Police Report on Rainbow Lounge

so thats what it sounds like when cops lie to try to save their jobs. reeks of bullshit to me.

They do polygraph testing on the officers. It’s virtually impossible to cheat a polygraph test unless your superhuman. Perhaps some of the “witnesses” should agree to be tested as well. Any takers?

Yo Check It.

We’s like doing this crazy documentary on da lounge and like this geezer from the PD like gives me a shout and says “yo, we’s got some crazy video of them geezers like dances and shit and we’s think it would be real good in yo film.” So me mate Jamal meets this police geezer and he gives em a cd with this crazy shit video on it. The cop told Jamal, like they’s checking da lounge fo crazy geezers and they like goes into the bathroom and opens the wrong stall door and like bam! they sees some crazy shit with these two hillbilly geezers and they wasn’t like all cool and hip looking and metrosexual, they’s like wearing overalls and shit. They’slike trying to pull da cop into the stall but he like runs outside and lucky films it all.

Peace Out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MOgSRnCEUQ

I bet the “women” that were going after the officers were actually chicks with sticks.

Uncle Beef:

I bet something near and dear to you smells like poo too. I agree with Elliot. Give em’ all polygraphs. The police officers’ accounts seem very plausible to me.

Sure, bring on the polygraphs (which measure physiological stress response, not deception). Superhuman or policeman, polygraphs generally aren’t admissible in TX court.

“The majority of polygraph examiners in Texas are former law enforcement officers or current officers with a private business, according to the Texas Polygraph Examiners Board.”

CHEERS!

After reading the blotch posting about the partial FW PD report on the events at the Rainbow Lounge, I was struck by how history has a funny way of repeating itself.
Genesis 19:4-9
4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. 5 They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

6 Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him 7 and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. 8 Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

9 “Get out of our way,” they replied. And they said, “This fellow came here as an alien, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door.

I’m betting the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The patrons of the bar claim to have done nothing wrong, hard to believe.
The cops claim to have done nothing wrong, also hard to believe.
I’ve been to enough bars(way too many) to know how people act to come to an educated guess that it was a mix of drunks and overly aggressive sober cops.
Hell, I can’t stand to be around my drunk friends if I’m sober and all I’m gonna say is that I’ve been to enough gay bars to know about their buffoonery.
They are a hoot to be around sometimes, but get a little handsy after a few drinks.
This is just a bad situation overall. The cops should have known they were in a lose lose situation.
This really is a black eye to our otherwise kickass city.
Live and learn. Hopefully, we can all move on.
I’d also like for the cops just to admit they messed up…they at least have an obligation to own up to it.

funny now. the TABC administrator has come forth and admitted that TABC violated their own policies in the raid, and the sergeant in charge of the raid has stepped down. additionally, 2 of the officers involved are on desk duty pending an IA investigation.

http://www.dallasvoice.com/artman/publish/article_11584.php

Not only that,
He said ” they should not have gone there in the first place, that something is very wrong.” He stopped short of pointing the finger at the FWPD, but it’s pretty clear what he was saying.
Someone gave the order to go there.

They were not only there but there with a vengeance.
TABC Administrator Allan Steen told the Dallas Voice, “If our supervisor had been contacted to OK the inspection, they would have asked, why such force?” Meaning having six FWPD and a paddy wagon pre planned for this.

The TABC Administrator, who has seen and been involved with hundreds of inspections, says “Why Such Force”. He makes it clear that this was something entirely out of the ordinary. The only way this will be fully resolved is with an outside independent investigation. Including questions about why the city tried to prevent the lounge from opening in the first place.

Professor Buddy says:
Genesis 19:4-9
4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. 5 They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

Here is the actual biblical text from Genesis 19, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version:

4 But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house;
5 and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.”

6 Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him,

7 and said, “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly.

8 Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.

9 But they replied, “Stand back!” And they said, “This fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and came near the door to break it down.

Dr. Chris Heard, Assistant Professor of Religion, Pepperdine University.

Most commentators agree that “know” in v. 5 is a euphemism for sexual intercourse, in this case forced. A few interpreters disagree and argue against this understanding, but since “know” is clearly a sexual euphemism in v. 8, I do not find such arguments convincing. The mob wants to rape the newcomers.

Now there are a couple of very important things to notice about this plan. First, the mob, while utterly cruel, is entirely rational. This is about premeditated violence, not sexual gratification. In v. 9, where the NRSV quotes the mob as saying “we will deal worse with you than with them,” the Hebrew phrase נרע לך מהם is perhaps better translated “we will do you more harm than [we would have done to] them.” The mob’s verb of choice, רעע, can in some contexts be properly translated “to do evil” in a moral sense, but here, where it takes an indirect object (”you”), it has the sense “to inflict harm.” The mob explicitly states that its intention is to do harm. The mob wants to put the visitors “in their place,” and they have chosen a particularly violent and demeaning method by which to do so.

The mob’s intention to inflict male-on-male rape on Lot’s visitors has nothing to do with sexual desire or sexual gratification. There is no hint here of homosexuality in the modern sense of “sexual orientation.” The crime has nothing to do with preferring sex with males over sex with females. Claims that the “sin of Sodom” per Genesis 19 related to homosexual orientation run aground on two ridiculous presuppositions.

