"I also want to add that I am a New England Patriot football player, I'm just not in union with coach Bill Belichek and owner Robert Kraft."~JayG, webmaster of "Defending The Faith".
When Larry Cirignano pushed Sarah Loy to the ground out of anger at the anti-gay "Rally for Democracy" last December, I was there. Tom Lang, co-director of knowthyneighbor.org and I made up our minds that enough was enough, and we were not going to let him get away with this. We decided to help make sure this act of violence got the public attention and hopefully the penalty it deserves. When bloggers everywhere made Cirignano's rage the talk of the blogosphere there were a few websites that were trying to paint a very different and dishonest picture of what happened. That's how I stumbled across Jay G. and his website.
Jay wrote, "...she started moving fast, stepped on another girls foot, then took a dive like you'd see in Big time wrestling..." On another thread he wrote, "So I saw the whole thing." Jay tries to discredit the very credible eyewitness account of Worcester Telegram & Gazette reporter Richard Nangle in saying, "Worcester Telegram reporter Richard Nangle wrote a completely one-sided and distorted article on the Traditional Marriage Rally held on the steps of Worcester City Hall on Saturday, December 16. Nangle wrote that Larry Cirgnano of Catholic Citizenship is guilty of assault and battery when the incident was actually staged."
I asked Jay if we would be hearing him testify to his claims in court under oath, yet never received an answer. The Worcester Police have no record of a statement taken from him, and it is my suspicion that he was not even there that day.
These are the circumstances by which Jay and I met. After defending the truth of what happened during the Cirignano incident on his site, I stayed on Jay's blog in an attempt to find a way Catholics and the gay community could live together in peace. It was important for me spiritually to try, since I was a lapsed Catholic myself. So that people reading my comments would better understand why I can relate to their beliefs, I lowered my guard and made my life an open book. Just when it seemed people may have begun to see the sincerity of my efforts, the mood started to change, and things like this were soon said:
"Furthermore, the push for pedophilia is now the "extreme" which will push homosexuality out of the spotlight of public debate and into full normality."
Then the attacks really began, and the poisonous remarks went wild. In more than 200 comments back and forth a plethora of hatred is spewed out at myself without provocation, as you can see for yourself.
Much hostility is evident here with comments aimed only at insulting. "Nazis" are brought up and compared to me, and the term "Sh@t eater" was used in the discussion of gay sexual behavior. The list goes on in a diatribe of hate and misrepresentations of the truth instead of the simple dialog on how we can live together in peace, which is why I came to talk there. My calmness in the face of this vitriol only seemed to add fuel to the fire.
In these repetitious unending personal attacks, I began to see a similarity that reminded me of another time in September, 2005 when I was talking to opponents of gay marriage on knowthyneighbor.org. I helped to expose that one person was fraudulently posting under several different names. When caught, the culprit had this to say:
"It took you long enough to figure this out. I had given some thought to sending the messages through proxy servers to disguise the IP, but that wouldn't have been as much fun. It was far more amusing to lead Cherie Johnson and John Hosty around by the nose for a couple of days."
In August, 2006 I had encountered another issue of dishonesty and have documented that here on my website for further reading. This was where the webmaster of knowthyfactsnotthyneighbors.blogspot.com is caught posting as the radio show host "Gregg" from the Pundit Review Radio Show. When called out on his lie, he pulled the article off his blog, doctored the comments, and screwed up covering his tracks so badly that he left a trail of evidence for all to see.
After coming across both these situations, it was easier for me to recognize the tell tale signs of fraud on Jay's site. I noticed that the names who argued with me appear no where else in his blog, and the similar writing style and content seems to give away the truth. Suspecting fraud, I put some of the names through the "Who Signed the anti-gay marriage petition" tool on knowthyneighbor.org. You would think that if these people were so against gays they would have gladly signed the petition, yet suspiciously, none of their names are listed. Some of the posts tell more details than others, and allow for further investigation, like Theresa LeBlanc who claims to be from Groton, yet is neither listed on the petition nor in that city. Plainly put, I believe Jay has been posting under these other names, but readers can judge for themselves. In case something "happens" to his blog, or the thread in question, I have saved it here on my blog for all to see.
If Jay is truthful, then Sarah Loy is a liar, all these aliases are real people, and Jay is a New England Patriot Football Player who seems to hate gays. What's your opinion? Mine is that once again the elaboration of a bad liar has gotten the liar caught.
5 comments:
Hm, I don't know much of the truth of allegations and such, but I can say that if you kept your cool while people were being that stupid and offensive at you, kudos.
