A Horrific Story And A Minister's Uncondintional Love Highlight Matthew Shepard Anniversary

This could be titled: Parent Hell, Parent Heaven. WARNING: parts of this article are very disturbing.

“You know Kelly, I tell you what. If you die before me…you know what, when you get dead, we’re going to go through your house and we are going to strip it, and that girl won’t have a pot to piss in…you little hefer, you have put my life through hell. Gay shit. I hate gay shit. I am not going to live my life telling you that I believe in two women being married. It is not in the Bible, it is a damned SIN! And I am ashamed you live with a damn woman… You go straight to Hell! Go to Hell, Bitch!”

Kelly's mother has obviously had no feelings for her daughter ... ever. 

Years after being kicked out of her home, Kelly met a wonderful woman named Leslie and they worked through the emotional trauma Kelly had suffered from her mother who had previously tried to "convert" Kelly with reparative  therapy. In the meantime, Kelly resumed a sporadic communications with her mother although she was wary of anything deeper. Then tragedy struck: Kelly was felled by a severe case of lupus and her heart damaged (she is prone to heart attacks). Leslie has been her only support and the two have struggled through enormous medical bills. 

Through her aunt, Kelly learned that her mother had been raising funds through her church, presumably to help Kelly or to at least visit Kelly during a hysterectomy operation. When Kelly received no funds nor any call from her mother about a visit, she decided to call her and tape the conversation as proof to her aunt that no money was forthcoming. What ensued was the terrible tirade above. 

Bob Watson of LGBTQ Nation penned an open letter to Kelly's mother of which the most poignant of phrases is: 

Your family is plagued with a woman suffering from a terrible disease. The disease is ugly, painful, debilitating and it ruins the heart. That woman is not Kelly, it is you. The disease is not the horrible one of Lupus which Kelly has, it is the disease of Homophobia that you have. 

Bob also brought out the possibility that since Florida (where Kelly and Leslie now live) does not accept same-sex marriage, the mother's threat to leave Leslie without a "pot to piss in" is very real. 

On The Other Side Of Reality:

If I had gay children: 4 Promises from a Christian Parent"

Rev. John Pavlovitz has struck a nerve amongst the Christian Right establishment: a Christian minister who would unconditionally accept homosexuality in his children could not possibly be Christian, could he? No "pray away the gay", no disowning, not a shred of righteous arrogance in his parenting strategy. His theology is so far from that of Kelly's mother as to be a different religion altogether. Then again, he's a Methodist and not a Southern Baptist. 

Here are his 4 Promises:

1) If I have gay children, you’ll all know it.
My children won’t be our family’s best kept secret.

2) If I have gay children, I’ll pray for them.
I won’t pray for them to be made “normal”. I’ve lived long enough to know that if my children are gay, that IS their normal.

3) If I have gay children, I’ll love them.
I don’t mean some token, distant, tolerant love that stays at a safe arm’s length. It will be an extravagant, open-hearted, unapologetic, lavish, embarrassing-them-in-the-school cafeteria, kind of love.

4) If I have gay children, most likely; I have gay children.
If my kids are going to be gay, well they pretty much already are.

God has already created them and wired them, and placed the seed of who they are within them. Psalm 139 says that He, “stitched them together in their mother’s womb”. The incredibly intricate stuff that makes them uniquely them; once-in-History souls, has already been uploaded into their very cells.

His blog post is not only worth reading because of these points, but because of the extensive pro/con comments (some encouraging, some righteously hateful) it engendered.

October 7, is the 16th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard. One of the parents in this article is mired in a belief and an attitude that is still taking time to eradicate, while the other parent is forging ahead to a new, loving world. Matthew would be so proud of him. We should all be so very, very proud of him. 

When "Slipping Through The Cracks" Is No Excuse: The Negligence Of Some Child Welfare Workers

'It was just like every inch of this child had been abused,'

"Before 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez was allegedly beaten to death by his mother and her boyfriend, they doused him with pepper spray, forced him to eat his own vomit and locked him in a cabinet with a sock stuffed in his mouth to muffle his screams, according to court records made public Monday."

But that was not the entire extent of his abuse. You may not want to read the entire L.A. Times article if you are sensitive to the issue because it contains some graphic descriptions of unbelievable abuse, but know that the case has sparked an outcry for reform of a child welfare system that was clearly inept.

