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Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and Nancy Goldstein has a good piece up explaining how far gays and lesbians have come since then, and how far they have to go. She cites bans on gay marriage, higher poverty rates, lack of health care, and DADT as examples. Sadly, 40 years after the Stonewall raid that led to riots from gays who were completely fed up with the way the cops targeted gay clubs for harassment, gays and lesbians still have to face police raids of bars based on flimsy excuses that result in police brutality.
Is it a coincidence that the Ft. Worth police chose the anniversary of the Stonewall riots to raid a gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge and arrest 7 people (hospitalizing one, who may have bleeding on the brain, according to the Dallas Voice) for public intoxication? Did you even know it’s a crime to be drunk in a bar? Probably not, because while it’s technically a crime to be intoxicated in public, it’s a minor one and usually you have to be a danger to yourself or other people. It’s in place mainly to arrest drunks getting into fights or people that are drunk and about to get behind the wheel. Or, it seems, if the cops want to honor the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots to intimidate gays and lesbians who thought that winning Lawrence v. Texas was the final step in making it legal to be gay in Texas. The blog at the Dallas Voice is bearing witness to what happened at the Rainbow Lounge Saturday night, and helping organize protests.
Some eyewitness accounts:
When it first started she went up to a cop and said thank you for coming out to keep us safe. This is a rough neighborhood. He said that’s not why we are here. She asked why they were there and he said a disgruntled employee had said that the bar was overserving people. She told him she had been drinking but that she had a designated driver. He told her that she was fine. She said they only arrested men and seemed to be targeting effeminate men.
This “disgruntled employee” thing keeps coming up, but the Rainbow Lounge has been open for a week, which doesn’t seem like enough time to develop disgruntled employees, even in the food and alcohol industry.
My name is Kayla Lane. I am a Ph.D. student at UC-Santa Cruz, staying with my sister, Kelly Lane, for the summer. We and a few of our friends went to the new Rainbow Lounge last night to dance and have some fun. I was in the VIP section when police officers started coming up there. The first arrest (that we saw) was right in front of me in that section.
They asked the guy if he had been drinking, and he said some, and they snidely replied, “Well, we’ll see how much!” and plastic handcuffed him as they read him his rights The guy was doing NOTHING wrong. It was utterly repugnant.
Once I saw this happen, I decided to try and speak with one of the police officers themselves, to go straight to the source and get their side. My sister Kelly and I simply started asking what they were doing here, stating how suspicious it seemed on this date and in this specific club, etc. This was a “State Policeman,” whose name I forgot, who tried to explain their actions by referring to “anonymous tips” and “disgruntled ex-bartenders.” We pointed out the place was open a week, so the disgruntled ex-bartender source seemed a bit unlikely! He wouldn’t really answer my questions. although he did try to grab my hand and flirt with me (which was completely uninvited).
More here.
There were protests yesterday, and in response, the Ft. Worth police and TABC admitted that they rolled into Rainbow Lounge to find and arrest people for being drunk. I’m not saying that it’s never been a practice in Texas to roll into bars and arrest people for being drunk, but I’ve never seen or heard of it. Cops linger outside of bar parking lots to grab drunk drivers, which is a much more reasonable thing to do, but if people are taking care of their own transportation and not causing any trouble, which is the case with the people arrested in this raid, then we have a problem. Again, how come, if they’re going to start doing this, show up at a brand new gay bar on the anniversary of Stonewall?
In case there’s any doubt left in your mind,* the Ft. Worth police statement has the telltale marker of bullshit on it.
In a statement, the Fort Worth Police Department said agents inspected three bars early Sunday and police arrested patrons at the Rainbow Lounge because they were drunk and tried to grope officers.
The eyewitnesses say differently, and say that patrons were arrested in the bathroom, standing at the bar drinking, and one just generally hanging out. But I’m sure this statement is crafted mostly to appeal to the homophobic population of Ft. Worth, who wants to believe that gay men descend in masses when cops enter bars and start groping them drunkenly. Because there’s something about a police uniform that says, “Fuck with me,” right?
Here’s what the cops were wearing:
I’d be more inclined to believe that drunken groping was the reason for the public intoxication arrests if the police were in plain clothes. Drunken groping in bars happens, though I doubt that straight men who grope women have anything to fear from the cops. As it stands, this, coupled with the eyewitness accounts, sounds like an excuse. The cops went in trolling for gay men to arrest and for an opportunity to disrupt a new gay bar, and drive away future patrons to put it out of business. And the Stonewall riot thing is unlikely to be a coincidence---the cops, after all, can’t be oblivious to what Pride celebrations are all about, since police are sent to public Pride events just like they are any other, and they’d probably find out that the events are honoring a riot bucking police authority through those means if nothing else. That has to burn their asses, so no wonder they’re looking for revenge.
The Ft. Worth police say they’re investigating the matter. I’m not holding my breath for any kind of discipline, even though it seems they slammed one man to the ground so hard he went to ICU with head injuries.
