Tomorrow, April 19, 2010, the Supreme Court will hear arguments for Christian Legal Society vs. Martinez, and I happened to catch a discussion of the case on Fox News that I would love to post, but it’s not up on the Fox News site and I don’t know if it’s a segment they will post.

However, I can summarize the Fox News interview. The Christian Legal Society is claiming that its freedom of speech and freedom of association are being limited by the University of California’s Hastings College of Law because they require members to sign a Statement of Faith and declare whether or not they are heterosexual. As I recall the discussion, gays and lesbians may join, but are not allowed to serve as leaders of the group because of their sexual orientation. The CLS representative claimed that Hastings was oppressing the group by dictating what it c0uld believe and violating its freedom to choose its leaders.

The representative for Hastings College of Law replied that the only thing that the college is denying the Christian Legal Society is a cut of student fees because separation of church and state requires that the state does not provide funds to religious organizations.

Here’s the thing: gay and lesbian equality is like a radioactive dye that shows the extent to which various religions have created enterprises for the purpose of getting the government to give them money that they can use to maintain and grow their organization.

When these religions are caught red-handed and armpit deep in the public purse, they have wall-eyed fits about the devastation that will befall the hostages they will abandon — widows, orphans, the sick, whatever — if they have to follow the same policies of non-discrimination that everyone else must adopt to receive government money. They chew the scenery about their freedom of speech and freedom of association. Basically, they create huge dramas to excite pity, demonize gays as the real bad guys, and drown out any honest dialogue.

These religions also use situations like this for fundraising purposes, so I expect it has been a HUGE cash cow. They also are used for propaganda purposes — in this case, further demonizing and de-humanizing gays and pushing the totally false objection to gay equality that it will mean religious groups can no longer discriminate against gays. Actually, thanks to the separation of church and state, religions always will be allowed to discriminate against gays all they want — AS LONG AS THEY ARE NOT USING GOVERNMENT MONEY TO DO IT AND/OR ARE NOT DOING IT ON GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. In fact, in this case, the Christian Legal Society IS being allowed to use government land and buildings for their meetings and to discriminate against gays as much as they want — they just are barred by the Constitution from getting a cut of the Hastings’ student fees to do it.

If you think the Christian Legal Society SHOULD get a cut of student fees — money exacted from the students by force, just like taxes — then does that mean you are OK with the reverse situation of having government health insurance programs pay for abortions?

There’s something missing in all the coverage this week about the Appeals Court of the Fourth Circuit ordering the father of a Marine who died in Iraq to pay $16,000 in court costs to the Westboro Baptist Church as he battles the church for conducting protests and picketing during the funerals of fallen soldiers.

People seem just to be angry that the members of the Westboro Baptist Church are hurting the feelings of grieving families who are mourning the loss of a family member who has given the last full measure of devotion to America, land that they love.

I also find the Westboro Baptist Church’s protests outrageous — all of them, really, since their founder, Democrat Fred Phelps, has an extraordinarily comprehensive list of hatreds: gays, women, Catholics, every Christian who is not a member of his church, Jews, Hindus, Swedes, the Irish and India. He has, however, fought and won many cases of discrimination against black people. So there’s that.

Here’s the thing: no one I listened to yesterday seemed to object to the hatred of homosexuals by Fred Phelps and the members of the Westboro Baptist Church. Hatred of lesbians and gays is Phelps’s primary hatred — WBC’s primary URL is God hates fags dot com (the link goes to their protest calendar).

Left and Right, it is safe to hate homosexuals.

Conservatives don’t seem to mind that the Westboro Baptist Church members hate lesbians and gays. The problem was NOT the hatred. The problem was the LOCATION of the hatred: military funerals. The Westboro Baptist Church also makes a point of protesting everywhere there’s a production of “The Laramie Project,” but as near as I can tell, the conservative blogosphere has concluded Matthew Shepard was not killed because he was gay — so those protests are acceptable.

