Poster on 57th and 9th Avenue:

The 7th NYC Wedding March, September 26 @12pm in Foley Square.  www.meny.us/march

I dislike that opponents of the Cordoba House have won in branding it the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ – more evidence that it’s mostly non-New Yorkers, who generally prefer calling it the ‘World Trade Center’.

I ventured out to take some Creative Commons shots of the protesters and supporters of Cordoba House, but there were only a handful of supporters when I arrived at noon.   If people are not against Cordoba House and think it’s fine, they aren’t particularly enthusiastic with support.  That would explain the lackluster support turnout.  I would say there were about 500-1000 people who showed up for the actual protest.

These images may be re-used and cropped – they are licensed Creative Commons 3.0.  Click on the photo to enlarge it.

This was the small crowd of supporters of Cordoba House.

Below are shots of the protesters:

Click here to see more images of the protest at Flickr.

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Abe Foxman, who is supposed to be one of the main public voices of tolerance, is a complete disgrace to the Anti-Defamation League.  It’s bad enough that he joined in the blinding bigotry of those who oppose the Cordoba House (the “Ground Zero mosque” – New Yorkers generally dislike calling the World Trade Center ‘Ground Zero’).  But he also completely mischaracterized history in doing so.

The other day on NPR Foxman talked about his opposition to the Cordoba House, claiming it was an analogous situation to Carmelite nuns who wanted a convent right on Auschwitz.  This is what he said:

NPR: What about this specific building or its specific location or its specific design makes it seem a little too in your face?

FOXMAN: Well, it I don’t know about the design. I don’t know about the for me it’s similar to a position that the Jewish community took, oh, about 15, 20 years ago when there was an effort by the Carmelite nuns to build a convent in or around Auschwitz. And we then said we welcome your love, we welcome your prayers, but please don’t do it on this site. This was a controversy for eight years.

We in the Jewish community, we in the ADL got accused of being bigots, that we are opposed to Christianity or the Catholic Church. And eventually the pope understood and said, OK, build it a mile away. [NPR]

This is not what happened at Auschwitz with the Carmelite nuns.  This is what happened:

In 1984, a group of Carmelite nuns opened a convent just outside of the gates of Auschwitz — in a building that was part of the original death camp and which housed the gas often utilized by the Nazis and their sympathizers to carry out the extermination of the mainly Jewish prisoners. The nuns said they intended to pray for the souls of all who had died and make atonement; Jews erupted in protest over the convent, which was — again — in a building that was part of Auschwitz. Three years later, the groups reached an agreement that the nuns would move, but they never did. It was actually 9 years after the convent opened, and only after Pope John Paul II — a Pole — ordered the nuns to relocate, that the convent-at-Auschwitz closed its doors. [....]

A little history lesson might also be in order. Around 960,000 Jews died at Auschwitz alongside 125,000 people of various nationalities, most of whom were not Catholic. Jews were a minority population in a majority Catholic country and faced extermination at the hands of the state (and, in many cases, their Catholic neighbors) because of their religion and race.

As a result of the attacks on September 11th in New York, 2,749 people died (excluding the hijackers). Those people came from 77 countries, though the majority were American, and approximately 60 of the victims were Muslim.  [TPM]

At Salon’s War Room, Michael Barthel explores Foxman’s unpalatable (for a civil rights leader) words and behavior:

Running parallel to this history of laudable public service, however, is a darker story centering largely on Foxman. The ADL’s private domestic spying operation had been going on since its inception, but after Foxman took over it engaged in operations like spying on anti-apartheid activists and other non-extremist groups. Foxman and the ADL became worried as much about direct domestic persecution of Jews as they were about opposition to Israel, and began to equate anti-Zionism with anti-semitism. Certainly, anti-Zionism can bleed into anti-semitism, but Foxman has taken this to a cartoonish degree, demanding apologies from Americans for expressing views on Palestine that would be well within the mainstream in the context of Israeli domestic politics. [....]

Foxman’s conservatism is clear in his selective outrage. He refused to condemn anti-semitic statements by Sun Myung Moon’s Bush administration-allied Unification church, declined to protest Fox News’ frequent use of Nazi imagery for the purposes of political vilification — and, of course, in contrast to his opposition to an anti-Mormon film, he’s happily gotten on board with the anti-Islamic sentiment that even he acknowledges is key to opponents of the Park51 project near ground zero.  [Salon]

Don’t expect me to listen to anything the Anti-Defamation League has to say as long as Foxman is at the helm.  I agree with Richard Silverstein: Abe Foxman is a Jewish dinosaur.  A disgraceful Jewish dinosaur.