*And I was disheartened to find out recently, when Samhita wrote a blog post at Feministing talking about how the recent shooting in Oakland that left four cops dead would likely result in the cops trolling around Oakland looking for payback, how many supposed liberals will loudly and repeatedly defend the police against the charge that they abuse their power to intimidate and harass minority populations. If you’ve had the lifelong privilege of being the sort of person the cops ignore, then I suppose they could seem friendly and innocuous, but as this case shows, that is not the case.
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Posted by
Amanda Marcotte on 06:53 AM •
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Oh, bullshit on the Samhita post. She wrote a shitty piece about a rapist who got pulled over by the cops. He’d been IDed as the rapist of a 12-year-old girl, and it turns out, had raped two women that very morning. Neither Samhita nor Feministe had the guts to admit they were wrong about trying to make a serial rapist and an abuser of women into some victim of police brutality. For fuck’s sake already.
You left out the part where there was no proof of police brutality, but plenty of proof the con was a total scumbag. A rapist, in fact. What the fuck? Is this Eldredge Cleaver all over again?
Oh, yeah, and it’s pretty obvious the reason things went south is because he’d only just committed two rapes and feared that the cops knew it, too.
It’s not like there aren’t a plethora of police brutality victims out there. Why pick a serial rapist to make into your poster child?
“I’m not saying that it’s never been a practice in Texas to roll into bars and arrest people for being drunk, but I’ve never seen or heard of it.”
It’s actually what got the whole “Die in a fire” meme going. It’s from the hate-mail the Texas ABC got when they started trying to drum up funds make the public safer by arresting people in bars on private premises for being “drunk in public.”
What a pile of bullshit, I’m so glad to hear there’s no crime in Fort Worth. Makes it the perfect place for me and all my gay and lesbian friends and their partners to move to doesn’t it?
Drunken groping in bars happens, though I doubt that straight men who grope women have anything to fear from the cops.
You’re absolutely right. During my senior year of college, we had a class party at a local bar. This was the first time I had ever been drinking with many of these people. Out of our group of about 30-40 students, 4 of them got kicked out of the bar for being too drunk. This was the first time I had ever seen anyone drunk enough to get kicked out of a bar, and it happened to 4 people in my class. I was embarrassed to be part of the group. But, not a single one of them got arrested for “public drunkenness” like the people at this gay bar. That’s right; they were drunk enough to get kicked out of a bar, but not gay drunk enough to get arrested for it. On top of that, one of the guys got kicked out for groping a waitress. This same guy is a rapist who date-raped a classmate and got away with it. An actual rapist groped a woman and was drunk enough to get kicked out of a bar, but even he wasn’t arrested.
So is Fort Worth just as a nice a place to live as New York or San Francisco? Why would a gay person who has a choice ever live somewhere like that?
Way to victim blame, Luke. Since gay people have no families, jobs, educational or financial needs or desires to incline them to live elsewhere. Segregation is not the cure for bigotry.
I mean to keep them from moving.
Hence the qualification “who has a choice.” Where do I blame the victim, Amanda?
Sure, if I had said “it’s their fault for living in Forth Worth,” then I would have blamed the victim. Too bad I didn’t say it, and you’re just reading that into my observation.
And yes, I think gay people have every right to tar Fort Worth and Texas with a broad brush, and every other place where this stuff happens, and stay well the hell away, given how scary and awful these incidents are. We have the right to protect ourselves, too, and no amount of community organizing or promoting changes that.
“So is Fort Worth just as a nice a place to live as New York or San Francisco? Why would a gay person who has a choice ever live somewhere like that?”
Why can’t gay people live in peace wherever they want, just like straight people? People choose to live in somewhere for a variety of reasons, and their choice of home shouldn’t be up for second guessing by others.
Why can’t we just live and let live in this country, instead of believing that every aspect of somebody else’s life is subject to our approval or disapproval, even to the point of using the law and its agents to enforce our thoughts and beliefs on the subject?…
What’s the point of the observation, then? I don’t see your point. Please explain wjy bring up the burden in gay people to move, if not to victim blame.
MikeEss, I wish it were that way. It isn’t, as this police brutality and discrimination demonstrates.
Therefore, I’m perfectly comfortable expressing my “disapproval” of Fort Worth, Texas and of cultural values that give rise to attacks on gay people. And I’m perfectly comfortable keeping people who espouse those values out of my life, rather than embracing them in a spirit of tolerance.
If it was to tar Ft. Worth, okay. Yeah, not a friendly place. Their loss. It just read like it was, “Don’t like being picked on? Move.” Which is way too simple.
I didn’t bring up any burden on gay people to move, Amanda. There wasn’t a point, except to vent about what kind of place would this happen and what kind of community would think this consistent with its norms and values. I wish things were better in the USA for gay people. I decided a long time ago I just didn’t want to deal with a culture war in my own backyard, and I left a place like this. More power to those who stay to fight it, but I’m just not one, and communities ought at least be honest about their problems and their disrespect of gay people.
