Fort Worth, Texas is not some hick town in the middle of nowhere. It's a city with almost a million people -- the seventeenth largest city in the entire country. It's population is only a little over 60% white and it is ranked an extremely safe city for its size.
It is also a city with an openly gay elected official and a population of gay men and women who frequent bars that do not have mysterious doorways with no name on the front in order to avoid detection from a largely intolerant community.
For many who learn about homophobia through movies like Boys Don't Cry or reports on high profile cases like Matthew Shepard, gay bashing is a small town phenomenon these days. Large metropolitan cities are just safer, more tolerant and more progressive with their social values.
Well, integration will do that. It will encourage a population to compare their beliefs with the reality around them and many will come to the conclusion that intolerance bears little relationship to the pleasant neighbors and friends they interact with on a daily basis.
But a city is not just its population.
Police officers, politicians, city officials and other arms of law enforcement and law creation are not only influenced by their everyday activities. They are influenced by the legal system in which they operate. That system repeats day after day that gay Americans are second class citizens, that their government doesn't care about their rights, that their relationships with each other are not as important or worthy of protection as their straight counterparts.
The message of official discrimination certainly bolstered Police Chief Jeff Halstead's opinion that gay and lesbian patrons of the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth are not equally protected by law. The message of official discrimination gave Halstead's employees the impression that slamming the head of one patron against a wall, resulting in a life threatening head injury, was acceptable behavior. It was this official discrimination that encouraged one member of the raiding team to assert that the restraint used -- including the violence inflicted on patrons -- was acceptable because someone touched his crotch in a sexual manner.
When Stonewall happened 40 years ago, the LGBT community was just realizing how big it was. It was an expression of power and identity in the face of forced anonymity and oppression.
The raid at Fort Worth is a different story altogether: A community that fought hard for measured acceptance in a big city was undone by the political understanding, distributed across the country, that despite your tolerance, when push comes to shove, LGBT Americans just don't matter so much.
It is time to correct that misinformation. Fort Worth can achieve this by adequately punishing the officers and commission officials involved and following through on LGBT training for law enforcement officials.
But the real change will come when the federal government repeals legal discrimination against LGBT people and endorses, finally, a policy of equality and inclusion.
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http://www.quest-online.com/NewFiles/Q16-10.pdf
It's a local gay magazine, but go to page 3 and there's an article on the rise of anti-gay violence and the fear to report it do to police harrasement. They percentages are big, but the numbers are small. They do bring up the fact that crimes do go unreported (see the police attitude). The point is that gay harrasment is here and on the rise--not only by joe sixpack, but police officer joe sixpack.
Point is the Fort Worth may or may not be connected to Stonewall (what no one wants to discuss is that you'd have to give the cops credit for even knowing about it, and most straights probably don't), but it was targeted and the cops used unbelievable excesive force.
The timing is odd enough for me to suspect TABC of messing around with the bar, but not everyone is plugged into the basic gay holidays. But someone who oversees and polices the bars certainly would be. I take TABC's disavowal of knowing it was the Stonewall anniversary with a big grain of salt.
A lot has been written about this in a short span of time (including one headline showing a "quote" that turned out to be only what they IMAGINED the officers had said, complete with spelling (misspelling) to emphasize the supposed ignorance of folks in Texas) by a lot of folks who were not there.
That homophobia still exists is a sad fact, but we need real facts and evidence, not knee jerk reactions. Because unthinking, knee jerk reactions...that is part of the problem.
Abuse of force can never be tolerated.
But I have seen some abuse of freedom of speech where quite a few people have written about this incident in the most inflamatory manner. Facts are needed, and justcie, not just outrage.
Attempted murder is attempted murder, even for cops.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/070709dnmetrainbow.13a0e378.html
The guy that was injured is out of the hospital, in case any one was worried about him, and has given a statement to the press, which is included in the above article.
It should never have happened, but local authorities do seem to be taking it seriously.
It would be interesting to walk down the street in Fort Worth (before the present incident and the publicity it engendered) and ask people if they knew what the Rainbow was and where it was.
I'll bet you'd have to ask a thousand people before getting a positive response.
It's all about police derangement syndrome.
Under “public intoxication†law they can take anybody they want to jail, and there is nothing you can do about it. You're in jail for the night.
Fort Worth is a nice place, but there are a lot of rednecks and some of them are cops.