Fears are growing for the fate of thousands of young girls in rural Mauritania, where campaigners say the cruel practice of force-feeding young girls for marriage is making a significant comeback since a military junta took over the West African country.
Aminetou Mint Ely, a women’s rights campaigner, said girls as young as five were still being subjected to the tradition of leblouh every year. The practice sees them tortured into swallowing gargantuan amounts of food and liquid — and consuming their vomit if they reject it.
“In Mauritania, a woman’s size indicates the amount of space she occupies in her husband’s heart,” said Mint Ely, head of the Association of Women Heads of Households. ”We have gone backwards. We had a Ministry of Women’s Affairs. We had achieved a parliamentary quota of 20% of seats. We had female diplomats and governors. The military have set us back by decades, sending us back to our traditional roles. We no longer even have a ministry to talk to.” …
A children’s rights lawyer, Fatimata M’baye, echoed Ely’s pessimism. … “The politicians are scared of questioning their own traditions. Rural marriages usually take place under customary law or are overseen by a marabou (a Muslim preacher). ..”
Leblouh is intimately linked to early marriage and often involves a girl of five, seven or nine being obliged to eat excessively to achieve female roundness and corpulence, so that she can be married off as young as possible. Girls from rural families are taken for leblouh at special “fattening farms” where older women, or the children’s aunts or grandmothers, will administer pounded millet, camel’s milk and water in quantities that make them ill. A typical daily diet for a six-year-old will include two kilos of pounded millet, mixed with two cups of butter, as well as 20 litres of camel’s milk. “The fattening is done during the school holidays or in the rainy season when milk is plentiful,” said M’baye. “The girl is sent away from home without understanding why. She suffers but is told that being fat will bring her happiness. Matrons use sticks which they roll on the girl’s thighs, to break down tissue and hasten the process.”
Other leblouh practices include a subtle form of torture — zayar — using two sticks inserted each side of a toe. When a child refuses to drink or eat, the matron squeezes the sticks together, causing great pain. A successful fattening process will see a 12-year-old weigh 80kg [over 176 lbs]. “If she vomits she must drink it. …”
Historians say the practice dates back to pre-colonial times when all Mauritania’s white Moor Arabs were nomads. The richer the man, the less his wife would do — the preference being for her to sit still all day in her tent while her black slaves saw to household chores. … Fattening of girls is practised beyond Mauritania, in northern Mali and rural Niger — areas conquered, along with half of present-day Spain and Portugal, by the Almoravid dynasty in the 11th century. The practice of fattening also continues in Nigeria’s Calabar state and north Cameroon. …
I don’t know any more than the San Jose Mercury News tells me, but it sounds ug-leeeeee — ugly enough for DeFrank Center staffers to call the police when— well, you read it:
(That’s the professional, technical term, barfing.)
You can probably view comments, but for now, you can’t post comments. But keep trying — and say a novena or chant or something for Haloscan to come back up. (The Haloscan people cite “server problems” — which is another professional, technical term, meaning: “We don’t know what the fark is wrong,” or “Our intern spilled a Coke down the back of the server”).
The excerpt below comes in the midst of a long article from the OC Register you should read, “Gay couples await Thursday’s Prop. 8 challenge,” which highlights Laguna Beach as the lone island of sanity in the deep-red sea of homo-hatred called Orange County, save for a few cognitively-dissonant homophobic bigots… like this one:
Laguna Beach resident Sheri Barry, a proponent of Proposition 8, said she joined her family at city demonstrations that were “ignored” by local media during the election season.
The Barrys had planned to protest the city’s decision at the March 3 City Council meeting, but decided to forego their plans after she said the family received “threats” in comments to an earlier story on the Orange County Register’s website.
“All I know is that (council members) aren’t representing the entire city, and shouldn’t get involved in politics – it’s not what the city is for, it’s for helping (the city) be successful,” she said.
She “loves” gays and is only trying to help by encouraging them to develop a relationship with God, Barry said, adding that her Christian views consider homosexuality a “rebellion against God” akin to alcoholism and drug addiction – rebellions that she argues have shaken the moral and social foundations of the United States.
“There are some whacko Christians out there, and if I ever saw one call a gay person a f–, I would be the first person in their face saying ‘no – don’t you dare talk to them that way,’ ” she said. “I’m not saying the heterosexuals are (necessarily) any better. If they are in rebellion of God, sin is sin.”
Hey, dingleberry, guess what? You are one of those “whacko Christians.”
And until the day you learn I don’t give a rip what you think your god thinks, you will always be a “whacko Christian.” Calling somebody a “fag” is not the demarcation point between whacko and non-whacko — a point you crossed, Little Miss I-Love-Teh-Gays, a long time ago.