(Pro-family conservatives also said nary a peep of protest when Randall Terry threw out his gay teen-aged son and Alan Keyes tossed away his lesbian teen-aged daughter.)

This is how homosexuals get the idea that conservatives/Tea Partiers hate them.

I don’t think the discussion of equality for homosexuals should be conducted in terms of objecting to hatreds — I don’t care how you FEEL about my equality, I just care what you DO about my having it. (And I believe that religious freedom CAN co-exist with homosexual equality, despite what Chai Feldblum, Obama’s new EEOC chief, says.)

But I remain very disturbed that the core hatred the Westboro Baptist Church members use to justify their actions and their faith is so faintly damned by conservatives. I know conservatives are amazed and outraged that Leftists and homosexuals consider the Westboro Baptist Church to be the demon face, heart and soul of conservatism. I had to become a fiscal conservative to learn that this perception is unfair and wrong. But it will continue until social conservatives resoundingly repudiate the Westboro Baptist Church’s core hatred to such a degree that it stops being the safest hatred in the world to have.

P.S.

The soldier at the heart of the case in the news this week, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, died in Iraq in a helicopter crash on March 3, 2006. Funerals for fallen soldiers at military cemeteries received federal protection from protests thanks to the Respect for Fallen Heroes Act, which was signed into law on May 29, 2006. Openly gay Congressman Barney Frank cast one of the few votes opposing it on the grounds that freedom of speech should prevail even if the speech is hateful.

Motorcyclists also formed a volunteer group called the Patriot Guard Riders to escort military funerals and provide a screen of American flags so the mourners do not have to see the hateful signs of the Westboro Baptist Church protesters. They also rev their motorcycle engines to drown out the church members’ singing and chants.

Becky, the libertarian lesbian lawyer and mother who blogged at Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever, declares today that she is ending her blog due to censorship imposed by Google last week, which has caused her traffic of 150,000 hits per month to crash. She tweeted this morning:

The time has come to say good-bye to the blog—and au revoir to my readers—I’ll be back somewhere, sometime, somehow.

I did a fair amount of work behind-the-scenes both to rally support for Becky and to encourage her to switch to a self-hosted WordPress blog with her own domain name. I haven’t heard back from her personally, but obviously from her last post this kind of help seemed to her to be part of the problem, which is that Google has acquired the power and wealth of a nation and is now using it like a despot to oppress. Advice that she should just move to a different platform appears to have been a galling symptom that we have knuckled under without a proper fight. And Becky is a fighter and her cause is just:

I do not believe that the federal government should regulate how Google exercises its power—they would only make things worse, and it would result in greater infringements of individual freedom. But that in no way lessens my disgust and disdain for a company that on a small scale will wipe me out with a key stoke, and on a large scale partner with Communist Party thugs in censoring the Chinese people.

These days most of the censorship is not the work of the federal government—it is the Titans of Silicon Valley , who also strive to know every single fact about every single living thing in the Universe, that scare the beejeebees out of me.

Becky is right. One of the scariest aspects of the Obama campaign from 2007-present, since they haven’t really stopped, was their observation that they could corrupt the online public forums and make opposing viewpoints disappear before people wised up that the owners of the forums were playing favorites when allowing merchants into the marketplace of ideas. And the owners of Google were among those corrupted, so, for example, HillBuzz has reported that Hillary’s supporters got lousy page ranks in Google, and their Blogger blogs and YouTube videos would vanish. (Remember that Google owners Blogger and YouTube.)

I am comforted that Becky’s tweet this morning and her last post both say “Au revoir” — “until we see each other again” — instead of “adieu” — “good-bye until we meet in heaven,” is how I translate “adieu.” I am going to trust her resourcefulness and faith in the value of her point of view to bring her back into the marketplace of ideas. She has an important contribution to make. I look forward to cheering her return.

Washington at Valley Forge, painting by Edward P. Moran, Library of Congress.

