Texas Gay Man Brutally Killed by Blunt Force Trauma
Marc Pourner, bound, gagged and beaten to death in rural Mongomery County.
Montgomery County, Texas – The body of a gay man was found murdered in a stand of trees in Montgomery County, north of Houston, on Saturday. His truck was also found at the scene by Sheriff’s Deputies, burned. Authorities told KTRK Television 13 that the victim, identified as 28-year-old Marc Pourner of Spring, Texas, may well have been restrained prior to his murder.
The victim’s father, Mark Pourner, who identified the corpse of his missing son on Saturday, told journalists that Marc was a well-liked bookkeeper for Randall’s Food Market, “a good friend to many and a man with a big heart.” Speaking to an interviewer for KTRK, Marc’s father said that the “speed and cold efficiency” with which his son had been killed indicated to him and the family that whoever did this had killed before, and, in all probability, would kill again. When questioned about a possible motive, he said that the family believed this was a hate crime murder, and that his son was openly gay.
Pourner’s roommates and friends grew worried after receiving a “disturbing phone call” Thursday night, and when he did not report for work last Friday, they alerted the authorities. About Magazine News reports that “a person of interest” tipped off the Sheriff’s Department, leading to the discovery of the body. The corpse showed evidence of blunt force trauma to Pourner’s head, and signs of having been tied and gagged. A source described as close to the investigation says that an arrest in the case is near at hand.
Speaking to Project Q on behalf of the Sheriff’s Department, Lt. Brady Fitzgerald described the investigation and the area where Pourner’s body was discovered:
“We responded to that area and we located the burned vehicle. The body was close to the vehicle in a pathway,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s a residential area that is sparsely populated. It was thick in the woods where they discovered the vehicle itself and the body. It would obviously have to be intentionally placed there.” When questioned about the details of the investigation, Fitzgerald went on to say, “We are still looking into the case. If he was murdered in reference to him being gay, it would be a hate crime and that’s the way it would be investigated if that was a motive.” Though he would not affirm that an arrest was imminent, Fitzgerald did tell Project Q that there was no evidence that Pourner had been robbed.
An online campaign has been started to pay for the expenses of the funeral.
This homicide takes place in the context of a heated election in nearby Houston focusing attention on the LGBT community, and in the wake of a series of violent attacks against gay men in Dallas that have taken place within the last month. Dr. Stephen Sprinkle, founder and director of the Unfinished Lives Project, said, “It would be folly for Texas authorities to divorce this savage, anti-gay homicide from the homophobic and transphobic campaign against the HERO ordinance in Houston, and from the fallout after the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in late June of this year. The LGBT community in Houston is on high alert following the demeaning heterosexist election, and the possible correlation between this killing and the outbreak of anti-LGBTQ violence in Dallas is coincidental only to those who intentionally look the other way.” Sprinkle went on to say that physical violence spikes after media attention like the Marriage Equality decision and the defeat of the equal rights ordinance in metro Houston.
The Arc of Justice Bends Like A Rainbow: Heartbreaks, Memories, Dreams
Dallas, Texas – To contribute to the spiritual discussion about the events of this June: the outrageous attack on Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and the victory of Marriage Equality in the U.S. Supreme Court, here is the text of my Sunday sermon for 6/28/15:
The Arc of Justice Bends Like a Rainbow: Heartbreaks, Memories, Dreams
A Sermon for Pride Sunday, June 28, 2015
The New Church – Chiesa Nuova
Dallas, Texas
Psalms 85:7-12
Hebrews 11:29-40
Luke 4:18-20
The Rev. Dr. Stephen V. Sprinkle, Professor of Practical Theology, Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas
“They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered.” These words are among the phrases of Friday that are imprinted into my consciousness and yours, too, I suspect. You will recognize them as the conclusion of the Majority Opinion of Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision striking down the bans that forbade marriage to millions of same-sex Americans in 14 states, including our own. “It is so ordered . . .”
But these are not the only words that won’t go away from my mind. Words from cries, and joyous shouts, and eulogies, from late last week and from the recent events of our lives that have culminated upon us this very June like “a thunderbolt” as our President, the Honorable Barack Obama said when he made his historic remarks in the White House Rose Garden celebrating the victory of Marriage Equality for all 50 states.
Here are some other stunning words our President used just this past Friday, 6/26/15, the same day LGBTQ people and our allies danced on the steps of the United States Supreme Court, and at the crossroads of Oak Lawn and Cedar Springs right here in Dallas. Immediately following his Rose Garden remarks, he boarded Air Force One to fly down to Charleston, SC beside our First Lady Michelle, to eulogize slain Rev. Clementa Pinckney and the other eight members of his flock, cut down by hatred in a Bible Study/Prayer Meeting at Mother Emanuel AME Church. Do you feel the whiplash of it? Having to deliver words of celebration at one moment, and then words appropriate to the outrageous deaths of Black Americans because of race hatred, as best we can tell—All in the same day?
Our President tried to make sense of it all from the stage of the University of Charleston, to find a way forward for the nation:
“Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete” he said. “But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again.
“Once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual. That’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society.”
President Obama continued:
“To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change, that’s how we lose our way again. It would be a refutation of the forgiveness expressed by those families if we merely slipped into old habits whereby those who disagree with us are not merely wrong, but bad; where we shout instead of listen; where we barricade ourselves behind preconceived notions or well-practiced cynicism.
“Reverend Pinckney once said, ‘Across the south, we have a deep appreciation of history. We haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.’”
History, you see, is hard to make sense of when you are in the middle of it, like we are this morning—When we are struck by a two-sided thunderbolt of history, one side damp with tears of joy for decades of struggle to win against homophobia and heterosexism for LGBTQ human equality, but the other side wet with the tears of unfathomable grief because of America’s “original sin,” the sin of racism.
You and I and our President are not alone in trying to make sense of it all, trying to sort out our emotions about the events of 6/26/15. On Friday, my friend Professor John Blevins who teaches at Emory University put it this way on his Facebook wall:
“Not sure” Dr. Blevins wrote, “how to temper the feelings of the Supreme Court ruling with the reminder that today in Charleston, SC there is a funeral for an African-American man and local church pastor who would have supported and cheered this ruling were he not gunned down in cold, calculated, hate-filled violence. We progress and regress. But I want to believe– have to believe– that Love Wins. Yes, the Supreme Court ruling offers some sense of that but so does the testimony of Reverend Pinckney– both in his life and in his death. We should remember that.”
Whatever else and whoever else we are this morning, we are the Church, and we are called upon to remember our heartbreaks, to dance with our dreams in our hearts around the Table of Jesus Christ, and to learn with appreciation from the history of others. We are the New Church, the Chiesa Nuova, founded on the memories and merits of St. Francis of Assisi. We are straight, bi-, and gay, trans- and cisgender, multiracial and multilingual, and we share something vital and living with Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston. We have been given a common task: to speak the truth alongside one another until all the bad news comes to redemption in the Amazing Grace of God. We, Mother Emanuel and New Church together, are called by the God of Life to remember the steadfast love of Jesus Christ, and to set all events of celebration and sorrow in the context of a future in which LOVE WINS, not just for some of us, but for ALL of us!
The Church must engage the events of these jumbled up, joyous and heartbreaking days, and re-tell them to a hurting society both in words and deeds of effective love. We are the storytellers! Who else besides the Community of Faith remembers and re-tells the stories of the justice prophets of Israel and the evangelists of the early Christian movement? Who else remembers and re-tells the stories of the Underground Railroad, and Jim Crow, and the struggle for women’s right to vote and equal pay; who else remembers and re-tells the breathtaking saga of the time of the Stonewall Riots in New York City, and the first brave voices of the sexual minority here in North Texas, of the lesbian Lavender Menace, and the life-and-death struggle against HIV/AIDS, of Harvey Milk’s famous call, “I’m Here to Recruit You!”, and of the first legal “I Do’s” spoken on the steps of the Records Building right here in Dallas between Lesbian couples and Gay couples set on letting the whole Lone Star State know that LOVE Wins!
If others want to tell the stories of our times in differing ways, let them. We welcome the stories and the histories of others, and we must grow in appreciation of those histories because we are all members of the One Human Family. But, in humility, and with our knees trembling from awe and joy, we of the Community of Faith must continue the tradition of telling the Good News in the midst of a world were goodness is not so obvious an outcome at all. Like our grieving sisters and brothers at Mother Emanuel, in English, Español, and the other tongues of our languages, the Church has this task: to interpret the events of everyday life, great and small, in the harmonies of the love of God. It is our responsibility to pull together the threads of the rulings of the Supreme Court, and the horror of the slayings at home and abroad, and to weave out of them a roadmap of justice and mercy so the human race can see a way forward in the storm, and find rivers of cool water in dry places—sweet destinies of deliverance and Amazing Grace for all the sorts and conditions of our fragile humankind.
Put succinctly, it is our mandate to follow the example of Jesus the Christ: to read aloud the ancient stories of God’s people, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, freedom for all those oppressed, recovery of sight to the blind, and then to roll up the scroll, and announce: “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine that you would live into a world where Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would be repealed? Where DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, and Proposition 8 would be overthrown? Where Marriage Equality would become the law of the land in all 50 states of the USA, and Justice Anthony Kennedy could pen these words on behalf of the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court?
“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Did you ever imagine that 150 years after the Civil War, that 52 years after Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, and 50 years after the Voting Rights Act, you would still be living in a world where young Latino/Latina “Dreamers” are still in peril of being deported from the land that has become their home, where a black teenage girl in a bikini could be wrestled down and choked at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, where we must confront that reality over and over again that, no matter what we say, black, brown, female, and transgender lives mean less than white male lives? Or that the peaceful welcome of a church sanctuary could be desecrated by the cold, violent hand of hatred?
Well, that is the world we have, isn’t it? Filled with joys and sorrows. Where by the grace of God we must rededicate ourselves to bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice in this time and place we have been given. That is what the Community of Faith must be about in our lifetime. President Obama, standing squarely in the tradition of the Black Church, concluded his eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, saying:
“…History can’t be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind. But more importantly, an open heart.
