It was a building under siege. Thousands of placard-wielding demonstrators chanted angrily behind police barricades set up outside a huge Mormon temple on New York’s plush Upper West Side.
The banners condemned the Church’s active sponsorship of the successful campaign to ban gay marriage in California. Michael Hogan, a gay illustrator who lived nearby, explained why he had joined the growing protest movement that swept across the US last week.
“It is important to be here,” he said. “We have to stand up.”
PHOTO: AP
The marriage ban has motivated gays in the US to protest perhaps more than any other event in recent times. Since the California ban was passed by a referendum on Nov. 4, huge protests have been staged in cities from San Francisco to Chicago to New York.
The scale of the protests has shocked many and led some commentators to compare it to the sort of communal political awakening that marked the birth of the civil rights movement. That was the tone of many of the banners and chants in the New York protest, which made references to the earlier struggle for black people’s rights.
“Gay, straight, black, white — marriage is a civil right!” went one chant.
One man carried a poster with the question: “Should we sit at the back of the bus too?”
Those words sent a powerful signal in a country that elected its first black president, Barack Obama, on the day of the ban and seemed poised to take a liberal turn in its politics. California’s passing of Proposition Eight, which in effect reversed an earlier move making gay marriage legal, was one of the few electoral disappointments for liberals. That the move should come in California — a state that is usually famed for its liberalism — was even more of a surprise.
“I was shocked at California. It was the one bad thing about election night,” Hogan said.
Organizers of the protests said that “Prop Eight” was simply encouraging hate and discrimination.
“Hatred has no place in society and it has no place in state constitutions,” said Corey Johnson, joint organizer of the New York demonstration.
If supporters of Prop Eight thought their victory would be accepted quietly, they were very wrong. It has opened a huge can of political worms. For many it showed how California, like the US itself, was still deeply divided over how to treat gay people. It split the Republicans, with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger opposing it and most of the conservative wing of his party campaigning for it.
It opened up a racial debate as many Hispanics and black voters, who tend to be politically liberal but socially conservative, voted for it. It also triggered a debate over the role of religion and the state as many churches fought to get the measure through.
Many of those churches were high-profile evangelical institutions that have long opposed any moves towards accepting gay marriage. But most of the outrage has focused firmly on the Mormon Church, whose members contributed more than US$20 million in support of Prop Eight.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS