park has sanitized the memory of Stonewall with its lily white statues and bland commemoration, Roland Emmerich’s upcoming film Stonewall has replaced the riots’ trans, lesbian, female, black, and Latina heroes with a gay, white, male protagonist from Kansas named Danny. Sections of the queer community have responded with outrage, accusations of trans erasure and racism, and calls for a boycott — and for good reason. After all, this is the functional equivalent of buying tickets to Selma only to find that Martin Luther King, Jr. is played by Robert Downey, Jr. Replacing the real heroes of Stonewall with a cis, white, gay guy doesn’t only erase the contributions trans women of color, butch lesbians, and street queens to the queer liberation fight. It also erases the unequal distribution of risk and privilege in the queer community and contributes to the harmful narrative that, as Emmerich puts it, “we are all the same in our struggle for acceptance.”

In reality, we never were, and still are not, all the same in our struggle for acceptance.

Stonewall is often seen as the night the gay liberation movement began and the moment America’s queer community “came out” of its societal closet. According to gay author Eric Marcus, “Before Stonewall, there was no such thing as coming out or being out. The very idea of being out, it was ludicrous. People talk about being in or out now, there was no out, there was only in.”

However, while this may have been true for white, middle-class gay people, it certainly was not the case for the trans women, drag queens, homeless youths and other misfits who fought for queer rights at Stonewall. After all, unlike middle and upper class gays and lesbians, these radicals didn’t — or couldn’t — hide their orientations, work respectable jobs, and blend into the mainstream in the years prior to Stonewall. As Stonewall veteran Miss Major Griffen-Gracey bluntly put it, “I’m six feet and two inches tall, wearing three inch heels and platinum blonde hair and the lowest-cut blouse and shortest skirt I can find, I’m not assimilating into anything!”

As upper and middle-class gays blended into heterosexual societies as ostensibly reputable teachers, nurses, lawyers, bankers, and countless other professions, it was the misfits — the transgender people, the drag queens, the butch lesbians and the homeless youths — who were living openly, defying societal expectations, and bearing the risks of gay life. They were the ones who faced the police batons, anti-gay vigilantes and societal hate. They were the ones who — after years of repression — finally snapped on that hot summer night and struck back against the anti-queer structures of oppression.

While middle-class white gays and lesbians picketed the White House wearing suits and skirts, trans women of color threw their heels at police officers and taunted the cops by forming kick-lines and singing raunchy songs.

While assimilation-oriented gays pleaded with the queer community for peace in Greenwich Village, enraged queers used parking meters as battering rams to break down the door of the Stonewall Inn and reclaim their safe space from the mob and the police.

And while homophile movements across the United States tried to show mainstream society that queers weren’t dangerous, the screaming queens of Stonewall perhaps illustrated something else: that they would neither accept the status quo nor assimilate meekly into the mainstream, even if that meant accepting danger and risk. They sought to reshape society such that queer people could be accepted on queer peoples’ terms.

Replacing the real heroes of Stonewall with the fictional Kansan, Danny, expunges this history. It delegitimizes the unequal burden of risk within the LGBT community in the years prior to and immediately after Stonewall. And perhaps most dangerously, it minimizes the very real differences in privilege that still afflict the community today.

One night as my research in New York was coming to an end, one of the queer homeless youths I had been working with throughout the summer turned to me with a simple question that has lingered in my conscience for the past year.

“So what are you gonna do now that you’re finished with us? I bet you must have this nice cushy job all lined up, on Wall Street or something, where you can go, drink your coffee every morning, read the newspaper, dress all fancy…”

Although his speculation was said in jest, it had a stinging truth to it. As a middle-class, white, gay guy, I would go on to graduate from an elite college. I could choose to find a conventional middle-class job, blend into conventional middle-class society, and never think about those queer people who don’t have the same opportunities as me. Indeed, if I’d been alive 45 years ago, I could very well have been one of those white, middle-class gays who carefully hid their sexual orientation, worked in the city from nine to five every day, and went home to their houses with a white picket fence in the suburbs every night.

But luckily, I’m not. I can be open about who I am and whom I love. And I have transgender people, butch lesbians, queer youths of color, and angry drag queens who rejected the status quo to and fought to revolutionize society to thank for that — not a cute boy from Kansas named Danny. Not a boy like me.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Anti-gay Bakers and Business Owners Soak Up the Spotlight in Ted Cruz ‘Religious Liberty’ Ad: WATCH

Looks like all the anti-gay culture warriors were busy this weekend either rallying in Kentucky or teaming up with Ted Cruz.

In a new Cruz video titled “Stand for Religious Liberty,” a “who’s who” of anti-gay florists, bakers, business owners, and public officials share horror stories of facing pushback for their discriminatory actions.

“When you have your own government telling you you don’t have religious freedom, now that is very disheartening,” said bakery owner Aaron Klein (pictured right, with wife Melissa) who was fined $135,000 for discriminating against a lesbian couple back in January 2013. Aaron recently gave an interview to the End Times radio program in which he warned churches would soon be forced by the government to fly rainbow flags, so clearly he knows what he’s talking about.

Related, Announcing White House Bid, Ted Cruz Asks You to Imagine a World Where Gays Stay Second Class Citizens

Also featured in the video is Barronelle Stutzman (pictured top), the Washington florist who was fined for refusing to provide flowers for a longtime customer’s wedding to his same-sex partner because of her “relationship with Jesus Christ.”

“I definitely understand freedom in a different way,” said Stutzman in the video. “When it happens to you, and it will happen to you when they take that away, it takes on a whole new meaning.”

The post Anti-gay Bakers and Business Owners Soak Up the Spotlight in Ted Cruz ‘Religious Liberty’ Ad: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.

Kyler Geoffroy

Anti-gay Bakers and Business Owners Soak Up the Spotlight in Ted Cruz ‘Religious Liberty’ Ad: WATCH

Trump: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Dead Issue

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Donald Trump weighed in on marriage equality and Caitlyn Jenner.

read more

Bil Browning

www.advocate.com/donald-trump/2015/08/21/trump-same-sex-marriage-dead-issue

Man discovered with Rosie O’Donnell’s daughter arrested

The man who was found with Rosie O’Donnell’s daughter, Chelsea, was arrested on Friday (21 August). According to CNN, suspect Steven Sheerer faces charges of distribution of obscenity to a minor and endangering the welfare of a child.

The arrest was made after authorities examined Chelsea’s phone. Law enforcement claim, according to a statement released by Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato, there is evidence of ‘inappropriate communications over the last several weeks between Sheerer and the minor.’

Each charge against Sheerer carries a possible penalty of five years in prison.

Early last week, the actress and comic used social media to announce Chelsea, 17, was missing. The teenager had previously last been seen a week earlier in Nyack, New York, with her brown and black terrier named Bear – a therapy dog.

She was found approximately six hours later at Sheerer’s Barnegat, New Jersey, home. Barnegat is approximately 70 miles from New York City.

Chelsea is one of four children O’Donnell is raising with her ex Kelli Carpenter. O’Donnell has a fifth child with Michele Rounds with whom she split from earlier this year.

The post Man discovered with Rosie O’Donnell’s daughter arrested appeared first on Gay Star News.

James Withers

www.gaystarnews.com/article/man-discovered-with-rosie-odonnells-daughter-arrested/

In one picture Streisand and Lady Gaga make the world perfect

Get ready to proudly scream and cry tears of joy. Last night Lady Gaga posted an Instagram picture of her and Barbara Streisand. Mother Monster is behind Babs, with her arms draped around the icon. Both look off in the distance.

The folks over at NewNowNext wonder if the picture is a hint of Streisand making a possible showing on the show American Horror Story: Hotel; Gaga is in the series. To be honest, the musical nerd in me didn’t go there. Could there be a duet album in the singers’ future? Why not? Gaga paired with jazz legend Tony Bennett.

No matter. The photo is enough. At least for now.

Barbra and me. what a completely amazing woman. #Funnygirls

A photo posted by The Countess (@ladygaga) on Aug 22, 2015 at 11:44pm PDT

The post In one picture Streisand and Lady Gaga make the world perfect appeared first on Gay Star News.

James Withers

www.gaystarnews.com/article/in-one-picture-streisand-and-lady-gaga-make-the-world-perfect/

The Foo Fighters Performed an Epic Drive-By Rick-Roll of the Westboro Baptist Church: WATCH

The Foo Fighters performed a concert on Friday night at Kansas City’s Sprint Center and the Westboro Baptist Church brought their clan to protest.

What the WBC didn’t count on was a counter protest by Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters themselves, who drove up in a truck blasting Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

It’s not the first time the group has performed such a demonstration against the WBC. In Kansas City in 2011 they performed a song in front of the church members, saying:

“God bless America! It takes all kinds. I don’t care if you’re black or white or purple or green, whether you’re Pennsylvanian or Transylvanian, Lady Gaga or Lady Antebellum, men loving women and women loving men and men loving men and women loving women — you all know we like to watch that. But what I’d like to say is, God bless America, y’all!”

Watch the antics, below:

Grohl and the Foo Fighters of course, come with a head-scratching chapter in their history, which many fans won’t forget.

In 2000, the group threw a benefit concert for AIDS denials group  Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives with a speech by founder Christine Maggiore and gave away free copies of her book, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? The group denies there is a link between HIV and AIDS. The Foo Fighters also had a link to the group on its website, which has since been removed.

Grohl has since attended benefits for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. He and band member Chris Shiflett have also shown support for marriage equality.

The post The Foo Fighters Performed an Epic Drive-By Rick-Roll of the Westboro Baptist Church: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.

Andy Towle

The Foo Fighters Performed an Epic Drive-By Rick-Roll of the Westboro Baptist Church: WATCH