1. Bumper sticker I spied in Colorado Springs yesterday: "Drill, baby, drill." The sticker appeared on the bumper of a Smart Car. Parked outside of Whole Foods.
2. Big kerfuffle in Fort Worth as gay protesters complain that cops who turned up at a gay bar to arrest patrons were brutal. I find this hilarious:
Protesters said they want to know why Fort Worth police officers and Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission agents used what the protesters described as excessive force when arresting seven patrons at the Rainbow Lounge early Sunday. ...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.
How drunk and horny do you have to be to be a male who gropes a male cop -- especially in Texas!? As Laura Kostelny cracks on the D magazine blog:
My first question here: Isn't it possible that the bar patrons thought that these were the hot cop strippers Michael Bluth hired to scare George Michael straight (so to speak)? (Apologies if you're not an Arrested Development fan.)
UPDATE: From something I posted below, in the comboxes:
Rod, your finding humor in this indicates to me that you can't even conceive that gay people could be wronged. We are so completely evil, depraved and sick that one of MUST have groped a policeman. Hah hah hah. Very funny.I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. I'm just seeing the news that one of the patrons is in critical condition, which is, obviously, very sad. If it comes out that the cops were in the wrong here, then I certainly hope they face whatever sanction the law provides for. Nevertheless, the story I commented on -- a report that Fort Worth cops who entered a gay bar were set upon by drunk, horny patrons who played grab-ass with them -- is funny to me, in a Darwin Award kind of way. That somebody got seriously injured in the subsequent fracas -- not funny.
Your inability to see that grabbing a cop's crotch is a grossly inappropriate form of behavior, and in fact a COMPLETELY IDIOTIC thing to do, suggests to me that you think gay people cannot be as stupid as the rest of us, and certainly not when it comes to expressing their sexuality, which is, on this view, a sacramental act. I would also find it funny if some drunk redneck at a cowboy bar put his hand on a female cop's rear end, and got taken down for it. If said redneck ended up in the hospital, well, that wouldn't be funny.
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It's very clear that the police are lying. They claim that Chad Gibson was injured outside the club. Not only do witnesses (among them a "veteran journalist") report that Gibson was injured in the bar, there are photographs showing him being held down. There are also photos of the damage to the wall. This club had been open for only a week. It's extremely unlikely that the damage to the wall was from a previous incident.
Rod, I think you owe your gay readers an apology. As sigilaris and others have mentioned, the D Magazine blog post you commmented on mentioned that someone may have been sent to the hospital. That post had just one paragraph on the incident. It contained a link to an article at your own paper in which violence was alleged. You knew when you posted that there was a possibility of police brutality. Yet you found humor in the incident. You should be ashamed.
JSP, for me it's the fact Rod is on theeditorial board of our paper, and thus part of the establishment for the community. I have also learned he 'test drives' some columns for the paper here first.
Groping a cop is, indeed, an idiotic thing to do. Apparently it is also punishable by a beating.
Clearly, the issue here is bigotry, or at least the appearance of bigotry. Police raids of gay bars is as sensitive a symbol of state-based bigotry as Bull Connor unleashing the dogs and high-pressure hoses during the Black civil rights era.
For the police in this instance to even be raiding a gay bar on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots is so obtuse as to be wholly incredulous.
And for Rod to dismiss their collective ignorance of Stonewall reveals his own investment in anti-gay bigotry. As another commenter said above, it's understandable and reasonable for individual officers to be ignorant of Stonewall's anniversary, but it is completely inexcusable that commanding officers wouldn't notify their street officers of the anniversary and dissuade such (apparently) pointless raids on gay bars in their jurisdiction.
And to "Jess Sayin'", who said on June 30, 2009, at 11:24 AM:
"Since Abner Louima is being invoked, it's worth remembering that the police brutality against him occurred in true-blue 'Noo Yauwuhk' and not in red-necked 'Foat Wuth.'
The regional snobbery and class bigotry on display here does nothing to make otherwise disinterested observers sympathetic to the gay and/or the liberal side of this Rashomon-like debate."
Your comment should be inserted into Rhetoric courses around the country as the most perfect strawman statement ever crafted. Yes, if anyone refers to the brutality committed upon Abner Louima by police officers due solely to his being gay, be sure to attack that example as inapplicable because it occurred in a "blue" state, as if that has any bearing at all on the discussion.
I'll give you some "regional snobbery" (which is always true when the setting is Texas), but please provide one example of class bigotry on display anywhere in these comments. And to assert such a plainly baseless diversion from the plain and actual bigotry displayed by Rod in his post? Ridiculous. As someone else said above, if Rod had posted a "humorous" story about any other racial, ethnic, or social stereotype, he would be roundly condemned for promoting bigotry.
Finally, I'm sure you feel very proud of your Rashomon reference. However, there is a significant problem: in the film, every witness told a separate story, whereas here there are only two stories - the self-serving, CYA version related by the cops and the version told by everyone else who was there, all of whom stand to gain nothing by lying since the young man in the hospital hasn't even been charged with assault, nor have any of them been criminally charged.
The original report -- the one I wrote the comment off of yesterday afternoon -- only had it that someone went to the hospital, having been injured in the melee that supposedly took place because drunk bar patrons sexually assaulted cops. I didn't file this under "homosexuality" because I don't think this incident says anything one way or the other about homosexuality, but rather the stupidity of a drunk, or drunks.
If, as we're now hearing, the cops appear to have overreacted, and the bar patron didn't do what the police accused him of doing, then again, throw the book at the cops. I've got no problem with that. If they were being brutal to an innocent, whose actions in no way warranted a scuffle, then they should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.
Anybody who thinks drunk gay men don't overstep their bounds at times and grope people who don't wish to be groped has never spent any time in the French Quarter at Mardi Gras. As I have. If this sad situation in Fort Worth was as I initially thought it was -- drunk bar patrons play grab-ass with cops, fight breaks out, guy goes to hospital -- I find dark "Darwin Award" humor in that. We now know that the guy who went to the hospital was/is critically injured, and that the cops may be lying to cover up their own brutality. Which changes things, as I am happy to acknowledge, even as I say that if an investigation shows the cops were brutal, they should be punished. If I had known more details of the situation at the time that I wrote this (early Monday afternoon), I wouldn't have posted it. Like the D writer, I thought this was pretty much a bar fight situation, not one in which somebody was seriously injured. I was mistaken.
If you want me to say that a gay man, or any man, who gropes or otherwise physically assaults someone else in sexual manner, and draws a proportional physical response from his victim, is always and everywhere in the right, well, you're not going to get it. If this were a situation in which a straight man had allegedly grabbed the rear end of a female police officer, thereby setting off an altercation, I suspect there would be far less protest from the usual suspects on this combox.
Anyway, I'm going to close down this thread, because I have work to do this afternoon, and any thread having to do with homosexuality almost always goes off the rails.