"It wasn't an issue of, 'I want bad things to happen to her because she's a homophobe,'" Lawless conveys of the curse she and 10 fellow gay pagans enacted. "It was like we need to defend ourselves and our community . . . I remember reading the next month that she made herself so unpopular with her homophobic crusade that she was reduced to panhandling at revivals."
Ironically, Savage is, like Bryant was in the day, known as an A-1 gay-basher. But this doesn't bother Lawless too much. She pretty much picks and chooses what she wants from Savage's ideological cafeteria.
Lawless barbarian: Like her heroine, Xena (played by Lucy Lawless), Laine Lawless sees herself as a fierce warrior who fears no male.
"She's nice looking, I'd take her," Lawless avows of her enemy, Derechos Humanos co-chair Isabel Garcia, seen here in a scene from Lawless' homemade doc How to Burn a Mexican Flag.
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"When he goes off on his homophobic rants, and he talks about how gays are perverts and stuff like that, and how we're destroying society, I just have to turn him off," Lawless relates. "And if I don't turn the radio off, I turn him off in my head until he starts to say something interesting."
Taking Savage's orders on flag-flaming has led Lawless to the unique position of being vilified by members of both the left and the right. In her documentary, she discusses at length how various social agencies and gay-friendly groups will have nothing to do with her anymore. She complains about how one far-left pro-immigrant news organization "outed" her as a lesbian and a pagan in the movement, "which I don't really believe to be relevant to my political activities." And even pagans have problems accepting her. For instance, one female shaman refused to do "journeying" — a practice that involves a trance-like state in which one can summon guides from the spirit world — with Lawless after learning of her flag burning.
Lawless seems genuinely disappointed by such personal consequences of her anti-Mexican activism. Yet, she saves her most vicious words for the gay community.
"They're all brainwashed communists in one way or another," she states. "Liberals, socialists, or outright communists. I have a friend who's a communist, who's a lesbian, who won't speak to me anymore since I burned the Mexican flag. I've tried e-mailing her. I made jokes about it, like, 'If you're dead, can you just call me and let me know?'"
It's not just pagans and liberals who want to keep Lawless at arm's length. Other anti-illegal-immigration activists are quick to distance themselves from Lawless' antics, however gently. Lawless' friend Yeh Ling-Ling, director of the Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America, is one. As a naturalized, Vietnam-born U.S. citizen of Chinese descent, Ling-Ling is a star in a movement that relishes any non-Caucasian as a participant. Ling-Ling came down from Oakland to be at a Freedom Riders protest at the Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. Courthouse in downtown Phoenix on January 13. Freedom Riders is an anti-immigrant motorcycle group, and the protest was in support of two Border Patrol agents who the anti-immigrant movement believes were railroaded over the shooting of a drug smuggler in Texas.
Lawless showed for the protest, of course, carrying a Mexican flag — which she merely stood on and spat at instead of setting afire. She bitched about not being asked to speak, and blamed this on her nemesis, Chris Simcox, who was present. But even Ling-Ling, who seemed happy to see her, and lunched with her later in the day, couldn't totally get with Lawless' whole flag-burning deal, though she did offer a rationalization.
"I understand her anger," proffered the petite Asian activist. "I wouldn't do such a thing myself. Many Mexican radicals have said, 'The U.S. is our land, this is stolen land.' So you can see why some Americans are very angry, and to express their extreme anger, since our federal government is not responding, they have to resort to this kind of action."
Chris Simcox of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps is more direct in his criticism of Lawless, reflecting a war of words between the two militants that's been ongoing for some time now. Simcox scoffs at Lawless' flag burnings as pure publicity stunts.
"It's bringing attention to yourself," he asserts. "P.T. Barnum would be proud of people like that. It creates a sideshow which does nothing to advance our cause. All it does is taint us negatively . . . We just want the borders secure and the laws enforced."
Lawless decries Simcox's Minutemen as wimps who've gone soft, been bought off, and will not engage the movement's enemies in battle. Whenever Mexicans take to the streets, "We'll burn a Mexican flag," she promises, although she admits that her Border Guardians group does not keep a membership list, and that, basically, she is Border Guardians, plus the 30 or so associates she can call on at any given time. Yet, the double-edged sword of her flag burning has marginalized her at the same time that it's made her more prominent. Nowhere is this more evident than in her battles with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the most dogged of anti-racist organizations in America.
Based in Montgomery, Alabama, the SPLC is perhaps best known for its battles with the Ku Klux Klan, but the nonprofit civil rights organization keeps a close eye on all suspected racist and hate groups, including those agitating against Mexican immigration along the border.
