Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Homophobic tweets made into a powerful, hard-to-watch PSA

This is a difficult PSA to watch. And it's supposed to be:



 From Equalitopia:

Charlotte Moore from Raleigh, North Carolina has created a PSA against homophobia after the Twitter hashtag #ToMyUnbornChild attracted homophobes to publicly announce that they would murder their child if he or she was gay.

#ToMyUnbornChild became a trending topic on Twitter a few weeks ago, and while most people used it to write loving tweets to their future children, some homophobes decided to do just the opposite.

@Homophobes, a Twitter account that retweets homophobes to expose their ignorance, published an article of 100 extremely homophobic tweets, which gained quite a bit of attention around the web.

Charlotte Moore was inspired, and decided to write and direct a PSA using the tweets. The video was produced by Brian Lee and Nick Heim.

From the video’s description:
I got the idea on a Thursday. By Sunday, we — me, my boyfriend, and whatever friends we could find to help us — had it filmed.

It’s easy to dehumanize hate speech online because we’ve gotten so used to seeing it. We tell ourselves that it’s the product of trolls, of random, anonymous strangers.

Except they’re not. They’re real people. Many of them will be parents. And some of their children will be gay.




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'Minnesota students rebel against anti-gay lecture' and other Wednesday midday news briefs

Minnesota Catholic High Schoolers Not Happy With Mandatory Marriage Discrimination Lecture - A story both sad and empowering. And it's got NOM's dirty fingerprints all over it.

Holy week in Maryland: Hide the eggs, not the naked politicking - And the Catholic Church is pushing other nonsense in Maryland.

Another few laps: Reports of Prop 5′s demise are premature (& proof Minnery knew he was spreading false information) - The tale of Prop 5's defeat in Anchorage, AL (which I posted about this morning) is getting more and more interesting.

Rep. Steve King Proposes A Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Approach To Gays In The Workplace - Because after all, why would gays want to talk about their families or have pictures of their loved ones at their desk. Heterosexuals don't do that. Oh wait . . .

Liberian Leaflets Call for Vigilante Actions Against Gays - How nice. A gay 'hit list' in Liberia.


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Pro-gay ordinance defeated in a strange web of controversy

It's never my pleasure to report bad news:

Anchorage voters rejected a proposed ordinance to add legal protections for gay, lesbian and transgender people in a chaotic municipal election fraught with ballot shortages and high voter turnout in many precincts.

With more than 90 percent of the precincts reporting late Tuesday, 58 percent of voters had voted against Proposition 5, the equal rights ordinance that was far and away the most controversial and emotional component of this spring's election.

As of late Tuesday, neither side was claiming victory nor conceding defeat.

. . . An unexpectedly high turnout, with some polling places running out of ballots, resulted in a large number of votes that might be on "questioned" ballots, which have to be counted by hand. The final results may be days or longer away, said municipal clerk Barbara Gruenstein.

Reports began circulating late in the day Tuesday that some precincts were running out of ballots because of heavy turnout. By 7 p.m. -- an hour before polls were to close -- lines were long at many polling places and extra ballots were being rushed to precincts that had run out

There is more chaos to this story than meets the eye.

Alaska's LGBT blog, Bent Alaska was tweeting that there are several precincts in which every ballot is being challenged.

Jason Lamb of Channel  2 News is also tweeting about some strange incidents, including voters being turned away and also a possibility that folks who did not live in Anchorage voted on Prop 5.

The vote on Prop 5 was a definitely emotional, which the opposition exploited in the following ads:





Even NOM jumped in by sending a tweet to voters in Alaska to vote against Prop 5. It was a bizarre tweet, seeing that Prop 5 was a city-wide vote, not a state vote.

It also signaled the fact that NOM seems to be butting into other aspects of opposing gay equality rather than simply opposing marriage equality.



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