The Christian Civic League of Maine's Mike Hein calls Pam's House Blend: "a leading source of radical homosexual propaganda, anti-Christian bigotry, and radical transgender advocacy."
He is "praying that Pam Spaulding will "turn away from her wicked and sinful promotion of homosexual behavior."
(CCLM's web site, 10/15/07)
Ex-gay "Christian" activist James Hartline on Pam:
"I have been mocked over and over again by ungodly and unprincipled anti-christian lesbians."
(from "Six Years In Sodom: From The Journal Of James Hartline," 9/4/2006, written from the "homosexual stronghold" of Hillcrest in San Diego).
"Pam is a 'twisted lesbian sister' and an 'embittered lesbian' of the 'self-imposed gutteral experiences of the gay ghetto.'" -- 9/5/2008
Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth Against Homosexuality heartily endorses the Blend, calling Pam:
A "vicious anti-Christian lesbian activist." (Concerned Women for America's radio show [9:15], 1/25/07)
"A nutty lesbian blogger." (MassResistance radio show [16:25], 2/3/07)
Pam's House Blend always seems to find these sick f*cks. The area of the country she is in? The home state of her wife? I know, they are everywhere. Pam just does such a great job of bringing them out into the light.
--Impeach Bush
who monitors yours Bevis ?? Just thought I would drop you a line,so the rest of your life is not wasted.
So today the President will sit down with Skip Gates and his arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge PD to have a beer. A lot of Internet bandwidth and airwave time have been spent dealing with trivialities, such as who is consuming which brand of beer (Obama a Bud, Gates tossing back a Jamaican Red Stripe. Crowley's will opt for a Coors Blue Moon).
I just want to point out that the fact that we're talking about a beer summit confirms the role of class in this whole brouhaha, an issue I raised earlier ("Why class does matter in the Gates arrest debate"). They are not sitting down to share a bottle of wine; the decision to "lower the class bar" by using the alcoholic beverage of the working (class) man is quite purposeful. Beer is a social signifier that Gates, Obama, and Crowley are on the same level as regular guys shooting the sh*t. Palin aligned herself with "Joe Six Pack" for the same reason -- to indicate she's down with the working class American.
Of course this is all artifice; Crowley is sitting down with the President of the United States and a superstar scholar from Harvard. Gates and Obama are way above Crowley's station in their professional and social spheres. However, what the Gates incident has taught us is that if you take Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates or any prominent black man out of context -- they can still easily and quickly drop well beneath Crowley's station given the right (or more accurately, wrong) circumstances. In the often-disappointing real world colored by perception and stereotypes, it's a rude awakening. If the President and Prof. Gates are anonymized into the average black man, it is still a world of driving while black, voting while black, shopping while black, hailing a cab while black, and now, being in your own home while black that they would experience.
What will these three talk about today, as they chug a cold one? I venture they will touch upon race in some, hopefully productive way, but I can put money on it that class won't be on the table.
• noun 1 the belief that there are characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to each race. 2 discrimination against or antagonism towards other races.
- DERIVATIVES racist noun & adjective.
It's clear no one wants to be labeled a racist, no matter how insane and inappropriate an action or comment they make. Some people seem to have a definition of it in their heads that excludes the possibility that anything THEY say or do might be steeped in racism, intended or not.
Take Boston Police Officer Justin Barrett, whose beat is District B-3 (Dorchester and Mattapan). He mass-mailed an execreble piece of trash to his presumably fellow non-racist friends (as well as The Boston Globe(!) and colleagues in the National Guard):
"His first priority of effort should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance."
"He indeed has transcended back to a bumbling jungle monkey, thus he forever remains amid this nation's great social/racial divide..."
"That paragraph was as pathetic as jungle monkey gibberish."
You are a Fool. An infidel...You should serve me coffee and donuts on a Sunday morning."
I am "not a racist but I am prejudice [sic] towards people who are stupid and pretend to stand up and preach for something they say is freedom but it is merely attention because you do not get enough of it in your little fear-dwelling circle of on-the-bandwagon followers."
"Gates is a goddamned fool and you the article writer simply a poor follower and maybe worse, a poor writer. Your article title should read CONDUCT UNBECOMING a JUNGLE MONKEY-BACK TO ONE'S ROOTS. JB"
Ummmm...never mind racist, this man is a dumbass for sending it to the media. Or maybe he really thought there was nothing wrong in that missive. No one is saying he can't have an opinion over who is right or wrong in this incident -- why in god's name is it relevant to refer to Gates as a "jungle monkey" in his criticism? BTW, the Police Commissioner, Edward Davis took Barrett's gun and badge; Barrett is awaiting a termination hearing.
