Friday Gay Blogging: Backlash Edition

But I'm talking about our backlash.

It's a sad fact that the courts are still the only guardians of civil rights for minorities, even if they're not as reliable on that score as they used to be. However, as long as that's the case, we have to rely on them.

You already know that California AG Jerry Brown has asked the state Supreme Court to overturn Prop 8. It's spreading:

From Joe.My.God, the Arkansas adoption ban is under fire:

In the lawsuit filed today, the ACLU argues that Act 1 violates the federal and state constitutional rights to equal protection and due process. Participating in the case are 29 adults and children from over a dozen different families, including a grandmother who lives with her same-sex partner of nine years and is the only relative able and willing to adopt her grandchild who is now in Arkansas state care, several married heterosexual couples who have relatives or friends disqualified by Act 1 who they want to adopt their children if they die, and a heterosexual woman who wants to be a foster or adoptive parent but can’t because she lives with her partner of five years. The complaint was filed this morning in Pulaski County Circuit Court.

Good.

Also in the courts, as you probably have heard, Florida courts have now struck down the gay adoption ban (the only one in the country specifically targeting prospective adoptive parents because they are gay):

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman said the 31-year-old law violates equal protection rights for the children and their prospective gay parents, rejecting the state's arguments that there is "a supposed dark cloud hovering over homes of homosexuals and their children."

She noted that gay people are allowed to be foster parents in Florida. "There is no rational basis to prohibit gay parents from adopting," she wrote in a 53-page ruling.

This is the second judge to void the ban; the first case was not appealed, but now, the Florida Supreme Court will hear an appeal by the state. It will be interesting to see if the court relies on evidence or prejudice.

And on the real backlash front, from Nancy Goldstein at HuffPo, a dissenting voice on Milk that reminds us what "backlash" truly is:

Harvey Milk deserved a better film than this.

Director Gus Van Sant's hagiography remains true to the facts of its subject's life while backing away from invoking the full-on, living color injustice, violence, passion, nerve, and sheer scruffy grassroots rage that fueled Milk and the emerging post-Stonewall Gay liberation movement. . . .

Bitch, I've seen queers more fired up when Bed Bath & Beyond runs out of sale items. Where's the passion?

Was Van Sant afraid that audiences wouldn't be sympathetic if 70s-era gay activists were people who suffered, swore, fought back, and fucked like they meant it? If the street kids actually looked like dirty, starving, broke-ass teen hustlers?

Gay history -- unedited -- is ugly, angry, and violent. It's police dragging us out of cellar bars and down to the station to gang fuck the femmes and face-rape the butches, queens, and trannies. It's military witch hunts; suicides and "experimental therapies," from lobotomies and electro-shock to Christian boot camps. It's Stonewall, where we showered raiding police with bottles, locked them in the bar, and set it afire. It's ACT UP and chaining ourselves to pharmaceutical companies' fences to protest AIDS drugs price gouging.

We're being too "civilized" again. By now, you know my thoughts on that syndrome, but it's nice to see Goldstein taking it and running with it.

Dessert today from Capricho, with thanks to Made in Brazil: