Goodbye, Exodus International

  
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2012, 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I’m going to miss Exodus International. In case you haven’t heard, the organization that once proclaimed its mission as preaching the gospel to Queer men and women that they could be “cured” of their homosexual desires and turned into happy little heteros shut its doors as of June 20. According to the media reports, the decision to shutter the group was made by a unanimous vote of its board after a year and a half in which Exodus had groped — pardon the pun — for a new sense of purpose after its president, Alan Chambers, disavowed “reparative therapy” at a Gay Christian Network conference in January 2012.

The disavowal, and Exodus’ subsequent dissolution, came about as a result of three years of involvement between Chambers, his wife Leslie (an appropriately gender-ambiguous name) and a journalist named Lisa Ling. Lisa Ling works on a TV program called Our America on — guess what — the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). The fact that it was one of Oprah’s minions who got Chambers to knock off the attempts to “pray the Gay away” and detach himself from the founding mission of Exodus indicates to what extent Oprah, even without a daily broadcast TV showcase, remains a sort of Mother Confessor to the nation, the source for absolution for all manner of real or imagined sins against the combination of vague progressivism and psychobabble she peddled for years on TV.

One reason I’m going to miss Exodus is that pointing out its various hypocrises was almost too easy. Two of its founders, Michael Bussee and the late Gary Cooper, traveled the U.S. in the 1980’s proclaiming to Queer folk the “good” news that their sexual orientations could change — only they rather blew (again, pardon the pun) the message when they ended up falling in love with each other. (They were the subject of a 1993 documentary called One Nation Under God.)

The organization’s credibility wasn’t helped in 2000 when a later Exodus president, John Paulk — a self-proclaimed “ex-Gay” who was married to “ex-Lesbian” Anne Paulk — was found in a Gay bar in Washington, D.C. and came up with a typically lame excuse for his presence there. In April 2013 John Paulk finally came out as a Gay Christian and announced his marriage is ending and he no longer believes in “reparative therapy,” either. Like Chambers, he has publicly apologized for his role in the “ex-Gay” movement.

I encountered the “ex-Gay” movement myself in early 1990, when I spotted in the North Park Albertson’s a flyer advertising a weekend event, the “San Diego Christian Conference on Trauma and Sexuality.” By then I’d been definitively identifying myself as a Gay man for seven years, but my journalist’s instinct made me curious about just what they were going to say at the conference and how they proposed to “cure” me of homosexuality and other “trauma-induced sexual sin.” So I registered for the conference and took my pens and note pads to take it all down and write an article about it.

The featured speaker at the conference was Sy Rogers, whom I found to be a screaming queen. He claimed to have given up homosexual activity and got married. Indeed, he said that after he first had sex with his wife he called a man from his church and complained that it wasn’t as intense as it had been when he had sex with men. “It’s not supposed to be that intense,” his friend said. But he sprinkled his speech with so many quotes from songs made famous by Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand I couldn’t help thinking, “You may not be having sex with men anymore, but you’re still Gay.” More recently Rogers — who, unlike Alan Chambers and John Paulk, still believes in “reparative therapy” — has switched from identifying himself as ex-Gay to identifying himself as ex-Transgender and has written a book about his experiences called The Man in the Mirror, available at the “Last Days Ministries” Web site.

The name of Rogers’ publisher is a good indication of what was motivating the “ex-Gay” movement at its height. Through all the queeny inflections and quotes from Saints Judy and Barbra that punctuated his talk, there was an undercurrent of fear, a genuine belief that God was about to strike down the U.S. the way he had Sodom and Gomorrah because of our growing tolerance of homosexuality. That attitude surfaced again right after 9/11, when Pat Robertson declaimed on his radio show that God had once put the United States under his personal protection and therefore not allowed events like the 9/11 attacks to happen to us.

When 9/11 did happen, Robertson explained, it was evidence that God had withdrawn that “protection” — and just then Jerry Falwell came on his show and agreed, saying that the reason God had taken his protection from the U.S. was because of our tolerance for abortions, homosexuality and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Falwell got lampooned for his remark, but few people who heard it quoted understood the context or what it said about the radical-Right world view in general.

Another weird thing about the “ex-Gay” movement as I experienced it during that conference in 1990 was its reliance on an old, discredited psychological theory from the 1950’s about what caused homosexuality. For a movement that ordinarily has little or no use for science — one which flatly rejects scientific consensus on issue after issue, from evolution to climate change — this part of the radical Right leaped to embrace the psychological orthodoxy of the 1950’s that boys became Gay because of weak or absent fathers, overly strong mothers and an absence of male role models. As the phrase “trauma-induced sexual sin” suggested, they also regarded homosexuality as a response to child molestation and urged people to scour through their childhoods for some horrible experience that would have sent their sexuality off the straight and narrow and nudged it into Queer paths.

I’ve done interviews with so-called “ex-ex-Gays” — people who’ve tried to “change” with the help of reparative therapists and A.A.-type groups, given up and accepted themselves as Queer — and read other accounts of what drove people both into and out of “change” attempts. One of the running themes is the “ex-Gay” movement’s obsession with blaming it all on the parents. If you’re in “reparative therapy” you’re encouraged to scour your childhood looking for unhappy memories — and if you can’t find any you’re encouraged to look harder. When I interviewed singer Justin Utley, who grew up Mormon in Utah and tried an “ex-Gay” program recommended by the Mormon Church, he said:

I accepted their answer, which was that I had been molested as a kid and just didn’t remember it. I believed that for a period of time, and I told my family. Before I had come out as a Gay man, I told them I had actually been molested and didn’t remember. We went on this pseudo-witch hunt of who in our community, when I was growing up, could have done this. Then my mom called me out of my bullshit and said, “I don’t know what the hell is going on with you right now, but you can’t blame something that’s going on in your life on a repressed memory of something that never happened.”

Indeed, according to Gabriel Arana, who published a moving account of having failed “ex-Gay” therapy with the movement’s founding psychologist, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi (who coined the term “reparative therapy” and last year got into a pissing contest with Alan Chambers on Facebook over whether he had ever promised a complete “cure” and whether he showed straight porn to would-be ex-Gay men), “My parents were surprised at how the therapy blamed them for my condition. … They continued paying for therapy but no longer checked in with Nicolosi regularly or asked what he and I talked about.” It’s odd, to say the least, that a movement which prides itself on upholding “family values” should adopt a form of “therapy” that seeks to “cure” homosexuality by tearing families apart — but that’s a good deal of what goes on in the “ex-Gay ministries.”

Do People Really Change?

So I won’t miss Exodus International for screwing up people’s lives and selling them a whole bunch of discredited pseudo-scientific crap in the name of “curing” them of a quite natural and normal human variation. But, quite frankly, I’ll miss their challenge to an equally annoying, though considerably less harmful, insistence on the Queer side of this debate that sexual orientation and gender identity are fixed, immutable, unchangeable. It’s long upset me that the Queer community has staked so much of its civil rights struggle on the idea that Queer people are “born this way,” which makes a great catch line for a Lady Gaga song but a lousy scientific analysis.

To say that attempts to force yourself to “change” from Queer to straight via the sorts of programs Exodus used to endorse — and successor organizations like the defiantly named Restored Hope Network still endorse — are wrong does not necessarily mean that people don’t change their attractions, often in ways that come as quite a surprise to them. I’ve heard enough stories from people who lived for two or three decades as heterosexuals, married opposite-sex partners, had children and then suddenly found themselves dealing with attractions to people of their own sex not to believe that that process doesn’t also happen the other way around: that a person can live an exclusively Gay or Lesbian lifestyle for decades and suddenly meet, fall in love with, have sex with and even want to marry a partner of the opposite gender.

Indeed, along with its ugliness, one thing that upsets me about the acronym “LGBT” (for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender”) by which the Queer community frequently identifies itself in public these days is that it’s become a token of inclusion, a substitute for the rethinking the Queer movement would have to do to be genuinely inclusive of Bisexual and Transgender people. To my mind, the very existence of Bisexual and Transgender people disproves the idea that sexual orientation and gender identity are fixed at birth. After all, what characteristic of a human being could seemingly be more “immutable” than the physical configuration of our bodies as male or female? But the Transgender community has taught us that there is an inward psychological and (if you believe) spiritual gender identity that doesn’t necessarily match the physiognomy we got stuck with by the luck of the DNA draw.

Likewise the Bisexual community has blown holes through the very concept of a “sexual orientation,” fixed across a person’s lifetime. In so doing Bisexuals have undermined a large part of the case for Queer rights as it’s traditionally been made: the idea that Gays and Lesbians are a fixed “community” similar to a racial or ethnic minority, and therefore are subject to — and should be legally protected against — discrimination. And the mainstream Queer leadership has responded to the threat with the token inclusion of the initials “B” and “T” in every organization name — and veiled, and sometimes not-so-veiled, attacks on Bisexual people and the whole idea of Bisexuality.

When Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon was interviewed for the January 19, 2012 New York Times Magazine and made the political mistake of saying her current relationship with a woman, after years of marriage to a man, was a “choice,” the enforcers of the mainstream Queer orthodoxy went after her like the proverbial ton of bricks. “You don’t get to define my Gayness for me,” Nixon said. “A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or if we swam here. It matters that we are here and we are one group, and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered Gay and who is not.”

“Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words, and it is going to be used when some kid comes out and their parents force them into some ‘ex-Gay’ camp while she’s off drinking cocktails at fancy parties,” said Wayne Besen, who as founder of a group called Truth Wins Out had done excellent work exposing the harm done by Exodus and other “ex-Gay ministries.” “When people say it’s a choice, they are green-lighting an enormous amount of abuse because if it’s a choice, people will try to influence and guide young people to what they perceive as the ‘right’ choice.”

I’ve long found it ironic that the Queer civil-rights movement embraced this rigid attitude of biological determinism when every other civil-rights movement in American history has attacked biological determinism. One of the tasks African-Americans and other people of color had to do to fight for their civil rights was to prove they were not biologically inferior to whites, and therefore there was no scientific basis for denying them equality. One of the tasks women in the so-called “second wave” of American feminism had to do was attack the biological determinism that had long been used to argue that women weren’t as capable of functioning in the workplace as men.

Yet the Queer movement — or at least its Gay and Lesbian components — have enforced a biologically deterministic explanation of Queerness with the ruthlessness of a dictator’s propagandist — as witness Besen’s snide remark about Nixon “drinking cocktails at fancy parties” while young Queers suffer through so-called “therapy” programs to try to turn them straight. And what’s more, they’ve done this in the face of ample evidence not only that Bisexuality exists, but it’s far more widespread and prevalent than once believed — and, indeed, that there are actually more Americans who self-identify as Bisexual than as Gay, Lesbian or Transgender.

In 2010 the Journal of Sexual Medicine published a national study of American women and men. Out of their 5,042 respondents 3.1 percent self-identified as Bisexual versus only 2.5 percent as Gay or Lesbian. What’s more, among adolescents the split was even more dramatic — 4.9 percent self-identified as Bi versus just 1 percent as Gay or Lesbian. Data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, based on in-person interviews with 7,643 women and 4,928 men, found that 2.8 percent of women and 1.8 percent of men identified as Bisexual, versus 1.3 percent of women identifying as Lesbian and 2.3 percent of men as Gay.

A 2007 survey, sponsored by the City University of New York (CUNY), found that of 768 Queer people 48.9 percent identified as Bi versus 51.1 percent as Lesbian, Gay or “homosexual.” But the gender difference was dramatic; 65.3 percent of the women in the survey identified as Bi versus 34.7 percent as Lesbian, while 68.4 percent of the men identified as Gay versus 31.6 percent as Bi. (The people who did the CUNY survey admitted that they did not cover Transgender people since they couldn’t find enough of them to constitute a representative sample.)

When I encountered these numbers — summarized in a marvelous 2011 report on Bisexual invisibility from the San Diego Human Rights Commission — they confirmed a lot of impressions I’d had from anecdotal evidence, particularly people I’d met and interviewed during my 18 years as editor/publisher of Zenger’s Newsmagazine. I’d long had the impression that women were far more flexible in their conception of sexual orientation, less likely than men to believe that one same-gender sexual experience marked them as Queer for life, and the CUNY poll results bore that out.

The National Survey of Family Growth numbers also bore out the belief I’d had talking to younger people — including some I interviewed for the magazine — that today’s youths are far less likely to regard sexual orientation or gender identity as immutable. They don’t think of it that way in abstract terms, and they don’t think of it that way in their personal lives either. More and more young people find labels like “straight,” “Gay,” “Lesbian” and even “Bisexual” too confining. They want to be free to fall in love with, and make love to, anyone they like, anyone who appeals to them for whatever quirky reasons humans are attracted to other humans.

This is especially significant because the modern-day Queer movement has staked much of its future on the idea that young people are more liberal in their views on sexual orientation and gender identity than older ones. This has been borne out in the polls that show that the younger you are, the more likely you are to support marriage equality for same-sex couples. But it’s going to be hard for a Queer movement to remain relevant and attractive to young people who increasingly reject its basic assumptions that sexual orientation and gender identity are fixed.

