'Before the War' is a collection of articles published on Temenos before the War in Iraq began. These pieces are being re-published to remember where we have been and reflect on where we're going. The following speech was given by Kate Raphael at the February 16th Anti-War Protest in San Francisco. To find out more about the queer anti-war movement in San Francisco, join this Y!Group: OUT Against the War

I'm proud to stand here today to honor a long tradition of queer anti-war activism. Most of you probably don't know that during the Vietnam War, two gay men got jobs as extras in the San Francisco Opera so they could unfurl a banner onstage that read, "Fags Say Stop the War." There are thousands of queers here today (right?) to join with every other community to say NO TO GENOCIDE. Because that is what our government has already committed in Iraq and we will not allow any more of it.

We are here, unfortunately, for the same reasons we were here in 1990: because our government, which claims to care about American lives, refuses to provide life-saving AIDS prevention information and materials to kids, and cares little about the lives of girls and women, who die every day from lack of access to safe abortions or contraceptives. We're here because a government that claims to care about our security does not intervene in the most dangerous place in this country: the nuclear family, where three women are killed every day by husbands or partners, where one in four girls and one in five boys is molested or raped.

We're here because Don't Ask, Don't Tell Don't Cut It. It's a discriminatory policy that is used disproportionately against lesbians and queer people of color. We demand options for queer youth that don't involve learning to kill. We say, Don't Join, Don't Go, Don't Fight. Ban the Military, not the Queers.

We're here to demand money for jobs, AIDS care, welfare, hormone treatments, schools, abortions, queer youth programs, dental dams. But if there were all the money we need for all of those things, we still would say, scrap the military budget. No War. Fund human needs.

We're here because the government of Israel is already using the preparation for war to intensify its campaign of terror to drive the Palestinian people from their land. I know this well, because I just returned from three months in the occupied West Bank. I can tell you that my neighbors were terrified about a coming "transfer", which means ethnic cleansing. They know what they're talking about. Some of them already lost their homes in 1948, again in 1967 and yet again during settlement expansion in the Oslo period. I, personally, will not allow this issue to be set aside or buried.

We are here, as we all must be, in a spirit of unity. We need to stand behind the organizations which have brought out over a million people to protest a war that has not begun - and that must not begin. That doesn't mean we ignore our differences. Our diversity is our strength. That means that queers need to come out in force against the "special registration" of immigrants and the imprisonment of Arab Americans like Farouk Abdel-Muhti.

It also means those of you who are not queer, and even those of you who don' t like queers, need to lift up your voices to condemn the Egyptian government's imprisonment of gay men for the crime of dancing together, and the Saudi government execution of crossdressers. Both of these assaults on human rights by repressive governments supported by our government have increased in the last year. It means you must join us in demanding that charges be dropped against the members of Gay Shame who were attacked by San Francisco police and then arrested in front of the LGBT Community Center last week. It means you can join the queer march against war this Friday night, at 5:15 at Castro and Market, to say Queer Rights Are Human Rights and Human Rights are Queer Rights.

It means you can join us now in saying, WE'RE HERE, WE'RE QUEER, WE'RE NOT GOING TO WAR.