Henry Louis Gates and I are very different people. He is a Harvard Professor. The closest I got to the Ivy League was a weekend visit to Yale. He is a successful author. I am a blogger whose aspirations may outstrip his abilities. He is world renowned. I am, well, not. He is, most definitely, far more knowledgeable about a great many things than I am. Of that I'm sure.
However, we have two things in common. We are both black men. As such, though he's a college professor and I'm long out of college, we are both perpetually enrolled in the same course.
Just hit my inbox a bit ago. I knew the minute he said "the Cambridge police acted stupidly" the other night that it was going to blow up in his face. It was one of those off-the-cuff remarks without his usual, planned nuance that bit him in the you-know-what, since we know how the MSM maelstrom runs with candid comments that aren't thought out as to how it will play. Not that he isn't speaking a truth, but that his personal relationship with Skip Gates put a big bullseye on the statement. The feeding frenzy then began.
STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
2:33 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Hey, it's a cameo appearance. Sit down, sit down. I need to help Gibbs out a little bit here.
Q Are you the new press secretary?
THE PRESIDENT: If you got to do a job, do it yourself. (Laughter.)
I wanted to address you guys directly because over the last day and a half obviously there's been all sorts of controversy around the incident that happened in Cambridge with Professor Gates and the police department there.
I actually just had a conversation with Sergeant Jim Crowley, the officer involved. And I have to tell you that as I said yesterday, my impression of him was that he was a outstanding police officer and a good man, and that was confirmed in the phone conversation -- and I told him that.
And because this has been ratcheting up -- and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up -- I want to make clear that in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically -- and I could have calibrated those words differently. And I told this to Sergeant Crowley.
I continue to believe, based on what I have heard, that there was an overreaction in pulling Professor Gates out of his home to the station. I also continue to believe, based on what I heard, that Professor Gates probably overreacted as well. My sense is you've got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved and the way they would have liked it to be resolved.
In my prior posts on the arrest of Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates in his own home by Cambridge police officer Sgt. James Crowley I have mentioned that class privilege plays a role in this debacle as much as race does. A lot of the debate about the incident dances around the topic but misses the big picture -- race and class are always factors because we are human beings colored by experiences and classification within this country's historical framework of those two elements.
I've seen hundreds of comments around the blogosphere getting bogged down in wish list items -- "if Gates had only been more polite" or "if the cop had only walked out once he saw the ID and knew it was Gates's home." Yes, either might have defused the situation, then again, maybe not. Yes, the cop was being yelled at by Gates, but it's less the yelling, than one specific thing that he said that hit the red alert button on class -- he tossed down the "don't you know who I am" card ("you have no idea who you are messing with"). That, friends, comes from privilege of a different kind, one that has nothing to do with race.
On Salon, I was relieved to see this given an apt name for this particular use of the power play, "Ivy League Effect," by "Phantom Negro." The reason for the pseudonym was obvious to me. As a fellow Ivy League prof, "Phantom Negro" knows Gates has the power to make live miserable for him/her ("Dr. Henry Louis Gates has reach and influence in the academy").
The Ivy League is not real life. College in general is not real life, and the Ivy League is a more fantastic version of college. The amenities are better, the rules are flexible, and everyone, student and faculty alike, is well aware that the realities of life as most people know it are merely a peculiar footnote to the day-to-day of campus life. I do not speak out of turn when I say this. I know because I am in and of that world.
As a black Ivy Leaguer, something funny happens as you become ensconced in ivy. You're smart enough to understand that race and racism are a reality you deal with on a daily basis, but you also know that your university ID sets you apart. Does this mean you are kept from hurtful incidents? No, but it is to say that much of the outrage felt at a racial slight is replaced by outrage at a class slight.
It's a closed, strange universe that I have experience with as well -- though I've been a lowly peon in that universe. Plus, my brother is a tenured professor who, thankfully, has somehow managed to stay down-to-earth and his feet firmly planted in the ground. I've always told him that if he starts exhibiting signs of what I called "acadamic bastard fever", a sisterly ass-kicking would be in order. But I've seen the wrath of the Ivy League/Celebrity Effect before, and it's a breathtaking level of ego rage, sense of entitlement and coddling that is mind-boggling. Even if you're in a college town, some of these characters fail to realize that no, not everyone in town "knows who you are" and, well, they don't really give a damn, either.