The San Diego Democrats for Equality — founded in 1974 as the San Diego Democratic Club and therefore the oldest political group in San Diego with a specifically Queer issue agenda — is having a hard time staying relevant to new generations of Queer people with new ways of thinking about their identities. In an era in which young people are questioning the ideas of a fixed sexual orientation, a fixed gender identity or a fixed political affiliation, a club started as a group of Lesbian and Gay Democrats is proving to be a harder “sell” to them than it was to earlier generations.

As I wrote in a commentary on Cynthia Nixon and the controversy over her New York Times Magazine interview in the March 2012 Zenger’s Newsmagazine:

Why on earth can’t we acknowledge at least some element of “choice” in how we express our sexual desires? No Gay man is equally attracted to all men, nor is any Lesbian equally attracted to all women, any more than any straight person is attracted to everyone of the opposite sex. If we can pick and choose our partners based on height, weight, age, hair color, tastes in politics or music, or whatever weird and beautiful criteria that guide us, why can’t we pick their gender, too? Why do we have to make some hard-and-fast decision, once we’ve had our first experience with a same-sex partner, that we have to identify as Gay or Lesbian for life?

So I bid Exodus International goodbye with really mixed feelings. I hate them for the harm they’ve done to people — especially young people pushed into “reparative therapy” by parents, families or churches and forced to undergo painful programs to “change” something that does not need to be changed, to “repair” something that is not and never was broken. I respect Alan Chambers for his change of heart and wish he’d self-identify as Bisexual, since by his own account — he’s married to a woman but he still feels sexual attractions to men — that’s exactly what he is. I condemn anyone who would use the idea that sexual orientation is a “choice” to force people into programs aimed at denying a large part of who and what they are — but I also oppose anyone who denies that there is a large and powerful element of choice in terms of how we as individuals define our sexuality and how — and with whom — we choose to express it.

Legally Married

By Drew Searing • Copyright © 2013 by Drew Searing • Used by permission

Drew Searing (right) with Puma, his lawfully wedded husband of five years

My husband and I are married.  Legally married.  We were married during the “limited edition marriage special” of 2008.  This week, we are celebrating our “wooden” anniversary of being legally married for five years, alongside the 18,000 other legally married same-sex California couples.

            No, we were never UN-married by a bunch of wealthy Mormons.  Our marriage was not invalidated by Prop Hate.

            I say that we are legally married and repeat it with conviction because over the last two weeks, I’ve had nothing but good-hearted well-wishers make flat-out incorrect and unnecessary comments to my husband and I about how we will now be “really” married. 

            It all started at the Day of Decision rally June 26 where not one, but three GAY friends of mine approached my hubby and I with remarks such as, “Isn’t this great?!  Now you guys can get married again, but this time it will be for REAL!”  Another similarly quipped, “The Supreme Court has validated your marriage... Yay!”

            Then came the comments and “Congratulations” on Facebook from relatives and friends who actually attended our wedding, but still had the wherewithal to blurt out messages such as, “Now you guys are legally married in California, isn’t that wonderful?!”  It has been wonderful for half a decade, thank you.

            I repeat, my husband and I are legally married and always have been since that fateful, wonderful July afternoon during the Summer of Love.  Whereas I am happy for all of us who can get married (again), about the only thing it means for us is that we can now legally get divorced. 

            Ok maybe I’m a bit bitter because our bragging rights are over... we’re no longer the mere 18 THOUSAND who got married that summer.  It’s been a fun ride, especially come April 15th when our much-needed same-sex family tax specialist works out that it would have been about the same refund either way.  I didn’t marry him for money anyway.

            So rah rah sistah boom bah... Hooray.  Now every Californian can get married.  Let the receipts from Gay Wedding Registers save California from financial ruin.  It’s so nice to be living history.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Zenger’s proprietor Mark Gabrish Conlan and his husband Charles Nelson also got legally married during the “limited edition marriage special” of 2008. We celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary on the Fourth of July 2013 and are glad we no longer have “special rights” to be married Gay Californians.

KNSJ 89.1 FM to celebrate launch of new community radio station July 4, 2013

Zenger’s editor-publisher Mark Gabrish Conlan to Host “Queer Hour” 3 to 4 p.m.

How do you start a new community radio station on a nonprofit budget? You call together a hundred social grassroots activists & their organizations, then inspire them with a vision of creating a community media outlet ‘by, of and for the people’. You explain that media consolidation has limited the public’s access to the vital news and culture that makes a democracy thrive. You promise to be a voice of the voiceless. You muster thousands of volunteer hours, an equal amount of small donations and a strong component of local talent. Presto, got radio!

Actually it took Activist San Diego (ASD) six long years and a couple hundred meetings ultimately to assemble San Diego’s newest radio station from the ground up — entirely with volunteer labor. It took several years of legal and technical work for ASD to submit the application and secure the construction permit from the FCC. During the last three years $45,000 was raised to buy a custom antenna, a sophisticated transmitter, an emergency broadcast system and a healthy dose of studio equipment. The station will launch with only a 10th of the resources normally required for such a venture: a testimonial to what is dubbed “people-powered radio.”

The new listener-supported radio station is officially known as KNSJ 89.1 Descanso. Descanso is the FCC’s “city of record.” KNSJ’s call letters reflect its mission: Networking for Social Justice. With the transmitter and tower at over 6200 feet in the Laguna Mountains, KNSJ’s signal can be heard in car radios from the US-Mexico border to Highway 52, from the East County mountains to the bay and KNSJ covers all of central San Diego. The estimated potential listenership is over 1 million people plus a rapidly growing set of younger listeners who will connect over the Internet or their cell phones.

KNSJ’s main studios will be in El Cajon, with thousands of listeners in East County having their first access to noncommercial, educational radio. Listeners, donors and volunteers will come from across San Diego County and the border region. KNSJ has pledged to train scores of “citizen journalists” to report on the untold stories of those who have been ignored by the commercial media. While the bulk of KNSJ’s programming will be news and education, KNSJ is looking to make a special connection with local bands, writers and performance artists. KNSJ has a stated objective of having a quarter of its music come from local musicians, 10 times more local music content than any other San Diego station is offering.

KNSJ will be “Born on the 4th of July,” initiating a full day of live broadcast plus audio and video streaming on KNSJ.org. The public is invited to come down to the World Beat Center at 2100 Park Boulevard in Balboa Park to participate in the live broadcast and in many cases get on the air with their opinions about how to shape this community radio station to meet the needs of San Diego’s increasingly multiethnic and diverse population. From 7-8 a.m. the broadcast will emanate out of Descanso with the voices of local mountain residents. In the late morning host Miriam Raftery, editor of the award-winning East County Magazine, will preview her regular show of news, information and cultural offerings. Former City Councilmember Floyd Morrow, has invited Mayor Bob Filner, San Diego City Council members and other community icons to celebrate the launching of the new listener-supported radio station. Efforts will be made throughout the day to raise the $35,000 (in pledges and on-line donations at KNSJ.org) to keep the station on the air and hire its first station manager.