UPDATE: The page is gone, as it should be, and there is a comment here. AFAIC, that ends the problem.
O.P.: I’m documenting this incident here, 1) because I want a public record of it; 2) so that the creep who ripped me off stands a chance of seeing it (anyone who knows him — perhaps someone who posts on his piddly little message board — is more than welcome to contact him directly and send him here to read this post); 3) to warn the world at large about the underhanded goings-on at WhiteRabbitCult.com; and 4) to ask: “Why do people steal”?
Remember this? It became the most popular post of 2008 on The Lavender Newswire:
The problem should be obvious. In my original post on May 11, 2008, I granted permission to download the graphic and re-post it, “provided you leave it as is.” Whoever runs WhiteRabbitCult.com removed the LavenderLiberal.com URL from the graphic, replaced it with “whiterabbitcult.com” and claimed the graphic as his own (even captioning it “White Rabbit Cults [sic] Guide To Obamaiac [sic] Behavior Cycle”). That’s like posting an AP wire photo and claiming that you took the picture.
That’s illegal. And not smart.
This blatant attempt to claim my original work as his own doesn’t even come near falling under “Fair Use”; he simply ripped me off, and hoped I wouldn’t find out about it.
I have been trying to leave a message for the owner of the site (his anti-spam mechanism does not work, and rejects all comments to the post, and his shout box does not work); a WHOIS on the domain name gives me nothing but a fax number and a suspicious-looking gmail.com address. I was willing to give the shameless rip-off artist the chance to remove the graphic before taking further action, but as he has left me no way to contact him, I phoned his registrar, GoDaddy.com — which is now investigating his WHOIS information.
Heads up, WhiteRabbitCult.com: The GoDaddy.com rep advised I file an “invalid WHOIS” complaint (which I did), and told me that if GoDaddy.com can’t contact you through your existing WHOIS info, they will shut down your entire site. (I’m not kidding, and neither was GoDaddy.com.) So you’d better update your domain registration, with a working voice phone number and verifiable email address, now. Of course, this also means that I will then be able to contact you (or that mysterious “AZ Prime Hosting” operating out of a PO box in Surprise, Arizona) directly, and demand you remove the graphic, and never use it again.
If all else fails, I will indeed take legal action; it doesn’t cost that much to file a small claim, and the expense and effort is worth it to me.
In the meantime, I found one lead: a PayPal donation link on the WhiteRabbitCult.com site. Clicking it shows the email address of the recipient: steve@cyloncorp.com. I went to the cyloncorp.com site (warning: extremely Flash-heavy, and could slow your browser to a crawl), and sent this message through its contact form:
If there is a “steve@cyloncorp.com”, please have him contact me regarding blatant copyright violation of my original work on his Web site, WhiteRabbitCult.com. I found the email address “steve@cyloncorp.com” as the recipient of PayPal donations for WhiteRabbitCult.com, and have no other way to contact him. If he does not remove the offending graphic immediately, I will take legal action. I will appreciate your relaying this warning to “steve@cyloncorp.com”. Thank you.
I receive an automatic message from one jason@cyloncorp.com confirming that my message had been received. We’ll see what comes of it, if anything. But rest assured, this is not over.
Can anyone answer this? Why would anyone take a graphic for which I granted permission to reproduce freely, as long as it was not modified, and then claim credit for it? Is anyone so stupid as to think I’d never find out about it? Or that I wouldn’t care? Or that I wouldn’t do anything about it? Or are people like this just so arrogant that they think the law (not to mention simple human decency and fair play) does not apply to them?
This is not the first time my original work has been ripped off, without so much as attribution — nor is it the first time I have taken action against the violator, successfully.
The last time, some jerk reproduced one of my Conservative Babylon entries word for word, and presented it as his own on some bizarre religious site. With no way to contact that jerk, I went straight to his ISP, which shut down his entire site within 12 hours of my compaint. (The site was back up a few weeks later, minus the page in question — which was fine by me; all I wanted was the removal of my original work… although I admit I experienced some genuine Schadenfreude when I saw the entire site was dead, and while imagining what hoops the owner had to jump through to get it back online.)
Anyway, I just don’t get it. Whether this sort of theft (and that’s what it is: theft) is discovered immediately, or months later, the perpetrator will be caught out.
And when you steal from me, I will do something about it.
He did OK. Your guy did very, very OK. I haven’t got any complaints. Yet.
Sorry, should have warned you. Now ask someone nearby to help you replace your jaw back into its socket.
On the flip side, I have a question:
Is Bobby Jindal retarded? No, I mean really retarded, in the clinical sense.