I photographed for Wikipedia the awesomely huge anti-Proposition 8 demonstration organized by Andy Towle and Michelangelo Signorile back in 2008.  One of my favorite photographs from the protest was this one.

Is gay the new black?  I was approached by Looking Glass Magazine to write an article about that and the  relationship between the ‘black community’ and the ‘gay community’.

I had a lot of complicated thoughts about the topic, and I tried to lay them out simply.  It’s a difficult onion to peel. Below is the press release for the ‘Gonzo Anthropology’ magazine’s summer Black Issue:

_______________________________________

New York (PRWEB) July 9, 2010 — Looking Glass Magazine, since 2007, the quarterly “Gonzo Anthropology” journal launches its Black Issue this summer along with new online features. The new issue provocatively features Blacks vs. Gays: What’s the Real Problem? on the cover. The article, by David Shankbone, takes an objective look into new research and asks what lies at the foundation of America’s “culture-wars.” Also included is an “anthropology of fashion” report detailing the history of the black dandy, an original comic book art and fiction from N. Steven Harris, and a featured exclusive interview with poet Amiri Baraka. (Veteran sound engineer Arya Sundar produced the video, which appears on the website.)

“It’s not an attempt at controversy, we are just doing what we always do,” said editor in chief Michael Merriam. “We are getting to the bottom of something in our culture.”

Merriam is no stranger to controversy. Last year, he crossed swords with HBO’s publicity department over an interview in which Bored to Death writer Jonathan Ames was tied to a chair and interrogated by dominatrix JoYin Shih as a feature for the magazine. HBO refused to allow Looking Glass to print photographs of the event.

Merriam denies that there was any real conflict. “They didn’t want us to use photos, so we didn’t, but we didn’t compromise the text at all. Ames had a great time, Yin had a great time, we ran a terrific interview. That’s all.”

Merriam created Looking Glass in 2007 as a pet-project as he worked on various magazines (he’s a former editor in chief of Time Out Istanbul). Looking Glass spiraled into its print and digital form in 2008 following a New Yorker Talk of the Town profile of Merriam’s work in digital publishing and the launch of a fashion magazine for the iPhone.

Looking Glass Magazine was initially conceived to contain twelve sections. “We wanted to laser in – find ultra-niche counter-cultural content,” says Merriam. Though the traditional model of print magazine publishing is rapidly changing, Merriam contends there are no plans to abandon the print edition. “On the contrary, we are always expanding it. Jay Kristopher Huddy creates an extraordinary visual experience out of it, and the magazine just keeps getting more intense every quarter,” he said. “We are completely devoted to print, and we believe it’s the best way to serve our readers.”

Online, at www.lookingglassmagazine.com, two new sections appear this month: a sports section and a science fiction section. The Playing Field is edited by ESPN’s Eno Sarris, who also writes for FanGraphis, Bloomberg Sports and RotoWorld. “The tagline for this blog is ‘the anthropology of sports,’ and it’s a good way to sum this thing up,” said Sarris about the new blog’s in-depth, brainy, and sophisticated perspective on athletic culture.

The science fiction section, a blog called The Observatory, features new fiction by Blair Kroeber and by award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, as well as an exclusive interview with Samuel R. Delany. The magazine also will encourage writers to submit stories and pay them SFWA minimum or higher for original fiction.

Publisher Paul Nowak, who is also a video game designer, has his own take on Looking Glass and its journalistic mission. “We think of our readers as users and culture hackers.

Issues of LGM are like cultural strategy guides. It makes sense. Video games use context to heighten the sense of importance around certain objects–that’s what we do for our advertisers.”

