Louisiana Man Charged With Attempted Murder In Violent Anti-Gay Attack

Surveillance video shows that a vicious attack on 52-year-old John Skaggs in a Shreveport, Louisiana tavern was totally unprovoked.  Several eye witnesses, including the owner of the Sandbar, said the victim was a regular patron at the bar and never bothered anyone, and had never even made eye contact with the attacker, William Payne.  Payne had told someone in the bar that he knew Skaggs was gay and that he was going to go beat him up.  Fucking sick.

face of ignorance: gaybasher William Payne

 

This comes from only one place: the church.  Christian leaders are working overtime to desensitize their flocks to violence and to encourage them to break the law (as declared in the Manhattan Declaration by Chuck Colson, a convicted felon from the Nixon administration).

Yet Another Anti-Gay Arsonist Burns Yet Another Gay Couple’s Home

While pulpits across the land burn with the Leviticus death threats “their blood shall be upon them”, another gay couple’s home is burned to the ground after enduring a year of christian-based anti-gay threats, according to a  neighbor of the Clayton, North Carolina victims. [link]

[…]

A neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of backlash against her, said there have been at least three separate incidents of anti-gay harassment at the home. A note with derogatory language was left in the mailbox, an anti-gay slur was written on the house with marker, and the tires of a car parked in the garage were slashed, the neighbor said.

“For this to happen here… it’s heartbreaking,” she said. “I can’t even put into words how horrible it is for them.”

Bizzell confirmed that the sheriff’s office was aware of two of those incidents, but would not say which two. He would not confirm whether they are related to the arson investigation.

“I felt sick to my stomach. I felt so sorry for the two gentlemen. They lost everything,” the couple’s friend and neighbor said. “We do believe that this is a hate crime.”

[…]

I posted about more anti-gay arson and fire-bomb attacks HERE, HERE, and HERE.  These have all happened in the last six months or so.

Yes, keep spreading your message of love and peace, christian leaders. /sarcasm.

Christian leaders preaching hate and lies are directly responsible for these incidents.  “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

.. [via JMG] ..

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Georgia Home Firebombed Following Christian Anti-Gay Threats

A 40-something gay man in Carroll County, Georgia was in his living room when a rock came smashing through the window of his house.

[… ]

The rock had a threatening note attached.

“It said, ‘we know you’re gay. And God hates gays. You won’t be raping anybody in the county and God’s going to make sure that you burn in hell.’ And something about my daddy… my daddy will make sure you burn in hell,”

Then hours later, he woke up to flames filling his bedroom.

[…]

His mother said she heard a commotion and saw fire coming from her son’s house next door. She said she ran out to find Staples lying in the yard. She said she thought he was dead.

[…]

“This is the first time I’ve dealt with anything of this nature in 16 years,” said Capt. Shane Taylor of the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office.
“I can’t believe anyone would have such hatred in their heart as to do somebody like that, especially when they don’t even know him. They don’t know him,” she said.“It hasn’t sunk in to me yet that somebody intentionally tried to burn my house down with me in it, and it just doesn’t register,” Staples [the victim] said. 

 

[…]

Here’s another report: Arson of gay man’s home probed as hate crime – [link – Times Georgian.com]

And another: Mother of gay Carrollton man speaks out on suspected arson of his home – [link – GA Voice]

More Christian anti-gay arson crimes:

I posted HERE about a fire-bombing incident last October in Canada following weeks of harassment, threatening notes with Christian anti-gay bullshit, then the mailbox burned down, then *boom* — a fire-bomb through the bedroom window in the early morning hours.  The couple barely escaped with their lives and their dog.  Everything burned to the ground.

–

Glory to Jesus!  Praise his name!

Canadian Gay Couple’s Home Firebombed After Christian Threats

”]A quiet gay couple, who townsfolk say are just nice, normal people who kept to themselves, woke up in the early morning hours on October 18, 2010 to a firebomb smashing through the bedroom window.  The house burned to the ground and they barely escaped with their dog and their lives.

GuardianUK:

[…]

The man said there were a series of disturbing events that have happened at their house since May that began with an anonymous card he received shortly after the couple moved into the area.

“We received a note in our mailbox … telling us the sins of what we were doing.”

He described it as “a church card in an envelope … with church sayings on it.” He said it contained a printed phrase condemning gay sexuality as sinful. The police now have the card, he said.

A week before the house fire, the couple’s mailbox was set ablaze, he said.

“There’s been ongoing things,” he said. “We were fearful … I slept with a pitchfork in the bedroom.”

He said other events also occurred but he couldn’t disclose details without harming the police investigation.

Other links:

Pamela Grothaus Gets Naked

 

Grothaus - (actual photo would cause "gagging")

[Update at the end (the little darlin’ has been canned)]

[Note: In case it’s not obvious, my first paragraph here is mocking Grothaus’ style of dramatic ‘I’m-trying-to-gross-you-out’ visuals and her use of ‘gag’]

=

Naples, Florida news blogger Pamela Grothaus brazenly strips it all off, bare naked, and then grinds it in her readers’ faces — her ugly, bile-spewing pie-hole, letting her piss-stained robe of pretentiousness fall around her ankles, naked ignorance and hatred that makes people want to “leave the room and gag”.  From JoeMyGod (it appears that the quote below is no longer on the link to the Naples news site below — I wanted to gag, but I clicked over anyway — it may have been removed due to complaints to the paper):

“Folks, it looks like political correctness has scored another victory at the expense of morality and religious freedom. In-your-face homosexuality will soon be given the green light in our armed forces. What’s next? A pedophile platoon? A bestiality battalion? A man-boy-love marching band? Let’s bring ‘em all out of their dark little closets and onto the battlefield—with special benefits and treatment to help them feel good about themselves, of course!

[…]

“So hold on tight, as America slides even further into the abyss of political correctness, while homosexual soldiers worldwide prepare for a colossal coming out party at taxpayer’s expense. Oh, yeah, there’ll be federal dollars wasted on this nonsense—can’t wait to see the price tag on that. and all of this hoopla so that soldiers who like to have sex with those of their same gender can display pictures of and coo over their same-sex lovers’ photos, as if that makes them “normal” to the rest of us. (Nah, we’ll just wait until you leave the room and gag.) – Naples Daily News blogger Pamela Grothaus.

First off, the level of utter stupidity and total delusional ignorance is just unimaginable and doesn’t have to be explained to normal people.  How is it possible to be so goddamned fucking stupid?  She underscores the basic problem with people like her who are irrationally opposed to equality for every citizen.

Christian Students Beat Up Girl Named ‘Randi’

A group of students in (*cough*) Mississippi, all pumped up and high on Jayzus after their Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, decided the good christian thing to do, since they didn’t have a queer to beat up, was to beat, kick and stomp the living shit out of a fellow 12-year old student because she has a “boy’s name”.  Randi.  With an ‘i’.

But, we know that Mississippi students can’t fucking spell.

After a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, four girls and a boy surrounded her. “They started talking about me like I was a man, and like, stuff like that. That I shouldn’t be in this world. And my name was a boy name,” she said. Foster described how these people attacked her. “I was kicked in the rib. I was kicked in the leg. I was hit in the face. I was sat on top of and my face was jammed into the floor. I was thrown onto the cafeteria table. I was thrown in between the seats.” Her mother, Meggan Foster, is appalled at the whole ordeal. “She was sitting in a chair. Her glasses were broken. She had been crying. She had a bloody tissue in her hand from her nose bleeding,” Foster said. She said that a surveillance camera caught the whole thing, but that the principal could not give her a copy because it involves other students.

What in the hell do you “christian” parents and church fuck-heads teach these kids?  The tactics of christianist hate groups like the American Family Association (Tupelo, MS), for one, are working better than they ever hoped to spread christian hatred and intolerance.

The parents of these junior christ zombies need to be held liable and accountable.

 

Christian Mental Illness On Proud Display

“Don’t be afraid to use words” like ‘mentally ill‘ and ‘sociopath‘ when referring to willfully ignorant and repugnant religious idiots.

.

via JMG

The Dark Ages vs. Bryan Fischer, Tony Perkins et al.

A single quote from the Dark Ages that nicely sums up today’s christianist leaders and “culture warriors:

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them. – Martin Luther [1483-1546], Table Talk, published 1569

And a few more that describe them quite well.  Religion today, as always, is used to justify any deed they do.

God does not work salvation for fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin vigorously…. Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding place of justice; sin must be committed.

Sin cannot tear you away from him [Christ], even though you commit adultery a hundred times a day and commit as many murders.

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a-begging. [Martin Luther, Table Talk]

Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but–more frequently than not –struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God. [Martin Luther, Table Talk]

Martin Luther and Johann Tetzel burning each other's books, circa 1518

Equality California Finds Noose Hung On Door

 

image from EQCA Facebook page

This is what it’s all about.  No matter how it’s packaged and marketed, no matter how loudly they preach about their “christian love”, what this is all about is raw hatred.  Their “culture war” is waged on adults, but the casualties are kids who have to grow up and live in this world.

Kids see and hear this hatred being spewed by religious leaders and preachers who then pass it on to teachers and parents.  Kids take this hatred to heart.  Bullies take these lessons on hatred and act them out.

The toxic leaders of the Religious Reich refuse to accept responsibility for the messages they preach that snuff out children’s hopes for life and a future; these vile Men and Women of God™ even blame the children for the treatment they receive.  Their message: gay kids deserve bullying, torment, death and hellfire.

 

Maggie cannot figure out what her organization is doing that would cause anyone harm.

Well, Equality California found this noose on their door a couple days ago, called in to report it and the officer told them “Sometimes you just have to live with being a victim”

Then the officer told them his car was broken into once, because, you know, getting your car stereo stolen is just like someone coming to your door and suggesting you should kill yourself.

The sign pictured is one that a NOM supporter displayed at one of their Indiana stops on their Hate Bus Tour.

via JMG

Evan Wolfson To Maggie Gallagher: Discrimination Has Consequences

Maggie Gallagher Srivastav of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) recently made a statement in the New York Post trying to brush off any culpability in the Religious Reich’s anti-gay hatred that drives teens to end their lives.

One of NOM’s supporters brought this sign to a NOM anti-equality tour bus stop a couple of months ago:

Maggie cannot figure out what her organization is doing that would cause anyone harm.

But for the life of her, Maggie Gallagher Srivastav cannot figure out what her organization, or any of the christianist organizations, could be doing to make teens not want to live anymore.

Nope, no reason at all!  After all, she and her cohorts are wonderful,  gentle, loving christians.

Well, Evan Wolfson, founder and director of Freedom to Marry, fires back on Maggie Gallagher Srivastav.  Here’s his letter:

Face it! Discrimination has consequences.

Dear Ms. Gallagher:

In your October 20th New York Post column attempting to take me to task for pointing out the damage done by anti-gay discrimination and the destructive message it sends to gay youth, you wrote, “These kids need help, real help. They should not become a mere rhetorical strategy, a plaything in our adult battles.”

Yet in that very column and, of course, in your continued use of anti-gay prejudice and rhetoric to advance your political agenda, you use young people in just that way.

In state after state, week after week, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) young people hear anti-gay organizations like your “National Organization for Marriage” (NOM) characterizing gay people as “depraved” and “immoral” and denigrating gay youth for embracing an “unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle.” You have opposed non-discrimination laws and even legal support for LGBT youth, exclaiming that being gay is a “dysfunction” that people should work to “overcome.”

Even as you note many of the harms endured by LGBT youth, you continue to campaign relentlessly for the legal discrimination that reinforces their inequality and sense of isolation and that licenses other people to look down on these young people and their dreams of full and equal participation in our society, including a lifetime commitment to the person they love.

