Category: politics & causes

politics, both trans & otherwise

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IN Just Made Bigotry Legal

from Lambda Legal, via Jillian Weiss:

Today, the Indiana House of Representatives, with a vote of 63-31, passed a bill designed to allow private businesses, individuals and organizations to discriminate against anyone in Indiana on religious grounds. Lambda Legal condemns SB 101’s passage, which Governor Pence has vowed to sign into Indiana law.

We are extremely disappointed that Indiana’s House, despite knowing the vast implications for all Hoosiers, voted to facilitate religious discrimination in many areas of life for Indiana’s families, workers and others. Once the governor signs this bill into law, women, racial minorities, religious minorities, people living with HIV and many others will be much more vulnerable to the whims of any individual or business owner who refuses services to particular groups of people based on religious objections to who those people are.

We urge members of the LGBT community to alert Lambda Legal if they experience discrimination explained as due to religious beliefs about gay or transgender people. If you have questions or feel that you have been discriminated against based on your sexual orientation, gender identity or HIV status, please contact our Legal Help Desk http://www.lambdalegal.org/help.

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#blacklivesmatter

Oh, #alllivesmatter people, please, just listen for a minute.

For those of us in communities that are targeted for violence – from both people who hate us and often the police who are supposed to serve and protect us – we’re aware that our lives are supposed to matter. We know our own lives matter.

But for LGBTQ people, that is not often the case.

For trans people, it is rarely the case.

For Hispanic people, it is rarely the case.

For black people, it is almost never the case.

The reason #alllivesmatter is an insulting response to a racial problem is because it whitewashes the problem. Being more humane doesn’t work; racial prejudices and homophobia go so deep historically, personally, unconsciously, that unless we pay special attention to the kinds of hatred that fuels the killings of trans women and black men, trans women of color in particular, young black men in particular, our systems don’t get any better.

Look, the hippies tried loving everyone and that was a long time ago, and if the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner teach us anything, it’s that people refusing to call our national race problem a race problem is part of it.

Please. Of course #alllivesmatter. But as Orwell once wrote, the problem is that some lives matter a hell of a lot more than others, which is why we need to highlight that #blacklivesmatter and #translivesmatter and #queerlivesmatter.

Step away from your white privilege. We are part of a system that kills black men and imprisons them and throws them away. “Universalizing” is exactly what disappears black lives in the first place.

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No Justice, No Peace: UVA & Marisa Alexander

A first year student was gang raped at UVA, and it took a Rolling Stone article (TW) to get anyone to pay attention.

It turns out UVA doesn’t even expel people who have admitted to rape.

Those of us who teach gender studies are assumed to be pessimistic at best and paranoid at worst, but you read two facts like that and wow, we’re just right.

Or you read that Marisa Alexander – the woman who fired a warning shot because she feared for her own life after her husband barged through a door she had locked herself behind and grabbed her by the neck – and all that 9 days after she’d given birth – was convicted and given 20 years in prison. She managed to plea down to 3, but why is she serving any time at all? She didn’t, mind you, kill or injure anyone.

Jeff Severs, a friend of a friend, after reading Wilson’s testimony about Mike Brown – which is something like a compendium of the racist imagination of black bodies as monstrous – wrote that “Brown’s body is bound to bear so horribly, impossibly much”.

As was that student’s, as was Marisa Alexander’s, and in none of these cases is there any justice, any condemnation of the objectification and othering of these bodies and the lives they carry.

I hate being right. I hate that my view of the world as unjust-by-design is so obviously, patently true. You can explain away Grand Jury history (well, actually, you can’t) or you can point up the peculiarities of the criminal justice system, but really, when university administrators are ignoring rape confessions and a woman who was defending herself is found guilty and given 20 years to serve – and who was, mind you, statistically more likely to die at her partner’s hands precisely because she was pregnant or had just given birth – that is, she had a better reason for self-defense than most, and far more than Darren Wilson ever needed – you have to know this system was designed to keep most of us in our places.

Bill Hicks was right, too, except they don’t even bother to tell you to pick up the gun anymore. They don’t have to.

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Come On Already, NYC

Honestly, we need someone to do groundbreaking stuff – don’t let Iowa beat you to it again, okay? Shoot, NYS has already beaten you to it.

A proposed law that would allow individuals to change the sex on their birth certificate without having gender reassignment surgery would ease the barrier to basic services such as health care, housing and jobs, transgender advocates said.

Testimony happened on Monday, 11/10, that helped explain why surgery should not be a requirement to change your birth certificate in NYC.

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Please, Please Vote. Please.

I’m starting to get a kind of sick feeling about Wednesday and I don’t like it. No, I didn’t do nearly as much as I should have but you can bet your ass I’ll show up to vote.

And what I’m worried about is that I’ll see the same pathetic numbers for voter turnout – especially voter turnout for young people – that I see every year.

And every year it breaks my damn heart that people die for the right to vote and yet people in the US just don’t bother to.

Why? I don’t know. I remember hearing a lot of “If voting worked, it wouldn’t be legal” more-radical-than-thou bullshit when I was a Green activist in NYC.

I know some people don’t feel sufficiently informed and honestly, if you know anything about any goddamn celebrity and you don’t know who you’d prefer to govern your life, your right to choice, your healthcare, your education, and pretty much every aspect of the rest of your life, your priorities are out of order.

The concentration of power in this country is becoming scary. I look at the bright, earnest young people I teach and I hope they are paying attention enough to realize that VOTING MATTERS.

Go do it. Even if you don’t feel informed. The first few times I voted, I didn’t either, and I always left the polls feeling guilty that I hadn’t done my homework. And I still never do as much as I want to, but you learn a little every year until how you vote and who you vote for starts to feel like something you know.

 

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Vote!

Tomorrow is Election Day, so here’s some important info about voting in WI:

  • YOU DON’T NEED AN ID TO VOTE TOMORROW.
  • You can register to vote at your polling place – all you need is proof of residency (WI license, bank statement, recent utility bill, other government document with your address on it). That proof can be paper or electronic.
  • The governorship is a BIG DEAL. Governors who are successful often go on to run for President, and Walker looks like he wants to. If he is voted out now, that will be way less likely.
  • When women and black voters get to the polls in hefty numbers, Democrats win.
  • Call your local Democratic office if you need a ride to the polls.
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WI’s Attorney General Needs to Hear from You

Wisconsin’s Attorney General Van Hollen is against same sex marriage. He was the one who put a halt to the marriages that were taking after a WI court declared WI’s super DOMA unconstitutional, and he has vowed to keep same sex couples from marrying no matter what the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals rules.

That is, he insists on defending a marriage ban that was already struck down by a WI court, and he can, because he’s Attorney General.

Wisconsin Unites for Marriage has a petition up which will let him know that same sex couples should be able to marry.