Or is his target audience retarded? He speaks as if he were the star of “Sesame Street: The Developmentally Disabled Edition.”
This is the first time I’ve heard Jindal speak live (”live” is an assumption; he’s more like a Disney Animatronics reject), and I had no idea he was this… squirrely. That’s the only word I can come up with: squirrely. Or moran. A squirrely moran.
“A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage,” co-written for the New York Times by anti-gay activist David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values (rule: beware any organization that uses the word “values” in its name) — who had the rest of the anti-gays spraying their pants over his “I’m a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage” snowjob op/ed last September — is the biggest steaming pile I’ve seen since… well, since Blankenhorn wrote his “I’m a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage” snowjob op/ed last September. On the surface, it’s just more baby spew from the anti-equality brigades, and something I would have dismissed as such without bringing it to your attention, except for one thing: Jonathan Rauch’s name as co-author on the byline.
Rauch, a longtime writer for Independent Gay Forum (which is where I discovered him, in the days when there were about three of us using the Internet), has always been too conservative for my comfort; while he wrote the book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, he also has a strong tendency to fall right into the trap of allowing the anti-gays to frame the debate — beginning with the idea that marriage equality should even be debated in the first place — and gives up far too much ground in his willingness to leave it — “it” being marriage equality, abortion, or whatever else is bothering him — “to the states” (i.e., the old separate but equal canard). Sometimes openly, and sometimes furtively (but probably unknowingly), Rauch extends “respect” to the promotion of blatant anti-gay bigotry, as if it were a legitimate alternative point of view. (Hint: It’s not.) “Let States Lead” is typical of his constant compulsion to capitulate.
Which brings us to the Blankenhorn-Rauch NYT op/ed, the basic thrust of which is: Let’s “compromise” on marriage equality.
It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage.
Hey, guys, guess what? That’s exactly what Barack Obama proposes to do (whether he does or not, or whether he can or not, is another story), so it’s not like you came up with a revolutionary new idea. The difference is that Obama’s plan would give us all the privileges of marriage, not some or “most.” (Christ, I can’t believe I’m practically defending Obama when I don’t believe a word our new president says about the issue; that’s how boneheaded Blankenhorn and Rauch’s “idea” is by comparison.)
But wait — it gets stupider:
But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.
How can I say this nicely? I know: You dopes. Religious organizations are ALREADY PROTECTED in their “right” to discriminate against anyone they want, on the federal level. Ever hear of a thing called the First Amendment, boys? Specifically that little business about “free exercise”?
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Word to the wise, boys: Don’t give up your day jobs to become constitutional scholars.
But wait — it gets even worse:
Further sharpening the conflict is the potential interaction of same-sex marriage with antidiscrimination laws. The First Amendment may make it unlikely that a church, say, would ever be coerced by law into performing same-sex wedding rites in its sanctuary. But religious organizations are also involved in many activities outside the sanctuary. What if a church auxiliary or charity is told it must grant spousal benefits to a secretary who marries her same-sex partner or else face legal penalties for discrimination based on sexual orientation or marital status? What if a faith-based nonprofit is told it will lose its tax-exempt status if it refuses to allow a same-sex wedding on its property?
Rauch, you put your name on this crap? After these baseless bogeymen have been debunked countless times? Never mind that you grant that’s it’s “unlikely” a church “would ever be coerced by law into performing same-sex wedding rites” — you just planted that seed in the mind of the reader: “It’s unlikely, but it could happen!” Planting doubt while feigning reassurance is the oldest trick in the book (and I’m convinced this cagily-crafted phrasing is Blankenhorn’s contribution).
Let’s set everybody (including the authors) straight, so to speak, on the unfounded junk in this paragraph. Apparently, Dave-O and Jonny, nobody sent you my “Six Big Lies the Freedom-Haters Are Spreading About Proposition 8.” Read it now, and pay special attention to Big Lie #2 — “Churches will be sued if they refuse to allow same-sex marriage ceremonies in their religious buildings that are open to the public. Ask whether your pastor, priest, minister, bishop, or rabbi is ready to perform such marriages in your chapels and sanctuaries” — and to my response, the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of which is this:
• Churches cannot be forced to perform marriages for anyone. For this to change, you’d have to gut the “free exercise” clause from the First Amendment.
• If church-owned facilities are already open to the public, then yes, the owner could be sued for refusing to allow access to same-sex couples. The solution: Keep the facilities private.
As for “What if a church auxiliary or charity is told it must grant spousal benefits to a secretary who marries her same-sex partner or else face legal penalties for discrimination based on sexual orientation or marital status?” I’ll you exactly what, via Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic (yes, the liberal magazine) in his article, “Charitable Choice & Hiring Practices“:
At the end of January—
—in the year 2001—
—President Bush signed an executive order removing impediments to charitable choice, which allows religious as well as secular organizations to administer federal social service programs.
…Bush proposes to exempt religious organizations that receive government funds from federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion. “Faith-Based Prescription for Discrimination,” shrieks the ACLU’s website. “Under the Bush initiative, for example, a Catholic church receiving public funds for literacy programs could fire a teacher for getting pregnant outside of marriage.”
In his most irritating (but enlightening) defense of allowing churches to discriminate freely on your tax dollar, Rosen continues:
It may seem that religious organizations are asking for special treatment when they demand the right to engage in discrimination with public money, accepting public funds but not the restrictions that usually accompany them. But it’s obvious, on reflection, that without the ability to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring and firing staff, religious organizations lose the right to define their organizational mission enjoyed by secular organizations that receive public funds. As Ira C. Lupu of George Washington University Law School has argued, Planned Parenthood may refuse to hire those who don’t share its views about abortion; equal treatment requires that churches, mosques, and synagogues have the same right to discriminate on ideological grounds. The Supreme Court accepted this reasoning in 1988, when it upheld religious nonprofits’ exemption from the federal law prohibiting religious discrimination.
And by extending this exemption to religious groups that receive government funds, the charitable-choice law is careful to insist that these groups can discriminate in the hiring of staff but not in the treatment of beneficiaries. In other words, a Baptist church may refuse to hire Jews as drug counselors, but it may not refuse to serve Jews who ask for drug counseling. Under charitable choice, the requirements of anti-discrimination law extend not to providers but to beneficiaries.
It’s not hard to understand why faith-based organizations need to discriminate on the basis of religion to maintain their essentially religious character. A Jewish organization forced to hire Baptists soon ceases to be Jewish at all. … If you want to work in a Baptist soup kitchen, all you have to do is become a Baptist.
While Rosen worries about churches retaining the right to discriminate based on gender and against people who, as he puts it, “refuse to conform to traditional gender roles” (as if it were a choice), he admits that the Supreme Court of the United States “refused to prevent the [Boy Scouts of America] from discriminating against a gay scoutmaster,” and opines that, to “protect the integrity of their religious message, faith-based organizations, too, should be able to refuse to hire drug counselors whose lifestyles conflict with their traditional beliefs — that single women should remain chaste before marriage, for example, or shouldn’t work without their fathers’ consent. The Boy Scouts case suggests that religious and nonreligious private associations should receive exemptions from sex discrimination laws whenever necessary to preserve their distinctive character.”
And:
In recent cases, some churches have taken the disingenuous position that they don’t discriminate on the basis of sex but should be spared the requirement to defend their hiring and firing practices in court because the First Amendment gives them a blanket exemption from having to answer to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the spirit of the Boy Scouts case, faith-based organizations should be free to discriminate only if they are willing to take the political heat.
They should be willing to take the political heat, and forfeit all public funding, including tax exemptions. Oh, I’m sure David Blankenhorn and his ilk will scream like little girls at that, but that’s the trade-off: I’ll support your right to discriminate against me in your private religious organization, as long as you don’t get a penny of my money to fund your discriminatory practices. (You want “compromise,” righties? Well, “compromise” means neither of us can have it one way — and yet while you have free reign to do whatever you want, I’m being forced to fund you. But we’ll come back to LGBTs’ ongoing taxation without representation another day).
Still (and unfortunately), for the time being, churches have every right to discriminate against LGBTs. So cut the crap, Blankenhorn — and Rauch.
Back to the NYT piece. Our feckless fearmongerers continue:
Yes, most gays are opposed to the idea that religious organizations could openly treat same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples differently, without fear of being penalized by the government. But we believe that gays can live with such exemptions without much difficulty. Why? Because most state laws that protect gays from discrimination already include some religious exemptions, and those provisions are for the most part uncontroversial, even among gays.
If you admit “most state laws that protect gays from discrimination already include some religious exemptions,” then why did you just waste all that ink fretting about “the potential interaction of same-sex marriage with antidiscrimination laws”? You just shot down your own bogeyman about churches being “coerced by law into performing same-sex wedding rites” and all the rest of the nonsense in the same paragraph.
Jiminy Christmas, boys, if you’re going to spew anti-equality rhetoric, at least try to make it sound as if you’re following something remotely resembling a logical train of thought. You’re making it way too easy to show your “ideas” up as the half-baked malarkey they are.