Yes, exactly, Amanda, is was to tar Ft. Worth. (Sorry it was not very clear.) I know I’m being unfair, too, but news like this is upsetting.
No worries, it’s not unfair to bag on Ft Worth, though I don’t imagine your average gay resident expects this level of harassment. Cops and gays in Texas have an ongoing conflict, which is why Lawrence vs Texas started here.
erm… so…
if people are going to be arrested for drinking in bars, we should be seeing a mass exodus of bar owners, as the bars CLOSE for LACK OF BUSINESS because there is NEVER ANY DRINKING EVER OUTSIDE THE HOME ALLOWED. resteraunts will no longer serve wine and beer, etc.
right? in Ft Worth, this is what’s going to happen? they are saying that it is illegal to drink in public, and that establishments that sell alcohol to be consumed on the premises are public, so we will see a mass closure of all the bars in Ft Worth as this law becomes known, right?
fucking lying liars who lie
There wasn’t a point, except to vent about what kind of place would this happen and what kind of community would think this consistent with its norms and values.
Gays have been harrassed and even assaulted in San Francisco of all places. Instead of saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you go somewhere else?’ to GLBTIs, maybe you should be asking the haters, ‘Why can’t you just let people be?’
Sounds like these homophobic pigs didn’t count on there being young people around who were raised right - e.g. not to think hate and arbitrary police attacks in any form were acceptable.
As for community norms ... um, it’s a dance club, not a strip joint. Hello. Same rules as other such establishments - but it sounds like the police want to be able to make up their own where gays are concerned. Notice they didn’t show up on BEAR NIGHT. Strip joints overserve patrons all the time.
It’s not like there aren’t a plethora of police brutality victims out there. Why pick a serial rapist to make into your poster child?
Because brutality in response to brutality is NEVER the answer, and police brutality is NEVER acceptable in any form, toward any person. Period.
The cops are not in the business of dispensing frontier justice, Ginmar. Not.
My parents moved to Ft. Worth from Dallas in the past 5 years, and I visited them there recently. That place is backwards!
I’m not surprised this bullshit is going on there--just disappointed. That’s the thing--for the most part I’ve had decent experiences in Texas, but stuff like this makes me feel like I am silly to talk it up/defend it to my non-Texan friends. My partner and I went to Austin for an Indian wedding--he’s from NYC, and he felt nervous getting out of the car in Indian clothing to go buy some safety pins. I thought it was ridiculous and told him I’d never been harassed for my skin color in big cities in Texas and that it’s come along way from the stereotypes of southern prejudice that we’re often exposed to. But now, this kind of stuff makes me feel like I should eat my words.
Also, in a true mark of backwater-ness, there was like 1 non-Starbucks coffeeshop with wireless, and no vegetarian food restaurants that were halfway decent. I know I’m in the less cool part of Texas when you can’t get decent veggie options at any Mexican restaurant.
Now that I have calmed down:
A good strategy to ensure equal and dignified treatment of gays by police, which my home city uses, is to have gay and lesbian police officers do much of the policing of the neighborhoods with gay bars and clubs. Police follow-up on some minor regulatory infraction in a gay club would almost certainly be undertaken by gay police, and at the same time, there are numerous gay/lesbian recruiting drives by the police. This means that the police patrolling these areas are more likely to identify with the citizens’ particular concerns, and that straight cops who are prejudiced have gay colleagues and maybe will become less prejudiced as a result. This strategy was undertaken in response to a history of harassment many years ago, and it has worked in building trust of the police among gays and lesbians, and ensuring fair policing practices.
In the ideal community MikeEss suggests, such group-based identification wouldn’t be necessary, and straight cops would treat everyone equally and with dignity. Fort Worth is evidently not this kind of ideal community, so this incident would be a good opportunity to push for pro-gay measures on the part of the police, such as recruiting gays and changing the way gay bars/clubs are patrolled. And if it were up to me, the cops involved in this would never be allowed near a police force again; I am not sanguine that the abusers in this case will suffer 1/100th of that consequence, though.
hey’d probably find out that the events are honoring a riot bucking police authority through those means if nothing else.
Nope, I don’t think they need to find out one thing about Stonewall.
It was Gay Pride Parade weekend. That’s enough for homobigots to get pissed. They don’t need to know the history. Gays out there being flaming and having fun and not getting the shit kicked out of them for it. Not even being ashamed!
So they went shit-kicking at the new gay bar. It’s a hate crime. They intimidated the patrons of the Rainbow Bar in order to teach homosexuals to hide. It’s not an isolated incident--they intended to intimidate a class of people-->which is what the misnomer “hate crime” means.
What makes it worse, is it came from TABC. This isn’t some random cops deciding to harass; this is many people coordinating a plan to harass--more then enough people for at least one to step up and say “Guys, I hate fags, too, but this isn’t legal.”
They better be fired.
