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Nall Troubles Two of the men arrested in the undercover police operation at Raleigh’s Crabtree Valley Mall have had the charges against them dismissed, according to a story in the News and Observer. Both men had been charged with committing a crime against nature (a felony offense). A prosecutor said that the charges were dropped because the evidence showed the men had not violated the law. Assistant District Attorney R. Thomas Ford dismissed the charges without presenting any evidence. In an earlier interview, Ford had said that an undercover police officer stationed in a mall bathroom had arrested the two men after seeing them standing in a stall with the door open. The dismissal notice that Ford filed in court said, MWhat they did is not crime against nature.” Defense attorneys for some of the other 37 men arrested in the undercover operation have charged that the police used entrapment. This argument was not raised in the cases that were dismissed. The News and Observer story printed the names, ages, and occupations of the two men. It noted that one of them, who works for the state Department of Public Instruction, had been suspended from his job without pay. The other man is an elementary school teacher from Carteret County. At the time of his arrest, the Carteret County News- Times ran a front-page story about the “probe of alleged homosexual activity and harassment of teen-age boys.” The story gave the names and other details about both men. It quoted the superintendent of the Carteret County schools as saying that the local school board was not going to take any action against the teacher, who had “a record of working with us without any blemishes that we know of.” The superintendent, T.L. Lee, said, “We’re simply waiting on court action. We don’t feel there is any action justified without substantiation. In America, you’re innocent until proven guilty, and we’re taking that stand.” In a related story about harassment in malls, the Gastonia Gazette reports the claims of several young men that they were evicted from Eastridge Mall for being gay. Theron Hatten, 18, said that he and four friends were told by mall security guards to leave the mall and not come back for two months, because they were gay. “We weren’t doing anything wrong,” Hatten said. “We were picked on simply because we’re homosexual.” The mall security director, Dick Warner, denied the claim, saying, “We don’t get into that sort of thing.” Hatten said he and his friends, who had just left a restaurant, were only talking to each other. “Maybe we offended someone by something we said. But we didn’t try to provoke any problems. We would have apologized to anybody we might have offended.” Warner declined to say exactly what the offense was, merely saying the young men were “involved in some kind of disturbance.” Hatten says three security guards told him and his friends that other shoppers complained they were “getting loud” and ordered them to the mall office. “It embarrassed us,” he said. “Everybody was looking at us like we were a bunch of criminals or something.” At the mall office, the five were told they were being thrown out and were asked to sign a document suspending them from the mall for two months. They said they were not given a copy of the statement even though they asked for one. “We signed it because we didn’t want to cause any more trouble,” said Larry Williams, who had moved to Gastonia from New York City four months ago. Williams and Hatten said they and other homosexuals have been harassed by mall guards who followed them around on other occasions. Warner said Eastridge has a trespass warning, which it issues to people who are “creating a disturbance or doing anything in violation of the morals policy at the mall.” State law gives mall authorities the right to evict people from their property. Warner said the mall issues the warning for “any number of things — arguing, screaming, yelling across the mall.” • MORFINFWS hi Charlotte CRC continued from page 1 Subcommittee chair Burson observed that, before the subcommittee seriously considers Cornelius’s recommendations, members want to learn more about homosexuality. “We need to be better educated," he said. At the same meeting, the committee will seek a legal opinion about North Carolina’s “crime against nature” law. Responding to some members’concern that having a fact-finding meeting might seem like support for gay rights, committee chair Leon Riddick pointed out that the action is not an endorsement of Cornelius’s recommenda tions. Riddick said, “We are standing on neutral ground now.” Some gay activists who attended the August meeting were pleased by the action. Don King, a found of Queen City Quordinators, said, “I'm glad to see a fine group like CRC, which I have a lot of respect for, begin to look at this.” King told an Observer reporter that job discrimination against homosexuals is frequent: “In some cases, people don’t get promotions or lose their jobs because they are gay.” King added, however, that physical harassment of homosexuals is rare in Charlotte. On Wednesday, October 3, at a meeting held at the Covenant Presbeterian Church, the CRC welcomed written statements concerning job and housing discrimination, police mistreatment and public harassment. Realizing that most gay men and lesbians — because they must protect present jobs — were not in a position to reveal every detail, the committee worked with King to assure that identities were protected. While including as much detail as possible in relating cases when harrassed, fired, coerced into resigning or held back from promotion, gay men and women were instructed to put their name and phone number on a separate sheet clipped to the report. King then coded each report and each name sheet with a number, giving the committee only the reports. If particular cases of discrimination needed more attention from the committee, King said, he would willingly act as a go-between. The results of this recent meeting were not available at press time. • Press Clippings L i Politic-tic-tic-tic ... I can hear you already: “Oh, no, more political garbage! Quel bore! When is The Front Page going to start covering interesting stuff — like bar news and softball tournaments?" Have patience, children. It will all be over in another month. Then we move on to other topics. Especially if the Republicans win big. Then we'll do a series on how to decorate your closet so you won't find it too suffocating during the next four years of ReagAmerica. You’ll be spending a lot of time in there. (By the way, the opinions expressed in this column are those of this individual writer, and not necessarily those of The Front Page and its staff.) (Although they should be.)( You should give them serious consideration, too.) First, The Good News Or at least semi-encouraging. You recall the 1983 ruckus over Gerry Studds, the Democratic representative from Massachusetts whom the House censured for his affair with a 17-year-old male page. When accused, Studds admitted that he was gay, but did not apologize, cringe, or whimper: a real real man. In September, Studds faced his first voter test since the censure. Seeking renomination fora seventh term, he was challenged in the primary by two other candidates. One of them, Plymouth County Sheriff Peter Flynn, said he had decided to run as he watched the new conference in which Studds admitted his gayness. Flynn asserted that the affair was “nothing less than a case of child molestation.” Despite what one columnist said might be “this year’s most vicious campaign,” Studds remained popular, even among conservative groups, who wisely looked at his public voting record and not at his private habits. As a result, Studds won an easy renomination. The final election, however, might not have such a happy ending. The Republican party and fundamentalist groups have targeted Studds as a particularly vulnerable candidate, and plan to spend lavishly to defeat him. Needless to say, Studds’s private life will once more become a matter of public discussion. Some of the public discussion has already appeared in the Greenwood, S.C., Index Journal (9-18). The paper printed a piece about the primary race by nationally syndicated columnist Robert Wagman. Obviously sympathetic to Studds, Wagman is appalled by the campaign against him, which was “marked by innuendo, intolerance, and slogans and bumper stickers whose contents can’t be printed in a family newspaper.” On the same page was an Index Journal editorial commenting on Wagman’s comment that “the campaign against Studds is marked by a lack of decency and fairplay.” The editorial then mentions the case of a high school student who was dropped from the National Honor Society because she was pregnant, but who pressured school officials into readmitting her. The editorial draws the obvious but tedious connection: “Decency? Honor? “These two samples provide interesting glimpses of society today. But what do they indicate? Increased understanding and tolerance of human conduct that was once frowned upon? A breakdown in old-fashioned morality? What?” I choose answer Nl. Guess which one the Index Journal chooses. It continues: “Oh, well. There couldn’t be a better time [than an election year debate over religion and politics] to think about decency and honor ... and what they stand ... or stood for.” [Note: their ...s, not mine. I think it’s called a “pregnant pause.” Another argument for abortion.] OK, Index Journal, let’s not talk “decency” and “honor.” Let’s talk “stupid.” “Stupid”is not understanding that a politician’s private life is irrelevant to his or her public life. “Stupid” is not realizing that a student’s pregnancy in no way invalidates the grades that got her into the honor society. “Stupid” is corrupting good words like “decency” and “honor” when what you really mean is “narrow-minded adherence to timid, oppressive bourgeois values.” So let’s not deal with hard words like “decency” and “honor” until we get “stupid” squared away. Sailor Gets Borked ... So much for the semi-victory. Now on to a substantial defeat, and intimation of worse in the future. In 1981, James L. Dronenburg was unwillingly, albeit honorably,discharged from the Nayy. A Korean linguist and cryptographer with a top-security clearance, Dronenburg had served for nine years, with an unblemished service and many citations for his outstanding performance. Despite all this, however, the Navy kicked him out. His offense: simply doing what sailors throughout history have been so well known for. He had repeatedly engaged in “homosexual conduct” with a seaman recruit in a Navy barracks —and I doubt that “homosexual conduct” means doing Ethel Merman imitations. Dronenburg filed suit, charging that the Navy’s policy of mandatory discharge of all homosexuals violated his constitutional right to privacy. But the U.S. Court of Appeals panel in the District of Columbia, in a 3-0 decision, ruled against him: “We can find no constitutional right to engage in homosexual conduct and, as judges, we have no warrant to create one.” The ruling is, as the New York Times News Service story (9-18) noted, “the broadest and most ringing repudiation a federal appeals court had given to the view of some libertarians that laws penalizing homosexuality are unconstitutional.” Of course, homophobes cheered the decision. The Aiken, S.C., Standard (which should be required by law to add “Sub” to the front of its name — truth in advertising, like “cheese food”) smugly states (8-29): “The decision would seem to be a setback for homosexuals seeking more enlightened and compassionate treatment in our society, but it is hard to see how the court could have ruled otherwise.” No, it’s simple: they could have said that sexual orientation is none of the government’s business. That seems bad enough, but it gets worse. You see, the court’s opinion was written up by Judge Robert H. Bork. Bork was appointed to the appeals court by Ronald Reagan. Bork is on Reagan’s “short list” of potential Supreme Court nominees. In other words, if Reagan gets re elected, we will probably get Bork, and opinions like this, for the next several decades. Just in case you needed another reason to vote against Reagan. The opinion is a masterpiece of ignorant bigotry masquerading as common sense. In fact, Bork explicitly cites common sense as a sufficient basis for his opinion: “The Navy is not required to produce social science data or the results of controlled experiments to prove what common sense and common experience demonstrate.” In other words, Bork will rely on his stereotypes and myths of hompsexuality, rather than actually seeking facts about individual gay men and lesbians. And what d oes Bork’s “common sense" tell him? “The effects of homosexual conduct within a naval or military unit are almost certain to be harmful to morale or discipline.” Nonsense, of continued on page 6
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