A successful template already exists: laws that protect religious conscience in matters pertaining to abortion. These statutes allow Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide abortions, for example.
Uh… Duh! I just finished explaining that — churches have the right to discriminate, in accordance with their deeply held bigotry beliefs.
There’s more cringemaking capitulation (and condescension) at the link, if you can stomach it. The piece ends with a confirmation of what I read into it, from the very first reading, from the very first line: Blankenhorn and Rauch each think he’s on the losing side of the marriage equality battle, and, rather than stand strong for his principles, right or wrong, each figures he’d better cave, at least partway, before losing the entire war. (That, or both are incurable narcissists who probably have some bright ideas for achieving peace in the Middle East overnight, too.)
Most telling, however, is the very first sentence:
In politics, as in marriage, moments come along when sensitive compromise can avert a major conflict down the road.
“Avert a major conflict down the road”? Avert? Down the road? Boys, have you been sharing a coma a deux for the past nine months? We are in the midst of a major conflict, and you can’t “avert” something that’s already in progress.
Rant, for now, off.
Addendum: My lovely wife informs me she has just posted her take on this piece. I haven’t read her post yet, and won’t until after I post this; I’m curious to see how our views compare, but I have a hunch we’ll be very much on the same page, as it were — although Buffy will, undoubtedly, as always, make her points with far more clarity, precision, and beautiful brevity than I ever could.
I suppose it was really only a matter of time before some bigot ripped one of my wife’s bumper stickers off the back of her car (see my rant and a link to my wife’s post here); in fact, I was surprised no one stole our No On 8 sign out of our yard in the days leading up to the election. Of course, that thought doesn’t make this seemingly small incident any less irritating — or is it so “small”?
After blogging about the bumper sticker theft, we came up with a solution to thwart the next thief (or perhaps some bigot who may decide to key the car, or worse): an automatic Web cam that will record any goings-on around my wife’s car, especially while we’re asleep. In fact, I constructed a cheerful little sign (above) for my wife’s back window to warn away miscreants. (Far be it from us to “surveil” anyone without their knowledge, even on our own private property).
While we were outside taking the above picture, we both had the same thought (a phenomenon which happens with amazing regularity; one day, we’ll probably be able to conduct complete conversations without ever saying a word to one another), and wandered over to a scarred eucalyptus tree in the front side-yard.
I had noticed this about three months ago, perhaps two or three days after it happened (as it is my wont to walk the perimeter of the property once every few days to see if any limbs have blown down, or if my loquats are ripe, or whatever):
One of the majestic eucalyptus trees lining one side of our property (we live on a corner) had suffered obviously deliberate damage; a huge hunk of bark had been stripped off the side facing the street. I say it was deliberate because it was impossible that a car, or even a truck, could have taken that large a strip out of the tree; the damage begins 18 inches from the ground, and extends to approximately six feet, four inches up the trunk. There were no tire tracks in the soft dirt anywhere near the tree — and even if some huge vehicle sideswiped it without leaving a single track (uhhh, by levitation?), there was no debris (bark or leaves) left behind.
I might have written the incident off as just plain weird, save for one disturbing aspect: a distinct cross carved deep into the tree’s exposed flesh (inset, below):
While (I’m sure) certain wacko factions will point to this as a sign from God marking ours as the home of evil demons to be eradicated come the Rapture, I have no doubt this vandalism is the work of human hands. And, I swear on my father’s grave, those hands were not ours. (With all the real assaults, both literal and figurative, on LGBTs every single day, we don’t need to send up any false flags — unlike some attention-seeking lunatics on the Right.)
No, we didn’t report this to the police, although we probably should have. I just didn’t think about it being anything other than random vandalism, and, having experienced far more aggressive attacks on my personal property (everything from auto break-ins to a deliberately-set brushfire on our orchard when I was a child), I didn’t see the point. I was extremely dismayed, and quite disturbed by the carved cross, but it didn’t enter my mind that perhaps we were being targeted… even though it happened curiously close to the date of the election. Contrary to what our enemies think, we don’t jump to conclusions and assume that every bad thing that happens to us is necessarily an anti-gay attack.
And, unlike our enemies, we do not relish being the target of hatred and oppression as they do their imagined victimhood — nor do we have fits of histrionics over extremely specious incidents of so-called “white powder” and physical attacks by phantom assailants with the superhuman ability to leap tall fences in a single bound, and disappear into thin air.
Now, since some bigot was bold enough to enter our property and strip a No On 8 bumper sticker off my wife’s car, I’m not so sure the tree vandalism was so random. Without evidence, I cannot in all fairness say the damage done to our tree was a hate crime. But I’m thinking it.