There are also federal statutes governing criminal violations of civil rights and conspiracies to violate civil rights. The abuse in Fort Worth ought to provoke a Justice Department investigation under these laws, the way that disenfranchisement of minorities does. Now, if only we could get a federal policy that equal treatment and treatment with dignity is a civil right, and that discrimination based on sexual orientation is as pernicious as discrimination based on the other factors already included in federal law; this, of course, is the kind of moral clarity a tepid White House and Congress are resisting.
I just wonder when the justice department will reign in the Homeland Security “I am the law” attitudes of jerkweed cops cultivated by the post 9/11 bullshit?
It’d be nice to be able to tar Ft Worth and blame texas, but police are the same wherever you go. We won’t be safe until we have the power to hold them accountable for their actions. Right now any infraction leads to a slap on the wrist, if that. Cops that are tried in court almost always win, and most cases don’t get that far. “Internal Investigations” are a sham.
t-ster, Austin is a lot different than the rest of Texas. We still have the redneck assholes and dick cops (who doesn’t?), but they don’t have majority support here.
TABC has a history of doing this sort of thing, not just in Gay bars, though. It was only a couple of years back that they and the State Police were busting patrons in hotel bars - hotel guests who would at worst, be stumbling back to their rooms, and charging them with PI.
Luke, that sounds like a really good strategy.
This doesn’t happen in SF because there are enough out gays and lesbians on the police force.
I suppose I’m over analyzing here and should just say, yeah, it’s harassment pure and simple. Of course I don’t know Texas law either. But, I can’t help but comment on how weird the description is. In my state you almost never hear of a case of being busted for overserving unless one of those stealth liquor agents personally observes it. If a person is overserved and there is an accident and it can be proven and traced to a particular bartender there is some liability.
As far as public intox goes it’s almost never charged unless there is a complaint or an officer observes someone falling down drunk and they’re afraid they are a danger to themselves.
GLBT and those who are sympathetic should protest this by going into so-called “straight” taverns all over the city next weekend and then calling the cops about “overserving” and “public drunkeness.” 100 calls from 100 different people. Very publicly report how many cops bother to show up and harass the “straight” bar patrons. Rinse. Repeat.
Then again, the assholes will likely just arrest the callers for “making false accusations” or some such BS despite that fact that I can guarantee that there are always at least a few sloppy drunks at every bar on a Saturday night.
(Disclosure: I live in the Metroplex--the large urbanized area between Dallas and Fort Worth.)
What Oriscus said. There was a huge hue and cry over TABC doing this in Irving in 2006. However, there is exactly no way that choosing this date and a new gay bar was a coincidence at all. They were sending a message: Stay over in Dallas.
See, Dallas votes blue. Dallas has a leadership that is very multicultural in nature. Dallas has a large and vibrant LGBTQI community. Dallas prides itself on being sophisticated, urbane, cosmopolitan. Dallas is a liberal city and in at least one survey, beat out Austin as the most liberal city in Texas.
Fort Worth votes red. Fort Worth is predominantly white. Fort Worth is a bit honkey-tonk and really loves the whole cowboy culture. Their biggest tourist draw is the Stockyards. In other words, they are the cultural and political opposite of Dallas.
And it’s a real shame. Fort Worth is an absolutely beautiful city. (So is Dallas but in a very different glass and concrete way). Fort Worth is just full of old masonry buildings, interesting historical sites, great art museums and so on. It retains its “we’re just a big ol’ neighborhood” feeling while having all the benefits of a city, where Dallas is so big, it’s lost that.
I wonder though. Did these folks think that they would do this, on this date, and no one would find out? Or that the “large and vibrant” LGBTQI community over in Dallas were unable to come the 40 miles to Fort Worth to make their lives miserable and hopefully get them fired? Really?
I hope those guys are lawyered up.
Ms. Kate, they didn’t ‘administer’ frontier justice. I’m actually sorry you said that, because it indicates something of your view on the case. All the evidence points to the fact they initiated a simple traffic stop, Mixon feared he’d be busted for the rapes he knew he’d committed, and he shot first. He killed at least two of the officers while they were prone and unable to fight back.
Mixon’s victims were, in all likelihood, black women, but hey, don’t let that stop you from ignoring them and making a scumbag into some kind of victim. Which he wasn’t.
Frontier justice my ass.
You missed the point Ginmar: the point being that the cops would go looking for payback from innocent people because one of their own was shot.
Nice that you support the police going after innocents because some scumbag shot a cop.
I don’t recall anyone defending a cop killer, ginmar. The ugly reality is that these incidents do create an excuse for the cops to bust skulls, one they’ll take, and denying that reality is a huge product of white privilege.
FWIW I read Luke’s post as “you say that FW is as nice as SF or NYC? Yeah, right. Given this, why would gay folks live there?”
I’ve been to Fort Worth. I don’t understand why ANYBODY would want to live there.
You missed the point Ginmar: the point being that the cops would go looking for payback from innocent people because one of their own was shot.
And why would they do that? This post you’re all discussing sounds like Samhita’s modus operandi: a persecution complex so overwhelming even a Christian would blush.
Hunter Thompson once said, “Feel cheated? Go to Texas.”
Choose your champions wisely.
Nice that you support the police going after innocents because some scumbag shot a cop.
Nice to see such a high level of discourse. Stay classy!
Lovelle Mixon’s actions are deplorable. But if we look at them within the context of police brutality, they sadly start make sense. Lovelle Mixon was trying to get out of going back to jail and this compounded with not finding work led him to desperate actions.
Oh, Jesus Christ. Is it any wonder why people took issue with Samhita’s post?
Her deplorable writing skills and huge holes in logic are a damning testament to the higher education system in this country. She shouldn’t have been admitted to a master’s program, let alone bestowed with a degree.
If they’re going after public drunkenness, how about a Longhorns or Aggies football game?
keshmeshi, you ask: And why would they do that? In response to: You missed the point Ginmar: the point being that the cops would go looking for payback from innocent people because one of their own was shot.
To be honest, I don’t know why cops would do it, all I know is that it’s incredibly common.
Something like this happened about 20 years ago in a Chicago suburb. Someone opened up a bar and switched it to a gay bar about a month later. The old fart who ran the town, and had been doing so since the Earth cooled, was horrified. He promptly sent “his” police into the place night after night to hassle patrons until it finally shut down.
Happy ending: This scumbag got nailed for taking bribes a couple of years ago and is awaiting sentencing.
You know what I’d like to know? What the hell does the late and thoroughly unlamented Lavelle Mixon have to do with police officers terrorizing a gay bar on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, anyway?
er...I wasn’t finished. oops. A family member is an NYPD policeman. Having to hang out with his little cop buddies was horrifying. One person told a story of how in the “good old days” cops would coat bullets with garlic so that if they shot a person their wounds were likelier to become infected, so that they were likelier to get their first kill on the job. Another told a story of being forced to work on New Year’s Eve. he was slated to go to a party, but had to respond to a drunk and disorderly call instead. He found the guy passed out on the sidewalk, and because he was pissed off at having to miss his party, he beat the shit out of the guy. this was a story that all the other guys laughed at!!
I have another close friend who’s a parole officer. He’s a decent guy and a good father, and though he’s tough with his parolees, he’s fair and plays by the rules. Clearly feels he’s doing society a service. But he has absolutely no sympathy with the people he’s assigned to: he thinks they’re all scum and that they don’t deserve parole in the first place. Meanwhile, he describes some of the behavior of his fellow parole officers, and some of them sound criminal themselves! These stories he tells with a laugh, as in “haha, isn’t that guy just a crazy fella!”, while similar behavior from parolees would get them locked up for years. So even good guys tend to excuse the behavior of their scummy fellow cops, because the culture is so insular and clubbish.
There are some good cops out there. But the idea that cops, as a group, have a pernicious us-vs.them power trip culture, shouldn’t come as any surprise.
Aaron, the aftermath of that shooting, and how angry some people got when entirely reasonable concerns about racially-motivated police retaliation were floated, left me concerned that this post would also attract comments from people eager to minimize the abuse of power that goes straight back to bigotry with the police. It’s like how you always worry when you write about rape that someone is going to say the victim made an incorrect choice that got her raped, you always worry that people’s hopes that the police aren’t the bad guys will rise up when you criticize the police. Certainly, the urge not to argue with people about this makes me not want to write about incidents of police racism that seem obvious to me, but that don’t have triple copies notarized proof.
NYC, has been experiencing an increase in anti-LGBTQI violence for years. I think it was the Village Voice that reported that the number of incidents has been going up steadily. Now, correlation doesn’t imply causation, but I think it’s interesting that as society in general becomes more open and as LGBTQI folk are increasingly “out” in places like NYC, the voilence is increasing. So, really, no place in the US is very safe for LGBTQI people.
keshmeshi, you ask: And why would they do that? In response to: You missed the point Ginmar: the point being that the cops would go looking for payback from innocent people because one of their own was shot.
To be honest, I don’t know why cops would do it, all I know is that it’s incredibly common.
It’s pretty simple really, cops want revenge, and to them any person that fits into the category of “bad guy” that they arbitrarily define will do.
The fear of police retaliation against a community isn’t some sort of paranoid imaginary thing. Cops do this all the time. Just the other day I was at a protest where every person there, and passers-by, were searched and threatened because at a similar protest a few months ago, a couple cops suffered minor injuries (there was a small group of people throwing things, which I don’t in any way endorse).
I’ve been on either side of things when it comes to police - as a known activist, and as a kid who dressed like a punk, I’ve been the kind of person that police like to stop and harass, and as a white person with a white-collar job, I’m the kind of person they ignore or treat well. Depending on what I wear, the difference is pretty noticeable. If you’re someone who’s never been bothered by the police for something arbitrary, hey, I’m not going to resent that , I just wish everyone had that privilege, and I wish you could realize just how lucky you are.
coat bullets with garlic so that if they shot a person their wounds were likelier to become infected,
Oh, good. By using a traditional herbal disinfectant, they minimized their chance of that. Stupid fuckers.
