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Dec '03
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HRC's Horrid Choice
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The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's highest profile "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" advocacy group, recently named Massachusetts State Senator Cheryl Jacques as its new executive director. Given Jacques dreadful record on civil liberties issues and her Anita Bryant-like political exploitation of sexual hysteria,
HRC's selection is horribly inappropriate. |
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Nov '03
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Facts, Not Fear
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Treatment for HIV infection has advanced dramatically since the 1980s. Back then, contracting HIV meant almost certain death, usually after a series of highly visible, body-ravaging opportunistic infections. Lacking any
effective treatments, those with HIV grasped at longshot potential therapies-- teas made from fermented fungus, herbs from the pharmacopoeia of traditional Chinese medicine, procedures to return blood back to the body after
being removed and heated, white light visualization and other forms of faith healing. None worked. Treatment advances came only after ACT-UP demanded action by the government, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies--
all of which had been slow to respond to a disease of fags, niggers, and junkies. |
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Oct '03
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Who Killed Father Geoghan?
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In 2002, John J. Geoghan, a Roman Catholic priest, was sentenced to ten years in Massachusetts prison for touching a 10-year-old
boy's backside at a public swimming pool in 1992. Geoghan's case received unprecedented media coverage. Local papers and television stations
told us again and again that Geoghan had abused over a hundred other boys. Soon, dozens of other Boston-area priests were similarly accused--
not with legal evidence, but rather with allegations and unsubstantiated hearsay dating back decades. Eventually, over 500 lawsuits
alleging misconduct by clergy were filed against the local archdiocese demanding millions and millions of dollars. |
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Sep '03
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Dean's Deadly Flip-Flop
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Among the gaggle of candidates for the 2004 Democratic presidential
nomination, former Vermont governor Howard Dean is held in reverence by many
lesbigay organizations and publications. Indeed, Dean's support for gay civil unions in
his native Vermont has won him the overwhelming support of gay and lesbian
voters, thus providing his first-ever national campaign with a vital financial and
organizational base that has startled television and op-ed pundits. |
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Aug '03
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Justice for Matthew Limon
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People who care about sexual freedom and civil liberties can celebrate this summer's Supreme Court ruling in
Lawrence and Garner v Texas striking down sodomy laws. The repugnant notion that the government can police our bedrooms to dictate how we use our own mouths,
assholes, and genitals has, at long last, been recognized as legally impermissible. |
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Jul '03
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Our Enduring Message
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The chronicler of gay sex Boyd McDonald remarked, "Some people have gotten a lot out of their homosexuality, so they have a lot to give back." Though he was speaking about the letter-writing contributors to his series of true homosexual experiences, Boyd's observation also
applies to the gay community's political leadership. |
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Jun '03
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Right Question, Wrong Answer
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Last month, commenting on the Texas sodomy case currently before the Supreme Court, US Senator Rick Santorum (R- Pennsylvania) noted, "If the Supreme Court says that you have
the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy... to polygamy... to incest... to adultery. You have the right to anything." |
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May '03
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Enough to Make You Sick
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Gay people rightly celebrate that thirty years ago, activists successfully pressured the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to revise its attitude towards homosexuality. |
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Apr '03
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'My Fellow Americans...
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These perilous times have led record numbers
of you to speak out. You have taken to the streets, to the Internet, and to countless town
meetings and civic gatherings to articulate your opposition to unnecessary war. I assure you that
I, George Walker Bush, your President, elected by almost as many votes as the front-runner,
have heard you. |
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Mar '03
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Cowardly Judges
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High school civics class teaches that courts protect individuals' civil liberties. Defending the Bill of Rights-- with its guarantees of freedom of expression, equal treatment under the law,
and protection from arbitrary state power-- is, we are told, best done by a judiciary insulated from political pressures endured by other branches of government. And, indeed, the courts
have at times protected freedoms that others have sought to erode. |
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Feb '03
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Sex Abuse Abuse
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Nowadays, almost anyone calling masturbation "self abuse" does so for comic effect. Only a few religious zealots continue to promote the idea that masturbation constitutes literal
abuse, leading to insanity, infirmity, and eventually eternal damnation. |
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Jan '03
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Texas Injustice
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Imagine yourself at home some evening, in your bedroom, getting down to some serious love-making with your boyfriend. You've played often, so you know just how to use your mouth and cock and ass to get each other
off real good. Just when you're as connected as two guys can get, in burst the police, guns drawn "You're under arrest for deviate sexual intercourse you're coming with us." |
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Dec '02
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Pen Pals
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Turn to the back of this magazine and you'll find dozens of personal ads from prisoners. And every month hundreds of readers respond to these ads, marking them as some of the
most popular ads in the personals section. |
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Nov '02
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Clearer Memory
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In the mid-1980s, some psychotherapists began peddling "repressed memory therapy" (RMT). According to them, sexual abuse was often so horrific that victims would banish memory
of it from their consciousness, sometimes for decades. Only with the help of a therapist trained in RMT could patients troubled by a wide-ranging host of symptoms get at the source of
their woes; almost invariably, RMT practitioners found that their patients had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a male authority figure. That a patient did not initially remember such
abuse was taken as evidence of how terrible the trauma in fact was. Why else, the circular reasoning goes, would the patient have so thoroughly repressed such memories unless the abuse
had been horrific? |
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Oct '02
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Anonymous Sex
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Open the pages of many gay newspapers and you'll find ads from therapists offering help to those afflicted with "sexual compulsivity." Guys are told that seeking out
multiple, anonymous sexual encounters signals the inability to form rewarding, intimate relationships. Working with a sex-as-addiction model, such therapists laud their clients' efforts to avoid
the parks and toilets and rest stops where they'd previously gone for their "fix." Getting guys into courtship-before-sex, one-partner-at-a-time behavior is seen as success, a move
towards more "mature" relationships. |
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Sep '02
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Fear the Fear Mongers
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Baz Luhrmann's delightful film Strictly
Ballroom teaches the lesson of the Spanish proverb
vivir con miedo es como vivir en medias: "a life lived in fear is a life half lived." The movie's hero learns that slavish conformity to the safe, "strictly ballroom" repertoire robs dancing of its
vitality. His father's failed example teaches him that dancing only becomes worthwhile when one finds the courage to dance ones own steps. |
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Aug '02
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"The tip of the iceberg..."