All we can do is watch — or rather, let our automatic camera watch for us. — and hope there’s no more to this story to report.
“Winning” — i.e., enshrining your irrational bigotry into the state constitution and destroying our fundamental right to first-class citizenship — just wasn’t enough for you, was it?
You pathetic, typical coward. You probably did it last night, under cover of darkness, ripping it off my wife’s car — parked on our property — which makes you a trespasser as well as a thief.
If you’ve got a problem with us, you ugly little worm, have the guts to face us in person — you already know where we live.
(And don’t anyone tell me it was “just a bumper sticker.” We know what message this cowardly little jerk is sending — and he’s sending it to all of us. Next up: cross-burning?)
Straight from the double-headed demon that lied its way to stripping us of our fundamental constitutional right to marry (which they even admit was our fundamental constitutional right), this is a long must-read. Here are just a few salient points our failed “leaders” (and, we hope, a new generation of more successful leadership) must heed:
Schubert Flint Public Affairs signed onto the Yes on Prop 8 campaign right before the first of what would eventually total 18,000 gay weddings took place after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. We immediately faced our first important strategic challenge: How to respond to the marriages? We decided to withhold criticism of the same-sex couples who were getting married (after all, they were simply taking advantage of the rights the Court had granted them)…
Over the next three months, sympathetic news articles and television reports appeared daily across the state. Traditional marriage supporters were routinely portrayed as right-wingers holding onto outdated, bigoted ideas. …
We needed to convince voters that gay marriage was not simply “live and let live”—that there would be consequences if gay marriage were to be permanently legalized. … We made one of the key strategic decisions in the campaign, to apply the principles of running a “No” campaign—raising doubts and pointing to potential problems—in seeking a “Yes” vote. As far as we know, this strategic approach has never before been used by a Yes campaign. …
We probed long and hard in countless focus groups and surveys to explore reactions to a variety of consequences our issue experts identifed. The California Supreme Court ruling put gay couples in a protected legal class on the basis of sexual orientation, and then found that gay couples had a fundamental constitutional right to marriage. This decision signifcantly changed the legal landscape. …
We settled on three broad areas where this conflict of rights was most likely to occur: in the area of religious freedom, in the area of individual freedom of expression, and in how this new “fundamental right” would be inculcated in young children through the public schools. …
Our ability to organize a massive volunteer effort through religious denominations gave us a huge advantage…
We built a campaign volunteer structure around both time-honored campaign grassroots tactics of organizing in churches, with a ground-up structure of church captains, precinct captains, zip code supervisors and area directors; and the latest Internet and web-based grassroots tools. …
We held the campaign’s first statewide precinct walk the weekend of Aug. 16. … This intense commitment to distributing materials throughout the state was the result of another key strategic decision. Supporting traditional marriage is not considered to be “politically correct.” We wanted voters who supported our position to know that they were not alone and so we made sure they saw our signs in their neighborhoods and our campaign materials at their church. And if they were part of an ethnic minority, all these were in their native language.
The final phase of the volunteer campaign, GOTV, was really a month-long operation. California allows early voting, starting 29 days ahead of Election Day. From Day 1 of this period, we tracked voters who either appeared on the permanent absentee voter list, or had applied for a vote-by-mail ballot. Those who were identified as persuadable received additional volunteer and direct mail contacts. Definite Yes on 8 voters were reminded to return their ballots as early as possible. The effort paid off…
By this time, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints had endorsed Prop 8 and joined the campaign executive committee. Even though the LDS were the last major denomination to join the campaign, their members were immensely helpful in early fundraising, providing much-needed contributions while we were busy organizing Catholic and Evangelical fundraising efforts.
Ultimately, we raised $22 million from July through September with upwards of 40 percent coming from members of the LDS Church. … Our initial television ad began airing on Sept. 29, a week after the other side began its campaign ads… We knew that this initial ad needed to be a home run—and boy was it!
Our campaign’s general counsel had alerted us to a press conference San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom held following the Supreme Court’s marriage decision in May. Like Howard Dean once did, Newsom got increasingly excited the longer he addressed the crowd until, with a smirk on his face and his arms fully extended, he exclaimed, “This door’s wide open now. It’s gonna happen—whether you like it or not.” …
We then segued into potential consequences by featuring a prominent law school professor warning about implications for religious freedom and freedom of expression, and letting voters know that as a result of the court’s decision, gay marriage would be taught in the public schools. The “Whether You Like It or Not” television ad immediately solidified (and excited) our base and captured the attention of voters across the state. We invested heavily in airing this television ad and a companion radio spot. …
The gay community sounded the alarm… This emergency cry for contributions was incredibly effective. Whereas they had raised $15 million in the previous nine months, they raised another $25 million in the ensuing seven weeks of the campaign. But their failure to respond to the “consequences” messages (especially the education message) in a timely fashion ultimately led to their downfall. After blanketing the state with “Whether You Like It or Not,” we focused our message on education. …
The response to our ads from the No on 8 campaign was slow and ineffectual. They enlisted their allies in the education system to claim that we were lying. They held press conferences with education leaders to dismiss our claims. They got newspaper editorial boards to condemn the ads as false. What they never did do, because they couldn’t do, was contest the accuracy of what had happened in Massachusetts.
