Fuck Civility and Fuck Franklin Graham

     Greg Hogben is absolutely right here. Stonewall was not achieved a half century ago this month through peaceful and respectful dialogue. It was achieved through brick-throwing and quivering fury at being pushed around by the NYPD and everyone else outside Greenwich Village. 
     What did respect and tolerance for bigotry get the centrist Mattachine Society (Which placed a sign in the Stonewall Inn's window calling for peace and civility over two months after the riots)? Fuck all, that's what quietly carrying signs in shirts and ties and pleated skirts got them. Abolition didn't start in Congress in 1865. That started in the streets of Boston in 1854 during the Anthony Burns riots, in Harper's Ferry in 1859 when John Brown took over the federal armory. Then it reached its peak between 1861-1865 on countless battlefields when we had to go war with half the country over the "right" to own African Americans. 
     If human history has one recurring theme only, it is there are always hateful, evil people in every epoch in history who are either denying people basic human rights or are trying to take away rights already won. These evil and bigoted people tend to be conservatives. And in a supposedly enlightened era in which gay marriage is legal in all 50 states, there are right wing nut bags like Roy Moore and Franklin Graham who are acting as if it's still pre-Stonewall America and start bleating about their "religious freedom." 
     Hogben is advocating for people in the LGBT community to yell at these nut cases. I'd go one further and advocate for them to literally shove their well-thumped Bibles down their throats. That'll send a message. Because rights such as abolition, women's suffrage and gay rights aren't won by peacefully holding up signs in church clothes. 
     It's won by violence in the streets of the United States. Because that's what marginalized people have to do. Wrench those rights from those who were never truly empowered to give it yet spitefully withhold it. And then we have to keep fighting to retain those rights across generations.