KnowThyNeighbor.org, which is a website which publishes the names of everyone who signed the petition to amend the Florida state constitution defining marriage. I naturally assumed since Exodus has a track record of supporting that (and Randy Thomas even spoke at a rally) all their names would appear on the petition. I did a quick search and failed to turn up all the major Exodus staffers I could think of. (But I must admit I don’t know the names of everyone at Exodus.)
I thought that a bit odd so I emailed Randy Thomas asking for comment. He was kind enough to promptly reply this morning:
We all signed the marriage petition; my assistant faxed in the petitions and mailed them in well before the deadline.
Sounds like a case for gay detective Donald Strachey.
Perhaps I don’t know how to use this but as a search engine it simply doesn’t seem to work.
Put in “Smith” and you get the information that no one by that name has signed the petition.
Perhaps you have to put in the whole name?
Worked for me:
Try this.
I know when I checked it before not all the counties were listed. If that is still true, maybe that is why Randy, et all are not showing up.
One possibility is that for the petition to be valid, you have to sign your full *legal* name. Randy is a nickname for many men, not a legal name–he could actually be a “Randall”. Similarly, quite a few men use their middle name socially and professionally, not their given first name, but they would be registered and have IDs under the given first name.
I saw a couple more people I know searching. Damn it.
Maybe Alan Chambers and Randy Thomas are their artistic names.
Or they’re registered to vote under their old drag names. 😛
Yeah, Jayelle, it’s pretty depressing when folks you know are on the list. One of my butt-head younger holier-than-thou catholic brothers is on there – I expected that. But the next-door retired couple who saw us caring for each other for the four years that we lived there – that’s a hard one to stomach.
Then again, I’ve heard church folks here in an unguarded moment say they really thought we ought to pop a “low-grade” nuclear weapon on Iran, which would “settle things down for a while.”
There’s a lot of hate out there, and the ‘friends’ of Jesus get meaner by the day!
I think that some of these folks really weren’t thinking of actual gay people when they signed these petitions. They’re just “protecting the sanctity of marriage” like their church asked them to. It doesn’t occur to them that they are protecting marriage FROM something and that something is YOU.
If you went to your neighbors and said “Do you really want to make sure that my sweetheart can’t visit me in the hospital or that we have to spend thousands of dollars just to make sure that if something happens to one of us the other will get the house”, they’d probably say “I never thought of that”. In fact if you told them “They won’t let me visit her in the hospital and I don’t know what to do”, they’d probably be the first to say “that’s horrible” and make a cassarole.
The anti-gay activists have done a good job of changing the subject from who they are hurting to some vague religious semi-patriotic concept. Your neighbors don’t see you when they think of these votes, they see militant radical extremist homosexual activists out to destroy all that is good.
Yeah, it’s a lie. And people like Alan Chamber know it’s a lie. Unlike your neighbors, they go into this fully aware of what they are doing. Alan and the others at Exodus know actual people that they are hurting and they are completely aware of the tangible harm they do.
I guess they are choosing to think that Jesus was kidding when he said “For I was hungry and you campaigned to make me lose my job, I was a stranger and you said immigration should not include same-sex rights, I needed clothes and you said gay couples should pay higher taxes, I was sick and you took away my health insurance, I was in prison and you said we have to keep sodomy laws on the books. Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Well I’m unsure if this is for finding people who want to exclude people with SSA from marrying or to include them, but either way if you sign a petition you have to expect that your name will pop-up somewhere.
Paul
Okay, now I see which way this thing is going – but then again my position doesn’t change. I would just like to elaborate that I don’t think someone is being “holier-than-thou” when they are believing in their religion. That seems the hypocrites approach…but that’s just my .02 cents.
Anyways if I’d had a chance I would have gone with the church as well.
Paul
Your two-hundredths of a cent?
Paul:
My definition of a holier-than-thou is someone who definitely should not be casting the first stone because of the plank in their eye, if you catch my mixed metaphor.
And exactly what part of anyone’s religion is voting to take healthcare away from another person? It’s spelled b-i-g-o-t-r-y.
Timothy: To agree with you – “I think that some of these folks really weren’t thinking of actual gay people when they signed these petitions. They’re just “protecting the sanctity of marriage” like their church asked them to. It doesn’t occur to them that they are protecting marriage FROM something and that something is YOU.”
I am sure there were many of these volks that weren’t thinking of actual Jewish people when they enabled the state to cleanse the race of immorality and protect the homeland. They were just doing what their leader asked them to do.
It’s just the banality of evil.
Yes, I do plan on confronting them; gently, but firmly with what the impact would be on people they know.