“Oh, good. By using a traditional herbal disinfectant, they minimized their chance of that. Stupid fuckers.”
Maybe they thought they were trying to police vampires.
“Strip joints overserve patrons all the time.”
I tend to think that you could walk into practically any bar in Michigan (just sticking with what I know) and nail them for overserving.
The legal standard is supposed to be visibly intoxicated, or something along those lines. When I was going to Michigan State, the standard seemed to be so long as you didn’t puke in the bar, you were okay. Same for the gay bar in Lansing that had a popular “Straight Night” on Fridays for anyone who wanted a good dance club.
Which is why I’d be about 90 percent sure this bullshit is gay-hating bullshit, no matter what day of the year it came on.
“Maybe they thought they were trying to police vampires.”
Even for that, you have to cut a cross in the end of the bullet, which must cut down on accuracy. Unless “From Dusk til Dawn” was in some way unrealistic.
the “good old days” cops would coat bullets with garlic so that if they shot a person their wounds were likelier to become infected, so that they were likelier to get their first kill on the job
The Italian immigrants in Chicago where our family doctor interned many moons ago would rub their knives with garlic and spit on them before proceeding with a Friday night duello. I don’t know what effect, if any, the former had, but the latter would lead to infections, a bite or puncture wound with human saliva is the most dangerous non-venomous injury we H. sapiens are subject to.
ice weasel,
You got any idea where that HST quote comes from? I don’t recognize it and a googling brings up only two links, your comment and another blog. I’ve read all the Doc’s stuff, but I don’t recognize that line.
There are also federal statutes governing criminal violations of civil rights and conspiracies to violate civil rights. The abuse in Fort Worth ought to provoke a Justice Department investigation under these laws, the way that disenfranchisement of minorities does.
And which civil rights law would such an investigation be under? Because such action is foreclosed by this:
Now, if only we could get a federal policy that equal treatment and treatment with dignity is a civil right, and that discrimination based on sexual orientation is as pernicious as discrimination based on the other factors already included in federal law
unless, of course, you are arguing for discrimination against GLBT folks coming under Constitutional and statutory prohibitions on sex discrimination, which is my preferred remedy.
Did anyone else notice this:http://chicagoist.com/2009/06/24/bartender_reacts_to_abbates_sentenc.php
The 300 pound cop actually claimed it was self-defense.
Can I ask a dumb question? Why the hell would anyone go to a bar if not to get drunk?
I mean, if that shit is illegal, I guess it’s back to drinking at home. Which, admittedly, does have its advantages: cheaper, and also I can drink straight from the bottle, so I don’t have to do dishes afterwards.
Elphie, I agree there is not a federal law at present that would provoke a Section 242 investigation for extreme and violent anti-gay harrassment such as what happened in Forth Worth, and that if sexual orientation were added to federal discrimination laws, there would then exist a grounds for federal investigation. I do think the federal constitution’s equal protection clause compels equal treatment based on sexual orientation (though this interpretation has not yet been endorsed by the Court), such that the FWPD’s actions were, indeed, a conspiracy to violate constitutional rights. Nonetheless, it is true that a court ever viewing their actions is such is probably a pipe dream.
This incident is a reminder of the urgent need for such protections - i.e., ensuring that the equal dignity and worth of gay people is subject to the same strict oversight of the law that the equal dignity and worth of other groups are, that the equal dignity and worth of gay people not be left to the local norms and the inclination of local officials and legislatures, etc., just as the equal worth and dignity of other minorities is not entrusted to localities. It’s thus also a reminder of the costs of Obama and Congress’ timidity on gay and lesbian equality. Perhaps an investigation could proceed on the grounds of
I just wonder when the justice department will reign in the Homeland Security “I am the law” attitudes of jerkweed cops cultivated by the post 9/11 bullshit?
I am still stunned that just because someone crashed some planes and ~3000 people died, my country completely lost its mind and forfeited an incredible amount of liberty in exchange for security theater.
So. Not. Worth. It.
In Chicago, if a bartender tries to stop serving a patron who’s drunk, she’ll get the shit beat out of her and the drunk will walk. Well, if the drunk is a cop who only spent the previous 6 hours beating on people during his binge.
Probation. Anger management class. And Judge John Fleming said that if he thought giving the guy a sentence would have any affect on stopping drunks from hitting people, he’d impose the maximum, but since he thinks the sentences are ineffective, and the bartender’s PTSD doesn’t count as a real injury, probation’s fine.
You know why no one helped the bartender? Because they KNEW THE GUY WAS A COP.
Caren, I find myself worried about something. American police forces careened out of control many years ago; what worries me is that very small groups of very focused vigilantes will start to murder the worst (or at least most visibly worst) cops, supposedly to keep the others in line. It might be organized criminals operating for their own purposes, (remember the “Los Pépés” murders and Escobar?), it might be small death squads of zealot Clean Cops, it might be a tight little group of civilian killers. ....
