Another Update - The Romans... 9 - Utility Poles and Masts

Update to the post dated 21-Feb-2012:


The Romans NEVER CRUCIFIED the Way We Think They Did! 9 - Utility Poles and Masts has been updated to reflect the use of tar or pitch in crucifixions as prescribed in the Lex Puteoli. and the implication of the crucifixions outside Jerusalem as depicted in the Roman Coliseum.

A Lawless State Tortures Its Own.

Bradley Manning, whether he leaked the video and the documents or not, was only doing his job!

From Paul Craig Roberts:

Bradley Manning, who allegedly provided the media with the video made by US troops of their wanton, fun-filled slaughter of newsmen and civilians, has been abused in solitary confinement for six months. Murdering civilians is a war crime, and as General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the National Press Club on February 17, 2006, “It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral” and to make such orders known. If Manning is the source of the leak, he has been wrongfully imprisoned for meeting his military responsibility. The media have yet to make the point that the person who reported the crime, not the persons who committed it, is the one who has been imprisoned, and without a trial.

Read the whole article here.

Actually the solitary confinement has been going on for seven months and counting. It is an intensive 23-hour-a-day solitary, made all the more inhumane by a now unneccesary for six-and-a-half months Prevention of Injury watch, ostensibly for the soldier's own protection! This is no less than torture, even when done with the best of intentions, and reeks of pure fascism.

More Proof It's Almost ALWAYS Heterosexual Men Who Sexually Corrupt or Endanger Children and Teens.

Awhile back I noted here of the case of this one gay man who pimped his five-year-old adopted son out to creepy pedophiles. Although this sort of thing absolutely should never, ever happen anywhere, I recalled a case back in the 80s where a South Boston, Mass. mother pimped her own adolescent son out to creepy pedophiles as well. And did an internet search for it. And I found this instead. A lot of heterosexual trafficking going on, and no homosexual trafficking present.

What It's Like for a Gay Youth to Live in an Antigay Household.

I will let Joshua Scarpuzzi tell the story. It's here, beginning at Comment No. 38. He was commenting on the fifth installment of the Courage campaign's liveblog the second day of the Proposition 8 Federal trial in Federal Court in San Francisco, California.

I currently live at home with my family…and the closest description of my mother is Anita. I feel like I'm living in “prayers for Bobby” everyday. It hurts to hear these things, these statements that live off of the fear and ignorance of religious people all over our country. I am good with God, I made my peace years ago and I know where I'm going after this life, and being only 19 and out and in the spotlight of the gay community here in San Diego is rough at times but it makes my stomach churn when I see the young gays who take their rights and freedoms for granted, who haven't been through the hate and shame and isolation many of the older, wiser gays have. And I'm not saying they should go through it. No one should, but I honestly feel that losing Prop 8, and now having this battle in the public eye and discussing all of the shit we've gone through will open the eyes of other kids, families, and the public to see the truth. We have a long way to go and I wish the best for everyone in that court room. Thank you so much for blogging this to us on the outside, it is truly a blessing.

Actualy Joshua experienced a year-long concentrated dose of the hate and shame and isolation many of the older, wiser gays have gone through when his biological family sent him away and had him committed to an abusive, homophobic ex-gay cult.

In October of 2007 I was transported against my will to a behavioral modification camp in western Montana. My parents had me locked in this facility for exactly 365 days of which I spent doing labor, line drills, shock therapy, isolation therapy, among other things. I was starved at times, spit on, molested, called a faggot, and beat up by staff and other kids. These religious hypocritical leaders, and I hate to compare the two (because I would never want to minimize what the Jews went through), are the modern day Nazis of America. They want to govern everyone with their narrow minded bigotry and we have to fight! We have to come out of the closet and say enough is enough!!!!! I survived 365 days of abuse and humiliation because I knew one day I could share my story with the world. I've still not told anyone on this big of a scale but I hope that one person may read this and that one person more will take a stand. I've been out in the real world for a year and 3 months and I still, day to day, get the abuse from my family. We have to keep fighting! For my friends who are still in these camps, for our own future, and for the future of our children. :(

If only Joshua were in the Courtroom telling his story!

There are so many of these “camps”, and so many these that goes on behind the closed doors of Prop 8 supporters, churches, and religious organizations that we never hear about. I've tried a few times to contact gay newspapers, news stations, and magazines as well as police officials to try and bring light to these “camps” but no one has wanted to publish my story. People need to know about the cruelty and hypocrisy that goes on behind the God-following mask they wear!

Yes, the news must be promulgated far and wide that these ex-gay cults are a menace! They've even brought the bogus idea of "reparative therapy" to the shores of the United Kingdom (Great Britain) and much to the UK mainstream media's credit, these dangerous cults are being denounced and discredited over there!

Ugandan Kill The gays Bills is Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine.

Anybody who knows of a sexually active OR romantically involved GLBT Ugandan would get caught up in this bill if it becomes law and if they commit more than one offense related to homosexuality, then they meet the Death Penalty once convicted! This means that for Ugandan gays, lying and hiding in the closet is no option. Their friends, relatives, employers, coworkers and ministers would have to give them up to the state. And the bill if enacted would have extraterritorial reach.

Link here: http://wakingupnow.com/blog/uganda-kill-everyone-video/comment-page-1#comment-1890

And even the antigay pastor Martin Ssemba could get caught up in this and get killed by the State if this bill were eneacted and he continues to show extreme gay porn in Ugandan churches. He's had two such presentations already and I doubt he'll stop! He appears to be a closet case to me. Still, we cannot allow this bill to become law! Kill the bill!

Utterly Disgusting and Insane Hate Video.

I found this at Joe.My.God. The original is at WorldNutDaily.

WARNING -- COARSE LANGUAGE ALERT.

Pardon my Fench but I am majorly pissed off and very angry.

Just fucking revolting. And twisting MLK's inspirational fight for freedom into killing human beings is beyond abhorrent.

The recent open talk about rounding us up should be seen as a RED ALERT.

The ramp-up of this type of vicious, violent rhetoric is truly disturbing -- it demands that we be more active, confrontational and vocal oursleves. Queer Rising and other groups who've started civil disobedience got it right; this has to be in your face, every day and a demand for no less than full equality -- and these morons publicized and confronted.

I'm sick of gay people who are too chickenshit to push back. You can't make a moral equivalence between hatred of the oppressor and hatred of the oppressed. We have no obligation to treat people like Molotov Mitchell with a shred of respect or even common politeness.

These people are classic bullies, and the only way their evil will be reigned in is if they have something to lose by bullying us.

Don't Ask Don't Tell is Exhausting for GLBT Servicepeople.

Comment 143 from Prop 8 Trial Tracker, today's Prop. 8 and DADT thread:

A poster named Ozymandias said:

I think there’s a big misunderstanding concerning DADT with a lot of people who support it (but are at least reasonable about it). I have heard people say ‘Why overturn it? What happens in the bedroom shouldn’t be anyone’s business!’ Naturally I agree, but DADT is not about preventing us from hurling our ‘lifestyle’ about.

I asked someone once, ‘How many times a day do you mention your wife in casual conversation?’ He said that he didn’t know because he didn’t think about it. Exactly – he didn’t have to think about it because his relationship with his wife was universally accepted. Now, I asked him, imagine being in a place where he COULDN’T mention his marriage because his marriage could get him fired. How many conversations would he suddenly have to edit? What about conversations via e-mail with his wife, if the e-mail server was owned by the company with this policy? Going further, even if he used a 3rd-party e-mail platform, how would he feel if his monitor was facing the door to his office? What if the company had internet-monitoring software? Was there the possibility that the company could somehow ’see’ his e-mails? What about Instant Messaging?

Even more than that, what if you ran into a co-worker away from work with your wife by your side? How would you handle company functions, or even places where you know your co-workers go after work? What if someone ‘found out’ about your marriage and said he was supportive – how would you feel if you received instructions to reprimand that co-worker for something? Or have to give them a project that they might feel is unfair? Would the knowledge that he knew affect your dealings with him?

He looked at me with open horror and said, ‘My God, the amount of paranoia that kind of policy would create… in every part of my dealings with my co-workers – that would exhaust me completely! Gays and Lesbians in the Armed Forces have to deal with that?’

Every day, was my response.

And it is exhausting. Having to look over your shoulder every day -- which is absolutely necessary in a hostile environment in which you are being hunted by other human beings. This is exactly the environamt that Former Senator Sam Nunn and Former President Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" promulgates. Superiors in the military, if they suspect any servicemember is gay / lesbian / etc., can ask other people including civilians how that servicemember exercised his / her liberties whilst off duty. Oftentimes the result is a dishonourable discharge which means the dischargee usually can't get a decent job. Servicemembers can't seek address for sexual or homophobic harassment because then they will be under increased suspicion! Oftentimes they have to defend themselves with no support whatsoever. Sometimes they're brutally murdered like Barry Wenchell, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat simply because he fell in love with a MTF transgender who had begun to present herself as a woman... yet he was otherwise straight.

It is past time to let our fellow GLBT servicepeople to serve their copuntry openly!

Proposition 8 - Stolen and Turned to H8

Turns out that there was a huge discrepancy between the exit polls for Proposition 8 and the vote counting results. A swing of 4% from one direction to the other. And a group in Los Angeles did their own exit polling with safeguards inaugurated to minimize lying to the exit pollsters: i.e., filling out printed informal ballots anonymously and inserting them into a locked box. They found even wider swings!

Links: Bradblog.com , WasProp8Straight.org

Not only were we LGBT America citizens queerbashed, so were the majority of California's voters, their state's constitution and the US Constitution!

And it looks like SCOTUS may pull a Conservative Judicial Activist stunt, like they did with Bowers v. Hardwick. :(

"This is un-American. My state is supposed to protect me, not discriminate against me."

So said Paul Katami yesterday in the historic legal challenge to California's Proposition 8.

That ballot question, place on the ballot by initiative petition, was motivated solely by religious fundamentalism and was approved by voters based on appeals to their fears and their blind prejudices.

And it's nothing but bloody discrimination in favor of heterosexuals, even the worst kinds thereof.

As Ted Olson has said,

At the end of the day, whatever the motives of its Proponents, Proposition
8 enacted an utterly irrational regime to govern entitlement to the fundamental
right to marry, consisting now of at least four separate and distinct classes of
citizens: (1) heterosexuals, including convicted criminals, substance abusers
and sex offenders, who are permitted to marry; (2) 18,000 same-sex couples
married between June and November of 2008, who are allowed to remain married but
may not remarry if they divorce or are widowed; (3) thousands of same-sex
couples who were married in certain other states prior to November of 2008,
whose marriages are now valid and recognised in California; and, finally (4) all
other same-sex couples in California who, like the plaintiffs, are prohibited
from marrying by Proposition 8.

There is no rational justification for this unique pattern of
discrimination. Proposition 8, and the irrational pattern of California's
regulation of marriage which it promulgates, advances no legitimate state
interest. All it does is label gay and lesbian persons as inferior,
unequal, and disfavored. And it brands their relationships as not the
same, and less-approved than those enjoyed by opposite-sex couples. It
stigmatizes gays and lesbians, classifies them as outcasts,and causes needless
pain, isolation and humiliation.

In a nutshell, the proposition humiliated and shamed us in order to advance a blind prejudice that I call heterosexual supremacy. And goes against the state's interest in encouraging people, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, intersex and straight alike, to commit to stable, lifelong, monogamous civil and sacred unions based on love. And inadvertently reduces the importance heterosexuals' relationships to simply breeding children.

It is a crime against humanity that must be ruled Unconstitutional.

Bush and the Rapture.

I found an illustration of the last seconds on Earth prior to the Rapture, at the site Democratic Underground. It depicts Bush with a whole bunch o' Christians on a hillside awaiting the rapture that is just about to happen. Below, World War III rages. Of course, it's just LIKE Bush to disappear whenever disasters and catastrophes happen. Remamber 9/11? Remember Katrina? Remember when the economic meltdown first reached critical mass last September and Paulson -- not Bush -- sent a page-and-a-half piece of proposed legislation to Congress?


Well, here is the Rapture!

Next to Neda's Murder, Most Appalling.

A 17-year old boy from the fine city of Tehran, who had less than a month to take entrance exam into university, had his fingers broken and the webs between his fingers slit by fascist thugs representing themselves as "security forces," most of whom didn't even speak Farsi.

And he hadn't even formed an opinion on the recent stolen election over there.

Link

Arrest Them.

URL Source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/190362

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball (Newsweek)

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against "high value" Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, said the memos were "ugly" and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a "truth commission" on torture.

I don't want just truth commissions, I want all who were involved in these " 'enhanced' interrogation techniques" to be arrested. And charged with Crimes Against Humanity.