Badlands Picket, City Hearing & Dr. King

BADLANDS RALLY
Sat., July 30 @ 9PM @ LYRIC (127 Collingwood)
Join guest speakers Rev. Dr. G. Penny Nixon from the Metropolitan Community Church
(MCC), Roberto Ordenana from the SF LGBT Community Center, and civil rights staff
attorney Malcolm Yeung from our newest co-sponsor, the Asian Law Caucus! Special
star MC: community activist/leader and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca.

BADLANDS PICKET
Sat., July 30 @ 10PM @ Badlands (18th & Castro)!

ENTERTAINMENT COMMISSION HEARING
Tues., Aug. 2 @ 5PM at City Hall (Room TBD)!
Please let the City know that discrimination won't be tolerated in our City: not at
Badlands, not anywhere, not ever. If you'd like to speak before the Commission,
please contact Julie Carlson at julieecarlson [at] yahoo.com. Otherwise, please just show
up, and bring your friends.

Also, below please find a notable excerpt from Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham
Jail"

*****************************
Friends,

After a year of "bar politics" (and B.A.R. politics), the Truth can seem less and
less important (if you don't believe it, check out this week's newspaper).

"Well, yeah... Natali violated the civil rights of our brothers and sisters, and
reinforced the de facto segregation of our community... But the protests have gone
on too long/these activists are unreasonable/some other excuse..."

I hope you'll join me in saying, with all the conviction in the world, that our most
basic civil rights, and our community, matter far too much for such excuses. And,
the Truth matters most when it's the most unpopular.

We really need your help speaking Truth these next few days: this Saturday at the
Rally and on the Picket Line, and especially this coming Tuesday, before the SF
Entertainment Commission. I really hope you'll join us for these important
milestones. Many thanks in advance!

********************************
Excerpt from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said: 'All
Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it
is possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry. It has taken
Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ
take time to come to earth.'

All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the
strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that
will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either
destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill-will
have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to
repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad
people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that
human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the
tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and
without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social
stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always
ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and
transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is
the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the
solid rock of human dignity�

One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths,
courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose, facing jeering and hostile mobs
and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer... They
will be the young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel
and a host of their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting-in at lunch
counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will
know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they
were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred
values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back
to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the
formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence�"

For the complete text of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.�s Letter from a
Birmingham Jail, as well as other essays and speeches, please visit:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/popular_requests/