TN Couple’s Home Torched After Threats From Neighbor

QUEERS lived here.

In Tennessee, a lesbian couple’s home was burned to the ground in a possible arson hate crime (emphasis added):

Carol Stutte says her partner is too afraid to come back to the property since the fire. She says they’ve been harassed all five years they’ve lived there by one neighbor.

She also says recently the neighbor threatened to kill them and burn down their house,” Stutte said. “I knew we had been threatened, but we never thought anything would be followed through,”

Lora Black, the Stutte’s neighbor and friend, was with the couple in Nashville when they learned their home was on fire.

“Right now, they are just terrified that our county is feeling like this about homosexual couples. Most homosexual couples are no different than any other couples,” Black said.

The Stuttes are staying in a safe house until investigators can determine what happened the night of the fire.

AFTAH Hate Academy Exposed

"Porno Pete" LaBarbera

This is great, Peter “Porno Pete” LaBarbera’s 3-Day Hate Academy was full of spies, two sent by Friendly Atheist, and you can see the great 3-part write-up there: Day 1 of 3, Day 2 of 3, and Day 3 of 3.  … the things they talked about were predictable and despicable.  But, what would you expect from this bunch of freaks?

This part amuses me .. a speaker was schooling everyone on the correct terminology to use; one advice was never use the word “gay“, always use “homosexual” because it sounds more degrading – “gay” was too positive, and besides, no one is actually gay, anyway.  Always refer to all of them as the same and make it as frightening as you can make it (even if you have to make shit up without citation), and on and on.  Then there’s the unspoken: never, ever admit to the reality that there actually are gay people (but don’t use that word!) who are good people, and pretend that heterosexual people whose lives are wrecked do not exist.

This is why, as explained in the left sidebar, I make the blanket derogatory references to heterosexuals and christians on the blog, it’s just to mock the way these anti-gay nut-jobs talk.  And, are they really so stupid to think that no one can see right through them, anyway?  I’m afraid the answer is, yup.  The other really amusing instruction from a speaker calling himself an “ex-gay” (that’s short for “still-gay”) to never talk to “homosexuals” about sex or the bible because it only serves to “turns them off”, but instead quote science to them and then they will be dazzled with your hetero-ex-gay brilliance and will be left dumbfounded.  Yeeeah.  Um, except for that little thing about christians rejecting any real science that doesn’t line up with their magic book and pre-determined outcomes.  Sorry, but – FAIL.

LaBarbera’s Hate Academy Begins This Week

"Porno Pete" LaBarbera of AFTAH

Peter “Porno Pete” LaBarbera who runs Americans for Truth (sic) about Homosexuality, has started up an academy for youngsters to learn all about how to properly hate gayness and gay people.  He wants to teach kids about Biblical truths (It’s really difficult to put the words “Biblical” and “truth”  in the same sentence together).

Alan Downing of JONAH, accused of sexual abuse of clients

One of the speakers for the “academy” is none other than Arthur Goldberg, the founder of JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality) and a convicted felon. JONAH is in the middle of a sex abuse scandal with one of the “therapists”, Alan Downing, who had his clients strip down naked in front of a mirror and play with themselves while he watches.  Downing has also admitted that he’s still attracted to other men.  They all are, and most surprisingly admit it.  Ex-gay therapists are frauds.  The therapy is a fraud.

It will be interesting to see how Peter’s little Hate Academy turns out.  The original tuition for the course(s) was the low-low bargain price $99, but the Peter is now letting kids enroll in his twisted world for free!  Cool!  Hopefully, it is because no one is interested.  What parent in their right mind would deliver their teen-aged kids into the hands of these deranged, deluded, dangerous freaks?

via Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters

UPDATE — Word is the “academy” was/is a flop.  And, JONAH stands firm defending their naked touch therapy, and, they have changed their name to Jews Offering New Alternatives to Healing.  Very good and accurate change of wording, as we know, these scams offer anything but “healing”.

Surprise! Another Hate-Filled Preacher

"It's time to stop burning flags and start burning fags!"