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Do a web search for the terms "pedophile priest" and "tip of the iceberg" and you will get hundreds of hits. In story after story, press and prosecutors routinely employ the iceberg cliché, warning that for each case of
abuse so-far reported, hundreds more wait to be discovered. According to some estimates, half-a-million Americans have been raped by their priests. |
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Jul '02
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Adios, Fifth Amendment
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You do not have the right to remain silent. Anything you say-- and anything we imagine you are thinking-- can and will be used against you. If you can't afford a lawyer, it doesn't matter since
you do not have the right to speak to an attorney. |
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Jun '02
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Pride Today
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One of the earliest gay pride slogans was "Gay is Good." This catch phrase was meant as an antidote to ubiquitous, vitriolic anti-gay sentiment. |
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May '02
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Stop Dr. Dildo
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Students of history are sometimes left wondering why victims of horrific pogroms and persecutions did not "see it coming." Of course, hindsight is famed for its clarity, but often oppressive measures seem so clear, so
calculated, that it is hard to imagine how victims ever tolerated the build-up to more final solutions. |
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Apr '02
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End the Cycle of Abuse
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It is tempting to gloat over the Catholic Church's problems arising from the revelation that a lot of their priests have been sexually involved with young
parishioners. After all, the Catholic Church has been a leading
advocate of the notions that celibacy that is,
no sex manifests a heightened spiritual state and that
all sex is sinful and immoral except in the procreative context of marriage. |
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Mar '02
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Ode to J/O
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A professor at a Boston area university reports that he likes querying members of his classes whether they've ever enjoyed homosex. Very few souls are brave enough to raise their
hands. He then asks whether anyone has masturbated. Amidst nervous giggles, almost everyone nods yes, they have masturbated. He then asks how the class can resolve the contradictory
polls: no one admits to homosex, yet all acknowledge masturbating-- and isn't masturbation a quintessential homosexual act? |
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Feb '02
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Perverted Science
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Sexuality is a potent force in human interactions. Thus, regulating sexuality can be a powerful way to control human beings. It used to be that the Church claimed this right and invoked the authority of God (as interpreted by
Church officials, of course) to narrowly proscribe acceptable sexual expression. |
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Jan '02
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Terrorizing Dissent
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San Francisco activists Michael Petrelis and Dave Pasquarelli have, for years, annoyed many people and institutions. Most recently, they have paired up to protest the policies and pronouncements of HIV prevention groups
and the San Francisco Department of Public Health. They have disrupted meetings, organized phone and fax zaps, and denounced their foes with harsh rhetoric. |
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Dec '01
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No Shortcuts to Freedom
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Citizens who value America's true strength will insist that we not curtail civil liberties for the today-despised. Instead, we must defend and promote freedom and protection from government tyranny. |
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Nov '01
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The Real Challenge
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When suicide bombers kill thousands of civilians, what is the appropriate response? How is life best protected from future similar attacks? Can we create a world in which no one feels
compelled to such wanton violence? |
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Oct '01
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Truth and L.I.E.
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Why is Michael Cuesta's film L.I.E. rated NC-17 ("X" in the old system)? It has no frontal nudity, little explicit sexuality, and less violence than is routinely seen on daytime television. So why the adults-only rating? |
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Sep '01
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Obscene Laws
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Should police have the right to ransack your house, seize your privately-kept diaries, and send you to jail if they deem what you've written to be sufficiently offensive? |
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Aug '01
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Free Al Baker
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In the last 20 years Stalinistic
legislation has tremendously eroded
Americans' civil liberties. "Child
pornography" is now so broadly
defined that no children (nor even
any nudity) need be
involved. |
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Jul '01
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Honeymoon Hypocrisy
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Vermont made history last year by enacting legislation allowing for civil unions between homosexual couples. Last month, Vermont legislators revisited the civil unions issue, and gay marriage activists warned of "an anti-gay initiative designed to demean gay and lesbian relationships." Just what were we being urged to oppose? What homophobic plot was the Vermont legislature concocting?
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