Hateful Connections

Is there really much distance between this:



And this?


Transgender Woman Brutally Attacked - the attackers claimed that the victim was "a man dressed like a woman in the bathroom"

A McDonald’s worker has taken credit for filming and uploading to YouTube the latest viral video to capture a brutal assault at a fast food restaurant.

The employee, identified as Vernon Hackett on social network accounts, posted the video clip to his YouTube page earlier this week. According to his Facebook page, the 22-year-old Hackett, pictured at right, has worked for McDonald's since September 2009 .

The April 18 assault, seen below, took place at a McDonald’s location on Kenwood Avenue in Rosedale, Maryland, a Baltimore suburb. According to the Baltimore County Police Department, a 14-year-old girl has been charged as a juvenile in connection with the assault, while charges are pending against an 18-year-old woman. “The incident remains under investigation and the State’s Attorney’s Office is reviewing the case,” added investigators.

Police said the assault victim "appeared to be having a seizure" when officers arrived at the McDonald's at around 8 PM. The victim suffered cuts to the mouth and face during the attack and was transported by medics to Franklin Square Hospital for treatment, according to a police report.

The police report identifies the victim as 22-year-old Chrissy Lee Polis, who appears identical to Christopher Lee Polis, whose rap sheet includes convictions for disorderly conduct, property destruction, and prostitution, according to court records. The civil rights group Equality Maryland has identified the McDonald’s victim as a transgender woman.

Polis told police that she was walking to the restaurant’s bathroom when she “got into a verbal argument with two black females” who “began punching her in the face with their fists and pulling her hair.” A female bystander told cops that when she tried to break up the fight, the suspects punched her in the face, which “caused her to become disoriented.” Police noted that the woman, who declined medical treatment, had “redness around her right eye which is consistent with someone punching her in the face.”

A manager at the Rosedale McDonald’s said she was “not allowed to speak to a reporter." In a corporate statement this afternoon, McDonald’s said it was “shocked by the video from a Baltimore franchise,” and called the incident “unacceptable, disturbing and troubling.” The firm added, “We are working with the franchisee and the local authorities to investigate this matter.”


As seen above, in a Facebook posting, Hackett contended that the woman seen getting beaten in the video was actually a man "dressed like a woman" who got into a confrontation with female patrons when he refused to leave the women’s bathroom at the Baltimore-area eatery. Hackett claimed that the victim faked a seizure and, when cops arrived at the restaurant, “he got right up.”

In other Facebook messages sent Friday by Hackett (see below), he acknowledged filming the fight, denied the victim was transgendered, and claimed he had “No Hate For Anybody…No Matter Tha Gender/Race Or Sexual Preference.” Hackett exchanged messages with Facebook users who wrote him to express anger about the video and his gleeful play-by-play.


Hackett did not reply to TSG messages sent to his Twitter and Facebook pages, which he subsequently deleted late this morning. He also has deleted his YouTube channel.

See Video of Beating HERE

 

Event Featuring Diane Gramley and the AFAofPA Slanders Gays and Promotes Violence Against Transgender Persons

Dispatch from Coudersport, PA

by Joe Wilson, August, 31, 2010:

Diane Gramley sat peacefully behind Robert Wagner in the Coudersport Public Library as the retired physician shared his views on transgender individuals with the assembled audience. “I'm gonna put a ball bat in my car,” he said, “and if I ever see a guy [Wagner refuses to use proper pronouns] coming out of a bathroom that my granddaughter's in, I'm gonna use the ball bat on him.”


Moments later he added: “In the good old days, before 'she-males' existed, they just called such people perverts.”

Gramley is no stranger to such ideas. As President of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Family Association, a 'traditional family values' organization based in Mississippi, she spends much of her time planting similar seeds of suspicion about the dangers posed by “men who think they are women,” her disparaging term for transgender females. She also crusades relentlessly against what she and the AFA call the “homosexual agenda” and the type of legal protections that her and Dr. Wagner's threatening rhetoric suggests are needed for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

Gramley was in Coudersport, a small town of 2,600 residents in the sparsely populated north-central part of the state known as the Pennsylvania Wilds, as a special guest of Dr. Wagner for what he titled “A Bible Believing Christian's Response to OUT IN THE SILENCE,” my documentary film about the quest for inclusion, fairness and equality for LGBT people in the small town where I was born and raised, Oil City, PA, just a two-hour drive from Coudersport.

Gramley, who also happens to call the Oil City area home, plays a central role in OUT IN THE SILENCE as a result of the firestorm of controversy she helped to ignite in opposition to the publication of my same-sex marriage announcement in the local paper. It was that controversy that compelled my partner, Dean Hamer, and I to go back to my hometown with our cameras to document what life is like there for LGBT people, and to show hopeful and inspiring stories about the growing movement for equality.

The film was produced in partnership with Penn State Public Broadcasting, received support from the Sundance Institute, premiered at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, and has been broadcast on PBS stations around the country. We're now using it as an educational tool in a grassroots campaign to help raise LGBT visibility and to bring people together in small towns like Oil City and Coudersport to begin building bridges across the gaps that have divided families, friends, and entire communities on these issues for far too long.

As part of this campaign, OUT IN THE SILENCE had screened just a month earlier for a standing-room-only crowd in the Coudersport Public Library despite vehement opposition from Dr. Wagner and the efforts of the local Tea Party and a small group of fundamentalist preachers to shut the event down and have the library 'de-funded' for making its space available for such a program.

Wagner's “Bible Believing Response,” he told the crowd of approximately 60 local church people, “was intended to expose the filmmakers’ real agenda and to question the directors’ assertion that the community should tolerate alternative lifestyles.”

During the two hour program, Wagner asked special guest Gramley a few questions about her experiences as a minor subject of the film, but he used her more as a prop, seated silently behind him, providing an odd sort of legitimacy as he put forth offensive theories and mischaracterizations about LGBT people, including that “AIDS is the gay plague” and “gays can't have families.”

Dean and I were in the library for the presentation. We made the six-hour drive to Coudersport from our home in Washington, DC because I wanted to bear witness to this event, to experience for myself, if only for a few hours, what it feels like to be so close to such willful ignorance and brazen cruelty.


As I sat there, listening to 'amens,' snickering laughter, and even a roar of approval from the people around me when asked if they agree with the AFA assertions that there “should be legal sanctions against homosexual behavior” and “homosexuals should be disqualified from public office,” I felt a sadness unlike any I have known before. A sadness for those who fall prey to such bigoted and hostile bombast, who carry the feelings these things stir into their homes and family relationships, and for the communities that suffer the sometimes-violent consequences of such mean-spirited divisiveness.

But as I looked at Gramley, unmoved next to Wagner, condoning the ugliness without a word of protest, I thought of all the courageous people who have attended OUT IN THE SILENCE Campaign events over the past many months in far flung places, including there in Coudersport, who refuse to be silent anymore, who are working for change in their communities against great odds, and I was inspired all over again.

It is in their spirit that we will continue our campaign to speak out in the silence and to help build the movement for fairness and equality in small towns and rural communities across America.

I hope you'll join us! Learn more at OutintheSilence.com

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