Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
politics, both trans & otherwise
Tonight on Logo, a few of the presidential candidates will be asked questions specifically concerning LGBT Issues. It’s the first ever LGBT-specific debate that will be televised, and I’m quite curious as to what the media response will be – if there is a media response.
As of late July, the candidates participating are:
The New York State Senate leadership – including Senator Joe Bruno – continues its tradition of blocking the advancement of gay rights by preventing the marriage equality bill from making it to the Senate floor for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote.
So NOW-NYC is asking us to send him a message: send him your old shoes with a note asking him to allow the marriage bill to be heard in the Senate.
Mail them to: Senator Joseph L. Bruno Room 909, Legislative Office Building, Albany NY 12247.
Damn, they’re honking to impeach Bush in Kentucky. Kentucky, folks: a red state through & through.
As Jim Pierce of The Hillbilly Report pointed out:
“Mark Twain is reported to have said that ‘when the end of the world comes I want to be in Kentucky, because there it will come 20 years later.’
If that is true George W. Bush should have been impeached several years ago . . . I suggest when Kentucky is ready to impeach George W. Bush and ‘Shotgun’ Dick Cheney, the Bush Administration is in real trouble.”
NCTE has reported today that since they sent out their alert for calls to your senators to support The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act more senators have signed on to support it!
So keep calling! Tell your friends to call!
You can find your senators’ contact information through NCTE.
This weekend, anti-choice activists are going to Wichita and Birmingham in order to try to shut down the only existing clinics that help women who want abortions get them.
If you’re down there, do contact your local choice group, & see if you can join the pro-choice forces. If not, you can make a donation to help them protest.
Not a big surprise, but the former Surgeon General under Bush, Dr. Richard Carmona, has testified that he was asked or told to withhold information on abstinence-only sex ed, emergency contraception, and stem cell research.
They have, of course, found this sap Holsinger to nominate, who I’m going to assume is more their kind of yes man. Not only that, but he’s declared publicly that homosexual sex is unnatural & unhealthy.
Today Senators Kennedy (D-MA) and Smith (R-OR) introduced the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 1585), which is being debated in the Senate this week and next. This amendment could be voted on as early as today. In short, today transgender people are one giant step closer to gaining federal hate crimes protections!
The language of today’s amendment is identical language to that of S. 1105, which the Senators introduced in April.
But to ensure that the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act becomes law, you must contact your Senators now and urge them to support this life-saving legislation.
As you read this, the Radical Right is mobilizing their base to oppose the federal hate crimes bill. They’re using scare tactics and flat-out lies in hopes of killing Kennedy’s amendment. Make sure that your Senators hear your voice and the true importance of this bill.
The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act would:
Find your Senators’ contact information.
The time to act is now! Call your Senators today and urge your friends and family to do the same!
(A sample letter you can copy & paste is below the break.)
It’s downright embarrassing to live in New York these days: six states have said no to the “abstinence only” Federal sex education money, but New York isn’t one of them.
So our kids get basic HIV info – because that’s required – and otherwise “cross your legs & take a cold shower.” Genius.
(from The Feminist Majority Foundation)
The Supreme Court handed down this morning a 5-4 ruling that requires the elimination of integration plans at elementary and secondary public schools.
The decision was made in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, et al. and Meredith, Custodial Parent and Next Friend of McDonald v. Jefferson County Bd. Of Ed et al, two cases brought by parents with schoolchildren in Seattle, Washington and Louisville, Kentucky. Federal appeals courts previously upheld integration plans in both school systems after parents sued. The Bush administration threw its political weight behind the parents.
In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “There is a cruel irony in The Chief Justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education… The Chief Justice rewrites the history of one of this Court’s most important decisions.” Justice Stevens, who has served on the Supreme Court longer than any other current justice, concluded his dissent, writing, “It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”
A 17 year old woman named Du’a Khalil was stoned to death in an honor killing and her death recorded on the cellphones of people who were watching & participating.
Police did nothing.
Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, wrote an exhausted, frustrated essay about her death, about the culture of misogyny & violence against women we all live with, & that essay has sparked an anthology in honor of Du’a Khalil.
I feel sick & leaden every time I see anything about this news, because there are so many other women who are hurt, beaten, & tortured who we don’t get to see. There are too many women I know who have been beaten or hurt or otherwise abused.
There is too much violence against women.