“That’s what I felt this week — an open heart. That more than any particular policy or analysis is what’s called upon right now, I think. It’s what a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls ‘that reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.’
“That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change. Amazing grace, amazing grace.”
Since Love Wins, since Love must win for everybody, let us throw a party where everyone is invited to celebrate with us, where everybody is somebody and nobody is nobody, and then roll up our sleeves and get to the work at hand!
Love Wins! Thanks be to God! Amen.
French Homophobia Skyrockets 78%; Forces Reassessment of LGBTQ “Progress”
Paris victim Wilfred de Bruijn, “the face of homophobia in France,” and French anti-gay marriage protestors.
Paris, France – The number of documented homophobic attacks is ballooning out of control, says a report published by the French anti-homophobia watchdog, SOS Homophobie. Since the passage of France’s pro-LGBTQ marriage law, advocates have been shocked by a rise of 78 percent in violent crimes against gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual residents in France during 2013. The ominous meaning of this spike in violence in a supposedly “enlightened” European culture is forcing advocates, activists, and government officials to rethink narratives of progress on the issue of human equality.
SOS Homophobie, the only organization with reliable statistics on attacks against LGBTQ people in France, says that a violent physical attack against queer people is occurring no less than once every two days, and increase of 54 percent since 2012, but this statistic does not reflect the whole story. The SOS Helpline received an astounding 3,500 calls in 2013, as opposed to 1,977 in all of 2012, registering an overall increase in anti-gay hate crime of the reported 78 percent. “In the last twenty years the number of reports of incidents [of homophobia] received by our association have not stopped growing, but in 2013 they exploded,” notes the most recent SOS Homphobie report. The report also found that the number of anti-gay insults online rose from 656 in 2012 to 1,723 cases in 2013, and the number of incidents that occurred in a school increased by 25 percent.
Justice and Interior ministries have been caught napping by these startling numbers, according to EDGEBOSTON. An ideology of “inevitable progress” on matters of human rights has caused Gallic cultural leaders to be blindsided by the shift towards anti-gay rhetoric and physical violence since the legal embrace of same-sex marriage. “There’s no doubt the rise in homophobic acts was linked to the context of the opposition against gay marriage,” Gregory Premon, spokesperson for SOS Homophobie, said to The Local. “Homophobic words and statements became trivialized during this period and helped legitimize insults and homophobic violence.”
A Dutch resident of northern Paris, who was punched and kicked senseless on a street near his home last month, has become the “face” of this new wave of anti-gay violence in France. Wilfred de Bruijn’s skull was fractured in five places and he lost a tooth in the attack, according to The Independent. He and his boyfriend Olivier were walking arm-in-arm at the time of the savage assault. “I woke up in an ambulance covered in blood, missing tooth and broken bones around the eye,” Mr. de Bruijn told The Local. “I’m home now. Very sad. Olivier takes care of me. Forbidden to work for at least 10 days.”
Mr. de Bruijn places the blame for the attack upon the shoulders of anti-same sex marriage protestors, and a group has taken credit for the brutal act. Le Printemps Français (“The French Spring”), whose membership is believed to be largely comprised of hardline Catholics and royalists, now boasts that it sanctioned and carried out the assault against Mr. de Bruijn and his lover. The shift from anti-LGBTQ marriage to a more general disgust against all queer and gender variant people is becoming more and more obvious. As Mr. de Bruijn said to The Independent, “The [anti-gay-marriage campaigners] know very well what can happen if you repeat, repeat, repeat that these people are lower human beings. Of course, it will have a result.”
Though the French government has reacted with outrage to the news of the attacks on Messieurs de Bruijn and Olivier, and another recent gay victim, Mr. Raphael le Clerca in Nice, confidence in governmental authority to cause social change in such a charged environment has been seriously shaken in what was once a bastion of culture and forward thinking. In the U.S. context, as well, the rise in Western European homophobia and heterosexism is not to be taken lightly.
Geography of homophobic Tweets in the USA in 2013 (source: The Atlantic Magazine).
While the Marriage Equality movement is advancing on the judicial front, most recently in the southern and western states of Arkansas and Idaho, it cannot be ignored any longer that incidents of anti-LGBTQ violence, especially against gay men and transgender people, has risen each year since the passage of the Matthew Shepard/James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in October 2009. The heat of anti-gay rhetoric from the Religious Right Wing has intensified, and homophobic Christianist preachers like Scott Lively have pressed their hate agenda abroad wherever they have gotten the chance, in Russia and the Slavic countries of the former Soviet Union, and in Central Africa, for example. While the attention of U.S. advocacy groups is upon Marriage Equality and a looming struggle in the U.S. Supreme Court, anti-LGBTQ attitudes have largely gone unaddressed, thanks to a blind belief in “inevitable social progress,” the irrelevance of domestic religious bigotry, and trust that the younger generations of Americans will finally tip the balance towards tolerance throughout the U.S. population.
We know, however, who is killing LGBTQ people in such alarming numbers in the U.S.A.: the very young who are supposedly their saviors. The persons who murder and maim queer folk in the United States are predominantly young men from 17 to 35 years of age. We also know that the under appreciated cultural power of religion to spawn false narratives of government oppression of “religious freedom” lies just below the surface of American society. And American public and private schools are hotbeds of un addressed bullying and violence against gender variant youth, with outrageous consequences for vulnerable children every week in these United States.
The Marriage Equality movement is not essentially about changing foundational attitudes towards people of difference. It is about stretching societal and cultural boundaries just enough to let same sex couples inside, where they can enjoy a similacrum of “normal life.” Marriage is a conservative issue in American life, and always has been. The serious and radical work of changing hearts and minds to accept challenging differences in society remains to be done, and cannot be ignored if Americans do not want to face the crisis their French allies are currently facing “just across the Pond.”
It is past time Americans take to heart the trenchant remarks of a French government spokesman outraged by the recent rise of homophobia in France: “The hatred and homophobic remarks have no place in our country and are punishable by law. The government strongly condemns these acts. These outbursts are unacceptable. When the most basic civil rights of our citizens are attacked, the authority of the state is at stake.”
Young Transgender Person Savagely Beaten in Hollywood Hate Crime: Updated
Victor Diego, 22, transgender and gay victim of brutal beating on Hollywood Boulevard [CBS 2 photo].
Reportage on the attack has been careful to note that how Diego identifies in terms of gender identity and gender expression is not known. His sisters Virginia and Melissa have used both male and female pronouns to describe Diego, which reflects family practice, but not necessarily Diego’s own sense of personhood. Photographs show a graceful, lovely person with a sense of style and taste. Sister Virginia Diego said to reporters, “Sometimes men try to talk to him and they get humiliated in front of their friends when they realize it’s a man. Because he looks really good, he looks like a woman, you couldn’t tell the difference,” she continued. Sister Melissa Diego said that the Los Angeles Police Department, Hollywood Division is pursing the case as a transphobic hate crime. “We don’t want this to happen to anybody else,” she said. We just want somebody to come forward and let us know what they saw. He deserves justice.” Diego is recuperating at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Update: GLAAD reports that the victim has informed the LAPD of her preferred name and pronominal usage. In contradistinction to her family’s identification of her gender, the victim wishes to be known by “Vivian,” and indicated that she wants police and the media to use feminine pronouns when referring to her.
Diego shows multiple injuries sustained in Thursday night’s attack.
Fox News Latino reports that Hollywood’s Beso Restaurant where young Diego works is owned by actress Eva Longoria, famed for her roles on The Young and the Restless, and Desperate Housewives. The film and television star has not issued a statement in relation to the attack.
As the manhunt for Vivian Diego’s attackers continues, we are left to speculate about the rising number of anti-gay, anti-lesbian, and transphobic bias attacks reported recently, especially in New York City where the incidents of hate crimes is spiking to record highs as LGBT Pride celebrations kick off in the Big Apple. Is this hate crime attack against a gay and transgender person connected in some copycat way to the wave of East Coast brutalities? Some pundits suggest that the recent emphasis on the high profile human rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the increasing number of states making marriage equality legal for their residents may be igniting hostility among the opponents of LGBTQ rights in America.
For now, Vivian Diego has more immediate problems: facing surgery and how to pay for it, recuperating from the shattering physical and mental experience of being attacked for who she is–a crime unthinkable among fair minded people, but brutally frequent in the swirling emotions surrounding the expansion of human rights in the United States.
Searching for LGBTQ Justice this Christmas 2012
“Magi,” J.C. Leyendecker, 1900.
“We three kings of Orient are
Bearing gifts we traverse afar.
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder star.
“O star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect Light.”
When the Reverend John Henry Hopkins Jr. wrote the lyrics for the universally loved, “We Three Kings,” in 1857, the term “homosexual” had not yet been coined, and would not be for another twelve years. We know now that “homosexuality” was a socially created term, invented by European social scientists in the latter 19th century to describe a new species of person. “Homosexuals” were a problem on the scene of the Industrial Revolution. Men (especially, at the time) were singled out and scrutinized because they were not procreating, adding children to the labor forces of the era that manned the “dark Satanic mills” of Northern and Western Europe and the United States. From the invention of homosexuality by the medico-political regimes of the age, gay men and lesbians were problems society had to examine, quarantine, and cure. So, there never was a time that “homosexuality” as a term was not biased against the humanity and dignity of same-sex loving people.
Christmas 2012 offers us a stunning perspective of change. In Europe, even as Pope Benedict XVI inveighs against gay relationships, much of the continent has embraced its LGBTQ citizens and secured their rights to live and love as the fully worthy human beings they always have been. In the United States, major strides have been taken against anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has been fully repealed, allowing fully open service in the U.S. military by LGBTQ servicepeople, and this election cycle has brought the election of the first openly lesbian U.S. Senator (Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin), three new states that have made same-sex marriage legal (Maryland, Maine, and Washington), and, for the first time, a state has refused to enact anti-LGBTQ bias into a state constitution by a public referendum (Minnesota). But, on the other hand, the murder of LGBTQ people has never been higher, tensions across the nation concerning upcoming Supreme Court rulings on Prop 8 and the constitutionality of DOMA are mounting, and there is no comprehensive federal protection for LGBTQ persons in the labor force. What are we to make of this moment in the struggle for human rights and full equality, then?
President Barack Obama who came out publicly for marriage equality in May 2012 said in an interview with Pink News, “One of the things that I’m very proud of during my first four years is I think I’ve helped to solidify this incredibly rapid transformation in people’s attitudes around LGBT issues — how we think about gays and lesbians and transgender persons.” We are engaged in changing the minds of our fellow citizens about who LGBTQ people are, as the President suggests. Instead of being a suspicious “species,” a variation of some straight ideal for human kind, we are neighbors, friends, relatives, loved ones, co-workers–in other words, everyday people as worthy of respect and acknowledgement as anyone else. And, as the President says, we are closer to changing the collective American mind in this direction than ever. Speaking of his own daughters, President Obama said, “You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.” Looking back across the last four years of his presidency, Mr. Obama observed that the United States is “steadily become a more diverse and tolerant country.
There’s been the occasional backlash, and this is not to argue that somehow racism or sexism or homophobia are going to be eliminated or ever will be eliminated,” he went on to say. “It is to argue that our norms have changed in a way that prizes inclusion more than exclusion.”
Magi, and activists, and clergy, and just plain people of good conscience still seek the Light of justice for LGBTQ people in this country and around the world. As we lean forward toward Bethlehem this Christmas season, may the searchers find courage in each other, and in the power of an idea whose time has come.
Merry Christmas to the Friends and Fans of Unfinished Lives!
Your Rights and Ours This Hallowe’en Season: A Special Comment
Dallas, Texas- In this unprecedented year of tragedy and hope, in the aftermath of the worst nature can do to many of our readers and supporters, the Unfinished Lives Project Team wishes your family and loved ones a Happy and Safe Hallowe’en. So much is at stake in this election season. Too many have lost too much to turn back now. The stance of this blog and this human rights project has been and will remain to be full of hope:
- For a better world than the LGBTQ community has ever known until now
- For the long arc of justice to bend toward all marginalized people, especially those whose lives have been touched with violence
- For the laws and protections afforded to us to be enforced swiftly, fully, and justly
- For all LGBTQ people to follow to admonition of Harvey Milk, burst down our closet doors, and begin to fight for the values we believe in
We have found allies and leaders who have our best interests at heart. We still believe in hope. That is what we are sticking with this holiday season.
- President Barack Obama has signed the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law
- President Obama has fought by our side for the full Repeal and Implementation of the Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
- President Obama has directed our Justice Department to defend DOMA no longer
- President Obama has nominated two outstanding women to the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Kegan and Justice Sotomayor
- President Obama vigorously supports the DREAM Act, allowing many LGBTQ Latinas/Latinos to live, work, and prosper in the United States–the only nation home they have ever known
- Vice President Joe Biden has blazed the trail for Transgender Rights, declaring this “The Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time”
- Both President Obama and Vice President Biden have declared their public support for Marriage Equality
- The President, therefore, deserves and has earned a second term
While we at Unfinished Lives respect choices to the contrary, to us the choice this election year could not be clearer.
Enjoy the day, then exercise your rights, and vote. Again, friends, Happy Hallowe’en. ~ The Unfinished Lives Project Team
Transphobic “Bathroom Bill” Introduced in TN Legislature
Nashville, Tennessee – A bill making the use of a bathroom by transgender persons a punishable offense is making its way through the Tennessee Legislation, according to Daily Kos. Transgender people are put in an insidious double-bind by the proposed bill: if passed, it will fine a person for the use of a restroom if the sex on that person’s birth certificate does not match the assigned sex of the toilet, while Tennessee does not allow for the sex assignment on a person’s birth certificate to be changed. The “Bathroom Bill” imposes a monetary fine on offenders – $50 – but the fine is the least of the legislation’s harm to transgender people. As Daily Kos and the Huffington Post point out, this bill would embed structural discrimination against a class of people into state law, much as sodomy laws did before the Lawrence v. Texas ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down across the nation in 2003.
The Volunteer State has entertained some of the most regressive, homophobic laws in the nation, typified by the reprehensible “Don’t Say Gay” and “License to Bully” bills, and as long as the radical, extremist right wing is in power in the state, the cavalcade of bias-driven laws is unlikely to stop. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill bans use of the words “gay” or “homosexual” in a Tennessee public school classroom (while, as Signorile says, “pervert” or “sodomite” are fine!) to prevent teaching or discussion about same-sex issues. The “License to Bully” bill, if passed, would offer protections to students who attack the legitimacy of homosexuality as a normal human variation–in effect offering cover to people who wish to bully LGBTQ students.
