Fort Worth Gay Bar Raid No Accident
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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I want to link to this, though chances are that this blog will get cut off soon and no one will see it.
http://www
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.
Texas is about appearance. I lived there for nearly 10 years. They want to appear to be cosmopolitan. But, in reality, they are, sadly, in many ways, a state of hick towns. This is a state where several JUDGES have said that gays who have been murdered got what they deserved. This is a state where "he needed killing" seems to be an adequate defense in court. It's for reasons such as this that sexual orientation needs to be included in hate crimes legislation because there are too many law enforcement officials, state attorneys, and judges who won't prosecute hate crimes against LGBT persons. My heart aches for LGBT people who have to live in that climate. It does, unfortunately, fling us back to Stonewall days. But, I have to confess, that I wasn't surprised when I read the accounts of what went on. There was a time in Dallas, when they would arrest gays and lesbians on the gay strip for jaywalking. The more things change, the more things stay the same..
If every person who's ever had their crotch touched inappropriately by slamming the offender's head into a wall, we'd need a lot more hospitals.
Texazz cops are criminals.
Wow... am surprised things like this happen nowadays. But I guess we have a long way to go.
Well, I am still waiting to see if the bar owner had any video of the happenings inside the bar. None have appeared so far, so either no video or nothing that helps the patrons' case. Cause gee, I've never been around a bunch of frisky, drunk guys (gay or straight) who were other than well-behaved (yes, sarcasm).
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.
So you blame the guy in the hospital for his brain injury? Nice.
Of course not, and you know that if your reading level is at all adequate.
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.
Bring frisky and drunk - absolutely worst case scenario - is no excuse for attempted murder.
Attempted murder is attempted murder, even for cops.
Time to haul out lawyers and witnesses. And even if the cops crotch was grabbed, this is not reason enough to brain damage a citizen. And it matters not what the orientation of the citizen is. Deadly force can only be used if the officers life is in jeopardy. Crotch grabbing does not constitute a life threatening event. Therefore the officer should be charged with using undue deadly force. Federal authorities should invoked in this matter.
Federal authorities have been asked to review the incident.
http://www
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.
Yeah, bubbas in the Republican South hate gay people. DUUUHHHH! They don't like Catholics, Jews, or blacks much either. It is amazing that anyone living in Texas of all places hasn't figured this one out. People in the South don't generally express contempt to someone else's face, unless they're drunk or a cop, or running in a group (of men, usually) so the collective testosterone level pushes them over the edge. But not just the men, BTW. I've heard women in Texas say the most utterly malicious ugly stuff imaginable about gays and lesbians. What do I call gay people in the South who think they're being accepted? "Delusiona
Only gays and cops know where the Rainbow bar is or what it is.
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.
Whan are we going to end the War on Civil Rights?
Bringing along a paddy wagon has nothing to do with an "inspection" and everything to do with initimidation and fear. The cops used to do the same thing prior to Stonewall in NY. I was in bars several tmes when the cops would bring a paddy wagon and patrons were told to leave the bar. No one was arrested in these cases but just having to pass that paddy waon outside the bar door with it's rear door open was enough of a message. These cops are thugs.
Of course the raid wasn't an accident. The cops called ahead to let the owner know that they would be stopping by. Such a dramatic headline.
They called ahead to say there would be an inspection. An inspection is NOT the same thing as a raid, sending in that many law enforcement officers with paddywagons to bash some heads. Your comment illuminates your own discrimination.
or at least his willful ignorance
The raid was an mistake and poorly executed. The Fort Worth Star Telegram has an article about the raid. It quotes a city council member and a school board member who are gay. And it quotes the chief of police as planning to have on going meetings with the gay community to keep this type of stupidity from reoccuring. The chief said that the police will not be working with TABC until this issue is settled. Fort Worth has it's problems with discrimination- I lived there for over 50 yrs (during the Jim Crow days, doing the Viet Nam war era, and during school integration). But it's main issue is "Is it good for business?" and this publicity is not good for business. I think that for the most part the citizens of Ft Worth have a live and let live philosophy with bigots thrown into the mix for sure. But because of the business influence, you'll hear more about the city and the gay community working together. Also, remember that one of the large Southern Baptist churches in Fort Worth just got kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention because of their tolerance towards the gay community. Also, the city does not have a million residents. It has about 500,000 in the middle of a hugh metroplex with over a million people with Dallas about 30 miles to the east. It is racially, economically, and politically diverse and beginning to lean Democratic unlike the rest of Texas.
Then the only reason the chief of police is making amends is because it's not "good for business"; he not doing it out of any real remorse. This was no mistake either and is about as much of a mistake as any of these politicians who cheat on their wives and then when caught hold a press conference telling everyone they made a mistake. A mistake is something done unintentioanlly and these cops had every intention of raiding that bar and bringing along a paddy wagon and terrorizing the Gay community.
A goof healthy law suit for damages by all the patrons and the bar will help solve the problem. Having to pay money for their mistakes will force the police to change their behavior like nothing else can.
I'm from Ft. Worth and was just there last month from the 9th thru the 24th. The city has over 600,000 people in it and Tarrant County, including Ft. Worth (which is the county seat), has nearly 1,000,000. There was a time not so long ago when all the racism and ignorance came from 'Big D' and the civic leaders of Ft. Worth saw their city in progressive terms. That's all changed now and the city reeks of right-winged, Republican, social climbers and 'good-ole-boys'. I hardly recognize my hometown anymore. The Hispanic and GLBT citizens have become targets of contempt and paranoia. It breaks my heart to see the vast changes in the population. The racism and homophobia is palpable and they don't even try to hide it. Of course, now that you can carry an UN-concealed weapon with you, the chances for something really serious happening, and NOT just through a police action, is closer to fruition.
Great article! Thank you.
Actually, you don’t have to be gay to get jacked up by the TABC, though it was likely a factor. It’s tantamount to a protection racket, they rule by coercion and fear.
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.
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