I am not sh*tting you, people. The Cambridge cop who arrested Dr. Henry Louis Gates in his own home told the press that he's not racist, as Gates has charged, because he tried to save the life of Celtics star Reggie Lewis 16 years ago by giving him CPR. I was IMing with Mike Signorile when he dropped the link in from the Boston Herald and I thought he was playing me. Nope.
The Cambridge cop prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims is a racist gave a dying Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate bid to save the Celtics superstar's life 16 years ago Monday.
"I wasn't working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn't working on a black man. I was working on another human being," Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward's fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.
It's a date Crowley still can recite by rote - and he still recalls the pain he suffered when people back then questioned whether he had done enough to save the black athlete. "Some people were saying 'There's the guy who killed Reggie Lewis' afterward. I was broken-hearted. I cried for many nights," he said.
Crowley, 42, said he's not a racist, despite how some have cast his actions in the Gates case. "Those who know me know I'm not," he said.
Needless to say, I was laughing so hard at this that I had tears streaming down my face. OK. How many ways is this man's reasoning absolute jackassery. As a campus police officer who is trained in CPR, did he think he had the option to refuse to give mouth-to-mouth to Lewis? Are we supposed to think he was so heroic that he was willing to touch his mouth to the lips of a black man in front of all those people? Honestly, this only raises some seriously uncomfortable questions about Crowley's thinking if he's using this to somehow "prove" he isn't racist. For instance, Lewis was a superstar, a black man, and, as Crowley observed, a human being. One presumes all human beings are equal and he would be comfortable with giving mouth to mouth to, say, RuPaul, or Halle Berry, or the janitor who sweeps the courts after a game. It's all good, right? I don't know what this cop is trying to get at with this tale -- to show he's down with the brown?
The real issue here, and it will likely not be discussed nearly as much as the race angle, is the class angle. Professor Gates, during his angry tête-à-tête with Crowley, tossed down the "don't you know who I am" card (to be precise, in the report it says Gates told him he had "no idea who he was messing with"). I know that I can't stand it when people in Gates's position and station drop that sh*t as a trump card (trust me, I see it first-hand all the time in academia to name one field), so imagine this officer, who clearly is in a different socioeconomic universe than Gates. It's one thing to be a famous black b-baller dying on the floor, it's another matter altogether when the other person might be perceived as a spoiled academic who's looking down at you and verbally abusing you.
Now that is no excuse for Crowley's incomprehensible arrest of Gates for yelling at him after the prof had already provided two forms of ID to prove who he is and that he lived in the residence, it's simply another factor that must be considered in this mess -- something that will obviously receive less play in the press than race, since class is also a third rail topic much of the time.
What do you think?
Oh, and about the Gates case, Crowley doesn't offer an apology of any kind.
Though he harbors no "ill feelings toward the professor," a calm, resolute Crowley said no mea culpa will be forthcoming. "I just have nothing to apologize for," he said. "It will never happen."
Irene Monroe, who guest posts every so often on the Blend, also shares her view of Cambridge, its police and how race and class are at play in this incident.
Living while Black in Cambridge Rev. Irene Monroe
None of us African-American residents of Cambridge are surprised or shocked by the humiliation and harassment Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 58, of Harvard University encountered at the hands of Cambridge police.
My partner, Dr.Thea James, an Emergency Room physician who would drive from home to work was stopped all the time for "driving while black." And when the Cambridge cops realized she's a woman, and a lesbian one at that, their unbridled homophobia surfaces. Thea now takes the bus.
My girlfriend's kids and their friends hang out at the Cambridge's Galleria Mall like kids do. The Cambridge police in the mall stop my girlfriend's kids and their friends; one white and two Asians are not, because "shopping while black" is always mistaken as shoplifting.
CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien snared an exclusive with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates about his "encounter" with Cambride police when he was arrested in his own home the other day (see my post "Unjamming your front door while black?"). The interview was during Moment of Truth: Countdown to Black in America 2; during the discussion Prof. Gates indicated that he may pursue legal action. President Obama was asked about the incident during the presser tonight, and he said that "the Cambridge police acted stupidly" for arresting the Harvard prof in his own home, and made note of the fact that racial profiling is a concern and that law enforcement agencies have to work to combat the biases that contribute to incidents like this.
The Blend has obtained a rush transcript from CNN of the interview. Here is an excerpt with the full text below the fold.
O'BRIEN: I've got to tell you, to see -- I mean, Professor Gates, I had him in college. And you know, to have that shot, your mug shot, it is quite a shock to see. What was that moment like for you?