When paramedics arrived, they found Gabriel naked in a bedroom, not breathing, with a cracked skull, three broken ribs and BB pellets embedded in his lung and groin. He died two days later.
"It was just like every inch of this child had been abused," testified James Cermak, a Los Angeles County Fire Department paramedic.

Gabriel's mother, Pearl, said that Gabriel had hit his head on a dresser. 

Pearl Fernandez and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, are in jail awaiting trial for capital murder and special circumstances of torture. 

The torture consisted of heinous acts, the least of which was making Gabriel wear humiliating girl's dresses to school because he liked playing with dolls. His murder has gone viral, because, like another publicized abuse/death - the case of Zachary Dutro Boggess - one of the "reasons" for his abuse was that he acted too "gay". Another reason: a system where "slipping through the cracks" means death. Months before his death, Gabriel wrote a suicide note, but it was dismissed as nothing consequential by child welfare workers (it contained no mode of suicide - kids have to be more specific than that!).  Reports of abuse from teachers were poorly followed up. "Huge caseloads" and "inexperience" were cited. 

"Inexperience". How experienced do you have to be to read a suicide note of any sort and not take action? How inexperienced do you have to be to visit a house more than several times, see bruises and not put the dots together? How inexperienced do you have to be to take the initial testimony of siblings as the truth - kids who are obviously scared the same thing will happen to them? 

The Good, The Bad And The Totally Inept

To be fair, some social workers can only be as effective as the law allows: Child Protective Services vary from region to region according to what authority they actually have. Some parents are very crafty and intimidating (e.g. Fred Phelps - the "Man Addicted To Hate" - repeatedly fended off CPS in Topeka, KS despite warnings from teachers and neighbors). Some truly are over-burdened with caseloads and become duly depressed about their work.  

The workers in Gabriel's and Zachary's cases, however, were absolutely negligent:

Four county Department of Child and Family Services employees will be fired over their involvement in the case of Gabriel Fernandez, the 8-year-old Palmdale boy who died in May, after allegedly being tortured by his mother's live-in boyfriend.

According to a statement from County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, the four include two social workers and two supervisors. Three others involved in evaluating multiple reports of abuse of Fernandez were issued warning or reprimand letters.
DCFS records showed that there had been five previous reports of abuse of the little boy, but that social workers had deemed them "unfounded." A sixth case was being investigated at the time of his death.

Five reports. FIVE. Five reports and a suicide note. 

Zachary Dutro-Brugess was murdered in, of all places, a homeless shelter. His abuse was reported by his older sister who had been abused as well, but not by the shelter.

Jezebel:

While [Jack] Schwab [Director of the Good Neighbor Shelter in Tigard, Oregon] says that the staff never saw anything that could be reported, it's hard to believe that such abuse could have gone on without the staff having even an inkling. And even those inklings can be reported.

Negligent Abuse

What happened to both children might have been prevented, had people paid attention. Unfortunately, we can't make lack of attention a crime, nor can we make negligence or ineptitude a felony. To some, the firing of two social workers and two supervisors was enough in Gabriel's case. To some, the consciences of the Good Neighbor Shelter will deliver justice. 

To Gabriel and Zachary, however, justice may not have been served.

Just a thought.

Proselytizing Death On Trial: Scott Lively Goes To Court Today For Crimes Against Uganda's Gays. Will Anybody Follow?

No one has done more to orchestrate this situation than Scott Lively. Since 2002, he has worked systematically to strip away human rights protections from LGBT people in Uganda and elsewhere around the world, to silence them and make it impossible for them to organize and defend their rights. While he peddles the usual, age-old lie that LGBT people are pedophiles in order to deliberately provoke the rage that feeds the growing repression and violence, he combines that myth with a new twist, that gays were also responsible for the Holocaust and that Hitler’s Germany is what can happen when a gay movement grows unchecked.- Vince Warren, Washington Post.

WHEN YOU COME DOWN TO IT, IT'S STILL KILL A QUEER FOR CHRIST

The career of Scott Lively is based upon two things: a lousy, dysfunctional childhood and the most homophobic book ever written. Homosexuality was a scapegoat for one and a sadistic boon for the other. Mistreated by a mentally ill father, Lively descended into alcohol at an early age and was basically homeless by the time he was 19. After having "found Jesus Christ" he went on to become the president of the California Chapter of the American Family Association and to author,with Holocaust revisionist Kevin Abram, The Pink Swastika.

Homosexuals Founded The Nazi Party and Were Enlisted For Their Extreme Cruelty.

So says the Pink Swastika. It also posited that Hitler was gay* and that homosexuals were NOT persecuted and exterminated in the Holocaust. The Pink Triangle barely, if ever, existed. Needless to say, the book (some of it based upon an earlier work in 1945 - Germany's National Vice) was roundly criticized by many historians as a "pernicious myth" and a "flat-out lie". Needless to say, it embraced by Christian Right churches and organizations as ... the gospel truth.

"I know more about this subject than anyone else in the world."

Lively:

"While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism," write Lively and Abrams. "To the myth of the 'pink triangle' — the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted — we must respond with the reality of the 'pink swastika.'"

Since it's publication, Lively has become one of the world's leading holocaust revisionists. and has billed himself as an "expert" in homosexuality and its causes, traveling to ill-educated and third world countries among them Latvia, Russia, Moldova and Uganda. He founded Latvia's Watchmen on the Walls, a rabidly anti-gay group. One incident is telling:

When in Latvia, Lively described the killing of an alleged gay man by members of Watchmen on the Walls, (in Sacramento, CA) his Latvian audience cheered. Lively decried the cheering and applause with a wimpy "now, now."

Kampala

In 2009, Lively and a group of evangelical Christians held a widely-attended conference focusing on the evils of homosexuality, the "gay agenda" and how homosexuality must be criminalized in order to stop its evil rise:

       “when [homosexuals] see a child that’s from a broken home, it’s like they have a flashing neon sign over their head.”

Uganda's First Lady, Madame Mouseveni, Minister David Bahati, clergy and legislators became incensed that anything like homosexuality could ever take over their nation. One month later, the infamous "Kill the Gays" bill was born.

Uganda On Trial

While Human Rights organizations, activists and the United Nations were aghast and the U.S. Congress mentioned sanctions against Uganda, Christian Right groups were quick to come to its defense with the reasoning that no entity had a right to tell Uganda how to control their societal affairs - especially if it was based upon (the Christian) religion. Nationally known Pastor Rick warren was silent on the affair and was pressured for months to speak out against the bill.

In the meantime, gays and lesbians were persecuted, people started going house-to-house trying to "expose homosexuals" (part of the proposed bill calls for sentences up to three years for not reporting homosexual activity), a prominent gay-friendly bishop's life was threatened and David Kato, one of Uganda's leading activists, was murdered. It is these actions for which Lively is being sued by Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG) under the the U.S.'s Alien Torte Statute. Lively's defense will be handled by Liberty Counsel, Jerry Falwell's legal arm from Liberty University.

@theCCR will be live tweeting the event using the hashtag #StoptheHate

Allies in Hate, Allies in Death

Cloaked under "free speech" and "freedom of religion", Lively's allies have been promoting his "ministry" (Abiding Truth Ministries) and The Pink Swastika for years. Chief among them are Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, labeled a hate group by the SPLC for its promotion of lies against the LGBT community.** Also in line for Lively's admiration society is Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and another "Kill the Gays" instigator, "prophet" Lou Engle. Reactions to the proceedings from these and other anti-gay leaders should be quite interesting.

The Humor In It All

If anyone can find humor in Lively's machinations and assertions, it is The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. Lively agreed to be interviewed for the program and its hilarious segment. Indeed, the stupidity of ANYONE such as Lively acquiescing to a feature on The Daily Show is monumental...as well as hilarious. 

At the same time, however, the stupidity of Lively, his assertions, his dealings with Uganda have been serious - deadly serious.

There will be no laughter during the the day's proceedings - only shock at the results of Lively's deadly proselytizing. 

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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*Quite an unusual take since Hitler "authorized an edict in 1941 prescribing the death penalty—yes, the death penalty—for SS and police members found guilty of gay activity." Also:

In 1942, the death penalty was instituted for homosexuality. Offenders in the German military were routinely shot. "That wasn't a punishment," Himmler explained, "but simply the extinguishing of abnormal life. It had to be got rid of, just as we pull out weeds, throw them on a heap, and burn them."

** Fischer himself has been a one-man hate group against gays, Native Americans and, of course, Muslims.