The print edition can be purchased throughout the United States at the $4.99 price point, and will be available at San Diego Comic Con. Archives can be viewed at www.lookingglassmagazine.com

Can anyone else tell me why Elton John, one of the biggest and richest gays that is out there, would accept at any price to perform for the country’s biggest homophobes and demagogues at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding?  The absurdity all around is incredible.  From Ken Layne at Wonkette

Beloved American comedian Rush Limbaugh met a lady while he was divorcing his third wife a few years back, and now that new lady is Limbaugh’s fourth wife. Exciting! But how do you make such a special once-every-couple-of-years event even more exciting? If you’re Rush Limbaugh, you pay One Million Dollars to a very famous singer and piano player who is also very famously homosexual and British and a gay-marriage supporter and AIDS activist — and that’s how, we guess, Sir Elton John wound up performing at Limbaugh’s latest wedding. But the sexiest men at the Miami occasion were the guests. Karl Rove, Fred Thompson, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, Clarence Thomas … it wouldn’t have been any more fantastic if God Himself decided to rain burning poison shit from the sky, forever.

And some of the comments:

• It’s one thing to be gay. It’s another thing to be a gay whore. What the Hell was Elton John doing serenading the most obnoxious bigoted swine in America?!!  Dolmance   says at 8:27 am, June 7th, 2010

• All whores, not just Elton: how could anyone kiss that guy’s ass unless they were getting paid? charlesdegoal says at 8:38 am, June 7th, 2010

• Jesus. That guest list. Too bad the oil slick couldn’t have washed up on shore and mired them all in icky, flammable goo.  Elton John is a whoooorah.  freakishlystrong says at 8:43 am, June 7th, 2010

Elton John: whore.  Enjoy the million!  Not only are you known as an asshole, you’re also now known as a whore.  Goodbye yellow brick road, indeed.

The audience he played for: hypocritical demagogues.

Rush’s audience on the radio: idiots who don’t see that many of these people just feed your prejudice, without really believing what you believe.  See, they are demagogues who are sane, ranting to insane people who give them money for those rants, who then turn around and give that money to gays.

Remember Republican Governor Bobby Jindal mocking volcano monitoring in response to President Obama’s first State of the Union address?  At the time, it seemed like such a nancy-pants, Libtard idea that we should monitor natural threats to ourselves.  It’s a Libtard idea that the government should do anything but build prisons to house black people for smoking pot.  That’s more-or-less what Jindal said:

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a “magnetic levitation” line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called “volcano monitoring.” Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C

Here’s him saying it:

And the prize for calling all this what it really is goes to…Ken Layne at Wonkette:

It’s unfair to blame only Bobby Jindal, the boy exorcist of the bayou, for this asinine response to Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address. Why? Because the entire national GOP leadership shares the blame for this dumb bullshit. [....]

Wow, $300 million to buy American-made cars for the American government’s fleet of cars? And $8 billion for high speed rail projects in America, when China has spent $170 billion on fast trains in the past decade and will have invested $300 billion by 2020? (”Disneyland” is apparently what Jindal thinks is the real name for “Los Angeles,” which is actually the nation’s second largest city and not some tiny swamp suburb like Baton Rouge, and the only California high-speed rail project ready to build connects LA/San Diego and San Francisco/Sacramento, the two population centers of America’s most populous state.)

But, chuckle chuckle, the *real* outrage is spending $160 million on the monitoring of active volcanoes in the United States. Ha ha, what kind of science nerd thinks volcanoes even exist?

Ken forgets to mention that two months after Jindal’s SOTU response, Alaska’s Mount Redoubt erupted, but J. Thomas Duffy at Gather.com remembered.

Seriously – how do these arguments hold sway with conservative voters?!  It beggers the imagination how they reason.

It was in March 2007 that I realized I was behind Barack Obama, and what he said that day rings true with today’s Tea Party movement.  I even  remember the day, March 28th:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama accused the Bush administration on Tuesday of pursuing a policy of “social Darwinism” that leaves every man and woman struggling.

“It’s a strategy that we’ve seen this administration pursue over the last six years, that basically says government has no role to play in making sure that America is prosperous for all people and not just some,” Obama said to applause during an appearance before the Communications Workers of America. [MSNBC]

That was three years ago.  In the interim, we now have the Tea Party.  Who makes them up? From Fox News:

Of the Tea Party supporters who responded, 20 percent make more than $100,000, versus 14 percent for the general pool of people polled. Fourteen percent of Tea Party supporters have a post-graduate education, compared with 10 percent for the general public. Twenty-three percent of Tea Party supporters have a college degree, compared with 15 percent for the general public, according to the poll.

The 18 percent of people who counted themselves among the Tea Party crowd are also mostly white, male and older than 45 years old.