First, such claims require us to accept the idea that 100% of Sodom’s adult male population was homosexual by orientation. In modern studies, figures of anywhere from 3% to 10% are proposed for the fraction of adult US males who are homosexual by orientation, and when figures closer to 10% have been proposed, evangelical Christians have gone into a tizzy of objections that it can’t possibly be that high. Yet some of those very same people who object that the fraction of modern US adult males who are homosexual by orientation can’t possibly be as high as 10% are willing to believe a 100% figure for biblical Sodom. It is just too improbable to believe that 100% of Sodom’s male population preferred sex with males to sex with females. Even if the story is entirely fictional and the people of Sodom just literary characters, the story loses all verisimilitude if we push it to that extreme.

Second, claims that the “sin of Sodom” per Genesis 19 was male homosexuality require us to believe that either (a) the entire male population—every single male in Sodom—had seen the visitors and felt so irresistably attracted to both of them that they felt compelled to rape them in order to gratify their lust, or (b) all homosexual men are indiscriminately attracted to all other men. Supposition (b) is simply false, although it seems to be a common fear among straight men; common sense and your own experience should tell you that (unless you are very strange) you are not indiscriminately attracted to all members of whatever gender you find sexually attractive. This leaves us with supposition (a), which actually has a serious history within biblical studies. The influential German scholar Gerhard von Rad proposed precisely that the visitors’ angelic beauty inflamed the Sodomites’ homosexual lust. But supposition (a) falters in a couple of ways. First, it is unreasonable to assume that all the men of Sodom had even seen Lot’s visitors before assembling outside Lot’s door. How then could their lust have been inflamed? Second, it seems to me rather unlikely that all the men of Sodom would respond to their individual inflammations of sexual lust by banding together for a massive gang rape. I think it rather likely that they might instead fight amongst themselves to see who would “get” the object(s) of their desire.

There are just too many problems, both of logistics within the story world and verisimilitude with the world outside the text, to long sustain any supposition that the men of Sodom, gathered in a mob outside Lot’s door, were motivated by sexual desire. They chose sexual violence as the means of their cruelty, to be sure, but their motive was to assert social dominance over the newcomers. If you want to explore this further, I make these same arguments in more detail in my book Dynamics of Diselection (SBL, 2001).

The “sin of Sodom” per Genesis 19 has to do with using sexual cruelty and violence to oppress and demean outsiders. It has nothing to do with homosexuality in the modern sense of sexual desire oriented toward members of one’s own biological sex, and certainly has nothing to say about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of loving, committed, sexual relationships between members of the same biological sex. This does not, of course, mean that the Bible as a whole is necessarily silent on that topic. Both Jim and Joe pointed to relevant texts in Leviticus 18 and Romans 1, and those deserve discussion in any comprehensive attempt to form a “biblical perspective on homosexuality.” Genesis 19, though, depicts and condemns something rather different.

De La Torre concludes his Ethics Daily essay as follows:

The same xenophobia demonstrated by the Sodomites, who sought to physically rape the foreigners within their midst, is present today by those who economically rape the poor and the undocumented alien. Both in ancient Sodom and in the modern U.S., the residents in power desire to subordinate the stranger, the undocumented and the alien within their midst.

Rather than using this passage to condemn homosexuality, today’s conservative preachers would be more biblically sound if they used Genesis 19 to show how so-called First Nations economically treat the peoples of so-called Third Nations, which is not so different from what the Sodomites hoped to do with the aliens within their own midst.

While I agree that Genesis 19 is better suited to the uses De La Torre suggests than to discussions of homosexuality in the modern sense, I am not so sure that it’s the most effective text to set in opposition to economic exploitation, nor am I so sure that this is the most natural way to use this text for moral or ethical formation. There are plenty of prophetic texts in the Hebrew Bible that directly address issues of economic exploitation in such powerful and unequivocal terms that one doesn’t need to make hermeneutical leaps like drawing analogies between the Sodomites’ intended physical rape of Lot’s houseguests and modern “economic rape”—indeed, I don’t much like such metaphorical uses of “rape” at all both because of the “sexualization” of oppressions that are not inherently sexual and because of the potential trivialization of actual rape. If we are going to tap Genesis 19 as a negative moral or ethical example, there are plenty of ways in which people in our contemporary world use physical violence, including sexual violence, as a means of social dominance and control; moralizing preaching from Genesis 19 would be much more convincing directed toward these sorts of abuses than toward economic abuses metaphorized as “rape.”

you will discover that the Bible never mentions homosexuals when it tells the story of Lot in Genesis 19.

That is one strong and logical reason the ancient Jews, for almost 1800 years after the destruction of S@dom, did NOT link the S@dom story to Homosexuality. Sodom sin.

The mountains above Biblical Sodom after a thunderstorm.
1. The Babylonian Talmud views lack of Hospitality as the sin of in S@dom.

2. Read this before you dismiss Inhospitality as the sin of S@dom in Genesis 19.

3. Hospitality Means Loving Strangers.

4. History And Scripture Clearly Identify The Sin in Genesis 19.

5. In The Bible, sodomites were shrine prostitutes, not homosexuals.