It's like my head

Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, bracing for the inevitable.

“Dyke.”

Pretending not to hear, Brittany would walk briskly to her locker, past the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who loitered in menacing packs.

“Whore.”

Like many 13-year-olds, Brittany knew seventh grade was a living hell. But what she didn’t know was that she was caught in the crossfire of a culture war being waged by local evangelicals inspired by their high-profile congressional representative Michele Bachmann, who graduated from Anoka High School and, until recently, was a member of one of the most conservative churches in the area. When Christian activists who considered gays an abomination forced a measure through the school board forbidding the discussion of homosexuality in the district’s public schools, kids like Brittany were unknowingly thrust into the heart of a clash that was about to become intertwined with tragedy.

Rudolf Brazda, believed to be the last surviving person who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp because of his homosexuality, has died, a German gay rights group said Thursday. He was 98.

The Berlin branch of the Lesbian and Gay Association, or LSVD, said that Brazda died on Wednesday. It didn’t give details of the location or cause of death.

As we wrote about a few weeks ago, Chick-fil-A’s charitable arm, the WinShape Foundation, has been particularly active in the fight against marriage equality. They’ve hosted conferences with some of the leading opponents of gay marriage in this country. A higher up at WinShape has even praised the efforts of anti-gay activist David Blankenhorn for working against marriage equality, and for articulating a solid reason why American culture should reject same-sex couples.

Now comes some email correspondence that Good As You has shared on their blog, where the WinShape Foundation’s Retreat Center — a center run by the charitable arm of Chick-fil-A — admits that they have a severe distaste for LGBT people.

“Please, not here!,” Dolan wrote. “We cherish true freedom, not as the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought.”

The opposition from Dolan, other religious groups and conservative political outfits threatening retribution at the ballot box has turned the Senate into a pressure cooker for Republicans.

And McDonald snapped.

“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing,” McDonald, 64, told reporters.

“You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, f—- it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.

“I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.”

At least four of McDonald’s fellow Republicans are considering voting for the bill, prompting widespread optimism that the Legislature is about to cross the threshold of history.