Note: I didn’t live in Vermont when we were getting into the whole civil unions things, though I’ve heard it got fairly nasty at times. This, I think, is demonstrably worse. I posted this to Daily Kos and thought it might be good to include here as well, even though it’s not local. So…
I’m going to give a little bit of personal history here. I am openly queer, and have been for most of my adult life. I am 5’1.5″ and though I am physically stronger than I look, there are a whole lot of people who could fairly easily beat the crap out of me if they choose to do so. Everything I’m talking about here on a personal level is old. I haven’t had cause to feel for my safety due to another person’s malice in more than a decade.
That said, I’ve been threatened and chased on several occasions. I once had a knife pressed against my throat. I’ve had death threats left on my answering machine. While engaged in an anti-war protest once, I had an ROTC student grab me by the throat and press his arm against my neck until his friends pulled him off.
All of this was scary. Some of it was very scary. I don’t know how much of what happened was real danger as opposed to people just trying to intimidate me.
But this crap (with a hat tip to Pam’s House Blend) scares me in ways that I can’t entirely articulate. I will warn everyone now that this video disturbed me deeply, and I would not recommend you allow any kids to see it. It’s that bad:
The Face of Proposition 8 from Theremina on Vimeo.
The text posted with this video (linked here) includes the following:
This footage was recorded 10/23/08 in Oakland, CA, on a public street corner near Lake Merritt. I was on my way home from the Lakeshore district when I encountered this group of supporters of Prop 8 (proposition to ban gay marriage). After turning my vidphone on, I was screamed at, physically intimidated and eventually attacked by one of the sign-wavers.
About two dozen men and women were standing under the I-580, chanting “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” and “Mom and Dad, not Dad and Dad”, etc. There were at least three counter-protesters present as well.
[…]
Something to keep in mind: when I hit the record button, I hadn’t said a single word to anyone, or interfered with the rally any way. I stood a fair distance away from the sign-wavers (remaining at least four feet away from all of them…until they approached me). But as soon as they noticed me filming them, I was greeted with curses and threats of violence. “Get that shit out of here. I’ll knock it out of your hand.” None of these folks knew me, yet they instantly knew they hated me.Eventually, as you can see, some of the protesters surrounded me and began poking at me with their signs. Others, some of the most visibly angry and hysterical among them (apparently minors), hid their faces behind their banners while continuing to scream at passing traffic.
[…]
The woman continued to poke at my face with her sign and call me “nasty.” Genuinely disturbed by the complete lack of rational behavior I’d seen up to this point, wanting to look into her face and possibly connect on some level with her as a fellow human being, I pulled a corner of the sign down away from my eyes and asked “why are you calling me nasty?”That’s when she attacked, clawing, grabbing and then shoving. I didn’t fight back; she was much bigger than me. After calling me a “nasty fucker” and threatening to kick my ass, she pried my phone out of my hand and tried to break it in half while her friends egged her on.
[…]
After she took away my phone, I stood there stunned, not really sure what to do. One of the counter-protesters (the woman who you see saying “No on Prop 8” towards the beginning of this clip) intervened and calmed the attacking woman down enough that I felt safe enough to dart forward to try to take my phone back. After a second or two of grappling, she let me have it back and went back to screaming at cars from a lawn chair near the side of the road.
[…]
I stood there for another minute or two, checking the phone’s applications for damage. One of the other sign-wavers, a teenage boy standing nearby, leaned over and whispered “fuck you, dyke.”Even though I wasn’t hurt besides a small scratch on my hand, and my phone was okay, being attacked definitely shook me up. I was a bit tearful. Call me naive, but I never thought I’d actually be in physical danger just for shooting footage and pulling the edge of a person’s sign out of my eyes. Verbal insults, sure. But attacked? Yikes.
The man holding the “Vote No” sign noticed that I was in tears and approached me. We hugged to a chorus of jeers, exchanged some reassuring words, and I turned to leave. Someone screamed after me: “keep crying, and keep walking.”
So that’s exactly what I did.
I’m voting no on Prop 8. I’ll take love over hate any day.
I don’t know if I have this kind of courage. I hope that if I were in these circumstances, I would show the strength not to run, but I just don’t know. I see stuff like this and my hands just start shaking and I get pulled back to that sense of vulnerability that happens, like when a group of homophobes started shouting at me from their car when I was on my bicycle one day and then proceeded to chase me in their car, yelling and threatening me the whole time (fortunately for me, bicycles can go all sorts of places cars can’t get to and it was a heavily trafficked area, so there was no opportunity for them to catch up, but still).
So I see this. I read it. I watch it. And I just think… wow.
I get violence. I understand it. I think it’s ineffective and futile, but on a raw psychological level, I get why people become violent and I get how mob mentalities can go a bit crazy from time to time. I’ve studied the psychology. Hell, I teach the psychology. But there’s a big difference between abstract understanding of violence and really knowing it for what it is. I know violence for what it is in the direct, personal level. I’ve seen enough of that.
But this… this… involving children in it?
This isn’t just violence. This isn’t just mob mentality. This is sick. This is pure, unadulterated hate.
We’ve got to show these people for who they are, everywhere we can. We have to publicize this and make sure that everyone knows what the Proposition 8 movement is, at its core: violent, dangerous and anti-person.
Loud and clear: we have to expose this everywhere we can.