Mark Gabrish Conlan, editor/publisher of Zenger’s Newsmagazine from 1994 to 2012, will host “The Queer Hour,” a pilot episode for his KNSJ-FM program “Zenger’s on the Air,” from 3 to 4 p.m. during the July 4 launch day. He will introduce Charles, his legally wedded husband of five years, and present compelling interviewees on aspects of the struggle of Queer (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender) people for liberation and equal rights. Leo Laurence, co-founder of the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) in early 1969 and co-leader of the first demonstrations against a private employer for anti-Queer discrimination, will speak about the history of the Queer rights struggle before the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in June 1969. Howard Menzer, founder of Scouting for All, will discuss his decades-long struggle to end the Boy Scouts of America’s discrimination against Queers and what he calls the “baby step” the Boy Scouts have just taken. Cecile Veillard, Sean Bohac and José Medina of SAME Alliance will talk about the struggle for marriage equality in San Diego and the prosecution of nine SAME Alliance members, including Veillard and Bohac, for civil disobedience at the County Clerk’s office in 2010. Members of Canvass for a Cause and Guerrilla Pride San Diego will close out the hour talking about the upcoming Pride events in San Diego July 12-14 and how they intend to bring a radical, anti-corporate presence to them.

KNSJ has reached out to former broadcasters and listeners of KLSD, a station pulled off the air by its parent company. KNSJ draws on hosts who have had previous radio experience, including Enrique Morones, Makeda Dread & Douglas Holbrook. Local musicians will offer firework-music until mid-night. KNSJ will mix local producers with national programming from Pacifica, the BBC, Thom Hartmann & Amy Goodman.

KNSJ Contact: info@KNSJ.org, (619) 283-1100, www.KNSJ.org

Over 2,000 Celebrate Supreme Court Victories in Hillcrest

SAME Alliance’s Event Draws Exuberant Crowd, but “We’re Not Done Yet”

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

March 1

March 2

Party at Adam and Steve’s

Congratulations, Angel & Kim

Mom, no more excuses

Crowd at rally 1

Crowd at rally 2

Cecile Veillard

Kelly Hutton

Eric Isaacson

Alfie Padilla

Kathy Carmack

Rev. Gerald Green

Karen Guzmán

Christina Griffin

Rally co-sponsor Activist San Diego promotes their new radio station, KNSJ 89.1 FM — check out their “Queer Hour” Thurs., July 4, 3 to 4 p.m.

“Win or lose, we’re not done yet!” That was the theme SAME Alliance chose for its rally and march through Hillcrest Wednesday, June 26 in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions on California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA). Faced with the awkward task of organizing an event without knowing either the day it would take place or the outcome of the cases in advance — many people who received leaflets for the event asked, “What day is it?” — SAME Alliance and its coalition partners nonetheless drew over 2,000 people to a spirited celebration of the Court’s ruling that DoMA’s ban on federal recognition of same-sex marriages is unconstitutional and its invalidation of Prop. 8 on procedural grounds.

SAME Alliance was originally called the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality and was formed immediately after California voters passed Prop. 8 in November 2008, bringing California’s 4 ½-month recognition of same-sex couples’ marriages to a skidding halt. Since then it’s organized events around the days of decision in the cases challenging Prop. 8 in both state and federal court. On August 19, 2010 nine of its members and supporters were arrested at the San Diego county clerk’s office for demanding that the officials honor federal Judge Vaughan Walker’s decision declaring Prop. 8 unconstitutional and grant same-sex couples marriage licenses immediately. The case dragged on for over two years before the San Diego city attorney’s office dropped all charges against the so-called “Equality Nine.”

Cecile Veillard, former president of SAME Alliance and one of the Equality Nine, spoke at the June 26 rally and once again called on county clerks to ignore the so-called “stays” — delays — on the anti-Prop. 8 decisions. “I challenge the county clerks to start marrying people by noon tomorrow!” she said. She also boasted that the decision throwing out DoMA’s definition of marriage, for federal purposes, as only between one man and one woman was already having positive effects. “Today, this morning, a New York City immigration judge immediately stopped deportation proceedings against a Gay Colombian man who is legally married to a U.S. citizen,” she said. “Before this, Sean’s and Steven’s marriage did not exist [for the federal government]. Now it does. This is why our struggle matters. For undocumented Queer immigrants, this is a big step.”

“This is more than just about rights,” said Kelly Hutton, SAME Alliance member who MC’d the rally. “Rights have been ours from the beginning, and we are taking them back. It’s about families, health care, jobs, immigration and being safe on our way home. It’s about a healthy and safe environment. It’s sending a message to youth that they don’t have to wait until it gets better. It’s better now!” Hutton also boasted about the wide variety of issues SAME Alliance is involved in besides marriage equality for Queer couples, including immigration, labor and protecting government whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. “At SAME we don’t tokenize,” she said. “All these issues are our issues. An injury to one is an injury to all!”

Attorney Eric Isaacson, who has been involved in marriage equality litigation in California since 2004 — first representing the First Unitarian-Universalist Church and now the California Council of Churches and other religious organizations supporting marriage for same-sex couples — explained the Supreme Court’s two rulings. “One said DoMA violates equal protection under law, and the other said the proponents [sponsors] of Prop. 8 don’t have the right to appeal because they aren’t personally hurt,” he said. “The decisions are narrow. The DoMA case focused on Section 3 [the federal definition of marriage]. It did not address Section 2, which says states don’t have to recognize [same-sex] marriages from other states. The Court says DoMA was motivated only by a desire to ‘express moral disapproval’ of [Queer] American citizens. The Court says the Fifth Amendment withdraws from government the power to defame a group. Justice [Anthony] Kennedy says the differentiation demeans the couples, and humiliates and financially harms the tens of thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples.”

Isaacson acknowledged that “these decisions leave open the right to marry itself. They don’t address the constitutions or the laws of Hawai’i, Nevada and the other 35 states [that still don’t allow same-sex couples to marry]. But I think it points the way to the right decision in those cases. And you know who made the difference? You did! It’s the dramatic shift in public opinion that has headed us in this direction. You need to talk about the injustice. We’re going to get there and it’s going to be because of you.”

Alfie Padilla, a male-to-female Transgender person who moved to San Diego from her native Houston, Texas in 2011, thanked groups like SAME Alliance and rally co-sponsors Canvass for a Cause (CFAC), for which she works, for their example. “I heard about it in Texas because when Prop. 8 passed, you made a ruckus about it. You talked to people you knew and said Prop. 8 was unconstitutional and just wrong. Taking people’s rights away is wrong, and you knew that and did something about it. When I got here from Houston in 2011, I had never seen so much energy. We’ve accomplished a lot, but there’s still a lot to be done. Transgender people don’t have a lot of rights. In some states people can still be fired for being Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender. But keep putting that energy into the struggle, because we are winning.”

“Today we have witnessed a great victory,” said Kathy Carmack, a CFAC staff member and a volunteer with the online video outlet Queer News Now. “I remember when Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage [in 2003]. I was only a sophomore in high school and it’s the first positive memory I have of good news about the Queer community. I saved the newspaper that announced it, and every time another state voted against us I would take it out.” Like the other speakers, Carmack said that the victories in the struggle for marriage equality didn’t just happen, and weren’t granted by judges or legislators just because they thought it would be the cool thing to do. “It’s people like you,” she stated.

 Carmack noted how far the Queer community has advanced since the 1960’s and 1970’s, when “you could be arrested in the streets for wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes.” That changed, she said, because “people in the streets yelled louder, engaged together and changed the world we live in.” She said that in her work for CFAC, which reaches out to people on the streets and in public places to ask them for support and donations for marriage equality, “I have met so many individuals whose stories have touched my heart: parents, activists, people who share stories about partners no longer alive. … It should not sadden us that our struggle is not over. It should empower us to continue to fight.”

Rev. Gerald Green of Unity Fellowship Church, a Queer-friendly denomination founded by and appealing mostly to African-Americans, said the victory was what happens “when people stand up and don’t stand down. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said until all of us are free, none of us are free.” Richard Barrera, recently appointed chair of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council, had to cancel at the last minute but sent a statement acknowledging the solidarity between organized labor and the Queer community.

“I’d like to consider myself an activist,” said Karen Guzmán of the San Diego DREAM Team. “Dreamers” has become an umbrella term embraced by young people who were brought to the U.S. as children by undocumented immigrant parents, have grown up in the U.S. and know no culture but ours (and in many cases speak no language but English), but are in jeopardy of deportation because they are technically not U.S. citizens or documented residents. The term comes from the DREAM Act, a proposed bill in Congress that would allow them to apply for legal resident status if they go to college or join the U.S. military. The DREAM Act is stuck in legislative limbo, but President Obama used his executive authority last year to set up a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that was supposed to accomplish the same thing.

“We do a lot of social justice work,” said Guzmán of herself and fellow DREAM Team members. “We promote fairness, justice, equality and treating immigrants with dignity. I am a Queer woman of color. Both my parents are undocumented immigrants. I am also a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault. I ‘out’ all these identities because I want them all to be safe and protected under the law. DoMA and Prop. 8 are gone and social justice won this battle. But we still have much to do for all these communities. … What is going to be the next step? Protecting women’s reproductive rights? Solidarity with our Trans brothers and sisters? Homeless youth? What is the next step we need to take? We are not going to reach peace until we have full justice.”

Christina Griffin of the United Domestic Workers and the San Diego chapter of the NAACP was the only speaker who mentioned that while the U.S. Supreme Court had given a major civil-rights victory to Queer people and their allies, the day before it had struck down the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that enabled African-Americans and other people of color in the U.S. to vote and eventually elect their own to office. “We must continue to fight for protection against voting discrimination,” she said. “We must continue to fight against retaliation against workers. We have to fight against the refusal of our county to recognize the rights of its greatest assets, its workers. We must continue to fight the bans on marriage equality in 37 states. A lot of you are allies in more than one cause. You’ve got to stand proud as an ally.”

Cecile Veillard, who closed out the rally and kicked off the march that followed, brought up another issue that usually doesn’t get discussed at Queer events: police brutality. (A year ago Veillard stepped down as president of SAME Alliance to concentrate her activist energies on fighting abusive conduct by police.) “We have to fight against police brutality because when police brutalize the most powerless members of our community, they target all of us,” she said. She also called for continued struggle against bans on same-sex marriage in the 37 states that still have them, and asked people to put pressure on the U.S. Senate to approve the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would ban job discrimination against Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender people nationwide.

The march stepped off onto University Avenue and moved west on University to Fifth Avenue, the site of the Hillcrest neighborhood sign. Then it did a U-turn and came back down University to end where it began, at the Pride flag at University and Normal Streets in Hillcrest. Participants looking to continue the energy had several options. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center at 3909 Centre Street had scheduled their own commemoration of the decision starting at 7 p.m., and various bars and restaurants along the march route had already attracted celebrating crowds who greeted the marchers with enthusiasm as they went by. Rich’s, which donated a stage and some equipment for the rally, announced they were changing the theme of a dance party this Saturday, June 29 from the movie Airplane! (the poster for it used the famous “twisted-plane” logo from the film) to marriage equality.

SAME Alliance to Sponsor Militant Action for U.S. Supreme Court's "Day of Decision" on Marriage Equality

SAME Alliance (formerly San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality) is sponsoring a militant rally and march through Hillcrest on the day the U.S. Supreme Court announces its decision in the marriage equality cases challenging California's Proposition 8 and the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" (DoMA) passed by Congress in 1996, by which the federal government refuses to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in a U.S. state or foreign country.

Regardless of which decision, DoMA or Prop. 8, is announced first, please meet at the Hillcrest Pride Flagpole (University Ave and Normal St. SD, CA. 92103) starting at 5 p.m.

***THE DECISION WILL MOST LIKELY COME DOWN MONDAY JUNE 17 OR MONDAY JUNE 24!***

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to make its decision on the legality of CA's Prop 8 and the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The date is unknown at this time, so be prepared to mobilize and join us at the Hillcrest Pride Flag for a rally with speakers and a march on the day when they are announced. Then stay at the Pride flag for an open mike or join us afterward at the San Diego LGBT Center at 7:30 p.m. for more activities in response to the decision.

Please help publicize this action by printing out one or more of the flyers below and distributing them. For more information, please visit the SAME Alliance Web site at www.samealliance.com

Manning Support Demo Draws 100 to Hillcrest June 1

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Bradley (a.k.a. Brianna) Manning

“Truth-Telling Is Not a Crime”

Manning’s face in the banner

Nemo in the pen

Anokai Casey with chalk

March leader Cecile Veillard

“Hero”

“Arrest war criminals … ”

“Free Manning” banner

Veterans for Peace flag-bearer

A support demonstration for U.S. Army private first class Bradley Manning, who is being charged with “aiding and abetting the enemy” by providing extensive information about U.S. foreign policy and military actions to the now-defunct Web site WikiLeaks, drew 100 people to the streets of Hillcrest in San Diego June 1. The action was part of an international day of support for Manning timed to commemorate the third anniversary of his arrest on June 1, 2010, and also to come on the eve of his court-martial, which began June 3.

