Hearing called on petition fraud; KTN will testify

THANK YOU to all who have reported their personal stories of petition fraud to KnowThyNeighbor.org. As a direct result of your actions, we have been able to provide the Attorney General's office with over fifty cases of alleged fraud and State legislators have taken notice.

State Senator Ed Augustus (Dem-Worcester), Co-Chair of the Joint Committee of Election Laws, announced yesterday that an oversight hearing will take place investigating your reports and those originating from other sources.  The hearing is tentatively scheduled for October 18 at the State House.

KnowThyNeighbor.org has been invited to testify and Directors Tom Lang and Aaron Toleos will be present to share insight into these allegations.

Would you like to testify too?  Opportunities will likely be available for the general public to participate in the hearing so please consider attending if you have something to say. We will make more information regarding this hearing available as details are confirmed.

KnowThyNeighbor is honored to have been asked to participate in this oversight hearing and will make every effort to represent the best interests of all the people of the Commonwealth.

Continue to notify us of any fraud you come across at reportfraud@knowthyneighbor.org.

Tom Lang & Aaron Toleos, Directors

Read the Globe Article

Comments

[Tyler]

TL & AT wrote:

KnowThyNeighbor is honored to have been asked to participate in this oversight hearing and will make every effort to represent the best interests of all the people of the Commonwealth.

Are you sure you aren't just going to protect the best interests of the HOMOSEXUAL people of the Commonwealth? Have any people from the other side been invited into the meeting to be heard?

Yet again, you have come to the realization that the courts are going to be the only place that you will win this.

[Joe S]

Bravo Tom and Aaron!

The process is so very important and since it has been obvious from the beginning that this crowd will do what ever they have to to win I encourage any and all people to come forward and participate in the process to keep democracy safe...

Thanks again...and we will all be routing for you!

Joe S.

[John Hosty]

The both of you are rapidly making this website the talk to the town. I wish you would put a hit meter on it so we could see just how many hits it is getting. You remind me that might does not make right, and in the end righteousness will prevail, not a twisted version created to serve those who let hate guide them. I salute you!

[Aaron Toleos]

Here are some blog stats as of 11:40pm on Oct. 6. Blog has been live since Sept. 11.

Total number of page views: 18187
Average per day: 727.48
Past 24 hours: 1042
In the last hour: 24
This week: 7628

If I have time, I will post some stats for the main site in the near future.

[Robert Sheeran]

After reading the last posting by Disapproves I had to respond – My first reaction to the concept of posting signers names and address was the same. I worried about confrontations that would hurt, rather than help, but one thing I think needs to be clarified that makes this different from harassment or intimidation and that is it is a human rights issue. Where would we be today if civil rights we’re left to the voters of the South? If a woman’s right to vote we’re not an in-your-face confrontation? Making this a voter issue is not true democracy; it’s perpetuating an argument that holds no basis in the facts. The very campaign against gay marriage is fear based. “If we allow same sex marriage, people will want to marry their pets” KTN is casting a light on that fear and looking to help put faces on who anti gay family legislation is going to hurt. It’s a huge leap to think that just because you disapprove of gay marriage that someone is going to harm your property or harass you over it. To me, the real basis of why people want a say over who I can and can’t marry is simple – they want to hold on to their values that make us less then a human or normal. Values that state I am incapable of the same love and commitment as heterosexuals. If that’s the way you feel, sign. I may want to talk with you at some point to share my views on that topic and point out how this will have no affect on you whatsoever. If that’s harassment, then don’t sign it. Rest assured, your property is safe, but your thinking about me as “less” may not be.

[Bart]

AP/365 Gay.com:

Gay Unions 'Perversity' Mich. Senator Says

"We call on Sen. Goschka to apologize for his hateful condemnation of our loved ones."

Goschka laughed at the demand.

"They should apologize for their lifestyle and tolerating something so terrible," he said. "The lifestyle, the act itself, it is utterly perverse. It's not natural."

How to Contact Goschka

Office Address: S-2 Capitol Bldg.

Mailing Address:
Senator Mike Goschka
PO Box 30036
Lansing, MI 48909-7536

By Phone: (517) 373-1760

By Fax: (517) 373-3487

Email:senmgoschka@senate.michigan.gov

[John Hosty]

Anybody want to defend this man? This is why we say this is about hatred. And this guy is a SENATOR! How frightening that we have people so foolish leading us.

[Taxin God]

Bart,

Thanks for the info. I will be writing this joke of Senator a letter.

[A&R S]

I am a Canadian in a legal marriage of two years - and a committed monogamous relationship for the past thirty years. We are defined as that monogamous gay couple with children.

Our attachment to MA includes the fact that we own property on Cape Cod- and that "R's" brother is the elder brother of a major northern MA employer who is not supportive of same-sex rights of any sort.

Although their other brother lives in CT supports marriage as well as civil marriage.
Both brothers are US citizens and vote in local elections. Both are heterosexual and professionally self-employed and both oddly enough, consider themselves Republicans.

As the eldest, I am a Canadian GLBT citizen who realises that a concerted national effort was the only way that the dominoes fell in Canada, province by province. Quebecers went to Ontario, Ontarians went to British Columbia, and married early on, while going back home to fight - and eventually make Canada one of four nations on earth where FULL AND EQUAL RIGHTS exist.

The MOST IMPORTANT OVERTURNING OF LAW is the 1913 law that in effect ISOLATED the MA gay couples as CT and VT have "Official and Legal Broom Jumping" coupled with laws limiting marriage. It is the same as Plessy v Ferguson coupled with Jim Crow.

