Dear Editor:

After attending the Town Hall Meeting regarding Pride and the registered sexual offenders, I have a lot of mixed emotions – so many in fact that I could not bring myself to speak that night.

There was a vocal crowd there in support of Pride and I hope they were there in support of the board members and not the pedophiles. I can see supporting the board and staff that are not registered sex offenders in some capacity as people, but to support pedophiles and their rights is going too far. I am all for diversity and being inclusive, but when did that include pedophiles? If that is what the majority of the LGBT community wants then count me out!

There is no comparison in my mind between being arrested in 1970 in a gay bar when you were over the age of 21 just for being gay, and as an adult sexually molesting and violating a child under the age of 14 – which is what all of these individuals were convicted of. These people did not get on the Megan’s list for a minor offense with another consenting adult in a park bathroom. Read the site yourself, and better yet look at all of the people on the site and try and tell me which ones are innocent, which ones won’t hurt another child again, which ones are predators that will continue to hurt innocent children – you can’t tell, that is why I have zero tolerance when it comes to this type of crime against children, whether they be from our community or not.

We should have taken a poll to find out how many in the audience had been sexually abused by an adult when they were children – these people are living with a life sentence for something that was not their fault at all, and relied on adults to protect them. How do you think they now feel about our community when many in the audience seemed to be more concerned about the civil rights of a few convicted child molesters versus the rights of these now adults to feel safe in their own community, not to mention the hundreds of kids that attend this and other community events.

Family Matters is one of the largest LGBT parenting groups in the nation, we have over 1,500 parents and thousands of kids in our membership – it is our responsibility to protect these kids wherever they are, they are counting on us to do the right thing, can we count on you to help?

We learned a lot in this process over the past month and many organizations are growing from this experience. It’s time that we all come together to focus on healing our community and focus our attention on the outside people that are attacking our community and want to see us discredited and fall apart. I am not about to sit by and let this happen, this is a critical time in our history and we need all of the support we can get, and we need the strength of the whole community working together.

Marci Bair,

Past President & Current Board Member of Family Matters

Dear Editor:

I am appalled at the attitude of many of the people who attended the town hall meeting August 15th to discuss the actions of the Pride Board. Countless speakers spoke out in defense of the registered sex offenders that were asked to resign. I heard people say these individuals made “mistakes” and committed an “indiscretion”. Not once did they point out that these are convicted criminals that committed atrocious acts against minors. One of these so called “indiscretions” was forcible sex with a child under the age of 14. I believe this is more commonly referred to as rape. These people were so concerned with the civil rights of these convicted child molesters that none of them stopped to consider the civil rights of the victims. Don’t the victims have the right to enjoy our community’s Pride celebration without the fear of being confronted their assailants? Allowing these people to work at our Pride festival is an injustice to anyone who has ever had to deal with sexual molestation. Shame on anyone who holds the rights of a convicted child molester above the rights of a victim of molestation.

Now it has been revealed that the clown that worked in the children’s garden at the Pride festival is a registered sex offender, convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under the age of 14. This revelation clearly demonstrates that all of the people who stated children were never in harm’s way were totally wrong. Certainly anyone who works in close proximity to children should undergo a criminal background check.

During the town hall meeting the co-chair of Pride admitted that the board made many mistakes and missteps in its handling of this situation, but he also offered many excuses for their actions and was more than willing to assign blame to others. How many mistakes does the board need to make before it becomes obvious that they are not competent wardens of our community’s Pride celebration.

It is unfortunate that our community as a whole was not well represented at this meeting. I am disappointed with those community leaders that did not come forward and express their opinions. The meeting was overrun by Pride volunteers who were clearly pushing their own agenda, and the moderator allowed the meeting to get out of control and off topic. I know that many people share my views and I hope that they step forward and speak up. I am thankful to Mayor Toni Atkins and State Senator Christine Kehoe for taking a public stand on this issue and speaking out against the Pride board. Pride belongs to all of us and we cannot let a small group of extremists ruin this celebration for the rest of us.

Nicholas Moede

Dear Editor:

Miss Hartline strikes again! Former prison inmate, drug addict and thief James Hartline who by her own admission spent 19 years incarcerated has now found Jesus. And Jesus told Miss Hartline to stir up trouble for “sinful” Hillcrest homosexuals where ever she can.

Hartline’s latest effort was the controversy regarding pride volunteers. Previously she convinced the Catholic bishop to deny a funeral for a gay club owner. She’s trying to close down Rainbow Road and the Obelisk book store. She’s involved in every anti-gay cause.

Although she’s living on disability she claims she spends 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week in her trouble-stirring activities.

Now I ask, if she can spend all that time stirring trouble, shouldn’t she be able to hold down a job? Miss Hartline needs to get a life of her own. Instead, her sole purpose seems to be creating problems for others.

Carson McIntyre

Dear Editor:

Adapted from the bird cage liner known as Mr. Murray’s regular inappropriate rant: As a ‘lesbian white woman’, I will not be voting on social issues in this election, but on the candidate who can and will turn our city around… period.

I will be voting for Donna Frye.

Antigone Charco

Dear Editor:

Judging from Marc Rouse’s outraged defender-of-the-faith letter in your August 4 issue about the two-page AIDS ad that appeared one week earlier — “It took a great deal of nerve for you to publish such a dangerous lie, in effect helping to kill off the very community you claim to serve” — no one would believe that the ad he so violently overreacted to was a listing of seven scientists who have challenged the idea that HIV causes AIDS and a reference to a Web site with more information on their views.

What’s most astonishing about Rouse’s letter is there’s no evidence he’s ever engaged with these scientists’ views, let alone actually visited the virusmyth.net Web site. It’s not clear how he believes publicizing a scientific challenge to the HIV/AIDS model is helping to kill people, but I’ve been active in the AIDS rethought movement for over 14 years and the usual allegation against us is that just the very existence of our point of view will somehow persuade Gay and Bisexual men to throw away their condoms, have unprotected sex and essentially screw each other to death.

I believe that in a lot of respects the advice given to Queer folk by the AIDS establishment has been far more dangerous than anything we’ve told them. The AIDS establishment has consistently underestimated the direct health risks posed by recreational drugs in general and methamphetamine in particular. Only recently have mainstream Queer and AIDS organizations started to warn about the immunosuppressive risks of mixing meth and Viagra — something David Rasnick, one of the scientists quoted in the ad, had been discussing in public since 1999.

The AIDS establishment has often pushed incredibly toxic drugs on otherwise completely healthy individuals who had the misfortune to test “HIV-positive” — on a nonselective test that can register positive from at least 64 other causes besides HIV, including hepatitis, herpes, malaria and flu — thereby in some cases speeding, rather than slowing, their deaths.

Indeed, the protease inhibitors and so-called “cocktail” combinations introduced in 1996 were so aggressively and heavily overhyped these drugs probably contributed to more unprotected sex among Gay and Bisexual men than anything our groups had to say about them. While the mainstream was loudly proclaiming that these drugs had “no toxicities,”

as early as 1996 Dr. Rasnick and other scientists on our roster were warning of the toxicities that did indeed develop. This has led to the ironic result that mainstream HIV prevention educators and AIDS dissenters increasingly sound similar when warning that these drugs have toxic, and sometimes life-threatening, “side” effects and that a few anecdotes about so-called “death-bed recoveries” can’t be taken as an excuse to write off AIDS as “a chronic, manageable disease” and abandon sexual risk reduction.

Sincerely yours,

Mark Gabrish Conlan

Editor of Zengers magazine