On Saturday
November 15
th 2008 I was in Philadelphia for the pro-marriage anti-proposition 8 rally at City Hall. The gathering seems to have ended up falling into three parts actually. The
first part was folks with signs and various chants erupting and a little speech and moment of silence for the 18,000 couples in California who
married since May of this year but are now in a legal limbo since California passed Proposition 8 by 52% calling for banning gay marriage leaving their legal fates unknown and no further marriages permitted.
A second segment then began involving most of the marriage supporters moving to the edge of City hall
along the main thoroughfares and hoisting their sign and receiving a great many honks of horns from the passing cars in support. Whenever the light would change signaling pedestrians to cross a few would run out and wave flags and dance around until the light changed back again.
The third part of the rally ended up seeming the most interesting to me. way on the other side of the plaza the "Repent America" folks showed up. These folks are a slightly less nasty version of the Westboro Baptist Church people - the "God Hates Fags" church who go around doing such enlightening things as crashing dead Iraqi soldiers funerals to alert everyone there that the reason their loved one is dead is because America tolerates gays and therefore God is punishing America through the death of this or that particular soldier. Like I said, that's Westboro Baptists - this is Repent America. Repent America shows up at each and every gay event in Philadelphia and position themselves and their bullhorn someplace unavoidable and begin to shout and yell at the gay people. They are at every gay parade and pride festival etc in Philadelphia and they are almost always ignored by the vast majority of the crowd.
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This time they got the attention they so obviously crave. The marriage supporters began to converge around repent America (all three of them) and their sign and bullhorn and funny little soapbox and respond to them for a change. Chants of "We don't hate YOU" and "God is Love" and "Cast the first stone!" and "We have a permit, you do not" came up from the crowd. Not having received any real attention at their previous protests the Repent America people began to sweat now that they found themselves surrounded by a couple thousand gay people shouting back at them.
Several plan clothes representatives of the Police arrived. They were identifiable by bright orange police arm bands that they wore. They asked the Repent America people of they felt ok and whether they wanted to continue. Apparently at first they said they felt ok if the police would back the crowd up a bit. About 10 minutes later the police were up front negotiating with the Repent America guys again, it seemed to me they were trying to convince them to stop or move somewhere else - they couldn't force them to, but they were asking. Repent America remained where they were but said they felt threatened by the crowd so a pro gay clergy member along with the police representatives began to ask the pro-marriage folks to form a clear "escape route" - basically right down the middle the sea parted and the progay folks linked arms and made a corridor for the Repent America people, should they decide to make use of it.
They did not make use of it for some time and the corridor only became longer and longer as the repentance bullhorn and the alternating chants drew most of the other rally attendees over tot he area. Eventually Repent America decided they had had enough and packed up their banner and walked right thru the corridor of linked arms. They took a breather and started back up a little further from the plaza about a half an hour later, but by this time the crowd had reverted to the standard tactic of simply ignoring them.
extra bits about prop 8:
Huckabee: Gays Haven't Crossed Civil Rights Violence Threshold - as evidenced perfectly by this blog post! video - note: he maintains that "institutional rights" and "individual rights" are two different things - can you explain to me how that is so?
Chuck Norris is many things, but none of those is a gay-marriage supporter.
lots of other prop8 signs from other places: http://buzzfeed.com/akdobbins/prop-8-protest-signs
prince - talks religious conversion to jehovah's witness and his anti gay marriage views
De Tocqueville understood the genius of American Christianity better than most Republicans today:
"I have no belief in the virtue or durability of official philosophies, and when it comes to state religions, I have always thought that, though they may perhaps sometimes momentarily serve the interests of political power, they are always sooner or later fatal for the church.
Nor am I one of those who think that to exalt religion in the eyes of the people and to do honor to the spirituality of religious teaching, it is good to give its ministers indirectly a political influence which the laws refuse.
I am so deeply convinced of the almost inevitable dangers which face beliefs when their interpreters take part in public affairs, and so firmly persuaded that at all costs Christianity must be maintained among the new democracies that I would rather shut priests up within their sanctuaries than allow them to leave them."
These people will kill Christianity before they get to enforce by law the fantasies of their own neuroses
3 comments:
I missed you all weekend and this was the perfect way to see you show up again! Thank you for posting this. I wish I could have gone but instead I was tossing salads. I appreciate this greatly. Thank you.
<3
hey c - or x - or teen - ....
it took me two hours to get that post just right - text and pics wise so im not sure where i was at the moment in time when you looked. you might want to check the final version.
btw - im listening to the elderly do rap again and again as i do what i gotta do on the nets :)
had a great time in dc - i can tell you more whenever you want - you want chat, phone or email?
u.m.
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