Finally, three weeks after the Yes on 8 campaign had introduced education as a message, the No on 8 campaign responded with what would be their best ad of the campaign. It featured State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell claiming that Prop 8 had nothing to do with education and that our use of children in our ads was “shameful.” This in-your-face response, much delayed but very effective, foretold the final period of the campaign—it would be largely about education. …
Our strategy had anticipated that the No on 8 campaign would label as “shameful lies” any claim that gay marriage had anything to do with schools, so we went to great lengths to document our ads. … But then we got the break of the election. In what may prove to be the most ill-considered publicity stunt ever mounted in an initiative campaign, a public school in San Francisco took a class of first graders to City Hall to witness the wedding of their lesbian teacher. And they brought along the media.
Now we not only had an example of something that had happened in California (as opposed to might happen), we had video footage to prove it. Within 24 hours of the No side airing their best ad, the one featuring O’Connell claiming that Prop 8 had nothing to do with schools, we were on statewide TV showing bewildered six-year-olds at a lesbian wedding courtesy of their local public school.
There were multiple skirmishes in the press over the education issue during the final days of the campaign. The other side claimed the wedding episode wasn’t really as we described it, while we defended the ad as accurate…
After several days of dueling ads featuring Jack O’Connell and kids at the lesbian wedding, the No side effectively conceded they had lost the education debate. They pulled the O’Connell ad and went in a new direction in the final few days—attempting to equate a Yes vote with racial discrimination. …
We decided to not respond to this line of attack, confident that it would backfire. The basic message that supporters of traditional marriage are bigots, guilty of discrimination, had never worked in focus groups. …
As the campaign headed into the final days, we launched a “Google surge.” We spent more than a half-million dollars to place ads on every single website that had advertising controlled by Google. Whenever anyone in California went online, they saw one of our ads in the final two days of the election. …
Try to ignore Schubert and Flint’s typically nasty smugness as you read the rest — but do read the rest.
If you don’t know who the Terry Caster family is/are (or that they donated a staggering $693,000 to strip civil rights from gay and lesbian Californians), get a crash course from Fred Karger here, and then come back and read the rest of this post.
Ready? OK. So… I’m researching the Caster family for entry in the Proposition 8 donors database (yes, I’m still working on it, and yes, it’s very close to launch), and I stumble across the Caster family Web site. It’s a butt-ugly, horribly-designed site, but a treasure trove of information on the infamous Casters (all of which I’ll share with you when the Prop 8 database launches).
One thing I almost missed was a small, easily-overlooked link, labeled “test,” in the extreme bottom lefthand corner of the front page of Caster Family & Friends. Click it, and it leads to …/doc_locator/420doc.htm — a page with numerous un-linked banners for organizations (such as NORML) advocating access to and/or decriminalization of (medicinal and/or recreational) marijuana.
The working links on that page lead to various other pages containing information about marijuana laws — and one link leads directly to a site called 4:20 DocLocator, a directory of doctors who will (apparently) prescribe medicinal marijuana, and related organizations.
That any of the uber-conservative Casters would link to such a site is surprise enough in itself — but, wait — there’s more.
So, on a whim, I decide to look up the domain owner of 4:20 DocLocator. This is what I find…
Domain Name………. 420doclocator.com Creation Date…….. 2008-08-03 Registration Date…. 2008-08-03 Expiry Date………. 2009-08-03 Organisation Name…. VICTORIACASTER VICTORIACASTER Organisation Address. PO BOX 227312 Organisation Address. Los Angeles Organisation Address. 90022 Organisation Address. CA Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
Is it a coincidence that the domain is owned by someone with the last name of Caster? I think not.
There is a “Vicki” Caster on the Caster family Web site, married to Richard “Dick” Caster, who owns the CASTERFANDF.NET domain name. (I’m not sure what the relationship between Dick and the rest of the Casters is; he’s probably Terry’s brother.)
So, the question is: Is the radically anti-gay Caster family pro-pot?!
