Loss of Privacy

This is the newly released surveillance video from the July 9th incident in Salt Lake City.

If you’re gay and you’d like to kiss, you probably don’t want to do it in an El Paso, Texas restaurant or in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Two gay men kissed in a Chico’s Taco restaurant in El Paso and their entire dinner party was tossed out because the management didn’t want that “faggoty stuff” in their eatery.  The restaurant claims that they can refuse service to anyone they want, however they forgot to check with their own city ordinance on the matter.

Briana Stone, a lawyer with the Paso del Norte Civil Rights Project …said the city anti-discrimination ordinance protects people on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation in public places. Perhaps more troubling, she said, was that the police officer chose not to enforce that ordinance and might have contributed to discrimination.

“This is such a blatant refusal to uphold the law on account of discrimination,” she said. “The result is devastating. The Police Department is allowing that and even participating in it by refusing to enforce an anti-discrimination ordinance, which is what their job is.”

Lisa Graybill, legal director for the ACLU of Texas, said that businesses can ask patrons to leave for lewd conduct, but that those standards would have to apply to all customers.

If they’re going to kick out gay couples for kissing, they’re going to have to kick out heterosexual couples as well.  The main problem with Chico’s, according to locals, is that it’s open 24 hours a day, has greasy, disgusting food, and is full of Cholo’s (soft core gang members) fresh from the border who are extremely homophobic.

In Salt Lake City, however, it gets a little murkier.  Apparently, church officials own part of the town square and can, thus, make “citizens arrests,” though arresting gay people for kissing or holding hands seems quite extreme.  They are also known for arresting people who are peacefully assembling and handing out christian leaflets, quite ironic since this is what Mormons do worldwide.

The kiss happened on a former public easement given up by city in 2003 in a controversial land-swap deal. The easement became private property, allowing the church to ban protesting, smoking, sunbathing and other “offensive, indecent, obscene, lewd or disorderly speech, dress or conduct,” church officials said at the time. In exchange, the city got church property for a west-side community center.

The men were eventually cited with trespassing on the plaza by the police.  However, the case makes little sense because, many times a day, people are seen kissing and hugging on the plaza.  The only difference, it seems, is that those people aren’t gay.  The church has not kept their promise to keep the area a public area and follow the law as it promised back in 2002.

This is the area in question.  More on the Main Street Plaza controversy.

Video courtesy of Air America radio.

Art is subjective.  Whether or not you find a LEGO made recreation of a concentration camp by artist Zbigniew Libera art, is your own opinion.  Although Libera insists that it was sponsored by LEGO, LEGO says they did not.

I must admit, I found it quite interesting.  I don’t think I’d want to play with such a toy, however, I found myself drawn to the photos, particularly the ones of skeletons.  I wasn’t surprised by such a thing, nor was I repelled in disgust.  Instead, I found myself contemplating why someone would create such a thing, as well as recalling the vast information I have learned over the years about the Holocaust.  In the end, art is about reflection, so I would say, in this instance, Zbigniew Libera has done his job well.

Just in case you missed some of these stories in the past couple of weeks, here’s a few gems that I stumbled across.

The Rev Peter Mullen, chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, called for homosexuals to be tattooed with warnings about the perils of gay sex in a cigarette-packet-style health warning.

Where does one even begin attempting to comment on such idiotic statements?

There is a video clip of cats flushing toilets over on YouTube.  It was slightly amusing.

There is a lot of wondering about why Blackwater and US troops might be deployed on US soil.  Conspiracies abound about the possibility of martial law before the election.  It could be true, but it could also just be fear mongering.  I really wish I could dismiss the idea out of hand.

Seattle high schoolers are now going to get failing grades that will affect their GPAs.  It’s the first time in seven years that this has happened.  It’s only being changed because it violated school board policy.  Too bad they didn’t do it because it’s the right thing to do.

The federal government is proposing a consolidation of personal information into databases.

There are more than 3,000 programs or databases in the federal government that hold personal information–Social Security numbers, addresses, fingerprints, and so on–yet the government is only beginning to develop a plan for collecting, protecting, and using such information.

The feds want to put it into fewer databases to better track individuals, despite the fact that they have admitted that data mining sucks.  This will probably also be used in conjunction with their new surveillance program that will turn military satellites back onto the US.

In Peru, an ancient pyramid has been found using satellite technology.  This is what we should be doing with satellites instead of spying on our own people.

In other, really cool, news, the library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum is revealing it’s long lost secrets, albeit very slowly.

You can also buy the US Constitution as a graphic novel.  Maybe now, with pictures, George Bush will understand this fine document.