Other people who saw through “states’ rights”
God, I couldn’t be more sick of the disingenuous “states’ rights” argument, now being whipped out on the gay marriage decision in California. It’s bizarre watching wingnuts get into a self-righteous huff about the all-important rights of states, when they only care about it when dismissing the fundamental rights of people. Which of course is never explicitly said, but that’s the point of it: “States’ rights” only seem to matter to people who feel the states can do a better job of oppressing the people than the federal government can. Should the federal government take the opportunity to wield power against individual rights—as they did with the federal ban on certain kinds of late term abortions—nary a peep to be heard from the people who have great love for the right of states, but not for people.
It just so happens that I started reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. In it, he quoted LBJ’s speech supporting the civil rights movement on March 15, 1965. I thought Johnson’s contempt for the “states’ rights” argument has some relevance right now.
There is no issue of state’s rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.
Blunt and to the point, as was his habit. With the gay marriage debate, you have the opposition forever arguing that the institutions set up to serve the people should take precedence over the people they’re meant to serve. The institution of marriage—at least the conservative definition of it—is supposed to be so sacrosanct that it can’t be modified to serve the very people marriage is supposed to serve. The government is not about serving the interests of the people, all of the people, but about just mindless oppression in the name of rights held by institutions that have no reason to exist without the people.
I mean, it’s obviously bullshit. But it’s such tenacious bullshit, and I have to wonder how many people who spout off about “states’ rights” honestly think the state is something that exists for its own sake and that it has rights above and beyond the rights of the human beings it’s meant to serve. 5%? 2%? 80%? What’s the stupid to evil ratio on this argument? How many of them realize that they’re echoing an argument that was reinvigorated to deny black people the right to vote? How many of them feel twinges of guilt, and how many would probably get on board with the idea that the state should be able to deny the right to vote on the basis of race? I am honestly curious about this.
Creepy bastard Rulon Jeffs poses with his newly acquired wives shortly before he died of old age.
William Saletan has two posts up about the slippery slope threats made by conservatives regarding gay marriage—basically, that if we allow that, then polygamy and incest are next. Saletan agrees with the slippery slope argument, but doesn’t think it’s a bad thing to switch from the taboo model of managing human sexual relations to the harm reduction/privacy model that he thinks is the groundwork for homosexuality. I’m not saying that he’s strictly wrong in his views on tolerance of cousins marrying or polygamy—consenting adults and all that—but I think his assumptions about the groundwork that made same-sex marriage possible is all off, and it taints his argument.
I don’t think that same-sex marriage is becoming more socially acceptable because people are more interested in privacy. I think it’s a matter of increasing egalitarianism and feminism especially. And so I strongly disagree with him that the tides are turning towards more social acceptance of cousin marriage and polygamy.
Cousin marriage doesn’t really seem to be a feminist issue, but the implication that Saletan is trotting out—that there’s some tide turning in favor of allowing it—goes against history in a big way. Saletan has got to know this, since he trots out cousin marriers like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. In half the states of the U.S., marrying your first cousin is legal, and those are the sort of laws that hang on from the past, and are not recent innovations that stem from increasing tolerance. The incest taboo in American and Western European cultures has recently expanded to cover first cousin incest,* and my sense of it is that it’s a result of people’s greater mobility and urbanity. We just meet a lot more people than in the rural past. We have high school, college, and internet dating now. Cousin marriage has become a marker of severe social isolation and backwardness.
Pam posted yesterday about the passing of Mildred Loving, linking the struggle to legalize interracial marriage with the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage. P.Z. put up a post demonstrating the religious wingnuttery that came into play in justifying the criminalization of the Lovings’ marriage, by quoting some of Mildred Loving’s account of the whole thing.
Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.
Taking the two together, it’s doubly clear not only are same-sex marriage rights linked with interracial marriage rights because they have arguments in common for them, but also because the opponents are the same assholes they’ve always been, using the same arguments that they always have. (In sum: “God shares my bigotry!”) The fight for interracial marriage was part of the culture wars, just like reproductive rights, gay rights, and the separation of church and state.
Without defending some of Garrison Keillor’s old man grumpy asshole tendencies, I have to say this article got a wry smile out of me, probably because I’ve done a lot of flying lately,* and his descriptions of the kabuki of airport security are well-rendered. I watch all that with interest, too, because the psychology of unusual situations fascinates me. People—all people—are creatures of habit, and I don’t care how smart you are, if you’re thrust into a situation where you don’t know the protocol, you act like a puppy that just learned that its paws are effective for locomotion. But human beings are flexible and adept at learning new things pretty rapidly, so it was just a matter of time before the security lines at airports became mundane. Basically, if you’ve done it once correctly, you can repeat the process again with very little trouble or hesitation, and the delays became shorter as more and more people in the security line had flown since 9/11 and learned the ropes. Now like 95% of people in line know what to do, yet like Keillor says, the security guards still yell at you. Of course, I’ve worked service jobs myself, and that 5% of idiots out there tend to occupy 95% of your time and brainspace, so I can’t blame security guards for preemptive yelling, but still it does create this environment where you are reduced to an inmate of sorts for 10-20 minutes.
And considering that security procedures are close to useless for preventing terrorist attacks, I can’t help but think that demoralizing people is the point of the security kabuki at airports. I know I sound paranoid—and again, I think it’s by design and no individual security guard is responsible, though some definitely enjoy the sadistic potential more than others—but it’s well worth remembering that it was a bunch of Republicans who instituted these rules and they do better electorally if people are living in fear and have grown accustomed to the idea of authoritarian society. Small sadisms are actually quite an effective tool in bringing others into the fear state where you can control them, as any schoolyard bully who has perfected the art of needling behind the teacher’s back can tell you. In Wired magazine, a recent article about the Stasi noted that one tactic used against a state opponent was to follow her around, letting the air out of her baby stroller’s tires when she wasn’t looking, to make her think she was losing her mind.
That’s a damn big household
There’s times when “domestic dispute” fits the bill. There are many times when it doesn’t. It’s especially not a domestic dispute if the killer and murder victim don’t even live together (trigger warning):
Update: I have more at the podcast.
PZ links to the terrible situation in West Texas where an FDLS compound is being dismantled by the authorities, because like all the other little empires Warren Jeffs has built, it’s a religious patriarchy taken to its logical conclusion, i.e. built around the practice of raping underage girls. For those who don’t know the story, a teenage girl that was handed over as a rape victim/wife to a 50-year-old man managed to get to a forbidden phone and called the authorities for help. So far, 416 children have been removed because they were being beaten, raped in “spiritual marriages”, or slated to be lifelong rape victims for crazy old fucks drunk on male privilege excused by their Sky Fairy. Considering that atheists supposedly have our own fundamentalists, I’m sure any day now we’ll find out that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are running rape farms where they swap daughters with their friends because Darwin told them they have a right.
Busy day today, and not that much time for blogging. I’m driving up to San Antonio for the ACLU conference, and after that, I’m hosting a book salon on This Common Secret at Firedoglake. Drop by the book salon this afternoon/evening if you have a chance.
In the meantime, I’m tickled that Margaret Cho is going to have a reality show on VH1. The long march of reality show subjects has mostly been a bunch of uber-sexist rock stars, either just being themselves or, in the case of Brett Michaels on “Rock of Love”, turning the sexism flame up to high by parading women in front of him like a dog and pony show to see who will win the chance to date him. Cho will be a breath of fresh air.
Waymon Hudson, president and co-founder of Fight OUT Loud, a national non-profit organization dedicated to empowering GLBT individuals and their allies to fight discrimination and hate, shared his first hand account of the vigil held in response to the murder of Simmie Williams. They gathered at the site in Broward County where Williams was slain. The 17-year-old was killed for not conforming to gender norms, but there has been rash of anti-gay, anti-trans hate crimes in the area that drew victims of hate and community officials together, including Melbourne Brunner, who was attacked for merely saying hello to a fellow resident at a restaurant.
Yesterday’s vigil for Simmie Williams Jr, a 17 year-old gay youth murdered on Sistrunk Blvd, was truly an honor to be a part of. Seeing a community come together to mourn the senseless death of a young man, offering the family both emotional and monetary support, made me proud of the tremendous strength that the LGBT community has shown in the face of hate and violence. We truly proved that we are all one family.
We encourage people to continue to give to help offset the cost of the funeral and donate to the reward fund set up to encourage tips. Donations for funeral costs can be made to the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of South Florida and contributions towards reward money for catching Simmie’s murders can be made to Broward Crime Stoppers.
More of Waymon’s account and additional photos are below the fold.
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Via Avedon, looks like the LA Times has been pulled into the frog-in-boiling-water effect and is insufficiently alarmed about the possibilities when the government starts looking for inroads to spy on its citizens.
The White House and House Democrats are needlessly fixated on retroactive immunity. The administration, echoed by House Republican leaders, warns darkly that the lack of immunity for past cooperation by telecoms will deter the companies from cooperating in the future; yet both versions (properly) make it clear that companies that comply with lawful orders in the future have nothing to fear. For their part, House Democrats overstate the usefulness of private litigation as a way to pry loose information about the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The Democrats’ opposition to immunity may have made sense as a bluff to induce the administration to provide Congress with documents relating to the program, as it belatedly has begun to do. But the possibility that private lawsuits would expose internal deliberations about the origins of the program was always slight. That sort of disclosure is even less likely after the Supreme Court refused this week to reinstate a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the NSA on behalf of lawyers, journalists and academics who claimed they were harmed by the surveillance program.
Yes, the carnage caused by miscreants in the ranks of law enforcement sworn to protect and serve the public continues unabated. Obviously using a Taser is appropriate in instances where a gun need not be used, but as we can see, this device can be a lethal weapon, and its use in some situations is highly questionable. From Taser of the Day, which monitors news stories about the device’s use.
Given the number of these incidents, tasing in many cases becomes a first resort rather than a next-to-last resort, even when the number of officers outnumbers the alleged perpetrator by a large margin.
- Jan 4th: Brandon Smiley, 27, Mobile County, Alabama, after becoming violent with the crew of an ambulance taking him to the hospital for treatment for a suspected drug overdose.
- Jan 4th: Ryan Rich, 33, Las Vegas, Nevada (unidentified in original article), after driving erratically, crashing into a wall, and trying to resist police removing him from his vehicle.
- Jan 9th: Otis C. Anderson, 36, Fayetteville, North Carolina, asked police for help, then ran, encountered police again, become combatitive, was shocked, then stopped breathing during his arrest.
- Jan 11th: Xavier Jones, 29, Coral Gables, Florida, “became unresponsive” after police responding to calls about a man at a party being disruptive shocked him for resisting arrest.
- Jan 15th: Mark C. Backlund, 29, Fridley, Minnesota, unidentified in the original article, shocked after he “became uncooperative” with police after a car accident.
Our friends north of the border are experiencing plenty of unnerving events like this:
A Halifax Youth Court judge criticized three police officers Tuesday for their arrest of a teenage girl, who was tackled in her own bed and shocked twice with a stun gun last February.But wait, back here in the States, we now have civilians using Tasers as a discipline device. Here’s parenting skilz for you:“The spectacle of a 17-year-old girl being Tasered in her bedroom is a very disturbing and disconcerting one,” Halifax Youth Court Judge Anne Derrick said in her ruling on the charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.
“I find the police acted outside the scope of their authority in arresting [the girl] and that she was entitled to resist and committed no offence in doing so, and I acquit her of the charges before the court.”
A former Albany man has been sentenced to 46 months in prison for using a high-voltage stun gun on his 18-month-old son. Rian Wittman was arrested in February and agreed to a plea bargain last year. The sentence was imposed Friday.Related:Prosecutor Reed Dinsmore said the stun gun delivered 30,000 volts during testing. “This is a case of a father torturing his 18-month-old son,” prosecutor Reed Dinsmore said. “Why? We can’t tell.” He said it’s not yet known whether the child will suffer long-term nerve or neurological damage.
* Pennsylvania man tased in his own home
* Out of control tasing continues
* Taser sadism on tape
* More out-of-control tasing - Ohio
* Police taser parties
* Taser of the Day blog
* Tasered While Black blog
Hat tip, Electronic Village.
Most people point to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on this day, but given the times we are in now, perhaps more apt ones to point to would be “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered April 4, 1967, during an appearance at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside Church in Harlem, or “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967.
More after the jump.
“Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism.
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[Writer’s Block picks a funny time to disappear. Happy day after Saturnalia, everybody!]
“What do you mean, you didn’t expect us? We sent you a registered letter!”
It’s a true joy to watch Republicans panic about Mike Huckabee. Austin Hill is our latest correspondent:
Pardon me, but have you seen my Republican Party lately? I don’t recognize it anywhere.
My mom worked for Barry Goldwater as she carried me in her womb, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of my home state of California when I was two years old, and I’ve believed in the principles of Goldwater and Reagan all my life.
But given the surge of the “Huckabee for President” campaign, it would seem that many Republicans have abandoned Reagan’s vision in favor of something more reminiscent of President Carter.
As a former Governor, Huckabee has a less-than-conservative track record on a wide range of crucial policy issues, from taxation to immigration to judicial appointments. But Huckabee speaks fluently about Jesus Christ, and theology, and for some people this is apparently all that matters.
And this is why I’m confused. How can so many members of the Republican Party be so quick to abandon the principles of Ronald Reagan?
What a sad headline. It encapsulates all that is wrong with this story, and the justice system in Saudi Arabia, Bush’s partner in Bush’s War on Terror. Life for women in that country is a human rights nightmare.
Women cannot drive, vote, or to appear in public without being accompanied by a male relative. Judgment is harsh for any breach of social and religious norms; in this case the outcry over a rape victim being sentenced to jail and 200 lashes for being alone with another man was so intense that the King pardoned her.
The BBC’s Heba Saleh says the king’s decision to pardon the woman victim is already arousing controversy with some contributors to conservative websites, who say he has breached the rules of religion in order to appease critics in the West.It should be noted that the U.S. has not condemned the Saudi justice system (you think o-i-l has anything to do with this?). I’m sure some of the religious extremists here would like to see women do more than “submit to their husbands” if given the opportunity.Earlier, the woman - who is a Shia Muslim from the Qatif area - had reportedly said she met the man in order to retrieve a photograph of them together, having herself recently got married.
She says two other men then entered the car and took them to a secluded area where others were waiting, and both she and her male companion were raped.
The woman’s companion was sentenced to 90 lashes. It is not known if his sentence was also lifted.
From the rapist/murderer-releasing Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor who is surging in the polls, a view into his mindset (and “Christian” thinking) about AIDS. This is from a questionnaire back in 1992 during a senate race:
“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague. It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”He also didn’t feel any more funding was necessary, even given his above hysteria.
“In light of the extraordinary funds already being given for AIDS research, it does not seem that additional federal spending can be justified,” Huckabee wrote. “An alternative would be to request that multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor (,) Madonna and others who are pushing for more AIDS funding be encouraged to give out of their own personal treasuries increased amounts for AIDS research.”Now, you wonder what Huck thinks about his statements today. As usual, he makes sh*t up that isn’t true. He tries to cite that no one knew about how HIV was transmitted at the time.
Huckabee said in a prepared statement released by his campaign Saturday afternoon that he called for quarantine when there was a lot of confusion about how AIDS is spread. He said he wanted at the time to follow traditional medical practices used for dealing with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.Sigh. Huckabee also said this in the questionnaire — someone should ask if he still believes this:“We now know that the virus that causes AIDS is spread differently, with a lower level of contact than with TB,” Huckabee said. “But looking back almost 20 years, my concern was the uncertain risk to the general population - if we got it wrong, many people would die needlessly. My concern was safety first, political correctness last.”
When Huckabee wrote his answers in 1992, it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.… The nation had an increased awareness of AIDS at the time because pro basketball star Magic Johnson had recently disclosed he carried the virus responsible for it. Johnson retired but returned to the NBA briefly during the 1995-96 season.
“I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.”Will the MSM give him a pass? Do you think any of his rivals will dare to blast him on this, lest it be interpreted as defending the homos?
Huck on immigration, after the jump.
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The abuse by law enforcement of the use of the “non-lethal” Taser device is nothing short of torture in many cases, where police pull out this tool too quickly, and unnecessarily, often when the victim has already been subdued. Other times the problem is that the level of use is outrageous — multiple applications of the device on a person after they are down and no threat to law enforcement.
The stories of this sadism are well-documented at this point — so many videos are turning up showing the misapplication of the Taser that you have to ask: where is the outrage?
Case #1: Gwinnett County, GA, 2004. Watch the Taser torture and murder of 31-year-old Deacon Frederick Williams in this police video. There are a number of reports about this event, where Williams was Tased five times in 43 seconds, four minutes after he was taken into custody.
More incidents after the jump.He was handcuffed behind his back and in leg restraints, following an epileptic seizure at his home; an ambulance was called by his wife and son, but the police arrived first. His last words were: “Don’t kill me, man. Don’t kill me.”
No charges have been filed in the torture / murder; the County DA refused to show this video to a Grand Jury, even though another man in custody was murdered just months earlier after being tortured with a TASER by the same police.
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Shakes is running a long series on the various items available for purchase by men who hate women and think that’s just so funny. It’s interesting, though I haven’t linked it before because I didn’t have much to say about it. But today’s series entry just can’t pass without comment.
In case the toy wasn’t hostile-seeming enough at first glance, the manufacturers give you an option to engage in a little playful rape, which is the toy victim’s fault, of course.
ou’ll note from the packaging that Lusty Linda can utter “8 lusty sayings,” which fall into one of two categories—”good mood” or “bad mood,” controlled by the click of a switch. Says one site (screen cap) that sells Lusty Linda, “too bad all women did not have such a switch.” Ho ho ho!
In her “good mood,” Lusty Linda says things like “Oh so good, do that again” and “Yes!” In her “bad mood,” Lusty Linda says things like “Ow!” and “Help! Help!” (Though she never loses her grin!) Talk about art imitating life. I don’t know about the rest of you gals, but nothing puts me in a “bad mood” like being raped! Trust Lusty Linda to speak the truth.
What I find fascinating about this stuff is that the male audience for these toys are probably the same kinds of guys who dwell bitterly over the way Andrea Dworkin pointed out that our society constructs heterosexual intercourse as rape. They pretend that they dwell over this because it shows how supposedly crazy she was, but in actuality, I think they’re bitter because she had their number. Dworkin didn’t believe that all sex was rape by definition, but men who think this shit is funny certainly do. If you think that screaming for help only differs from ordinary sex because your selected fuckhole is just being whiny tonight, I’m pretty convinced you have no fucking clue what sex with a woman who genuinely is into it would even be like.
And this has shit all to do with any anti-humor or even anti-dirty humor bent to my personality. I’m eagerly attending the Air Sex contest tonight, with high hopes they’ll let us take pictures. But jokes about the absurdity of sex and non-jokes about how your stupid penis is a stupid weapon to be used against the hated half of the human race are utterly different things. For one thing, only the former has a good deal of potential to be funny. The latter just tends to speak of the inadequacies of the men attracted to such tropes.
We can’t say we weren’t warned that Ann Coulter’s little un-joke about how women should lose their right to vote functions as a way to widen the discourse to allow those sort of deeply misogynist sentiments in. Chris Matthews is one dose of No-Doz away from suggesting that Hillary Clinton be disqualified for the run for President because of Teh Vagina,* and so you can guess who’s next on the checklist of mainstreaming anti-suffrage sentiment—well, Tucker Carlson, of course. Isn’t he always third in that line? When Eleanor Smeal noted that it’s embarrassing how poorly women are represented in the halls of political power, Carlson went on a head-patting, cock-stroking rampage.
“I’m not embarrassed. I almost — when I get up at a baseball game and sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ I don’t hang my head because we don’t have enough women in Congress. I’m actually not embarrassed by it at all.” Smeal responded, “Well, it has nothing to do with your baseball game obviously,” to which Carlson said: “I don’t know why that’s embarrassing. You could make the counter case that most women are so sensible, they don’t want to get involved in something as stupid as politics. …They’ve got real things to do.”
According to the San Antonio newspaper, as of this morning, there are still 20,000 people stranded on roofs awaiting aid in the Mexican state of Tabasco. 1.5 million have been displaced from their homes due to heavy flooding.
There is much to be outraged about besides nature’s utter indifference to human suffering. Brownfemipower notes the racism of the coverage of the flood:
Fox News: Mexico Floods Swamp 900,000 Homes; Disease Outbreak Feared
UPDATED Fox News: Thousands Depart Mexico Flood Zone Amid Disease Fears, Reported Looting
CNN: Devastating floods prompt outbreak fears in Mexico
MSNbc: Headline news:Teacher arrested after allegedly fleeing with boy (scroll down and down and down some more, and there nestled between sports and politics, is a small little link announcing “Mexico state 80 submerged”
ABCnews: Headline News: “Teacher Arrested In Mexico” World news section: Nothing
Detroit Free Press: Mexicans flee as region floods: Infectious waterborne diseases could surface
AP: Mexico Fears Disease Outbreak From Flood
Bloomber.com:Mexico’s Red Cross Is Preparing for Disease in Flooded Tabasco
This should surprise no one; I remember how, in the wake of Katrina, conservatives were more angry that people were looting than the fact that there were corpses floating in the street, and the threat of even temporary price controls to keep people from dying of dehydration sent many a free market cheerleader straight to the fainting couch. That the majority of victims were black drove so much of the casual cruelty towards survivors.
Oh my fucking god, Howard Kurtz.
I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.
This was in response to Digby complaining about endless Republican-driven media blather about Hillary Clinton’s boobs and John Edwards’ hair.
You read that right. “OHMIGOD BOOOOOOBZ” is no less legitimate a news story in Kurtz’s eyes than no-doubt purely partisan crap over our nation’s violation of the Geneva Convention, the establishment of American gulags, and unconstitutional spying on American citizens. The only reason apparently, to cover stories about the dismantling of our democracy is to get at the horse race aspects. Will torture prisons help/hurt the Republicans? Will the abandonment of our basic principles of justice and liberty turn the 2004 election? Is John Edwards’ hair too shiny to win him the nomination? It’s all the same story, because they’re just sports reporters covering a beat.
Time to drag this excellent campaign commercial out again:
October 11 is National Coming Out Day.
Despite all that good news, not everyone has the option of coming out –
* Without ENDA, LGBT citizens can be fired from a job where there are no local anti-discrimination protections.
* We most certainly see members of the community get the crap beaten out of them or worse in many parts of the country
* and it goes without saying if you have anti-gay parents and you're not yet 18 (or are dependent on them for support), coming out is probably a really bad idea unless you are prepared for the consequences of them taking the news badly.
That said, coming out is the most powerful thing one can do, but it cannot be done in isolation; straight allies have to be willing to publicly defend their gay friends and acquaintances.
* Support Equality organizations in your state, if it is at risk for an amendment challenge. Give your time and money, if you can spare. In North Carolina, the organization at the grassroots level is Equality NC.
* Get involved. It's easy to write a check or complain from the sidelines and the comfort of our keyboards about the effectiveness of those working locally and nationally on our behalf; it's another to come out, live out and work to make a difference — whether it's writing your representatives, grassroots activism, or making an effort to engage with your friends, neighbors and colleagues about equality issues.
* If you are straight and an ally, COME OUT. Support your gay friends and loved ones when you hear intolerant conversation, politely engage ignorance with information.
Here's a short video I made for the occasion this year.
Each Coming Out Day I ask this Q of the Day:
I came out in my late 20s. When I came out to my mother, it was fairly anticlimactic. She wasn't particularly angry but, of course, sad because of all of visions of what a daughter should be were sort of shattered. But I don't think she was entirely surprised, nor was my brother when I came out to him. He has always been supportive.One thing I do regret is that my mom passed away before she could see me marry my wife, Kate, when we married in Vancouver. But all of my family has been extremely supportive. In fact, they probably knew, but it never was made explicit until I sent my announcement that we married to everyone via e-mail and in a card in the mail. So if people didn't know, that was one way to come out all at once.
The one thing everyone can do is come out if it is at all possible, if it is safe for you to do so. And that's a big caveat, but I think that for many people coming out is more of an internal process than it is the external process. Many people, once they do come out, find that most people either knew or thought that they were [gay] and had made peace with that. So I hope you take this time to think about whether it's time to kick open that closet door.
Are you out to…
– your friends?
– your immediate family?
– your extended family?
– any/some/most of your colleagues at work?
– your boss?
– your doctors?
– your neighbors?
I'm happy to say that I can check off all of those today, but it took years of constantly coming out, choosing when “the right time” would be to come out to any of the above groups. It's a seemingly endless process, never easy, almost always awkward (since I'm an introvert to begin with). It's not like something that comes up in casual conversation, nor do you really want it to. But eventually kicking the door open beats life in the closet.
For my straight readers:
– are you “out” as an ally?
– are you able to talk about gay friends or relatives with others?
– are you comfortable shooting down homophobes when they spout off during a conversation?
*** More videos about the importance of coming out — and supporting those who are coming out, are after the jump.
Neil linked an article that’s making the rounds again about the way the Allies effectively broke down Nazi resistance to testifying after WWII through kindness and playing games of wit with them. It’s very interesting and more evidence against the use of routine torture to “get information”, which is the official excuse for torturing from the Bush administration and all their defenders. It helps to watch lots of “24″ to convince yourself that there’s just oodles of people out there who are one electroshock to the genitals away from spilling all sorts of life-saving information. The article is good—all a refutation of the idea that torture is an effective way of obtaining information.
I have a concern, though, and the thread below the post devolves into a discussion about whether or not torture is an effective interrogation technique, which indicates that a lot of well-meaning people are getting sucked into the discussion of “how to interrogate for information”, when the entire discussion is a red herring. The assumption behind a lot of the “torture doesn’t work” discourse is the idea that those who made torture a policy are perhaps well-meaning (want information) but misguided. Which then devolves into a whole discussion about when torture is useful for the goal of getting information or not, and people lose sight of the fact that “information” is an excuse used to conceal the real reason for torture.
The situation in Myanmar continues to spiral out of control and there’s more calls for we wee bloggers to say something helpful. I’m not sure there’s anything we can type furiously that will help, but if it does, here’s a post with a wish attached to it that our wretched species would evolve into a semblance of decency already.
Mike the Mad Biologist has a post that’s straightforward and made me tear up a little.
Yet the people of Myanmar still march, only armed with the conviction that their government is unjust and that it can be changed through non-violent means. They are awe-inspiring and humbling, not only for their courage, but for their steadfast committment to dignity in the face of in indignity.
Days like this make me both admire the human spirit towards freedom and despair for our chances as a collective of freedom-lovers to ever truly reach the pinnacle, to really succeed in toppling the ugly side of human nature, the side that craves oppression. Will we ever win? It seems unlikely.
But when I feel like that, I remind myself of this quote from Camus:
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Our hearts are with those who struggle in Burma because they must, because you will never be wholly owned as long as you continue to struggle. It’s easy for me to say that, though, isn’t it? Which is why writing this is hard; my awe of those who put their lives on the line is humbling. May we all have the courage of our convictions as those who struggle against the military dictatorship do.
This article in Salon by Robert Burton about a woman in what doctors thought was a permanent vegetative state—but who shows indications that she can conjure fantasies when asked—is interesting in light of the anti-choicers attempt to turn Terri Schiavo into a cause celebre to demonstrate (fallaciously) that they care about all sorts of human beings that aren’t embryos. It’s interesting because of the science involved, but also because he makes mention, though doesn’t necessarily agree with, a lot of myths that sprung up from the anti-choice side and got wide circulation. I’d like to quickly put down those myths.
Myth #1: The decision whether or not to terminate life support was about Schiavo’s specific condition.
Their extraordinary conclusions are beyond provocative; they raise profound questions about the very notion of consciousness. What’s more, they could throw thousands of families and doctors into utter turmoil. As with the Terri Schiavo controversy, patient advocacy groups, self-serving lawyers and politicians with personal agendas could use the study’s stamp of certainty as a given.
Burton doesn’t state that directly, but his statement here about how this study could “influence” the landscape invokes the anti-choice myth that this is about a very specific, unique circumstance in medicine, and it’s not really. The case was decided on two merits: Who has the final decision-making capabilities for the patient on life support and what were the patient’s wishes about the situation. The main relevance of her condition was whether or not she was far gone enough to put the decision to terminate in the family’s hands; but that fact wasn’t really up for dispute anymore. The real axis was whether or not Michael Schiavo got to decide or Terri’s religious nut parents.
Myth #2: Wingnuts really give two shits about “life”.
Burton pokes a hole in this, even though it seems unintentional.
This is not simply an academic question applicable to a single patient. Tens of thousands of patients in a persistent vegetative state linger in long-term care facilities. Others remain under the radar, being cared for at home by their families.
Tens of thousands of patients, many of whom are not getting the care they or their families would have desired due to lack of funding. (Thus, the at-home, under the radar stuff.) Tens of thousands. And wingnuts made a fuss over exactly one. To understand why, you have to look at the big picture and, I dare say, through patriarchal eyes. Through those eyes, we see a battle between patriarchs over final “ownership” over the female body. By the rules of the patriarchy, the wealthier, older father got final say, not the younger husband. There was also a big, heaping dose of the bizarre anti-choice love of making other people suffer for their ideologies—just as they don’t want the pregnant 15-year-old to have another chance by allowing her an abortion, nor did they want Michael Schiavo to be allowed a chance to do what widows should be allowed to do, move on and start new relationships.
Basically, they can’t mind their own damn business. It’s always about meddling in other people’s affairs, especially if there’s a hint of sex involved. That’s why they’re not standing up for the people being denied life support because of funding, but they do meddle with the death with dignity cause, which allows people to choose for themselves when to die when faced with end of life issues that involve non-stop pain and suffering. If you have a personal choice to avoid suffering, they’re going to get involved and deny that choice to you. If your suffering is from socio-political reasons, like you’re a soldier dying needlessly in Iraq when everyone wants to keep you alive, don’t expect the “pro-life” wingnuttery to lift a finger.
Myth #3: The axis for these decisions is the amount of brain activity involved.
The focus on brain activity really goes to show how much the Terri Schiavo fiasco was borne from the meddlesome nature of anti-choicers who are primarily concerned with denying birth control rights and wanted to find a “pro-life” foothold to demonstrate (fallaciously) that they’re more interested in “life” than in meddling with other people’s business. Brain activity has become a rallying cry for anti-choicers who hope that the sooner you can detect something that looks like it in the womb, the further you can strip away women’s rights. Which is a shame, because fetal development should be a consideration for individual women making their own choices. But now fetal development has been used as a rhetorical tool to draw attention away from the true concern, which is the right to control your own body and the right to have health care.
In abortion and in right-to-die cases, brain activity is a minor concern compared to the major issues of bodily autonomy and who decides. That there’s flickering in the brain of some vegetative patients isn’t an argument against the right to die in my eyes—hell, I’d rather have the life support pulled if I was trapped in some sort of hell where I could think and feel but not act in any way. The issue is that I want to decide or have my appointed decision-maker decide, not the anti-choicers and not Congress and not some relatives with a political agenda.
Things are gearing up for the rally in support of the Jena 6 tomorrow (my last post here). Thousands are expected in Jena, Louisiana and at rallies around the country. You can learn more about the event at freethejena6.com and Color of Change. You can search for events near you here.
* No surprise — The Southern Poverty Law Center Warns of Expected White Supremacist Activity at Jena Rally.