In a major national survey issued in October 2011, the first of its kind, transgender people in the United States were shown to be the object of discrimination in every sector of life. The Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Study, “Injustice at Every Turn,” noted that “It is a part of social and legal convention in the United States to discriminate against, ridicule, and abuse transgender and gender non-conforming people within foundational institutions such as the family, schools, the workplace and healthcare settings, every day.” This amounts to a colossal moral failure in American life, and the Tennessee bill is of a piece with this systematic and structural bias-attack on transgender people.
The ACLU decries anti-transgender “bathroom bills,” seeing such laws as fundamentally violating non-discrimination laws. Social advocacy groups within the state, such as the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition (TTPC), are opposing the bill, which was introduced by State Senator Bo Watson (R) to make Tennessee, in the words of Think Progress, “a particularly unfriendly place for transgender people.” The text of the “Bathroom Bill” may be accessed here.
As transgender advocate Ryan Sallans, writes in his popular blogsite, “I’m thinking of all you folks down in Tennessee. When is this sh*t going to stop? I just wish politicians didn’t exist, the world would be a better place. Communities should just sit down and talk, get to know each other, respect their differences and understand we all are just trying to live and make it mean something in a challenging world.” When will the sh*t stop, indeed! (Thanks for links to Dr. Jason Lamoreaux).
Gay Couple That Changed the World: John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner Remembered
Tyrone Garner (l) and John Lawrence celebrate Lawrence v. Texas.
Houston, Texas – Lawrence v. Texas, set in motion by a couple of accidental gay activists, broke the back of anti-sodomy laws in the United States. What they did amounts to the “Brown v. Board of Education for gay and lesbian America,” according to Harvard constitutional law expert, Laurence Tribe. Yet when John Geddes Lawrence, aged 68, died on November 20 of heart disease at his home in Houston, no mention of the landmark Supreme Court decision was made in the obituary or at his funeral. Tyrone Garner, the other half of this remarkable couple, had preceded Lawrence in death back in 2006. Only when a lawyer in the case, Mitchell Katine, called Lawrence to invite him to a ceremony commemorating the law-changing decision, did he receive word of Lawrence’s passing from his life-partner, according to the New York Times. Katine let the rest of the world know that an inadvertent giant in the struggle of LGBTQ equality had died.
Lawrence and Garner were arrested on September 17, 1998 for sodomy in a private home by Houston Police. The police had been called in to investigate a false weapons report by a jealous former lover of Lawrence’s, who admitted he had falsified the report as an act of revenge. Nonetheless, the arrest went down, and Lawrence and Garner, who had hooked up earlier that day, were thrust by events upon the stage of history. Lawrence was angry at the arrest, feeling that his privacy had been violated unjustly. That anger was a fire in his belly that saw the case through lower courts to the U.S. Supreme Court for its decisive ruling of June 2003, striking down anti-sodomy laws in fourteen states. Writing for five of the six Justices on the prevailing side, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared, “The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state,” he continued, “cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.” A compilation of documents and the text of Lawrence v. Texas, provided by Justia.com, the U.S. Supreme Court Center, may be accessed here.
We cannot overestimate the significance of John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner’s decision to fight back against an unjust law. So much hung in the balance. They were not professional activists, the rainbow-flag-waving kind. They were simply two gay men, attracted to each other, whose right to privacy was trampled by a legal system that upheld a heterosexist status quo. One black, one white, this gay couple set the wheels in motion for every forward step in human rights since 2003: the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 2010, and its full implementation by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and President Barack Obama in 2011, and the whole raft of same-sex marriage laws passed on the state level around the nation.
Professor Dale Carpenter, who wrote a recent book on Lawrence v. Texas, interviewed John Lawrence. In conversation, this unassuming naval veteran and obstinate gay man asked Carpenter, “Why should there be a law passed that only prosecutes certain people? Why build a law that only says, ‘Because you’re a gay man you can’t do this. But because you’re a heterosexual, you can do the same thing’?” Tyrone Garner told the Houston Chronicle in 2004 that he took quiet pride in the role he played in history. “I don’t really want to be a hero,” Garner said. “But I want to tell other gay people, ‘Be who you are, and don’t be afraid.’ ”
Sometimes a couple of men get mad, and dig in, and the world changes. That is what the LGBTQ community owes John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner. Because of their courage, the United States justice system has changed forever.
Hillary Clinton to the World: “Gay Rights are Human Rights”
Graphic from beingliberal.org on Facebook
Geneva, Switzerland – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared to the leaders of the world that LGBT rights must be a priority for the world community. As reported by the BBC, Secretary Clinton said in a speech to international diplomats at the Palais des Nations on International Human Rights Day, “Being gay is not a Western invention, it is a human reality.” In a powerful declaration of the full humanity of LGBT people, she refused to excuse discrimination against gay people because of religious beliefs or social mores: “Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority,” Clinton said to the U.N. audience, “being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” Clinton reflects the policy power of the United States government, making it clear that, despite difficulties with allies who discriminate willfully against LGBT people, the Obama Administration will combat discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexual people, and transgender people using foreign aid and diplomacy to promote change.
