Ramblings of a Gay Pagan in Erie PA.

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I have really been feeling overwhelmed of late. I am just juggling a lot of projects (Erie Gay News going to press this weekened, Drenched Fur happening the week after - pray for me!) I am hoping that the various bits don’t collide with each other.

One of the columnists for Erie Gay News is about done with the previous batch of columns, so I recently emailed him to let him know about renewing. I wasn’t sure if he recalled all the columns he had sent before, so I directed him to the page that groups together features. A while ago, I added some code so that when I link an article to a feature or an author, there is a page generated which displays all of the articles related to that and the number of hits.

The columnist sent me a very nice email and also a voice mail stating how much he appreciated that feedback. It made me feel very good. I spend a fair amount of time playing around with various aspects of the Erie Gay News site, and it’s nice to know when it is helpful.

Joy and gratitude

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With today officially being meeting hell, I thought that I might be irritated or grouchy after 3 meetings right in a row.It was actually a very uplifting day! The picnic meeting went very well. When I walked in to Presque Isle Gallery Coffeehouse playing music as part of a peace and justice event. The meeting went well, and there was a lot of good energy and ideas generated. At one point, I heard the guitarist play  “The Times, They are Changin’”, which I have recently been obsessively playing. Hearing it in the background as I was at the meeting was transcendently blissful. It sounds like the fundraising activity for the picnic that we are adding this year is going along well.

After that, 2 of the folks who had been at the picnic meeting came to another meeting about fighting against an anti-gay marriage amendment in Pennsylvania. It was fairly productive. It got done quickly enough to go home and help Deb with some computer stuff.

The Drenched Fur meeting also went fairly well, and I am glad at how things are coming together.

So, for having all kinds of good people around me, and the chance to be involved in my community, I am deeply grateful.

Happiness

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We had some absolutely kick-ass volunteers at folding for Erie Gay News tonight. I am so grateful for all of the wonderful people who help us. We got done relatively early, quite possibly earlier than we have ever completed before. The hosts for tonight had yummy snacks on hand, which was very thoughtful of them.

As a delightful bonus, there was frolicking this evening. We do so love that.

Okay, so I am in a good mood right now. About to turn in.

Cropping a crop

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Last night, I went to see FACE, the drag show at the Zone Dance Club that happens the 3rd Sunday of the month. It was Michelle Michaels birthday, so I hurried completing the newsletter and dashed off. My friend Season was acting as stage director with a clipboard and a riding crop. We thought that it made for a good photo, so I snapped that with some others.

Co-editor Deb was over today to fix photos that we had previously taken. However, the tool in Photoshop that lets one specify a particular area and then remove everything out of it was forcing all the selections to be square, which limited how much she could get done.

I did some research and called her. It turns out that she had the photo of Season with the riding crop on the screen. Deb figured out what we needed after I started, and we both noted that it was incredibly apropos to crop a photo that included a crop.

Deb had recently talked about linking to various audio files at the Erie Gay News site. it occurred to me that it was a very similar set up to what we already have with embedding video, although there were some differences. I looked around and decided to go with the Yahoo Media Player for embedding audio files on the site. I had to play around a bit with the tables and coding, but now it is set to go. I added an RSS feed for audio galleries, links to the audio gallery section when it exists in all the articles, created a page for the audio gallery (I figure that since we already have pages that group video and photos by year, why not do the same for audio?) and burned a feed on Feedburner to boot.

There are only a few entries in there now, but it will be very easy to add stuff in the future.

One of the first tests that I did was embedding an interview with the producers of Out in the Silence on the page that announces the screening at the library in Westfield NY next week.

Ordinarily, I try not to slip into Ice Queen Demon Bitch Goddess from Hell Royale mode (but being gay and having French ancestry), the genetic predisposition is definitely there.

A while ago, I got some right wing press release. I may have gotten it more than once, but I definitely recall unsubscribing from the link at the bottom of the email. I didn’t send back a nasty reply, I just did my best to remove myself from a list that I had NOTHING in common with.

