The 50 Spot: A Call for LGBT Rights in Michigan

by Michael Jones · 2009-03-31 07:23:00 UTC
Topics:

Towson protest

The buzz from around the 50 today: (1) a call for LGBT rights in Michigan, (2) a Republican political association in California moves forward with plans to host a virulently anti-gay speaker who blames homosexuals for the Holocaust; and (3) and Maryland high school and college students turn out in the rain to stand up against the hate group known as the Westboro Baptist Church.  More below....

Michigan: Recent news from the Triangle Foundation shows that hate crimes against LGBT people in Michigan increased 133 percent in Michigan last year.  That news, coupled with the statistics that show that LGBT youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide, has led several groups, including the Michigan State chapter of the ACLU and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), to call on Michigan to expand statewide anti-discrimination laws.  As Heather Grace with AFSC explains: "Eighty-nine percent of folks in the nation support equal rights in employment - and yet, discrimination in much of Michigan employment, housing, public accommodations, public service and educational facilities, is still legal."  Legislation like this is doubly important in a state like Michigan, which next to Ohio, has the largest number of documented hate groups in the Great Lakes region, and one of the higher numbers in the country.

California: What do you do when you're a GOP group, and the event you wanted to host at a country club gets canceled because the club doesn't like the fact that your featured speaker blames LGBT people for the Holocaust?  Well, if you're the Murrieta Temecula Republican Assembly, you just find another venue to host your hatemongering keynote. The speaker in question, Scott Lively, runs Abiding Truth Ministries, which is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  And for good reason.  Despite the fact that it's well known that the Nazi party exterminated LGBT people by the thousands in Germany, Lively insists that homosexuals played a large role in Nazism and contributed to the Holocaust.  The fact that a recognized GOP group would want to host him is the equivalent of the Republican party welcoming Rev. Fred Phelps into its fold.  Make no mistakes, this is a legitimate Republican Party group in California, hosting the head of a hate group.  Embarrassing and disgraceful.

Maryland:  Speaking of hate groups and the Rev. Fred Phelps, it's worth mentioning that folks in Maryland showed up in droves yesterday to protest Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church (WBC).  More than 250 folks, mostly from Towson High School and Towson University, came out to show the folks from WBC that they're not only a fringe radical group, but they also have the message of Christianity completely wrong.  As one local Presbyterian pastor, Rev. Tom Harris, said: "We wanted to provide a witness that Christianity isn’t about hate.  It's about love."  Perhaps one day, the six people that belong to the WBC will get that message

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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