And what do these Tea Partiers think?

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people. [New York Times]

Big surprise:  Older white male voters who have more money than the rest of us, and also have the benefits of government programs like Medicare and Social Security, don’t really care about the poor.  Not their problem.

Even though Obama cut taxes for 98% of Americans, they think he only cares about the poor:

Bruce Bartlett, a fiscal conservative and columnist for Forbes who worked in the George W Bush and Reagan administrations is shocked by what he sees happening on the right these days. He became a conservative, he says, because he saw liberalism as driven by lofty unachievable or unreal motives whereas conservativism he believed was pegged primarily to concern with consequences and so based on cold hard reality. He reports that the Tea Parties have turned the world around. Tea Partiers yelling about taxes are delusional, he writes. They know nothing about taxes.

Bartlett was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and Deputy Assistant Secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department. In March he wrote: “Federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president…. and last year’s stimulus bill, enacted with no Republican support, reduced federal taxes by almost $100 billion in 2009 and another $222 billion this year.” [Forbes via the Colorado Independent]

So much for “Ask not what your country can do for you…” – it’s now all about “Give me back every dollar I earn, screw the country’s future generations, and screw the poor!  It’s all about ME!”

Ugh – two birther posts in a day.  Lou Dobbs has a huge profile in GQ where he tries to completely whitewash his image for a possible Presidential run, or whatever.  Don’t believe it.   Alex Pareene at Gawker called it:

Now he even supports amnesty for undocumented immigrants, no longer refers to them as “illegals” or “illegal aliens,” and actually blames the drug war for violence at the borders and corporations for the exploitation of workers. In other words, he is a libertarian-leaning liberal on the issue. Which makes no fucking difference, because he spent literally years telling, again, millions of people that illegal hordes of Mexicans were spreading leprosy and wanted to actually reclaim the southwest and turn it into Aztlan.

[....]

Because if that is what he actually believes, why is he mocking Eliot Spitzer for calling for drivers’ licenses for undocumented workers? Why is he going on the radio to blast “Barack H. Obama” for using the first-person too often in his speeches instead of demanding that Republican senators actually fucking sign on to a comprehensive immigration reform package that actually helps these people he’s gotten rich demonizing? Harry Reid would like to introduce one! This could happen this summer if people like Lou Dobbs actually helped drum up popular support! But no, it’s easier to go on the radio every single goddamn day and say “haw haw haw Al Gore is a fat retard because it’s snowing.”

The only thing people like Lou Dobbs believe in is *power*; that’s why he can give such an interview.  That’s why John McCain gets pissed off now when you call him a “Maverick”.

Orly Taitz, the bottle blonde Birther Queen who had her 15 minutes last year, has arrived at the point we all saw for her once the birther headlines died down: she is a public embarrassment.

Lawyer Orly Taitz has been told she won’t be allowed to speak at a Tea Party tax day rally in Pleasanton on Thursday because other candidates planning to be on the platform basically don’t want to be seen with her.

“We hadn’t done our research,’’ said Bridget Melson, who is organizing the rally in Pleasanton, which has one of the larger Tea Party groups in the states. “When some of the more defamatory comments she was making came out we realized that wasn’t what the Tea Party was about.’’ [OC Register]

I was thinking about this attorney/real estate agent/dentist, who when she wasn’t filing frivolous law suits, pointing out charming cabinet fixtures or drilling teeth, was so unashamed to be the face and voice of K-R-A-Z-Y.

What does she do with herself now?  At the time she was on the news and making headlines, she had a groundswell of support from other nutcases who did not have the balls that Taitz did, and for good reason: few want to be the face of birtherism.

But birther-branded she will be for the rest of her life, no matter what else she does.  That can really limit the options one has, to be so associated with a fringe movement that many consider racist.

Ms. Taitz, welcome to yourself as a public embarrassment best to be avoided.  Many of us saw it coming.

What’s sad is that all those e-mails and letters of support she got from other birther nuts–that must have made her heady with adoration–were only meant to keep her fired up to do things nobody else in their right mind would do.

For someone like me who grew up in the 1980′s to be a Catholic Republican (I was an associate chairman of the Georgia Federation of Teenage Republicans, and a youth coordinator for Newt Gingrich), it’s ghastly to see conservatives in such disarray today with their values.