One particular web posting, on the white supremacist message board Stormfront.org, came from former Baton Rouge neo-Nazi leader Robert Moore. In the posting, Moore wrote about police security arrangements in Jena and whether weapons would be allowed in certain areas. "Remember, Louisiana is an open-carry state, and your vehicle is an extention [sic] of your home," he wrote. "We also have the right to defend ourselves if attacked."Additional items and comments related to tomorrow are after the jump.
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From Roxanne (who’s restarted her own blog), I see that, just as we critics of faith-based programs predicted, the attempts to use government power to push fundamentalist Christianity are only intensifying. Now federal prisons are quietly purging religious books that come into conflict the Christian Fundies Uber Alles.
Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.
The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.
Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
JTrain, blogging at Majikthise, has an interesting post up about a post-Katrina situation he blogged about almost two years ago. Two years ago, the stories about doctors issuing morphine doses that may have hastened the deaths of some patients in an overwhelmed New Orleans hospital were only rumors, and at the time, J (who’s a doctor that does a lot of E.R. work) explained the concept of a triage:
“Triage”, as the word root implies, originally meant separating patients into three groups–those who would likely be OK without medical care, those who are beyond any help, and those who can benefit from medical care. The idea is to concentrate resources where they can do the most good; it’s no use spending valuable time working on someone with hours left to live no matter what when you can save decades of meaningful life for three or four other people in the same time. In that case, the right thing to do is to provide comfort for the dying, and in a serious and urgent situation, that might include active euthanasia.
If you have sufficient resources, choosing between comforting the dying and attending the salvageable isn’t necessary, but obviously in a hellhole battlefield-style situation like New Orleans after Katrina, there’s a direct conflict. The dying become a direct resource-suck that could end up killing the salvageable. In this case, J broke down the likely options for the dying:
–Evacuate the patients. It may not even be an option. If it is, they’ll probably die en route. If they do make it, it’s just so that they can wait to die in a different building, probably still separated from family, and (just to be frank about it) using resources and manpower that are already scarce to delay the inevitable for a little bit. The patients’ last hours will be spent in a flurry of activity, and on the other end comfort will almost certainly take a back seat to raw necessity.
–Leave the patients. They won’t make it, but the lack of nursing care or meds will mean their last hours will be spent alone and miserable. This is not an option, IMO.
–Push the morphine.
From a strictly utilitarian standpoint, there is only one good option, and a disaster like Katrina brings out the utilitarian in all of us. That doesn’t make it easy to do, or easy to accept.
Hey, everyone remember the posts about New Orleans and how the survivors of Katrina are getting screwed left right and center? Remember Leigh, who gave a lot of good information? Well, she will be one of the people speaking about the post-Katrina Gulf Coast recovery tonight at The Democracy Center from 6:00-8:00. The center is located at 45 Mt. Auburn Street Cambridge, MA.
Hilzoy and Stephen have drawn my attention to this article from CNN about how the war in Iraq has pushed a lot of women into prostituting themselves to feed their children. It’s basically wall-to-wall horror, but as Hilzoy notes, this particular image really sums up exactly how wretched the situation is:
Rahim tells the heartbreaking story of one woman they found who lives in a room with three of her children: “She has sex while her three children are in the room, but she makes them stand in separate corners.”
I read a lot of stuff like this and often feel I should blog about it more, and then don’t, because I don’t know what to say. But today, I’m thinking about how so much of the support for this war has come from this self-righteous superiority complex from so many on the right, many of whom have dosed their views heavily with a Christian superiority complex. From the beginning, this war has been sold as a missionary project, and supporters have largely bought the idea that we’re invading Iraq to civilize the Iraqis from their medieval/heathen ways, and whether they are medieval or heathen changes according to what sounds better right now.
With the Christian right, the Iraq war has been plugged into the larger “warriors for Christ” theme that’s been on the upswing. Sara Robinson described it in a recent post very well:
If you doubt [the fundies’] intentions, just look at where they’re putting their energies. Bitterly disappointed by the limits of government power, they are now focusing intently on accruing military power instead. Dave wrote about the OSU’s officially-sanctioned efforts to proselytize to our soldiers in Iraq. Other groups are targeting these soldiers after they come home, seeking to fill the hole left by the paucity of VA counseling and transition services. Mikey Weinstein has made the case that they’ve deeply infiltrated both the faculties and the cadet corps of our military academies. They’ve also made specific appeals to the military leadership: Jerry Boykin is far from the only general who puts his duty to God ahead of his duty to country, and being “born-again” is increasingly viewed as a requirement for promotion in certain areas of the service. And, through Ron Luce’s “Battle Cry” rallies, millions of teenagers are being schooled in the logic and aesthetics of spiritual (and real-life) warfare, priming the pipeline with another generation of Christian soldiers. Across the fundamentalist world, there’s a new militance. They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it any more.
A woman is beaten in front of her two young daughters. What’s the first line of advice from the peanut gallery? “Call the cops! Press charges! Call 911!”
Yeah. Okay. Maybe not in Georgia.
Emelina Ramirez called police to tell them her roommates were attacking her, punching and kicking her in the stomach. When the police arrived, they handcuffed her, took her to jail and ran her fingerprints through a federal database. She is now in an Alabama cell awaiting deportation.
Getting a beat down while brown is a crime.
Ramirez, 30, was three months’ pregnant in June when, she says, her roommates attacked her. The Carrollton police officer who arrested her did not speak Spanish. He charged her with simple battery and took her to jail.