So, today, I got the following bolus in my email from the same outfit:

Press Release

STATEMENT

Contact:  jmattbarber@comcast.net - 202-255-1959

DATE: February 10, 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Reportedly “Gay” Prop 8 Judge Should Recuse Himself

Lynchburg, VA – Matt Barber, Director of Cultural Affairs with Liberty Counsel, released the following statement today on news that the San Francisco Chronicle has “outed” 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Vaughn Walker as an active practitioner of the homosexual lifestyle. Judge Walker has presided over California’s Proposition 8 case filed by homosexual extremists who seek to manufacture a constitutional “right” to so-called “same-sex marriage:”

“The revelation that Judge Walker apparently chooses to engage in homosexual conduct, if true, would explain much of his bizarre behavior throughout this trial,” said Barber. “At every turn he’s displayed extreme bias in favor of his similarly situated homosexual activist plaintiffs. These individuals have eschewed the democratic process and seek to employ like-minded judicial activists to radically redefine the millennia-old definition of natural marriage.

“Enter Judge Walker. In unprecedented form, and to plaintiffs’ delight, he has created a circus-like atmosphere throughout. He even violated federal rules by deciding to allow the trial to be broadcast worldwide, but was subsequently shot-down and sharply rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for doing so.

“Unfortunately, the damage was already done,” continued Barber. “Prop 8 supporters lost around two-thirds of expert witnesses who, naturally – based on homosexuals’ violent reaction to passage of Prop 8 – feared for their own safety and for that of family members.

“Judge Walker then ordered Prop 8 proponents to disclose private communications, work product, emails and campaign strategies to plaintiffs while – in an example of jaw-dropping inequality – permitted plaintiffs to keep the same materials secret.

“He also allowed plaintiffs a parade of ‘expert’ witnesses who viciously maligned Christians and other observers of natural and historic sexual morality as ‘prejudiced,’ ‘bigoted’ and ‘homophobic.’

“This is no different than having an avid gun collector preside over a Second Amendment case,” continued Barber, “or a frequent user of medical marijuana deciding the legality of medical marijuana. Even his fellow judges on the notoriously liberal 9th Circuit have been forced to step-in and overturn more than one of his inexplicable rulings relative to this case. Based on his demonstrated misbehavior, there’s no reason to believe anything will change.

“At worst, Judge Walker’s continued involvement with this case presents a textbook conflict of interest. At best, it objectively illustrates the unseemly appearance of a conflict. If Judge Walker somehow divines from thin air that the framers of the U.S. Constitution actually intended that Patrick Henry had a ‘constitutional right’ to marry Henry Patrick, then who among us will be surprised?

“Any decision favoring plaintiffs in this case will be permanently marred and universally viewed as stemming from Judge Walker’s personal biases and alleged lifestyle choices. For these reasons, and in the interest of justice, Judge Walker should do the honorable thing and immediately recuse himself.”

###

Lovely, huh? (And from what I have read, the “expert” witnesses that the “protectors” of marriage had were pretty much not qualified and just spewing back what the attorneys told them to. Feared for their safety, hmm? The same folks who depict gay men as weak sissified wimps are now apparently living in terror of us.

So, not only had I not requested the initial email, but I had dutifully done my best to unsubscribe previous to getting the recent one. If someone intrudes when I have asked them not to, then they have forfeited the right to restraint (I.e. No more Mr. Nice Gay!)

This, I replied back with

Remove me from your email list immediately. Why on Earth are you sending this sort of "Christian" trash to a gay publication anyway? And will you stop putting gay in quotes? It is incredibly rude. As an active practitioner of the penile-vaginal intercourse lifestyle, I am sure that you can understand.

So, you would also agree that in a case about school prayer a Christian judge should recuse him/herself? Gay folks are automatically biased and straight folks are automatically not? (I.e. if the judge was a heterosexual Evangelical Christian, and gays claimed that person was biased, then you would agree with that, right??)

Stop spamming me with your drivel.

The boogerheads better not send something back. It really annoys me when people place words that my community uses to refer to itself in quotes – it is incredibly passive aggressive, as if they are somehow more knowledgeable about us than we are about ourselves.

Too funny! The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), consisting basically of Rev. Fred Phelps and his rather mentally askew family protested outside the offices of Twitter in San Francisco.

There were counter-protesters at the ready with some truly delightful signs.  A personal fave: God hates #tags! - a reference to the church’s official site, God Hates Fags and the hash tags used to find info about a particular topic on Twitter. Gay and geeky – gotta love it!

According to the article, one of the younger women from WBC was tweeting WHILE they were protesting Twitter. I am guessing that A) these folks didn’t have their irony detector turned on and B) she must have been chosen by virtue of having opposable thumbs and being able to walk upright, or something.

