The "twinkie defense" - to be recycled?

Those who say there's nothing new under the sun are correct. Can anything and everything can be repurposed, recycled and re-used? Good news for the environment, bad news in other quarters.

DAMMIT JANET! suspects that Deputy Marshall "Pepper" Abbott may have to find a novel way to defend his over-reaction two weeks ago when he arrived at a house in an upscale suburb in response to a noise complaint, and ended up calling for back-up, with the result that a contigent of his colleagues, including a canine unit, a helicopter and a firetruck had to rescue him from a "Code Lavender".

The incident is under investigation by the local district attorney's office since it appears that Deputy "Pepper" may have over-reacted to a perceived threat from a group of middle-aged Encinitas lesbians gathered at a backyard fundraiser for Democrat candidate hopeful Francine Busby.

According to a police document leaked to the media,

Busby has said that the event was not loud, but was a standard fundraising house party, at which she briefly spoke through a microphone and had finished up her remarks at some time around 8:30 p.m.

The Sheriff's deputy arrived about 45 minutes after that, and things got ugly. By the time it was over, multiple people had been pepper-sprayed, one of the hostesses and a guest were arrested, and a full Sheriff's Department backup had come in, including even dogs and a helicopter -- to deal with a crowd of middle-aged Democratic donors.

The police report says that Deputy Marshall G. Abbott used his pepper spray because he felt threatened by guests who were surrounding him. It also says that he ended up with "several scratches and minor swelling on both of his arms."

Busby and others who attended the event believe that the caller is probably the same person as an unidentified heckler who shouted obscenities and anti-gay slurs at the assembled crowd.

"Several scratches and minor swelling on both his arms" ... Abbott must be suffering from an ailment known only to imaginative lawyers, likely a combination of homosexual panic and a physical allergy to lesbians. Throw in a twinkie defense, and he's all set.

Everything old can be new again.

The Lavender Menace

Stonewall was a moment charnière in the gay liberation movement as Montreal Simon and Slap Upside The Head wrote last month.

For lesbians, a different type of watershed moment took place for the US women's liberation movement when Betty Friedan was quoted about

... the threat that she believed associations with lesbianism posed to NOW and the emerging women's movement. Friedan, and some other straight feminists as well, worried that the association would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement. Under her direction, NOW attempted to distance itself from lesbian causes – up to omitting the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors of the First Congress to Unite Women in November 1969.

Friedan's remarks and the decision to drop DOB from the sponsor list led lesbian feminist Rita Mae Brown to angrily resign her administrative job at NOW in February 1970. On March 15 1970, straight radical feminist Susan Brownmiller quoted Friedan's remarks about the "lavender menace" and dismissed her worries as "A lavender herring, perhaps, but no clear and present danger" in a New York Times Magazine article.

While those events are long past, there are christian fundamentalist haters who still fan the flames of gynophobia with regard to lesbians. For example, this blogger with impeccable hater connections to a number of religious rightwing political astro-turfing organizations, is an unabashed cheer-leader for the testerical actions of Marshall G. Abbott, aka "Deputy Sheriff Pepper".