Word: craned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...developers appear satisfied with the agreement. Still, Daniel Crane '72, attorney for Intercontinental Construction, the company in charge of replacing the buildings, emphasizes the cost of meeting the commission's demands...
Unlike the 200 gay and lesbian couples whose mass "wedding" ceremony last month made a loud political statement in San Francisco, Gerry Crane planned his commitment ceremony to be a private and discreet affair. On a misty day last October, 80 of Crane's closest friends gathered at a botanical garden in Grand Rapids, Michigan. With a Presbyterian minister presiding, Crane, 31, a high school music director, and his lover of four years, Randy Block, 36, affirmed their love and exchanged gold rings. Almost immediately the religious right directed its ire at Crane with the pinpoint accuracy of a laser...
...Crane is the object of a tactic that is proving increasingly effective--going after local targets just below the national media radar. Even while the Christian right's media-savvy national leaders are downplaying antigay initiatives, its local soldiers are working to raise the issue that America's young people are being exposed to gay alternatives too early in life. By pitching the attack closer to home, where parental fears are more easily aroused, conservatives are extending their influence while escaping the tough scrutiny that has greeted their more visible campaign in statehouses to ban same-sex marriages...
...fact, most of the action is local rather than national, but it can wreak havoc, as in Crane's case. After word of his gay "marriage" leaked back to the school in rural Byron Center (pop. 6,500), where Crane has been teaching for three years, outraged parents demanded his ouster. There were no grounds for firing him, especially since he had shaped up the once moribund school band to win a regional award. Instead, the school board proclaimed that "individuals who espouse homosexuality do not constitute proper role models" and promised to "monitor" Crane...
Soon flyers appeared on windshields in church parking lots denouncing the "Sodomite music teacher." Next the parents of Crane's 140 students were mailed packages that bore no return address and contained an antigay video called Gay Rights/ Special Rights, produced by the California-based Traditional Values Coalition; a 100-page antigay treatise titled "Setting the Record Straight" by the Colorado-based Focus on the Family; and a letter exhorting parents to "perceive the grave dangers that your child is facing." National religious-right groups deny involvement. "Their point," says a skeptical Crane, "is to flood people with misinformation...