This sermon is from 15 years ago.  Pastor Jeff Owens issued an “apology” which you can read at Joe.My.God. Joe notes the apology is sort of hidden on their contact page.

The damage this sermon caused over the years is unmeasurable; it can’t be known, only speculated.  I’d love to be able to dig up police reports from that town in the days after that sermon.  Besides any attacks that could have been provoked by the “godly” words of a sociopathic Man of God™, that attitude gets passed down to children with their parents at that sermon.  What if a parent in that congregation had a kid who was gay, and they believed they had a christian duty to put their kid through a lifetime of hell?

Or, a kid sitting in that sermon who decides it’s then OK to physically harm and even kill other human beings they deem inferior, as long as they invoke the god.  Or the kid who took it to heart and ended up abusing drugs or committing suicide, because this vile man made them believe that they were human garbage.  Words, especially from someone in a leadership position, have tremendous weight.  And these people need to be exposed, it needs to be called out for the dangerous rhetoric that it is.

“We need to stop burning flags and start burning FAGS! We need Hunt-A-Homo Week. We need to take ’em all out and shoot ’em with a scatter shotgun.” – Pastor Jeff Owens.

Peter LaBarbera Supports Violent Christians, Denounces “Soft Christians”

Peter LaBarbera, who is always railing about the intolerance of the Evil Vicious Homofascist Terrorists™ towards christians, is anything but tolerant of his own christian brothers who don’t sport a woodie over  smearing and smearing innocent children and adult’s lives.  Always standing in judgement, he calls out the new head of Focus on the Money Family, Jim Daly, for “emasculating” the organization for not being hate-filled enough, for daring to focus on more urgent matters in society.

I liken Peter LaBarbera to his  counterpart on South Park: “Gay people? Gay people are evil, right down to their cold black hearts which pump not blood like yours or mine, but rather a thick, vomitous oil that oozes through their rotten veins and clots in their pea-sized brains which becomes the cause of their Nazi-esque patterns of violent behavior. Do you understand?” – Peter LaBarbera Mr. Garrison on South Park.

The Peter’s post is chock full of the same tired lies, but one paragraph in particular made me have a WTF?! moment.  Here he criticizes Daly’s focus on the christian militias that are springing up and threatening violence on law enforcement:

Scolding bands of unshaven, gun-toting Christian fundamentalists roaming the woods surely will earn Jim Daly plaudits in the liberal media. Reminding the world that homosexuality and Christianity are incompatible; that repentant homosexuals can leave the lifestyle through Christ; and educating on how sin-embracing “Christianity” corrupts and confuses the Church, will earn him derision in the same media.

Peter, you’re fucking kidding, right?  Are you really trivializing “bands of unshaven, gun-toting”, ambush-murder-plotting, psychopathic christian fundamentalists as though they’re just playing harmless woodland games?  You are fucking unbelievable!  So blinded by your obvious mental fixation on homosex and the projection of your own self-fears — so deluded by your religious mythology that you actually dismiss these dangerous lunatics plotting to ambush and murder a policeman and then ambush his funeral — you are sick, dude, fucking sick.  You would never admit that there are gay folk who are good people, or that there are christians who are evil.

Peter, if you want to put the great money and time resources that “God” has bestowed upon you, to use this “gift” for your “Lord”, why don’t you tackle the very real problem in your own backyard … the fact that Chicago is a world hub of human trafficking?  What about these horrible abuses on children and women perpetrated by heterosexual men in your part of the country?  Ah, that’s right … you’re too busy combing through gay porn and prancing about at leather street fairs to actually use your “talents” in any sort of admirable way.  But, it’s understandable for a person who casually trivializes organized groups of christians intent on ambushing and murdering law enforcement officers to just “groups of unshaven, gun-toting christians” frolicking and playing in the woods, having Bible studies and humming hymns (or humming each other).

This is the beginning of Peter’s “dear AFTAH readers” post about FOTF (my notes in [brackets]):