Not even the widely watched, anti-gay Fox News Channel could escape its powerful grasp. A few days after California Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Proposition 8, California’s now infamous gay marriage ban, Fox News posted a poll on its website. By a wide margin, the channel’s viewers disagreed with this decision. That changed when Kevin Patrick O’Neil posted a link to the poll at his wildly popular Facebook page. Almost immediately, thousands and thousands of O’Neil’s closest friends participated in the poll.
As of August 9th, 2010, 72% of poll voters supported Judge Walker’s decision. Rupert Murdoch is undoubtedly a very unhappy camper.
O’Neil, a resident of Durham, England, has much to be proud of. In the three months since he launched Wipeout Homophobia on Facebook, the Facebook page has been given the thumbs up by an impressive 45,000 friends! The page has quickly become one a worldwide gathering place for LGBT people. WHOF is a page that gets things done.
A few days after the Fox poll victory, O’Neil posted a link to a petition with a most important goal: saving the life of a gay man in Iran who was sentenced to death for the “crime” of being gay. Again, page members jumped in and helped.
The origins of WHOF are simple. O’Neil got tired of all the anti-gay, racist and sexist FB pages that were being posted by various hate groups and individuals. He found that by reporting these pages to the FB powers that be, they were deleted. Going on the United We Stand theory, O’Neil created WHOF for the express purpose of turning his efforts into a community activity.
The response was stunning. Hundreds of people from around the world signed on every day. And it continues.
One week ago, the membership stood at 40,000. Five thousand more joined just in time for the site’s 3-month anniversary this week.
In order to handle the staggering number of posts, WHOF now operates with a staff of five.
While often serious, there’s also fun to be had. A few days ago, WHOF members were asked what they’d do if they could be invisible for a day–keep it clean, O’Neil requested with a chuckle.
Some posts are quite moving, as when members were asked their hopes and dreams for the future. Equality, tolerance and community were the answers.
There have been a few bumps on the road, O’Neil reports. Abusive taunts from homophobes are to be expected, but O’Neil was quite disheartened when he received hate mail from within the gay community.
“They don’t like religious posts, but then they don’t like anti-religious posts, or they don’t like straight people being members,” wrote O’Neil in an email to Polari. “We had to stop posting all together one weekend because the hate speech from the very people we were defending got so bad. We all just love to hate. Don’t you hate that?”
O’Neill successfully combated the problem by setting down very strict posting guidelines which can be viewed in WHOF’s Notes section. No hate speech or abuse of any kind will be tolerated. Says O’Neil: “A tiny minority just want to get a reaction or some attention from the others, but it won’t be happening here.”
And the page continues to grow. There are now more posts each day than any one person can keep track of. It’s not unusual to see one, two or even three hundred comments at any one post. People are now using WHOF to alert each other as to the activities of anti-gay religious leaders and politicians, submitting artwork, videos, sharing personal stories, or just offering a kind word.
“We actually achieve what we set out to do”, says a justifiably proud O’Neil. “We’ve gotten 1,300 homophobic pages removed from Facebook and we have a real sense of community building in this group. I think we got the balance just right. Know how we did it? We listened to the members, we got rid of the bigots and the self servers and the haters. We kept the genuine, nice normal, average, wonderful people that we have today, and we all worked together to make our voices heard.”
Here here!
You can make your opinions known to Fox News by taking part in their poll here: Fox News Prop 8 Overturned Poll
Categories: Features
Tagged: fox news, kevin patrick o'neil, proposition 8, rupert murdoch, vaughn walker, wipeout homophobia on facebook