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May 3, 2002
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich:
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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May
3, 2002
Hatemongers
Try to Cleanse History
Gays: Forgotten Heroes of 9/11
by John Troyer
Last week, the Minneapolis City Pages ran a story
by Paul Demko regarding the controversy surrounding Judith Levine's
new book "Harmful to Minors" published by the University
Press. Levine's main thesis is that sex "is not ipso facto
harmful to minors, and America's drive to protect kids from sex
is protecting them from nothing."
One of the protest methods used by avid
critics of both Levine and the University Press is an Internet-based
campaign, sending letters to Gov. Jesse Ventura's office asking
him to intervene and stop publication of the book. The petition
is available at http://www.conservativepetitions.com
(I owe Paul Demko thanks for listing the Web site in his story).
In all truth, Conservativepetitions.com
is my new favorite Web site to talk about with friends over tea.
While skimming through this Web site pluck-full of various intellectually
astute arguments on just about any topic, I came across a related
topic I chose to pursue instead of the brouhaha surrounding "Harmful
to Minors." Specifically, I came across a gem of a petition.
Near the letter to Ventura is a petition
denouncing "homosexual activists exploiting our national
grief over terrorists' attack on World Trade Center." I
really couldn't have made a sentence like that up, so I encourage
all interested individuals to look at the petition.
The campaign to stop homosexual activists
is being waged by Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman (please stress
the "man" in the title) of the Traditional Values Coalition.
Sheldon's involvement comes as no surprise, and his previous
work with the Web site http://www.godhatesfags.com
sums up, for me, the Traditional Values Coalition's position
on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The problem is I am a die-hard counter-American,
civil libertarian and I firmly believe the Traditional Values
Coalition has just as much right as any other group to make asinine
statements. I will also now tell all members and adherents of
the Traditional Values Coalition why they are completely wrong
about the menace of homosexual activists exploiting anybody's
grief anywhere.
Here is the first line of the above petition:
"While Americans are in mourning, volunteering their time,
donating blood, and praying for the victims of the World Trade
Center and Pentagon attacks, homosexual activists in Washington,
D.C. are aggressively pushing homosexual special rights legislation
that has been stalled in Congress."
The "special rights" being
mentioned involve health care coverage, hospital visitation guarantees
in the event of a partner's illness and a few other menacing
requests like legal safety from job/housing/insurance discrimination.
It's the typical laundry list of really subversive cultural requests
by the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender activist movement,
the members of which incidentally pay federal and state income
tax supporting governmental institutions from which no guarantees
of due process under the law are apparently ever guaranteed.
I really do not know how special any
of these rights are (unless of course they can be denied without
cause). These rather banal, reasonable requests really demonstrate
how unreasonable the Traditional Values Coalition becomes regarding
any topic about the ever-lurking homosexual activist. Unless,
of course, the story is about some empirically proven conversion
program that guarantees de-queering an individual, and so the
said man/woman would not burn in hell. Indeed, I still prefer
brimstone to false consciousness.
And now the last line of the petition:
"We must not allow homosexuals to exploit our national grief
for their selfish political objectives."
Besides the obvious question of just
who is exploiting what with this petition, I want to take a moment
and talk about the contributions made by GLBT people on Sept.
11 conveniently overlooked by the Traditional Values Coalition.
It was bad enough Jerry Falwell, while chatting with Pat Robertson,
made the following statement a few days after Sept. 11 on the
"700 Club" television program.
Jerry Falwell: "What we saw on Tuesday,
as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact, God continues
to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give
us probably what we deserve."
Pat Robertson: "Jerry, that's my
feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We
haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population."
Jerry Falwell: "The abortionists
have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be
mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies,
we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists,
and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively
trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People
for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize
America, I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped
this happen.'"
Now I know Jerry Falwell repeatedly explained
to everyone that his comments were taken out of context (from
what or how I remain unsure) but then again, <www.godhatesfags.com>
could just as easily be misconstrued as a gourmet cooking Web
site.
What really angers me about the whole
situation is how some of the conveniently forgotten people considered
to be heroes, called heroic by President George W. Bush himself,
were gay and lesbian members of society.
Case in point is Mark Bingham, a 31-year-old
advertising executive from San Francisco. Bingham's name and
identity have been lost in the "let's roll" rhetoric
championed by Bush's speechwriters starting in late September.
Bingham was a fellow passenger with Todd
Beamer on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. A telephone
dispatcher reported hearing Beamer say "let's roll"
to a group of other men preparing to enter the cockpit.
Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett
and Jeremy Glick are the four men Bush administration officials
believe stormed the cockpit of Flight 93, preventing the hijacked
plane from hitting a target in Washington, D.C., (perhaps the
Capitol building itself), thereby potentially saving many more
lives in the process.
Mark Bingham, called a national hero
by almost everyone, was openly gay and, more to the point, a
Republican.
Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona
spoke at Bingham's memorial service, thanking him for potentially
saving his own life by forcing the plane to crash in Pennsylvania.
In October, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association
began a letter campaign to talk about not only Mark Bingham,
but also Father Mychal Judge, chaplain for the New York Fire
Department who died while administering the last rites during
the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers.
Judge was openly gay and worked extensively
in the GLBT communities of New York. The list could go on for
quite a long time, and I will assert that among the 300-plus
firefighters and rescue workers killed in New York on Sept. 11,
at least a few must have been gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender
individuals.
So to the petitioners of the Traditional
Values Coalition, I strongly suggest dropping the case against
homosexual activists. Mostly because it's a tired argument, and
Americans will always support their gay and lesbian neighbors.
However, I am hopeful the Traditional
Values Coalition continues the persistent campaigns against wily
homosexual activists because then I am guaranteed consistent
opportunities to write about the everyday accomplishments of
gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans and the menace
of blind faith.
John Troyer is
a columnist for the Daily Minnesotan, the University of Minnesota's
student newspaper. He can be reached at: troy0005@tc.umn.edu.
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