Mind you, I’m very much in favor of decriminalizing marijuana, completely. (In fact, I’d like to see it regulated and sold as alcohol is.) So it’s fine by me if the whole darned Caster family spends all their time lying around baked to the gills and scarfing on raw cookie dough. Not that I’m saying they do, of course (although I would encourage just such a scenario, in the knowledge that it would mellow out the whole ornery whackjob family and make them a farkin’ lot easier to deal with).
The point is: How can a radically conservative, right-wing, Christian fundaloon family, or even one member of a radically conservative, right-wing, Christian fundaloon family — which wraps the cross in the American flag and then bludgeons gays to death with it, all the while screaming about the decline of “morality” — possibly justify marijuana usage, for any reason at all?
I’m guessing (guessing, I said) that someone in the Caster family is suffering a terminal or otherwise painful illness, and has discovered the (literal) blessing of marijuana. And I’m guessing that this Caster, or maybe even all the Casters, experienced a one-eighty in thinking about the Evil Demon Weed… in much the same way Republican Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter suddenly broke with the rest of the rabidly right-wing pack and became a fierce advocate of stem cell research — embryonic stem cell research — after he found out he had brain cancer.
Or like Nancy Reagan, who took up the stem-cell gauntlet in the final days of her husband’s long, cruel, and losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Not that my heart doesn’t go out to Specter, and to Mrs. Reagan — and to whoever among the Casters might have been forced by circumstance to modify his or her views on medicinal marijuana — it does. (Really, it does. My daddy died a very slow death from the most cruel form of cancer, the pain and fear-filled horror of which would probably have been somewhat ameliorated by pot. I know that the long, slow, agonizing death of my beloved 37-year-old cousin was indeed eased — at least, while she was still able to function, before her breast cancer spread to her brain — by toking up.)
I can despise the gay-haters for what they’ve done to us, but at the end of the day, when we’re talking life-and-death, everything else goes out the window. (Yeah, bad mix of metaphors there; sorry.)
But I won’t hesitate to point out hypocrisy when I see it. And if what I believe about the Casters is true (and it’s only my deeply held belief, so all you Casters reading this can tell your lawyers to stand down), I can’t imagine any greater hypocrisy than this: A family of radical-right religionists who think they have the God-given authority to eliminate our right to marry — which was legal as established by judges (the majority of whom are Republicans, appointed by Republican governors) entrusted to uphold the law of the land the Casters claim to love so much — advocate, ever so furtively, for access to a controlled substance which is currently illegal.
The hypocrisy boggles the mind.
By the way: If you intend to click on any of the links on the Caster family Web site, I suggest you do it immediately — because when the Casters find out that somebody has connected them to the pro-marijuana movement, the incriminating little “test” link (and perhaps the domain record for the 4:20 site, if not the entire site itself) will probably disappear.
Meet the radical anti-gays of “America Forever,” who make Fred Phelps and the rest of his “God Hates Fags” clan look like the picture of sanity and tolerance:
Note the ironic headline. Note that if the Trib had refused the ad, the rhetoric wouldn’t be “boiling over.”
Chino has an idea of just “how and why it is that a fringe outfit like America Forever suddenly has the funds available to pay for full-page ads in the Utah press.” You should read what he has to say.
It’s a sick, sick world, folks. Be careful out in it.
We ended up on the cutting room floor, much as we did with Milk. But it’s still a lovely video, created from Courage Campaign’sphoto project of the same name.
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is telling the Pentagon and gay-rights advocates that it will have to study the implications for national security and enlist more support in Congress before trying to overturn the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” law and allow gays to serve openly in the military, according to people involved in the discussions. …
How many times do I have to say “I told you so” before anybody outside the choir hears me singing?
That’s why I’m not blogging regularly anymore: It’s absolutely pointless. By the time anyone outside the choir hears it, it’s too late. And by “too late,” I mean the guy has already been sworn in. All you can do now is hope he does nothing, instead of making things even worse.
Get up to speed on professional bigot Maggie Gallagher and her singlemindedly anti-gay National Organization for Marriage, courtesy of Fred Karger, here — and get a straight guy’s perspective on these so-called “defenders of marriage” (from nearly than a year before NOM went public in its war on civil rights), here.
Wonky Zip codes are as they came from the Secretary of State’s file download:
ProtectMarriage.com may be getting all the attention, but it isn’t the only anti-gay PAC that apparently had to be forced to file all donor records — here are the records of more than 300 donors to the Capital Resource Family Impact, the pro-Prop 8 PAC backed by Karen England’s Capital Resource Institute (read all about these hysterical homophobes here), filed with the California Secretary of State’s office January 30, 2009 (actual transaction dates cover October through November, 2008):
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