And the cops would scream “isn’t this horrible?????” and large stretches of the public will shift uncomfortably and quietly ask, “but what other way was there to keep you in line? you destroyed all the other methods’.
Sounds like a ludicrous movie, I know and concede. But before 9-11 crashing a plane into a building was something restricted to a Tom Clancy novel.
You know why no one helped the bartender? Because they KNEW THE GUY WAS A COP.
Well, maybe not that. It might have been the simple fact that he was a 300 pound armed and violent psychopath.
No, wait. They would have known he was a Chicago cop, then. Never mind.
Nonetheless, it is true that a court ever viewing their actions is such is probably a pipe dream.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals found that discrimination against a trans person was discrimination based on sex. So, no it’s not a pipe dream. The LGBT movement has chosen to go in a different direction, seeking specific LGBT statutory protections, leaving individual plaintiffs to make the current law evolve as best they can acting through their own lawsuits.
YOu gotta be fucking me. The cops pulled this fucker over, he drew first, disabled them, executed them while they were on the ground and wounded, and then the cops went looking for him to keep other people safe. Rapist? ARmed Robber? Suspected murderer? Where in fuck do you get innocent victim? Again, are there no Sean Bells in Oakland? Or are the women he raped just not too hipster for you?
It’s pretty simple really, cops want revenge, and to them any person that fits into the category of “bad guy” that they arbitrarily define will do.
Yeah, which fits this case how?
Nice that you support the police going after innocents because some scumbag shot a cop.
Ms Kate on 06/29 at 12:51 PM
Yeah, Ms. Kate, because that’s exactly what I said. Christ, this is why I’m so fucking disgusted with middle class feminists, whatever the fuck you’re calling yourself. God, shades of Eldredge Cleaver and Mumia Abu-Jabar. You’re disgusting. Innocent black men languish in prisons all over but some rapist gets all the attention and all the college-educated white women gotta show off that degree.
I don’t recall anyone defending a cop killer, ginmar. The ugly reality is that these incidents do create an excuse for the cops to bust skulls, one they’ll take, and denying that reality is a huge product of white privilege.
Yeah, because you won’t come out and do it honestly, but boy, you sure all are eager to ignore those women Mixon raped. Tell me how erasing black women isn’t white privilege. Again, so how is Lovelle Mixon innocent? How are the cops guilty? You got any proof? At least one of those cops was black. How as he not a danger to the public?
And the women and girls he raped? What about that intersectionality, again? Or did you just decide to bulldoze one street so it’s only one way this time?
Fucking class bullshit again. God, this gets more disgusting every time I see this shit.
So, Mixon killed 4 cops in March, 2009. When did the Oakland PD go out and brutally bust the skulls of innocents for payback? It’s been, what? 4 months?
Of course the irony being that Van Cliburn is Ft Worth’s most beloved son, as gay as the day is long (he frequently brought Boyfriend of the Week to the retail bookstore I worked at in Ft Worth) but NO ONE will ever mention this in any Ft Worth press. Even though it’s as open a secret as it’s possible to have. He’s rich and famous and brings in the music fan dollars, so it’s ok.
Average gay folk having fun, though, not so much.
Yeah, and neither officer that he killed ever got off a shot. Ms. Kate, you want to apologize now? Amanda, you got anything to say?
Did some hipster get ticketed by the police this week? A little bitter maybe? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Ft Worth’s most beloved son, as gay as the day is long
Yes, I found this in the Wiki:
In 1998, Cliburn was named in a lawsuit by his domestic partner of seventeen years, mortician Thomas Zaremba.[2] In the suit, Zaremba claimed entitlement to a portion of Cliburn’s income and assets and went on to charge that he might have been exposed to HIV and claimed emotional distress. Each claim was subsequently dismissed by an Appellate Court, citing palimony suits are not permitted in the state of Texas unless the relationship is based on a written agreement.
I had a piano teacher, many moons ago, who in the course of conversation, told me that it was common knowledge that Van Cliburns’ mother accompanied him to Moscow to keep him from messing around with ‘young lads’ when he was there for the Tchaikovsky Competition.
My first significant piano teacher, OTOH, had a student who was assigned to drive Van Cliburn from the airport to the school he was attending for a recital, and apparently his mother was with him and a bit of a chatterbox.
Southern women can be that way, Amanda excepted, of course 
, my grandmother, not so much. One time my father came into the room after being on the phone for a while. Mother asked who it was. PA, who had a hatred of verbal mimicry unless it was done professionally, answered in a pitch-perfect imitation of Grandma Avenger’s voice (think Lady Bird Johnson), “How you doing, son?” and then talked his ear off.
Anyway, Van Cliburn was heard to remark that his mother suffered from “verbal diarrhea”.
’m not saying that it’s never been a practice in Texas to roll into bars and arrest people for being drunk, but I’ve never seen or heard of it. “
The TABC raids bars nightly. Sometimes they stay in the parking lot and bust you when you get in your car, other times they go in and arrest people. Most of the time they work alone, but they also partner with the local police. They’re State Police officers and can arrest someone for any of the same reasons any local police can, but they’re supposed to stick to alcohol related crimes.