“This day of protest began 13 hours ago in Canberra and Sydney, Australia,” said Joe Cruz of San Diego Veterans for Peace at the start of the rally. “Then it moved to Korea, where freedom fighters demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy. Then it moved west to Heidelberg, Germany, where I was stationed when I was in the U.S. military, and to Amsterdam, London, Wales, and then across the ocean to Hartford, New York, Boston, Maine and even Tampa, Florida. Then it came west to Phoenix and then to California, in San Diego, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and now San Diego.”

Manning’s plight has gripped anti-war activists and other progressives worldwide despite minimal coverage by the corporate media. It was dramatized as part of the San Diego action. Organizers set up an outdoor pen of wooden standards and cord made to look like barbed wire, and a volunteer activist named Nemo stood inside the pen in an orange garment that resembled a prison jumpsuit. The pen was 6’ by 8’ — the size of the cell in which Manning has been held in solitary confinement for much of the time he’s been in custody. But since the event was outdoors and in a public place, they could not have Nemo be naked — as the real Manning was forced to through much of his incarceration, supposedly to keep him from killing himself.

The action began with Nemo reading some of the 10,000-word statement Manning himself presented in court on February 28, when he acknowledged providing WikiLeaks with U.S. military and State Department cables but denied aiding and abetting the enemy. Manning explained how his job as an intelligence analyst for the Army gave him access to State Department communications.

“With my insatiable curiosity and interest in geopolitics, I became fascinated,” Manning recalled. “I read not only the cables on Iraq, but also about countries and events I found interesting. The more I read, the more I was fascinated by the way we dealt with other nations and organizations. I soon began to think the documented back-door deals and seemingly criminal activity didn’t seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world. … The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion this was the type of information that should become public.”

“This is one American solider,” Joe Cruz said of Manning. “We have over 5,000 [U.S.] soldiers killed [in Iraq and Afghanistan] and we have killed up to 1 million Iraqis. Why all this fuss about one man? It’s a symbolic case. It’s because we are all Bradley Manning. The war against Manning is a war against all of us, against a security state, a surveillance state.” Cruz compared the Obama administration’s war against whistleblowers and their subpoenas for information from the Associated Press and Fox News to the tactics of the East German intelligence agency STASI, which spied on everybody in the country (or tried to) and let them know it in order to intimidate them into silence.

“Just three months ago, our media felt Bradley Manning was not a major story,” Cruz said. “Then they found out at the AP, Fox News and CNN that they were being targeted for doing their duty as journalists. It’s about more than Bradley Manning. It’s about the principles we hold dear.” Cruz also noted that the oath one takes to join the U.S. military — which hasn’t changed between his enlistment in 1962 and Manning’s in 2006 — “is not an oath to the Commander in Chief, nor to Congress, nor to God. It’s an oath to the U.S. Constitution, to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And that Constitution has been violated by the fascist war parties in Washington, D.C.”

A number of speakers cited other individuals who have attempted to resist U.S. militarism and the growing power of the American surveillance state and have suffered for it. Pat Grayson of the San Diego Coalition to Free Manning mentioned the late Aaron Swartz, Internet entrepreneur and inventor of the RSS data-management system, who killed himself last January while facing up to 35 years in prison for allegedly hacking into the database of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to steal articles from medical journals. She also mentioned another Internet activist, Jeremy Hammond, who is currently being held in prison pending trial for allegedly exposing the activities of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., also known as Stratfor, a private intelligence corporation that Barron’s magazine called “the shadow CIA.”

Grayson noted that, like Manning, Hammond is being held without bail, “which is unheard of, because the government doesn’t want them to defend themselves. Jeremy Hammond is in jail for stealing e-mails from a secret corporation that is monitoring private e-mails and selling information to other corporations and the government. … This corporation was going after civil-rights, animal-rights and Occupy activists.” According to Grayson, the judge in Hammond’s case, Loretta Preska, has a conflict of interest since her husband, Thomas Kavaler, had one of the e-mail accounts Hammond is accused of disclosing and also shares clients with Stratfor, but she has refused to remove herself from the case.

Alfie Padilla, who identifies as a male-to-female Transgender person and works as volunteer coordinator for the Hillcrest-based Queer rights organization Canvass for a Cause (CFAC), focused on Manning’s own gender identity. Though most accounts of Manning’s case — including the official Bradley Manning Support Group and its Web site, www.bradleymanning.org — refer to him as a male and use Bradley as his first name, Manning made contact with a gender-identity counselor on the Internet in November 2009 and discussed his desire to transition to female. Other chat logs indicate that Manning decided on “Brianna” as her feminine first name, which has led some of Manning’s supporters not to identify Manning by a first name at all and to use gender-ambiguous language like the ordinarily plural pronouns “they” and “them” to describe Manning.

“One of the most emotional times in my research on Manning was when I read a quote that they didn’t mind going to jail but they didn’t want pictures of themselves as a man plastered all over the media,” Padilla said. She called Manning’s incarceration and trial “an intentional attack on Queer and Trans people by the state. The state wants to make it seem like a random person did this, but Manning is one in a long line of Queer people who stood up for the truth. The Queer movement is not just corporate people and celebrities.”

Long-time San Diego peace activist Lynn Gonzalez talked about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and told the story of Omar, a former Marine she became acquainted with when he called the hotline she staffs for disaffected servicemembers. When he was sent to Iraq in the early years of the war, Omar “got off the plane in Baghdad and was shipped right to Falloujah and put under constant combat stress for three weeks,” Gonzalez recalled. “He didn’t even have a chance to shower. He was in the trenches as a sniper when a woman darted out. He shot her before he realized she was a woman. Then he had to listen to her scream for hours before she finally died. No one in his unit could risk coming out for her body.”

Omar’s PTSD first kicked in in 2004 when he was still in Falloujah, Gonzalez recalled. “He was sleepwalking, breaking bottles and cutting himself with the edges,” she said. “He was sent home, and at first he just wanted to go back to his unit. Then I finally got him to go to the psych ward at Balboa Hospital, and when he got out he wanted nothing to do with the Marines anymore. In fact, he even gave me the keys to his car so I could pick it up for him at Camp Pendleton, since he didn’t want to go back there.”