On violence against queer people around the world, Secretary Clinton acknowledged that there was still much to be done at home in the United States, where LGBT people were unindicted felons in 14 states as late as 2003 (when the Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling struck down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas), and many face attacks and all manner of bullying even today. Still, Clinton argued, “It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives.” The effect of these words on the continuing physical violence against LGBT people in the U.S. and throughout the world remains to be seen, but the results could be inestimable, according to Unfinished Lives Project Director, Dr. Stephen Sprinkle. “Today, Secretary Clinton served notice on all who perpetrate violence to terrorize LGBTQ people anywhere in the world that harm against this marginalized population will not be tolerated by civilized people. Cloaking anti-LGBT bigotry in religious or moral special rights is coming to a close,” Sprinkle, an ordained gay Baptist minister, said. “We are reaching the tipping point in the culture wars in this country, and the scales are falling in favor of security and justice for members of the gender variant and sexual minority. United States foreign and domestic policy has entered into a new era of advocacy for LGBTQ people on a par with racial/ethnic minority people, religious minorities, and women.”
Known for her advocacy for women and children, this speech indicates that the rights of LGBT people, always part of Mrs. Clinton’s public agenda, now has moved to a front-and-center priority for the most prominent woman in American politics. The speech was sweeping in scope, announcing that, in words redolent of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, gay rights are “inalienable.”
In the moving conclusion to her remarks, Secretary Clinton spoke directly to all gay people who find themselves persecuted and in fear of harm (and, by indirection, to their persecutors, as well): “And finally, to LGBT men and women worldwide, let me say this: Wherever you live and whatever the circumstances of your life, whether you are connected to a network of support or feel isolated and vulnerable, please know that you are not alone. People around the globe are working hard to support you and to bring an end to the injustices and dangers you face. That is certainly true for my country. And you have an ally in the United States of America and you have millions of friends among the American people.”
The full text of Secretary Clinton’s speech may be found on the State Department website by clicking here. A link to the full text of the speech, and video of Secretary Clinton delivering it, may be accessed on Huffington Post here.
About
If you are a first-time visitor to the Unfinished Lives Project website, we invite you to read A Welcome Message introducing you to our project. We are truly grateful for your visit.
The Unfinished Lives Project website is a place of public discourse which remembers and honors LGBTQ hate crime victims, while also revealing the reality of unseen violence perpetrated against people whose only “offense” is their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender presentation. LGBTQ people in the United States are suffering a slow-rolling decimation of terror and murder all across the country. Every locale and demographic of society are affected: First Nations, Anglo, Black, Latino and Latina, South and Southeast Asian, Transgender, Bisexuals, Gay men, Lesbians, disabled, young, and mature. Homophobia has a long, crooked arm, and it is reaching out to snatch the life away from women and men whose tragic stories are under-reported to begin with, and whose memories are swiftly forgotten.
The horror of these killings transcends the shock and bereavement of loved ones and friends. These are not typical homicides; they are not killings for money or drugs, incidents of domestic strife, or crimes of passion. The vicious nature of hate crimes against LGBTQ persons is extremely brutal, grotesquely violent, and egregiously hateful.
Each murder serves the LGBTQ population as a sobering warning about the actual level of danger in our communities. The message these killings send is that freedom and open life for LGBTQ people is a cruel dream. Every time we remember one of these victims, however, the intentions of their killers are frustrated. To remember these women and men is to begin the process of changing the culture that killed them.
Our Project Director
Dr. Stephen V. Sprinkle (Keith Tew photo).
Stephen V. Sprinkle is Director of Field Education and Supervised Ministry, and Professor of Practical Theology at Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas, a post he has held since 1994. An ordained Baptist minister, he is the first open and out Gay scholar in the history of the Divinity School, and the first open and out LGBTQ person to be tenured there. Read More…
Recent Social Justice Advocacy Activity By Dr. Sprinkle
Summer 2009 – Dr. Sprinkle responded to the Fort Worth Police Department and Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Raid on the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay bar, on June 28, 2009, the exact 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Dr. Sprinkle was invited to speak at three protest events sponsored by Queer LiberAction of Dallas. Here, he is keynoting the Rainbow Lounge Protest at the Tarrant County Courthouse on July 12, 2009. Read More…
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Dr. Sprinkle will gladly present his acclaimed presentation to your organization. To arrange an Unfinished Lives presentation for your organization or group, please contact us.
Dr. Sprinkle has given his Unfinished Lives presentation to these and other community groups and organizations. Read More…
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Steve Sprinkle
Unfinished Lives: Remembering LGBT Hate Crime VictimsBrite Divinity School/Texas Christian UniversityFort Worth TXprofessor, minister, author, blogger, LGBTQ advocate
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Unfinished Lives 
Hate Is In The Air: The Awful Cost of Demonizing LGBT People
Hate Crime Arson in Florida is one symptom of growing violence against the LGBT community.
Sarasota, Florida – The Associated Press carried this headline at 2 a.m. on September 11: Investigators Search for Man Who Set Fire at Gay Nightclub. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department officials say that neighbors of the popular gay nightclub reported it being on fire at approximately 9 a.m. this past Sunday. Officers are searching for a man in a dark, long-sleeved shirt and light colored shorts, carrying a gas can, who walked up the door of Throb Nightclub, and had his image captured by a surveillance video camera. He allegedly started the fire and ran from the scene. Authorities of the Florida State Fire Marshall’s Arson Unit and the sheriff’s office are asking the cooperation of the public in the search for a hate-filled perpetrator.
This troubling story caught the attention of Vicki Nantz, documentary film maker and LGBT advocate, who traces this anti-LGBT violence back to the speech and actions of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk jailed for contempt of court for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses, and her attorney and co-founder of arch-conservative Liberty Counsel Mat Staver. Nantz, Producer/Director of films investigating violence against women and the LGBT community, warns her Facebook friends on this 9/11, “Be safe out there, everyone. Hate is in the air.”
What 9/11 has to do with an outbreak of anti-LGBT violence in southwest Florida fourteen years since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon, and the highjacking of United Airlines 93, drew the attention of Diana Butler Bass, the widely acclaimed commentator on the United States religious scene. Bass wrote on her Facebook wall for September 11, “One day, someone will write a book about how, in the early 21st century, we went from fearing and hating terrorists to fearing and hating people of differing political opinions. The sad and haunting legacy of 9/11 is thus.”
Fr. Mychal Judge and Mark Bingham, gay heroes of 9/11
The disrubing irony of the heightened atmosphere of anti-LGBT rhetoric and violence on the 2015 anniversary of 9/11 noted by Nantz and Butler Bass is the courageous role openly gay heroes played on September 11, 2001. The Rev. Fr. Mychal Judge, Franciscan Chaplain of FDNY and one of the first firefighters to die in the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, won his title as “the Saint of 9/11” that day. Avid rugby player Mark Bingham was one of the brave and desperate men who stormed the cockpit of UA Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, sacrificing himself to bring down the jet liner before its hijackers succeeded in crashing it into the White House or the U.S. Capitol Building. Both were openly gay men who threw themselves into the breach for their fellow human beings at a time of crisis and disaster. Both died sacrificially, not as any of the demeaning epithets being aimed at LGBT people by Cruz, Huckabee, Staver and their ilk since the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states, but as American heroes.
Butler Bass makes a convincing connection between the fear of terrorists stoked by politicians and pundits since the original September 11, and the demonization of persons of differing political views today. Fear not only twists the guts of the public. Its primitive energy offers craven haters with an ideological agenda to advance a ready vehicle to advance it. And she is also right that fear of the other has seeped so deeply into the American psyche that no community is immune from the temptation to spread rumor and innuendo against those who oppose them politically. Some LGBT people, for example, have indulged themselves in making cruel comments about the physical appearance of Kim Davis and her marital history. The vulnerability of LGBT people in America, however, calls for a reconsideration of post-9/11 manipulation of public fear.
Nantz helps us see that the threat of acts of violence against the lives and property of LGBT people is not simply another example of the political system in the Washington beltway gone awry. It has real consequences, from the arson at a gay nightclub to the epidemic murders of transgender women of color throughout the country. The hate in the air in post-9/11 America is a combination of the historical cultural loathing of LGBT people, and the cynical manipulation of a once-supreme white patriarchal group by the likes of presidential candidates and their legal and media henchmen. While they would deny any connection between their incitement of anti-LGBT sentiment and any outbreak of violence, their words and deeds are in the background of every hate crime perpetrated against the sexual and non-normative gender communities of America, and the reach of their cynical ideology is increasingly global. This anniversary of 9/11, our LGBT neighbors, families, co-workers, and friends are less safe in their persons, jobs, and property than they were even a year ago.
How we have declined from honoring the LGBT heroes of September 11 for their courage and sacrifice, to this 9/11 anniversary when anti-LGBT fear is being manipulated by calls for so-called “Religious Liberty” (read, “the re-imposition of oppression against gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual people”), is the book that cries out for someone to write. Hate is in the air this 9/11, and what it portends is something every American should be worried about.
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September 11, 2015 Posted by unfinishedlives | 9/11, Anti-LGBT hate crime, Arson, Diana Butler Bass, Flight 93, Florida, Fr. Mychal Judge, Gay Bars, gay men, GLBTQ, Hate Crimes, hate speech, Heterosexism and homophobia, Kentucky, LGBTQ, Liberty Counsel, Mark Bingham, Mat Staver, Mike Huckabee, New York City, Pennsylvania, Perpetrators of Hate Crime, religious hate speech, religious intolerance, Same-sex marriage, Special Comments, Ted Cruz, transgender persons, Transgender women, U.S. Supreme Court, Vicki Nantz Films, Washington | 9/11, Anti-LGBT hate crime, anti-LGBT hate crime murder, Arson, Diana Butler Bass, Flight 93, Florida, Fr. Mychal Judge, Gay Bars, gay men, GLBTQ, Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and homophobia, Kentucky, Kim Davis, LGBTQ, Liberty Counsel, Mark Bingham, Mat Staver, Mike Huckabee, New York, Pennsylvania, religious hate speech, religious intolerance, Religious Liberty, Ted Cruz, transgender persons, Vicki Nantz Films, World Trade Center | 2 Comments