Baron von Steuben training the troops of Gen. George Washington at Valley Forge, 1777. Painting by Augustus G. Heaton, U.S. Archives, 111-SC-83897.

It is Memorial Day and I do wish to honor all the members of our armed services, living and dead. But I am going to have to start insisting on having me all of that equality they talked about today that every other citizen has, and, frankly, practically every illegal alien, too.

I attend Memorial Day services because I play bassoon in the Bel Air Community Band, one of the largest and best community bands in the U.S. We play for the Memorial Day services held in Bel Air, Maryland, because we are patriotic. Many of our members have served in the armed forces, including our conductor, Scott Sharnetzka. Some are currently serving — Aberdeen Proving Ground is nearby.

In the past four years or so since I’ve played with the band on Memorial Day, the talks have been very moving — including a Marine sergeant who lost an arm and both legs in Viet Nam, and last year a father reading a letter from a fallen son. The Air Force National Guard general who spoke this year will be leaving for Afghanistan in a couple of months.

But thanks to Carrie Prejean touting as one of her credentials for speaking against marriage equality for lesbians and gays the fact — I assume she’s telling the truth — that one of her grandfathers fought in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge, I found myself listening to the speeches today about liberty and American values and getting angry. One of my ancestors — an I-don’t-know-how-many-greats-grandfather — spent the winter in the Revolutionary Army under Gen. George Washington at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. (There was no battle with the British at Valley Forge, but it was a turning point of the Revolutionary War simply because enough of an army stayed with Washington to keep the war for independence going.) Grandma said he was so hungry that when he caught a frog and it got away before he could cook it, he cried. Why does the service of MY ancestor not count? Where is MY equality? Why is it legal to deny me marriage equality, a job, a home or the right to enjoy a public accommodation, such as a restaurant or store, for the BEING crime of being homosexual? Why does MY equality vary from state to state, even county to county or city to city?

One of the answers is that our military’s policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” goes a LONG way toward perpetuating inequality for lesbians and gays. It gives our inequality a rationale — we do not have equality because we haven’t paid for it with our service. Never mind that foreigners are allowed to serve in our military as THEIR path to FULL citizenship.

I don’t know my family’s military service history between the Revolutionary War and World War II. During World War II, I think both my mother’s brothers who were old enough were in the Army. I know Uncle Herbert was — I have photos of him in uniform. Both of my father’s brothers were in the military in World War II — his brother Donald was a Flying Tiger in China. (Yes, the same Flying Tigers as the John Wayne film.) His brother Paul was in the Army — oh, and I think Uncle Paul was gay. My parents met in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, separating uranium for the Manhattan Project. (My father is nuclear physicist Hubert P. Yockey.) My mother’s father and one of her sisters worked there, too.

So — why doesn’t MY family’s service count toward MY equality as a homosexual?

And — since we have a far-left Democrat in the White House who promised to end “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” AND Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, NOW really seems like the time for the legislation to remove this policy of inequality. It’s time for liberal gays and lesbians to give Obama a deadline for repealing “Don’t ask, don’t tell” because enough lesbian and gay pioneers like me have settled in Fiscal Conservative Land that they really do have a place to go now when Democrats don’t keep their promises.

Memorial Day seems like the right time to remember that fighting for equality is a virtue and that fighting for the right to serve in your nation’s military is patriotic and shows the willingness to pay the price of equality in full measure. It is time to repeal “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” It is time for homosexuals to have equality.

Update, 5/27: Becky, the lesbian libertarian at Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever, also has some worthwhile observations about “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and a pertinent video — plus, she has hot illustrations, while the closest I have ever come to heat here is a nude Bea Arthur portrait staid enough to be handing in the Tate Gallery.

Totalitarian liberalism is on the march in Canada to silence Kathy Shaidle here:

In Ms. Shaidle’s case, she became a target because of her outspoken support of Israel and her criticism of the Canadian government’s use of “human rights” to stifle free speech.

and here.