Andy Schlafly: Before he can denounce, could you tell him if the molestation happened at a Catholic school or a public school?

Take Conservapedia.

I visit the site to get the mainstream conservative perspective on social issues.  While Conservapedia might seem like a ridiculous fringe site, laden with superstition and selective rationality, they do reflect mainstream conservative thought.

That should frighten you: their senior editors are now ridiculing those who want to see pedophiles and those who protected them brought to justice.

One of their arch-villains, atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, recently said he would try to have the Pope arrested in Britain for covering up so much pedophilia under his watch (never mind the worse crime of doing nothing to help all those abused kids).

No matter to Conservapedia, though.  The idea that an atheist would “bully” the Pope outrages Conservapedia’s Terry Koeckritz, one of the site’s senior editors:

The more a person strays from the mainstream and the less followers they have, always look for a rise in silly, kooky stunts on their part to try and seem relevant. Dawkins has long ago ceased to be an intellect and more a silly tool. I’m hoping the guy succeeds in trying to arrest the Vicar of Christ. He will only seem foolish and petty, and might get to spend some time in prison as well. –ṬK_/Admin^/Talk 21:42, 10 April 2010 (EDT)

Sure, trying to bring the Catholic criminal conspiracy to justice is just a “silly, kooky stunt” that will make the amoral atheist seem “foolish and petty”.

Everyone knows the ‘Vicar of Christ’ can’t be touched, no matter how much touching of children he knew about.

Mr. Koeckritz makes no mention of the crimes against 200 deaf boys, or moving pedophiles around so that they can abuse more children, or that it still goes on today, or that the Catholic Church has repeated this pattern in over 25 countries, including Austria, Australia, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Spain, the United States, and many others.  So much for your “Vicar of Christ”, Mr. Koeckritz.

But even more jaw-dropping was Andy Son-of-Phyllis Schlafly, the man who is re-writing the Bible, who took such umbrage at Dawkins’ publicity stunt with the Pope that he thinks we’ll all turn our noses up at Dawkin’s ‘true colors’:

Dawkins’ role is to make atheism look popular and friendly. He made a big mistake by showing the true colors of atheism here. I guess someone can put on a good show for only so long, before the real person comes out.–Andy Schlafly 21:52, 10 April 2010 (EDT)

I think this is a little unfair. Much as Dawkins is not a nice piece of work, the current Pope is not whiter than white either. His defence of the perpretrators of those horrible acts is shameful. MikeSorter 11:10, 11 April 2010 (EDT)

Abuse of kids by adults in public school is far worse. Why aren’t you demanding that action be taken there to address that bigger problem? See the latest news item, for example.–Andy Schlafly 14:03, 11 April 2010 (EDT)

I don’t remember saying I don’t want action to be taken? Adults abusing kids in public schools is shameful, as you rightly say – if we are to shame these teachers, we should shame the priests doing similar things, and shame the man who is now Pope who attempted to cover the whole thing up – just as we should shame the headteachers who tolerate or tolerated it. MikeSorter 15:01, 11 April 2010 (EDT)

Andy Schlafly won’t denounce the Catholic pedophile conspiracy; he’ll denounce the straw man of abuse of kids in public schools.  At RationalWiki, a site that ridicules Conservapedia pretty much for the sort of stuff you just read, one postor pointed out the obvious:

I’ve been very pissed about this utter lack of law enforcement response to these people with power raping children since he story broke in Boston, what, ten years ago? Cardinal Law got a sinecure in the Vatican – moving him beyond the purview of local cops. He moved rapists with dog collars from place to place to cover up what amounts to a conspiracy to make it ok for grown men to touch children in ways we all despise. So what if the grandstanders happen to be atheists? In greater Boston a movement formed to make their “church donations” to a separate body pending the “outcome”… not up on the latest details because I stopped killing trees a while back. ħuman 03:10, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Who would you rather stand with here?  The supposedly amoral atheists who wants to expose the hypocrisy and pain caused by the Catholic Church heirarchy; or conservatives like Andy Schlafly and Terry Koeckritz, who are more bothered that an atheist has the audacity to question why this child molestation horror should not go unpunished at the top?

The Catholic pedophile apologists at Conservapedia are looking pretty disgusting (and Andy Schlafly teaches children, although if you’re a girl student he insists on giving you an easier test because you shouldn’t compete with boys).