They also partner with local police for the Cops in Shops raids.
The raid in and of itself isn’t that suspicious, given that the TABC routinely raids new bars, since new bars either 1) don’t know all the rules well or 2) are over eager to serve and serve people illegally.
The brutality is absolutely unacceptable.
“So, Mixon killed 4 cops in March, 2009. When did the Oakland PD go out and brutally bust the skulls of innocents for payback? It’s been, what? 4 months?”
This seems like a fair question, as opposed to Ginmar’s ravings.
“Yeah, and neither officer that he killed ever got off a shot. Ms. Kate, you want to apologize now? Amanda, you got anything to say?”
I don’t know what Samhita said, but Ms. Kate and Amanda seemed to me to be talking about the likilihood that the Oakland PD was going to go out and behave more brutally than usual in unrelated cases, because the were pissed off about the murder of the their fellow officers by this Mixon guy. Whether this happened or not, who knows, but it’s not at all related to anything you typed.
Elphie, the problem with using sex discrimination laws, or protection based on sex under the equal protection clause, to protect LGBT persons from discrimination is that these protections are not complete for gay people and would not protect LGBT persons from most instances of harassment motivated by anti-gay animus.
Arguably, there is a case to protect transgendered people from discrimination based on sex-discrimination laws, or a case for the right to marriage equality based on sex-discrimination laws (or the equal protection clause’s coverage of sex). These cases require certain judicial interpretation of statutes and the Constitution, which can easily be pounced upon by conservatives crying activism (their favorite fake process argument despite that their own interpretations of the statues and equal protection clause are exactly that: interpretations). Without “specific LGBT statutory protections,” though, judges do not have a clear legislative mandate that such protections and equal esteem are required. And LGBT advocates make a compelling moral case that the specific protections for sexual orientation are required.
I should add that judges ought not need the “clear legislative mandate” I referred to, in order to hold that equal esteem and dignity for gay people is required by the Constitution. However, the clear legislative mandate closes the door on yet another fake-principled right-wing objection to courts’ insistence that gay people be treated as fellow citizens and human beings.
Elphie, the problem with using sex discrimination laws, or protection based on sex under the equal protection clause, to protect LGBT persons from discrimination is that these protections are not complete for gay people and would not protect LGBT persons from most instances of harassment motivated by anti-gay animus.
Actually, under the right analysis, sex discrimination laws would offer complete protection and would protect against anti-gay harassment. There’s no “clear legislative mandate” against sexual harassment in Title VII, at least not the way you’re envisioning it, yet the protections against sex discrimination are broad enough to prohibit sexuahl harassment. As the Supreme Court held. And, as the Sixth Circuit held, the same law is broad enough to protect trans persons.
Yes, it’s a matter of legislative interpretation—that’s how law is made and enforced and practiced. It’s just how law works. It’s normal, it’s natural, it’s perfectly defensible and is defended every day. It’s why law libraries have all those books with all those cases in them: that’s what the law is, a living breathing instrument that changes and evolves all the time. So, yes, it’s different than passing a specfic statute, but it’s not lesser or more problematic. Especially given the incredibly crap-tastic way trans protective statutes are written, including the ENDA amendment that was pure crap: it wouldn’t have protected trans persons and had the very clear potential to narrow protections against sex discrimination. Faced with expanding protection for all v. expanding protection for some at the expense of others, I’ll take the former.
I actually created a username just to comment on this.
To the people bashing Fort Worth on here: Congratulations! You are all hypocrites!
Stereotyping and prejudice are the very things that the LGBT community has been fighting for years, but here you are judging an entire city, and the more than half a million residents by one (albeit a really fucked up one) incident.
The Fort Worth community is for the most part outraged about this too. There was a protest in Downtown the following Monday and there is another scheduled for this coming Sunday.
I totally admit that homophobia is a problem in Fort Worth, but it’s a problem everywhere in America! There is no city in America that can truly call itself free of homophobia. This is a social issue that permeates geographic lines and stereotyping just isn’t going to help!
And one thing I haven’t seen mentioned in these comments (probably because no one making these comments actually lives here) is that we have an openly gay city council member! He has been very vocal about this arrest and he is doing what he can to make sure the investigation actually goes somewhere!
So please, give my hometown a break! It is far from perfect, but it is certainly not a hellhole like many of you are making it out to be. I invite you to come give it a chance. This is a very rare incident, which is why it is getting a lot of press!
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Oh, bullshit on the Samhita post. She wrote a shitty piece about a rapist who got pulled over by the cops. He’d been IDed as the rapist of a 12-year-old girl, and it turns out, had raped two women that very morning. Neither Samhita nor Feministe had the guts to admit they were wrong about trying to make a serial rapist and an abuser of women into some victim of police brutality. For fuck’s sake already.
You left out the part where there was no proof of police brutality, but plenty of proof the con was a total scumbag. A rapist, in fact. What the fuck? Is this Eldredge Cleaver all over again?