Until and unless the entire American nation fixates its attention on the only oasis of partial freedom ( no federal rights but full states rights ), and limits the number of marriages to residents only, the rightwingnuts who have all three branches of your government, media and corporations in their pocket, will ultimately inundate the only beacon of freedom in your country.

R assures everyone that - if his MA brother, sister-in-law, or family members sign the petition, that he will post pictures of himself and siblings and write a local newspaper story clearly indicating that it is he who left the Liberal Party tradition of progressive social views he was raised with.

[A&R S]

Boomer-generation to today's Canadian Quebecer generation - Anglican, Protestant or Catholic - NEVER want to return to a theocracy it experienced from argueably, the Quebec Act of 1775.

Prime Minister Martin - threatened with Catholic excommunication from the two gay cardinals of Quebec ( the open secret in both Montreal and QC )- and certainly not the first of their genre either - did not flinch.

The Catholics have elected to the papacy a man who may be the penultimate self-loathing gay theocrat. His own biographer as Cardinal Ratzinger indicated that the man had attempted suicide and was gay.

His Machievellian response ( Rovian response )was to scapegoat gays. The difference from Europe and North America is the unwillingness of US and Canadian gay clergy to quietly closet themselves or accept a change in their moral theology that spoke to the moral neutrality of condition as opposed to activity.

[dejah thoris]

Tyler baby, it's about time you stuck to your own knitting and let other people live their lives as THEY see fit.

Or, is there some perverse reason you're interested in sticking your unwanted nose into other people's private business?

Some people think it's okay to interfere in other people's business and privacy. They think they're doing it for "gawd" or "Murka" or some other muttered reason. Where does it say in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that citizens of this country have the right to persecute others for ANY reason?

Tyler and all the rest of you bigots out there -- do you think that your crusade against your fellow Americans makes you big men? Important women? Somehow "better" because you have an invisible SkyDaddy on your side?

Think again. You're treasonous, hatefilled bigots. And the country would be better off without you.

Yet, you are welcome here, as much as anyone else, because you're Americans and you have the right to believe and say and do as you wish.

People died in wars so that you can spout hatred and calumny at others. What FUN you must be a dinner parties. What shameful lovemakers you must be in your darkened bedrooms, late at night. What shriveled souls you must have.

What decent society would put up with your hatred? Unfortunately, the answer is that we don't have a decent society because for at least a decade now,it has been co-opted and run by hate-filled "Christians" using their religion as a weapon. And now we pay the price for letting such as you continue to have your free speech without retribution.

And now, I read that in your "Christian zeal" to strip other Americans of their rights, you also feel the need to lie (in the petition drive) and bring in troglodytes from other states.

Let's see -- who was it who said "You will know they are Christians by their love"?

Actually, I don't believe you and your followers know what love and tolerance is. But you DO prove 2nd Thessalonias 2:10-12: "And for this reason God sent them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie."

The lie here, is of course, of your own making. Your Gawd never told you to hate gays and women and whoever else you hate. You made that one up on your own and then talked yourselves into believing that Gawd told you to believe it.

But, hey, if it gives you a woodie to hate other people and beat your wives or whatever you do when Gawd doesn't make the world to suit your twisted delusions, I guess that's your right. Just don't expect the rest of us to respect it very much.

[John Hosty]

Being Catholic myself I find it amusing that Catholic women have no problem supporting bigotry towards gays. Women still can't be priests. They are second class in their own religion. No wonder they don't have a problem persecuting gays. When gays are the issue women can stand in the group that hate them as equals with the men that hate gays. It reminds me of something a friend of mine said after 9/11. He said it was the first time he as a puerto rican felt equality in America because we all suddenly came together as one against a common enemy. After the hysteria died down feelings returned to the routine he was used to, but he still marvels at the feeling of being equal. Once the gay marriage issue is resolved one way of another, the attention will fade and what of the women? They will still be second class citizens in their own religion. The moto is "United we stand, divided we fall." Think about it...

[A&R S]

My career requires travel throughout North America as well as Europe and Asia. My fluency in the three major languages of the hemisphere allows me to be a rather informed and aware consumer of GLBT realities on the street.

There is a difference in Canada today. Even the initial freedom provinces of ON and BC are different when given federal as well as provincial or territorial rights. Activists are no longer involved in fighting for rights, but now attempting to assimilate into the privileges and responsibilities of full citizenship.

Nothing is still to be won. ALL rights, including the military and the ability to marry your spouse on base officiated by a willing chaplain.

The United Church of Canada, the largest Protestant denomination in Canada, is gay-affirming (with a conscience clause for detractors - yet they must find another to do it.)

Unless the MA toehold is kept, the march toward freedom may indeed take generations in the USA. Of course, we welcome our brothers and sisters yearning to breathe free, to take to the highway as well as the street, and just head for " The True North Strong and Free."

[John Hosty]

Julian Bond, Chairman of Board, NAACP

African Americans ... were the only Americans who were enslaved for two centuries, but we were far from the only Americans suffering discrimination then and now. Sexual disposition parallels race. I was born this way. I have no choice. I wouldn’t change it if I could.

Sexuality is unchangeable.

Many gays, many lesbians, worked side by side with me in the civil rights movement. Am I supposed to tell them now thanks for risking their lives and their limbs to help me win my rights but that they are excluded because of the circumstances of their birth? Not a chance.

The lessons of the civil rights movement of yesterday … is that sometimes the simplest of ordinary everyday acts, of taking a seat on a bus, of sitting down at a lunch counter, of applying for a marriage license, sometimes these can have extraordinary consequences, can change our world.

Upon receiving Equality Virginia’s Equality Commonwealth Award.

I found this posted on another site.