GATES: It was terrifying. And I realized…
O'BRIEN: Were you afraid?
GATES: I knew that I was in danger but I knew, too, that as soon as my friends could get to jail, starting with Professor Charles Ogletree, who is my friend and lawyer, that eventually I would be OK.
But what it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable all people of color are and all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policeman. And this man clearly was a rogue policeman.
O'BRIEN: The police report said he described you as behaving in a tumultuous manner.
GATES: Yes, look how tumultuous I am. I'm 5'7", I weigh 150 pounds. And my tumultuous, outrageous action, Tom, was to demand that he give me his name and his badge number. Soledad, why? Because if I had stepped out on the porch -- it is important for all people to know this about the police.
If I had stepped outside of my house, he couldn't come in my house legally without a warrant. He couldn't arrest me without a warrant. Had I stepped outside he would have slapped handcuffs on me for being under suspicion of breaking and entering because he was responding to a profile.
Two black men with backpacks were breaking and entering into my home. And when he see me, he just presumed that one of them was me.
O'BRIEN: A neighbor called 911. I mean, it was a neighbor of yours who said that description, two black men breaking into your house. Are you angry with your neighbor?
GATES: No. In fact I hope right now that if someone is breaking into my house this nice lady is calling the police. I have a lot of valuable art and books in that house. And in fact, I think I'm going to send this person some flowers. I hope she is watching. I know that she must be intimidated and she must think that I'm very angry.
It wasn't her fault. It was the fault of the policeman who couldn't understand a black man standing up for his rights right in his space. And that's what I did. And I would do the same thing exactly again.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, HOST: The charges were dropped?
PROF. HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., ALPHONSE FLETCHER UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR, HARVARD: Charges were dropped and the mayor of Cambridge, God bless her, called me and apologized to me. And my lawyers and I are considering what further action. Because this is…
O'BRIEN: What does that mean? Does that mean lawsuit?
GATES: Perhaps. Because this is not about me. This is about the vulnerability of black men in America.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.
Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.
Here is the police report. The Harvard professor was inside his home when the cop arrived, and he showed them his driver's license and university ID. Apparently the officer was offended by Gates's anger at being treated like a criminal for trying to unjam his front door, so he arrested the professor. From the report:
As I reached the [Gates's front] door, a female voice called out to me. I turned and looked in the direction of the voice and saw a white female, later identified as Lucia Whalen. Whalen, who was standing on the sidewalk in front of the residence, held a wireless phone in her hand and told me that it was she who called. She went on to tell me that she observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch of __ Ware Street. She told me that her suspicions were aroused when she observed one of the men wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry.
After this, Gates was in his foyer watching what was occurring on the sidewalk. The cop asked him to step outside. Gates said no, and asked the officer to identify himself. The officer did, then said he was investigating a break-in in progress. At this point, the officer's report says "Gates exclaimed "why, because I'm a black man in America?" It escalated from there, with Gates apparently calling the police department to get the chief on the line to report a "racist police officer." At this point the whole thing turns into chaos, with the officer contending whether gates was lawfully in the residence by his behavior, asked Gates to come outside (he didn't), so the officer went inside and the yelling continued and the officer eventually decided to arrest the academic.
Now this incident raises a few questions to discuss:
Would a white professor have been subject to the same suspicion by the woman who called in the report of a break-in?
While a white prof wouldn't have yelled "I'm a black man in America", say he had said something to the effect of "is there some reason you're standing in front of my home?" and proceeded to engage angrily in the same manner. Would he be arrested?
Would a white prof react as strongly to the police officer's initial inquiry since he would not be a victim of racial profiling?
Did Dr. Gates's explosion of anger in his own home warrant an arrest? Is this a manifestation of the "angry black man" phenomenon, where the lower threshold of public anger by black men is seen as more threatening than it would be for a white man?
Was the fact that Gates threw down the "don't you know who I am?" card a mitigating factor?
OK, while ruminating on the above, here's a comment from one of Gates's colleagues.
[Harvard Medical School professor S. Allen] Counter, who had called Gates from the Nobel Institute in Sweden, where Counter is on sabbatical, said that Gates was “shaken” and “horrified” by his arrest.
Counter has faced a similar situation himself. The well-known neuroscience professor, who is also black, was stopped by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect as he crossed Harvard Yard. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.
Does that change any of your answers to the above questions?
So today the President will sit down with Skip Gates and his arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge PD 
"His first priority of effort should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance."
Living while Black in Cambridge
