Civil rights group targets religious conservatives
3 June 2005, Dyana Bagby, Southern Voice
Gay rights organizations such as the Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal have long been tracking anti-gay groups, including Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council. But now the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization known for monitoring hate groups including the Ku Klux Klan, labels them as extremist groups.
Attorneys Morris Dees and Joe Levin founded the center as a small civil rights firm in 1971 in Montgomery, Ala. The organization continues to monitor white supremacist groups as well as the rise of anti-immigration sentiment and other extremist activity. The center never in its 34-year history took aim at the religious right before now, but the rising volume of the national debate over gay marriage puts such groups in the limelight, Potok said.
“Our bailiwick is extremism,” he said. “We’ve avoided the Christian Right in the past, and we don’t feel we’ve expanded to include the Christian Right — we feel very strongly they have entered our world [of extremism].
“They have gone absolutely wild. The level of personal demonization was really quite remarkable. We felt we had to say, ‘Thus far, no further,’” Potok added.
The magazine devotes 23 pages in its current Intelligence Report to a 30-year history of the religious right’s anti-gay efforts. The report chronicles events from Anita Bryant’s statement in the 1970s that, “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks they must recruit the youth of America,” to a recent direct mail campaign from Lou Sheldon, founder of the Traditional Values Coalition. The mailing states, “They [gays] want our preschool children. … They want our kindergarten children. … They want our middle school and high school children.”
_ _ _ _ _
Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said the personal vilification and the false science against gay men and lesbians issued by institutions of the religious right are not only hateful, but dangerous.
“It is quite remarkable how they claim to hate the sin but love the sinner. That’s an absurd claim. We have reports that clearly show this kind of rhetoric paves the way to violence,” he said. “Without question, gay men and lesbians are the most attacked group — and the hate crimes toward them are more violent.”
The typical hate crime offender is a white man between the ages of 14 and 21, and offenders often say they are simply acting out the wishes of the larger community, Potok said.
So when Christian leaders spout anti-gay messages and preachers sermonize on the “moral intrinsic evil” of homosexuals, as Catholic Church officials have stated, there is little doubt the language leads to violence, Potok added.
Full Article
Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report
HOLY WAR
World O'Crap
Robert Knight, Crusader
"Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks they must recruit the youth of America."
— Anita Bryant, 1970s
"[AIDS is] nature's revenge on gay men."
— Pat Buchanan, 1982
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
— Pat Robertson, 1992
"Homosexuals are dangerous. They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and there is nobody there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual."
— Lou Sheldon, 1992
"The feminists' longtime, self-proclaimed goal is an androgynous society. Repudiating constitutional intent, history, tradition and human nature, they seek to forbid us, in public or private life, to recognize the differences between men and women."
— Phyllis Schlafly, 1996
"Brute beasts ... part of a vile and satanic system [that] will be utterly annihilated, and there will be a celebration in heaven."
— Jerry Falwell, on homosexuals, 1996
"The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit [homosexual] conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle."
— Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, 2002
"I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain: if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died."
— Jimmy Swaggert, 2004
"All foul urges of the Jewish soul come together in homosexuality, and the law should recognise them for what they are—utterly base aberrations - extremely serious crimes that should be punished with hanging and deportation."
— Völkischer Beobachte, official newspaper of the National Socialist German labour party, 1930
"Particular attention should be addressed to homosexuality, which is clearly expressive of a disposition opposed to the normal national community. Homosexual activity means the negation of the community as it must be constituted if the race is not to perish. That is why homosexual behaviour, in particular, merits no mercy."
— Reich Legal Director Hans Frank, 1938
* excerpts:
Homosexual acts had been punishable in Germany under Paragraph 175 of the Reich Penal Code since 1871. As with other aspects of the Penal Code, police practice and case law developed over time to define which acts " between whom and in what circumstances " would come under the purview of §175. In 1929 - as a consequence of a decades-long campaign by sexual reform organisations and the gay movement (from 1897) and growing popular support for law reform - the Reichstag Committee on Criminal Law recommended the abolition of §175.2. This recommendation had not been approved by parliament by 1933, the time of the Nazi take-over of power in Germany.
Notwithstanding these formal legal barriers, thriving gay and lesbian communities had developed in Germany between the turn of century and the early 1930s. Berlin, Hamburg and other big cities were major centres for these communities, and were the sites of both organised and informal collectives and networks. Lesbian and gay organisations, magazines and other publications, cafes and bars, cultural events, and other expressions of a community were to be found in significant numbers. Such community structures provided lesbians and gay men with means of expressing their identity, engaging in political activities, and ensuring mutual support.
- - - - -
After the NSDAP had secured power in 1933, repression against homosexuals and their collectives increased dramatically. Raids by police and Gestapo throughout the country led to the arrest of significant numbers of gay men. Lists of "homosexually active" persons were established by the police (Reich Office and Gestapo records of "suspects" for just the three years 1937-1940 include the names of over 90.000 individuals). Most bars known as meeting places for gay men and lesbians were closed throughout the country and the few remaining ones served as sources of information for the police and the Gestapo. Libraries and bookshops were purged of "indecent" scientific and literary materials relating to homosexuality. Emancipatory organisations had to cease their activities, including the publication of their magazines; publishers' stocks were confiscated, forcing them into bankruptcy. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a driving force behind the campaign for law reform, was destroyed on 6 May 1933. The writings of its President and Founder, Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, and other scientists were publicly burned on 10 May 1933.
Historians estimate that some 50,000 men were sentenced to severe jail sentences by Nazi judges on the basis of §175. Between 1937 and 1939 alone, 24.447 men were sentenced to jail sentences under §175; no reliable data exist for the years after 1943. Rates of acquittal declined sharply after 1933 and fines were increasingly replaced by imprisonment or penal servitude; clear indications of the heightening of repression.
Up to an estimated 15,000 homosexual men were deported to concentration camps for "re-education through labour". In the camps they were often subjected to the harshest regime and assigned the most hazardous work duties. As a result, an unknown but large number of these Pink Triangle detainees died in the camps, often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to so-called "medical experiments". Instances of collective murder actions against homosexual detainees, in which hundreds were exterminated at a time, are well-documented. An as yet undetermined number were forced into military service in so-called punitive battalions, whose high-risk duties included clearing mine fields.
Even those who escaped legal persecution saw their life drastically altered, if not destroyed. Unknown numbers fled abroad, entered into marriages in order to appear to comply with prevailing norms, and/or had to cope with severe psychological disturbances as a result of the general climate of terror.
Since female homosexuality was not included in the criminal code in Germany, lesbians did not suffer from the same forms or degree of persecution as gay men. However, some historical evidence exists of police records being collected on lesbians and the presence has been documented of a small number of lesbians in concentration camps on the grounds of their sexual orientation and because of "anti-social behaviour" (Green Triangle detainees). Lesbians did suffer the same destruction of clubs and organisations, banning of publications, closure of meeting places, and destruction of informal community networks as gay men. Furthermore, as all women, lesbians did not, according to Nazi ideology, have any role to play in public life. Lesbians, who could often not rely on a male breadwinner, were at a double economic disadvantage.
* from the Pink Triangle Coalition:
An International Coalition for Coordinating Affairs Relating to Nazi Persecution of Gay Men and Lesbians
The Pink Triangle Coalition currently includes the following organizations:
* Agudah (Association of Gay Men, Lesbians and Bisexuals in Israel)
* Homosexuelle Initiative (HOSI) Wien, Austria
* International Association of Lesbian and Gay Children of Holocaust Survivors
* International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), USA
* International Lesbian and Gay Association - Europe (ILGA-Europe)
* Lesben- und Schwulenverband in Deutschland (LSVD), Germany
* Pink Cross, Switzerland
* World Congress of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations (WCGLJO)
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