When jail officials ran her fingerprints through their database, they discovered that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted her because she had missed a deportation hearing in Texas.
“The bottom line is: She was in the U.S. illegally,” said Lt. James Perry, the investigating officer in the case. “She was involved in an incident where the system caught up with her. That was that.”
Carrollton police do not target illegal immigrants, Perry said. In the last year, the department has worked with undocumented immigrants who were witnesses or victims of a July 2006 home invasion that resulted in murder at a trailer park. Since then, the Police Department has set up a Spanish-language tip line.
Still, the police report from the Ramirez case raises questions about whether officers do, in fact, target Latinos.
After Ramirez was arrested and her 8-year-old daughter went to the station to give her account of the incident, Perry said, he went back to the house to interview the roommates about the allegations.
Before asking questions, however, Perry asked the inhabitants for identification and observed “both body language and verbal language that led me to believe they might be illegal.” According to the police report, “we then told everyone they would have to go to the jail to be fingerprinted.”
We can thank Carrolton’s finest for showing us just how much of a priority crime fighting is–it’s pretty high, if the crime you’re worried about is an expired visa, or being brown, or having suspicious body language. The assault and battery? Not so much.
Note too, the lack of outrage of a beatdown of a pregnant woman–in this case, a Latina woman. And make no mistake, that’s because there is no concern for her or the fetus. If she was White, you’d see all sorts of outrage over the harm to the fetus. The DA would file charges. If she miscarried as a result, heads would roll. But she’s not White, and she’s not middle class, and her fetus won’t be a bundle of joy but just another brown face that too many people would like to see gone.
Xicanopower also reports that Ramirez was possibly abused by her ex-husband. This is a dirty little secret–abusers will hold the citizenship status of their partners over their heads. Report the abuse, go to jail. Lose your kids. Get deported.
I’m pretty sure some folks will step up and ask why she didn’t just leave. Why not leave her abusive ex? Why not leave this horrible situation with her psychopathic roommates? And the only thing I can say to that is, have you ever been through this? Abusers use everything at their disposal to control their targets–be it money, violence, fear, whatever. You don’t realize going in that someone is just a craptastic abusive jackhole. It happens gradually, and by the time it’s really bad you’re in so deep and you’re so messed up by the abuse that you feel there’s no way out.
Oh, and? If you’re an immigrant, apparently there is no way out, except to jail.
Thanks to Brownfemipowerfor the heads-up post.
Update (from XP, who posted this over at my site):
I finally got a little more information about the whole ex-husband deal. Her friend just left a comment on my site. This is what he just told me.
She did marry a police officer from Carrollton, GA who, instead of obtaining an attorney and getting her legal status straightened out, held her status over her head, and was abusive towards her. He is the father of her youngest US born child. After about a year and a half of abuse, and aid from a woman’s shelter, she obtained a divorce from the abusive cop, and thanks to him, remains “undocumented”.
Karlas’ father has not paid child support in I don’t know how long, nor has he made any attempt to see his daughter.
Is it being “undocumented” that’s the crime here? Or is it being brown and female?
One thing that I missed in my prior post about Katrina evacuees was that the FEMA trailers which house them are toxic. The levels of formaldehyde are actually sickening the people “rescued” from New Orleans.
“Rescued” is an odd word, however. It’s more accurate to say that the US government pushed them off into camps with the hope that somehow, a wormhole would open up and transport them away. It’s the only explanation I have, as they are stranded, their homes in New Orleans are not a priority for rebuilding, their presence is obviously not wanted back in New Orleans or in these host communities, many which are trying to either revoke the trailer permits or let them expire. Jobs, transportation, and decent living conditions are simply scarce.
“Rescue” can’t even be considered when you realize that contrary to popular believe about FEMA, they actually did know about
The Federal Emergency Management Agency since early 2006 has suppressed warnings from its own field workers about health problems experienced by hurricane victims living in government-provided trailers with levels of a toxic chemical 75 times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers, congressional lawmakers said yesterday.
A trail of e-mails obtained by investigators shows that the agency’s lawyers rejected a proposal for systematic testing of the levels of potentially cancer-causing formaldehyde gas in the trailers, out of concern that the agency would be legally liable for any hazards or health problems. As many as 120,000 families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita lived in the suspect trailers, and hundreds have complained of ill effects.
On June 16, 2006, three months after reports of the hazards surfaced and a month after a trailer resident sued the agency, a FEMA logistics expert wrote that the agency’s Office of General Counsel “has advised that we do not do testing, which would imply FEMA’s ownership of this issue.” A FEMA lawyer, Patrick Preston, wrote on June 15: “Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. . . . Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them.”
FEMA tested no occupied trailers after March 2006, when it initially discovered formaldehyde levels at 75 times the U.S.-recommended workplace safety threshold and relocated a south Mississippi couple expecting their second child, the documents indicate. Formaldehyde, a common wood preservative used in construction materials such as particle board, can cause vision and respiratory problems; long-term exposure has been linked to cancer and higher rates of asthma, bronchitis and allergies in children.
Well, I’m glad FEMA’s on the ball when it comes to trying to cover its ass. They’ve got to be on the ball for something, after all. There is nothing like a cover up on top of outright abandonment and indifference to show us how much we value people who are Black and poor.
And I’ll take this opportunity to remind people to contact their senators and representatives about the bills in Congress that would help Katrina evacuees.