I, myself, and getting more and more annoyed at the plethora of crap that is in people's brains. Associating homosexuality with pedophilia (google video search for Boys Beware, and old Sid Davis flick, and be appalled that this is probably still being shown some place seriously), cross gender issues (like the news story here saying "see how this kid is obviously gay at a young age" when we have zero evidence of what his sexual preferences are), violence (as though gay people are likely to beat some het up for kissing differently gendered people and leaving them to die of exposure tied to a tree somewhere), and so much more.
A huge problem I have with many people, and Christians seem to fall into this category easily, is that fact that they believe that they are correct, and that the end of getting their point across justifies whatever they do. Changing handles a lot to skew perceptions that there are more people than just one for a particular opinion is rather childish and damning to the person doing it, yet it's all in the name of them and their opinions. People picketing funerals, assaulting and killing others, spreading lies, taking legal action... all of this makes me not respect the people doing such things.
Personally, I would think that education could help here. Yet the same people would be so opposed to that, saying "we don't need to know that" or "our children should be raised in ignorance as our god intended." It's maddeningly frustrating.
Jeff: "A huge problem I have with many people, and Christians seem to fall into this category easily, is that fact that they believe that they are correct, and that the end of getting their point across justifies whatever they do." Christians don't do that! If one shows anything other than love, mercy, compassion, grace; engages in hateful rhetoric and condemns others, he or she is not a Christian, and that fact has to be recognized and announced! The Gospel, the Good News, is about God's grace (unmerited favor to us) that we appropriate through faith (trusting God over and above seen circumstances). If one trusts God, he/she embraces his/her lesbian and gay sisters and brothers; if one obsessively condemns others, he/she is not expressing faith in God and cannot, therefore, be presumed to be a Christian, regardless of his/her identification as such!
Jeff and Jerry, thanks for the great comments. My initial goal was to try and reach out to those who are so virulent and get them to see there is nothing to be afriad of. Now that I put my best effort forward and it has been brutally rebuffed my new goal is to show the public what type of real hatred there is out there, and let them see for themselves perhaps what they didn't think was real.
In their silence they allow people like JayG. to speak for them, since their silence is mistaken for approval.
Jeff, since it sounds like you have not visited that site I invite you to read some posts under the thread, "Friend of the Court" and see why I'm mad enough to post this thread here. We too as members of the gay community are partly responsible for the trouble we see today because we have been silent too long. There are more allies out there than we think, but they are not going to fight our battles for us. We need to be active, and they in turn will stand with us. There is no better time than now for us to do all we can.
Jerry: "Christians don't do that! If one shows anything other than love, mercy, compassion, grace; engages in hateful rhetoric and condemns others, he or she is not a Christian..."
I disagree. Christians do all sorts of things. And far as I can tell, they are all Christian by that loose definition that the word "Christian" applies. They also claim that other people who claim to be Christians are not really Christians, and that you cannot say bad things about Christians because those Christians over there aren't really Christians... and so on. Ask some non-Catholic in a born-again church somewhere and they'll tell you that Catholics aren't really Christians. Nor are Mormons, Assembly of God people, the Boston Church of Christ, the people who write/read Jack Chick tracks and take it seriously, and a huge list of other people. Mind you, if you ask many of them, they will also claim that you are not Christian yourself, along with everyone else who isn't them. I've heard it again and again: in paper, blog posts, from a Christian friend of mine from an Assembly of God church, in a local (Derry, NH, at the time) church's talk on cults -- which was all about other Christian groups that are really cults and not Christians.
While I understand the distinctions you are trying to make based on how you act versus how other people act, many people use the same label of Christian. And this is the correct label form everything I can tell. "Christian" is a general purpose term for people who worship or follow that profit there mentioned in the New Testament of the bible. That others not belonging to the same particular group behave badly from your point of view doesn't change that. I'm sure you can find people who will say that they are Christians and that you are Christians. They will probably be standing under a very expensive "god hates fag enablers" sign, and they will be every bit as vehement in their convictions as you, even as they hear a Gay Man's Christian Choir singing at the same event while contra dancers revel.
Mind you, in all this I'm not saying how you follow your religion is wrong. I'm saying that you are trying to cling exclusively to a label that a lot of other people use to describe a much broader range of people. Perhaps you should get a different label, or modify it, or add to it so that it is more specific to indicate you're specific points of view on what people who follow Jesus should be doing.
Jeff: " "Christian" is a general purpose term for people who worship or follow that profit there mentioned in the New Testament of the bible. That others not belonging to the same particular group behave badly from your point of view doesn't change that." My point is that if one follows Jesus, one does not engage in hate-mongering, or seek to deprive others of civil rights! Of course, people can use the term "Christian" for all sorts of purposes, but Jesus makes it very plain that we'll know who is a Christian, a follower of Jesus, by their fruits (Matthew 7:16, 20), and those fruits are those of love and not of hate!
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