According to Gonzalez, servicemembers who get PTSD generally get it from guilt feelings over innocent civilians they killed. “War is an aberration,” she said. “We are not meant to be killing each other. It’s hard for a lot of people [in the peace movement] to maintain sympathy for the soldiers because they’re the ones doing the killing, but all those in war are victims. Wars are fought by the 99 percent for the benefit of the 1 percent.” Gonzalez closed by mentioning another victim: Kimberly Rivera, a U.S. war resister who fled the military, went to Canada, then was deported to the U.S. by the Canadian government and is now in the Miramar brig in San Diego County awaiting charges. She’s also separated from her four children, two of whom are Canadian-born.

Attorney Charlie Pratt, a long-time Queer activist, talked not only about Manning and Rivera but also fellow attorney Lynne Stewart, whom he’s known for 40 years — and who is currently in prison for violating so-called “special administrative measures” in connection with representing Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, convicted of masterminding the first attempt by terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. The “special administrative measures” were supposed to prevent her from relaying any communications between her and Rahman, ostensibly to keep him from using her as a conduit to relay instructions to his followers to commit terrorist acts — but Stewart pointed out they also prevented her from telling Rahman’s followers not to get involved in terrorism.

Stewart is suffering from severe breast cancer, and her supporters have alleged that her cancer was allowed to become terminal after she was refused medical treatment in prison. Pratt called the government’s attack on her, and their refusal to give her compassionate release, “pure persecution” and part of a campaign to silence all dissent against the U.S.’s war policy. “Everyone has a time in their life as an activist when you have to stand up,” Pratt said. “We have to stick to our principles, suck it up, be brave and understand not to separate Bradley Manning, Lynne Stewart and Kimberly Rivera from the rest of us. We owe them. We can stand up and we must stand up.”

After the rally, participants staged a march to the military recruiting office near the Uptown District shopping center. They marched in the street and, to make it difficult for the police to push them back to the sidewalks, marched against the direction of traffic. The action ended at about 3:30 p.m., though some people reconvened later that night for an Overpass Light Brigade display of lights spelling “Free Manning” from the 10^th Street Bridge, aimed at the drivers on the 163 freeway below.

Over 700 March Against Monsanto in Balboa Park

Action Targets GMO’s and Seed Patents

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

  

“When they own food … ”

Jeffrey Smith with U.S. Senator Tom Harkin

Makeda

Dr. Lori Robbins

Nick Barnaby

Tom Eden

Eva Roufé

Local activist Cathy Mendonça (right) with other participants

The March

“Mankind will stop … ”

 “Monsanto Owns FDA”

“No food … ”

“Not lab rats … ”

“Right to Know”

“Righteously Raw”

“Sleeping with Monsanto”

It might seem strange that over 700 people would come out to the Balboa Park fountain on a bright, sunny day, listen to speakers for over an hour, march all the way down to Little Italy and then return to Balboa Park to listen to speakers for over an hour again just to target one corporation. But Monsanto isn’t an ordinary corporation. According to protesters, Monsanto’s dominance of the worldwide seed industry, its aggressive promotion of genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) and its legal strategy of forcing farmers to sign agreements to buy new seeds every year instead of saving some for future planting indicate that the company will stop at nothing until every atom of food consumed by humans everywhere on earth is a proprietary Monsanto product.

“It’s easy to be angry at Monsanto,” said Jeffrey Smith of the anti-GMO group Institute for Responsible Technology, who addressed the afternoon rally from Denver via Skype. “We can tell stories all day about why they’re the world’s most hated corporation. Three of the Monsanto scientists who did the ‘safety’ studies on rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone, used to get cows to give more milk, which was linked to breast cancer and other human health hazards in some studies) refused to drink milk afterwards, and one bought his own cow. We’ve caught Monsanto doing research that hides problems with their products. Monsanto withholds seeds from other scientists, and if the scientists get them anyway from other sources, Monsanto goes after them in court.”

According to Smith, Michael Taylor was an attorney for Monsanto when he got a job with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he signed the paper certifying that foods containing GMO’s were chemically identical to foods without them. “The overwhelming consensus of the scientists at the FDA was that [foods containing] GMO’s were different — and dangerous,” Smith explained. Nonetheless, Taylor, an attorney with no scientific background, made it official U.S. law that GMO’s were harmless and therefore foods containing them didn’t have to be labeled as such. Taylor was rewarded with a higher-paying job at Monsanto — and now he’s returned to the FDA, newly appointed by President Obama to oversee all food-safety regulation.

“In 1999, a Monsanto spokesperson said their goal was to make sure 100 percent of all the world’s seeds came from them,” Smith said. “Their plan was to take over from God. They want to genetically engineer all life and eliminate the products of billions of years of evolution. So when we stand up against Monsanto we are protecting all future generations. We cannot clean up all the self-propagating genetic pollution already released by Monsanto. No ancestor of ours has ever had the opportunity to do this much because no technology has ever been long-lived than theirs.”

How could Monsanto literally take over the entire human food supply? The process began in 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court first ruled that life forms could be patented. Monsanto got into the business of genetically engineered seeds to protect their patented herbicide RoundUp, which they sold to farmers as a weed killer. When the patents to RoundUp were about to expire in the 1990’s, Monsanto hit on the strategy of genetically modifying soybeans and other crop seeds so RoundUp wouldn’t affect them. But these so-called “RoundUp Ready” seeds came with a catch: you could only use them if you signed a contract with Monsanto saying you’d only use RoundUp with them — not a competing herbicide — and you had to buy your seeds anew from Monsanto each year instead of saving seeds from your harvest for next year’s planting.

What’s more, Monsanto’s legal department aggressively went after farmers whose crops contained genes from Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds, whether the farmers had deliberately planted Monsanto seeds or not. One victim was Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, interviewed by this reporter in 2001, who had spent over 20 years building up seed lines of organically grown soybeans and rapeseeds (the source of canola oil). Unfortunately for Schmeiser, one of his neighbors was a Monsanto customer, and seeds containing Monsanto’s patented genes drifted over into Schmeiser’s fields and cross-pollinated his plants. Monsanto sued him and won when the Canadian court said it didn’t matter that Schmeiser hadn’t planted Monsanto’s seeds or wanted their genes in his plants; as long as they were there, no matter how they got there, he was violating Monsanto’s patents. As a result, he not only had to pay Monsanto a hefty judgment, he also had to destroy many of his laboriously bred seed lines.

With legal precedents like that, Monsanto could conceivably take over the world’s entire food supply and claim ownership of absolutely everything we eat or drink. All they have to do is get enough GMO seeds of every food crop in distribution and let nature do the rest for them. If they can demand royalties from every farmer who grows a crop Monsanto makes a seed for, they will own not only every form of edible plant life but every food animal as well — since many GMO crops, including corn, are not only consumed by people directly but are fed to livestock. The power Smith says Monsanto wants is not only to control evolution in their laboratories, but to loose their patented genes on the world’s fields so they incorporate themselves into every farmer’s crop — and thus every farmer has to pay a royalty to Monsanto and no one can eat without enriching Monsanto’s coffers.

