Anti-Gay Bigots to Rally in Chicago Tomorrow—join the counter-protest!

[lgbtlib...@aol.com]

Supporters of equal marriage rights for same-sex couples will counter-protest against a rally led by the anti-gay "Illinois Family Institute" (IFI) at 10:30 AM, Saturday, April 27th at 2200 N. Sacramento Avenue in Chicago's Logan Square / Humboldt Park neighborhoods. 

 

Both sides are attempting to influence a close vote on Illinois's equal marriage rights bill that may happen sometime in the next few weeks.

 

The Logan Square/Humboldt Park rally is apparently part of a recent IFI strategy to drive a wedge between Latinos and gays, targeting predominately Latino congregations for its anti-gay propaganda. 

 

For those of us who remember IFI's repeated dalliances with notorious immigrant-basher and perennial Illinois GOP candidate Jim Oberweis, this is pretty rich.  The IFI is pursuing a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy that ignores that many people share both immigrant and LGBT identities.  While the IFI has flirted with the anti-immigrant 'Tea Party' movement, undocumented LGBTs are in the forefront of the movement for genuine immigration reform.

In 2009 the IFI was designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for "attacking gay people and homosexuality in general." 

 

"In 2009," reported SPLC, IFI "Cultural Analyst" Laurie Higgins "compared homosexuality to Nazism, likening the German Evangelical Church’s weak response to fascism to the 'American church’s failure to respond appropriately to the spread of radical, heretical, destructive views of homosexuality.' Elsewhere, Higgins has pined for the days when gays were in the closet. 'There was something profoundly good for society about the prior stigmatization of homosexual practice… . [W]hen homosexuals were ‘in the closet,’ (along with fornicators, polyamorists, cross-dressers, and ‘transexuals’), they weren’t acquiring and raising children.'”

Saturday's counter-protest is co-sponsored by the Gay Liberation Network (GLN), the Bisexual Queer Alliance Chicago, and Queer Fest America (list in formation). 

 

While the vote for Illinois's equal marriage rights bill is currently a close call, activists at GLN note that this need not be so. 

 

The Democratic Party, controlled by Rep. Mike Madigan, has an iron grip on both houses of the legislature and the governorship, and Madigan regularly whips his party's functionaries into large majorities voting for measures he cares about.  But with his daughter probably entering the race for governor, Madigan has decided not to spend his political capital on ensuring legal equality for gays by insisting that his party's representatives vote for the measure.  In this, the cynicism of IFI's divide-and-conquer strategy is only matched by Madigan himself.

 

Please join the Facebook event here and share it through social media.  For more information on Saturday's pro-equal rights counter-demonstration, email the Gay Liberation Network at LGBTlib...@aol.com