Kudos to those folks who met with the face of hatred and laughed right back at it!

Westboro Baptist Church Protests, Gets Protested Outside Twitter

Yesterday, the Westboro Baptist Church and their subtly-named picket group, God Hates Fags, brought their dog-and-pony-show to San Francisco. That's right -- the freaky people came to freak out the freaky people.
The religious group, based in Topeka, Kansas, usually pickets soldiers' funerals, reasoning that they died defending a gay-loving country. Thursday, they set their sights on a larger target: the headquarters of the social-media giant Twitter.

Westboro Baptist Church Protests, Gets Protested Outside Twitter - Asylum.com

I woke up feeling geeky this morning. Admittedly, when don’t I? It occurred to me that there is a fair amount of time we have an event at the Erie Gay News web site that has a URL to RSVP/register/buy tickets for, so why not add a field to link for that? That might help organizers better plan and since it is just a URL, I don’t have to fiddle so much with the event when I paste it in.

I made sure to not only add it to the calendar page, but the calendar RSS feed as well, which means that all of the sites carrying our calendar will also get the RSVP/registration URL's when they are filled in.

Hmm, I should probably come up with a page to request submitting an event. Maybe sometime soon. I still need to reset the newsletter.

A busy Monday

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Don’t tell me I don’t know how to multi-task! I was home for lunch on Monday and was trying to get the envelopes and labels generated and set up for the folding of Erie Gay News this Thursday. (And I got notice earlier today that the order has shipped, so it looks like we are on time. Yay!)

I had run out of a prescription, and we also changed insurance providers. So, while I am printing labels and envelopes and sticking the former onto the latter, I am juggling phone calls to the doctor’s office and the insurance provider, since it seems that the prescription isn’t covered by the new provider. Fortunately, there is an equivalent, so things are cool.

After work, I headed over to the Erie Mondays at Matthew’s at Matthew’s Trattoria. It was okay. I mostly chatted with religious study faculty from Mercyhurst.

After that, I went home to grab some dinner and let the dogs out. Then I popped over to Nelson’s tavern to the going away party for my friends Jo and Josh, who just got married and are relocating to Oregon after stopping off in to visit Florida. (Okay, not the most linear travel path, but sounds like fun.)

I also stopped in at Craze to confirm that we are on for the GLBT Legislation Advocacy meeting on February 18 at 7 PM. I then went home and finished some geek tasks.

Tonight was pretty much a “I think I need to be in a coma for a little bit”, although I did get some geek stuff taken care of.

Tomorrow is the State of the Union Address Watch Party at Matthew’s Trattoria and Thursday is folding at the Zone Dance Club.

Nate Silver rightly points out here that it is not clear where causation might lie. However, I think that anyone could find meaningful statistical data that supports the absurd claim that denying same-sex couples equality under law IN ANY WAY harms the marriages of opposite sex couples.

To put it more simply, the same folks making this claim are the very same folks who didn’t get Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Neal Patrick Harris and other folks before they came out. If you can’t reliably identify a population or a phenomenon, then it is exceedingly silly to claim that you will be affected by it.

Using gay couples as scapegoats doesn’t help heterosexual marriage. At the end of it all, any relationship is about the people involved in it, and not about some group of outsiders. Duh.

Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans

by Nate Silver @ 4:12 AM

Over the past decade or so, divorce has gradually become more uncommon in the United States. Since 2003, however, the decline in divorce rates has been largely confined to states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. These states saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent between 2003 and 2008. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban as of January 1, 2008, however, saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period.
The table below details the divorce rates for the 43 states that reported their divorce statistics to the CDC in both 2003 and 2008. It is calculated by taking the total number of divorces in the state that year, and dividing it by the number of married persons, as reported by the Census Bureau. The result is then multiplied by two, since each divorce involves two people. This is different than how the divorce rate is sometimes calculated, which may be as a share of the overall population rather than the number of married persons; I prefer my approach because it will not penalize a state for having a lot of marriages (and therefore more opportunities for divorce). However, there are also more complicated versions of the divorce rate calculation that account for the age of the married couples, and so forth; these are probably superior, but mine is intended to be a simple approach. The table also lists the percentage change in the divorce rate between 2003 and 2008, and the current status of gay marriage and domestic partnerships within each state.

(More at the link below)

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans

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