One result of Monsanto’s strategy that’s already affecting the world is an increase in chronic diseases Smith and other GMO opponents think are associated with the consumption of genetically modified foods. “Thousands of doctors are now prescribing non-GMO diets, and their patients are getting better,” Smith said. Among the health hazards of consuming GMO foods, Smith said, are allergies, asthma, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, migraines, skin conditions, problems with fertility, anxiety, depression, other mental issues, kidney disease, hypertension and diabetes. (For more information on the health hazards of consuming GMO’s, visit http://www.responsibletechnology.org/health-risks.)

So what is Smith suggesting we do about GMO’s? The government isn’t going to solve the problem, he said, not with Monsanto virtually owning the process that supposedly “regulates” them. The answer, he said, is simply don’t buy them — and don’t shop at stores that carry them. It’s because no one is forced to buy GMO’s — at least so far, alternatives to most GMO products still exist in the marketplace — that Monsanto and other companies invested in GMO’s are fighting tooth and nail against laws that require that foods containing GMO’s be labeled as such. In Europe, where products containing GMO’s do have to be labeled, major companies like Nestlé, Unilever, McDonald’s and Bayer have stopped selling GMO products because no one will buy them.

It’s worked in the United States, too, Smith said. Enough consumers became aware of the health hazards of milk containing rBGH that they stopped buying it — and Walmart stopped carrying it. Deprived of a market in the stores of the world’s largest private corporation, dairies stopped using it. (Smith didn’t mention that a key player in the story was Alta-Dena Dairy, which had to go to court to win the right to label their milk as not containing rBGH.) Though Smith and other anti-GMO activists lost a major battle in California in 2012 — they put Proposition 37 on the ballot to require that foods containing GMO’s be labeled, but a multi-million dollar corporate-funded campaign and flaws in the initiative’s wording led to its defeat at the polls — Smith said the Prop. 37 campaign brought the U.S. closer to a “tipping point” at which people will demand non-GMO foods — and the major food companies and grocery stores will have to comply.

Smith’s speech was the final act of a nearly five-hour event that contained a rally in the morning outside the fountain in Balboa Park, a march to the farmers’ market in Little Italy, then back to the park for the afternoon program at the World Beat Center. Makeda Cheatom, also known as Makeda Dread, founded the World Beat Center in the 1970’s in one of two unused water towers in the park — the Centro Cultural de la Raza is in the other — and both have faced ongoing battles with the city ever since for the right to stay there. Makeda boasted that she started San Diego’s first vegetarian restaurant, The Prophet, and at the World Beat Center she offers classes on how to live entirely on raw foods.

Makeda talked about how GMO seeds and foods are being “dumped” in Third World countries, how activists there are fighting back and how we need to take them as an example. “We have to get more First World people in this movement,” she said. “I don’t want to have divisions between Black, white and Brown people. It’s all one people, and y’all come from Africa anyway.”

San Diego State University (SDSU) food sciences professor Dr. Lori Robbins spoke at the morning rally at the fountain about Monsanto’s power in the political system and the health hazards of glyphosate, the key active ingredient in RoundUp. “Why doesn’t our government protect us?” she said. “Monsanto stuffs so much money into the ears of our government that they can’t hear us. We’re paying with our money, our lives and our future. That’s why we’re in the streets — so our government can hear us. Maybe we need a new government.”

“Or no government!” responded a member of the audience.

“Telling you everything that’s bad about Monsanto in three minutes is impossible,” said Hugh Moore of the Green Party of San Diego County. “There’s only one way this gets into us: the government allows it. Internationally, the U.S. government is the lobbying arm of Monsanto. When France decided not to let GMO’s into their country, Monsanto sent the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, to talk to the French government to try to get them to change their minds.” Moore said that 270,000 farmers in India have committed suicide in the last 15 years because they’ve gone broke due to Monsanto’s requirement that they buy new seeds every year instead of saving them from previous plantings — as farmers have been doing since agriculture existed.

“I want to talk about the role of the media in activism and in the situation we’re in in this country,” said Nick Barnaby, one of the organizers of the event. He and other speakers talked about Section 735 from the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act.” Enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in March 2013 as part of one of the big “compromise” budget bills, Section 735 allows Monsanto and other companies that make GMO’s to keep manufacturing them even if they’re sued.

According to Barnaby, the U.S. media are complicit in Monsanto’s takeover of the worldwide food industry because they aren’t reporting on Section 735 and other issues exposing the risks of GMO’s. “How many of you heard about the Monsanto Protection Act on TV?” Barnaby said. “How many of you heard about this march on TV? Nobody. … I found out about [Section 735] in December. We find these bills and put together campaigns to stop them. If the TV would actually cover these stories, it would be different.”

Barnaby said that anti-GMO activists need both to grow their own food and start their own media on the Internet. “This is just the start of the new food revolution,” he said. “We have to network locally. We’re going to do a lot of activism, including your Senators and Congressmembers. The other thing we need to do is make real-time changes in our own lives. There are a lot of new techniques to grow your own food. I’d like you to grow food and not lawns.”

A number of speakers at both rallies are doing just that in various ways. Tom Eden gave a pitch for aquaculture — a system of underwater farming in which plants and marine animals live, nurture and sustain each other, creating consumable food for humans. He also urged people to visit the Web site http://healthyfoodlocalearth.wordpress.com, which offers help for would-be food growers in San Diego. Another speaker put in a pitch for the Organic Consumers’ Association, http://www.organicconsumers.org, which among other things is launching a worldwide campaign to ban nicotinoid pesticides and Monsanto’s Mon810 genetically engineered corn, which have been linked to the mass death of bees (see http://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/50865/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=8662).

At the afternoon rally, Eva Roufé showed a PowerPoint presentation promoting an organically grown vegetarian diet. “Organic food is more expensive,” she conceded, “but it’s natural and it’s more nutrition-dense, which means you can eat less. And the more we buy it, the more they’re going to grow it.” She offered tips for storing vegetables, including soaking them in water to keep them fresh longer, and said when you buy organic you can save your own seeds and use them to grow your own food for next year.

Turner Bell of City Farmers’ Nursery also offered advice for people interested in growing their own. “You just need to keep clean and be aware of safety,” he said. “You can find unique ways of doing things. Grow your own foods and learn to eat seasonally. When you’re in the garden, you’re around a lot of oxygen-producing plants. There’s a lot more to a garden than just food. Being in a garden is stress-reducing. I am really blessed to be able to live and work in my garden, to have fresh eggs and honey, and to be able to make my own olive oil.”