Their featured ex-gay speaker, Stephen Bennett, didn't show up because he was allegedly involved in a hit and run accident just before the event. Brian and the other panelists were convinced that it was a "homosexual" who hit Stephen and drove off - providing them with a theme for the night. One speaker asked, "Where is Stephen Bennett's 'safe zone?'."
All of the speakers could not stop talking about our penises and vaginas, and what people should do with said body parts. They are more obsessed with our bodies and sex lives than we are.
So once again paranoid Brian and his followers believe that the "homosexual activists" were at work but this time they supposedly stopped "ex-gay" Stephen Bennett from attending (not too different than Amy blaming the "homosexual activists" for breaking into her home and terrifying her cats). Now why doesn't these religious zealots believe that God was the one who stopped Stephen Bennett from "testifying"? If they believe that God is the micromanager they make God out to be I'd be thinking The Lord stopped him.
Mark does point out what I knew from the start:
Nothing the speakers had to say was in any way related to the Laramie Project.
I hope the people in Acton who OK'd this sham forum were present to see what was truly behind the motives for those people who called for an alternative forum to present the opposite view of "The Laramie Project". What I can't figure out is what is the opposite of "A gay man is left to die on a fence by men who did it just because he was gay", he wanted them to do it? It makes no sense.
6 comments:
The opposing view of the Laramie Project? Is that like advocating for hate crimes as a societal need or something? (Coming from those two, that probably isn't far off.)
Though we leave out the possibility that perhaps Stephen Bennet was stopped by a gay man. And hat gay man is christ. But that would be queering christ no?
I live in the AB community and decided to attended this meeting to listen to the objections to the Laramie Project.
Wrong. The play was not discussed, but was substantially distorted by Brian Camenker. The evening could only by described as an incoherent and shocking 2-3 hour diatribe against gays.
Linda Potter has been working with our youth and putting on amazing theater in AB for years.
Like always, we anxiously await this falls production.
I think at this point we could gain momentum in seriously classifying this group, massresistance, as a hate group. Get the leading orgs int he country like sothern poverty law center to chime in. get some legislators to sign a declaration of sorts. make sure that no school ever feels comfortable allowing this hate group to occupy the spaces of learning again.
I made it out to Acton for the "forum" At the beginning of the evening there were about 100 people in the audience. A little less than half seemed to be Brian's people because they clapped at all the tired, scare tatics that the speakers used.
Most of Brian's people were between the ages of 60 and 70 with the exception of a group of single men who sat by themselves and the only way I could describe them is they looked like the type of guy you would see hanging around alone at your local bowling alley.
I was in the lobby as some people began to leave around 9:00pm and I watched a reporter as he had a hard time trying to find anyone who had a child in the school system. He did find one couple but they would not comment.
One of the speakers Jim Lafferty, is a hired PR gun from Washington DC, whose PR Agency represents far right wing groups and is the son in law of Televangilist Lou Sheldon from the Family Values Coalition, his plane ticket and other expenses were paid for by Brian and Ami and the 3 other active MR members.
I can't begin to discuss how strange the talk by Dr Diggs was. This guy really enjoys talking about men and gay sex. He talks a great deal about how dangerious gay sex is, but offers very little about women or lesbian sex.
One of the other speakers was a real nut job named John Russo from Reading. He talked about how he wasn't "zombified by the Reading School Committe. After making some of the most wild assertions about gays I have ever heard. And I have heard a lot. He wondered why he couldn't get someone from the Gay community to debate him.
By the end of the night, there were about 50 people who were able to endure Brian's entire performance. ( During his talk Brian told the audience he knows about theatre because he was once a newspaper theatre critic.)
Before the night ended someone took a picture of Ami as she chatted with Brian at the front of the auditorium. She got all worked up and and demanded that the Acton Police Officer who was in the theatre stop the young man. After the cop looked at the camera, the young man left the building.
Ami was asked by a member of the audience if this was any different then the pictures she takes outside Boston City Hall before the BAGLY Prom and posts on her BLOG. Ami said she was there as a private citizen.
I guess one day you can be a paid MR staff memeber, hate blogger and co-hostess of the MR infomercial/paid radio program on the even more obscure foreign language station AM 1330 WRCA. And one night you can be just a private citizen.
It looks like comments have been turned off for the top post, but jsut noticed this item on MassResistance. Edward Pawlick has died.
http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen/07c/pawlick/index.html
I'm not sure why, but I find this paragrpah funny:
Besides Libel by the New York Times, Ed wrote two other books: How to Avoid being Overcharged by Your Life Insurance Salesman in 1968 and Freedom will Conquer Racism and Sexism in 1998.
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