I’ve got lots of errands to do today and a Camp NaNoWriMo project to get back to, but one story that made it into yesterday’s Friday Links definitely needs a follow up: Attorney General: People ‘duped’ by religious freedom law. So, late Thursday night a federal judge struck down Mississippi’s so-called religious freedom law. He ruled that the law actually establishes a state religion, by very specifically protected some religious beliefs and overriding the beliefs of those who feel differently.
Mississippi has only one state-wide Democratic politician, the Attorney General, and he issued a press release explains why his office isn’t sure it will appeal. The Attorney General’s office did defend the law against the challenge, but as he points out, appealing the law can cost a lot of money over a period of years:
“I will have to think long and hard about spending taxpayer money to appeal the case… An appeal could cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, North Carolina has set aside $500,000 for defense of its bathroom law. Even if we won and the injunction were set aside on appeal, the case would be remanded and proceed to trial over about two years. Because of the huge tax breaks handed out to big corporations by these same leaders, the state is throwing mentally ill patients out on the street. This is hardly protecting the least among us as Jesus directed.”
But he also essentially says that the judge ruled properly, because the law doesn’t actually protect religious freedom:
“The fact is that the churchgoing public was duped into believing that HB1523 protected religious freedoms. Our state leaders attempted to mislead pastors into believing that if this bill were not passed, they would have to preside over gay wedding ceremonies. No court case has ever said a pastor did not have discretion to refuse to marry any couple for any reason. I hate to see politicians continue to prey on people who pray, go to church, follow the law and help their fellow man.”
Because it’s Mississippi, you know that the only reason a Democrat got elected Attorney General is because he leans further to the right the most Democrats (I need to write a post about the fact that we don’t have a liberal party in this country; the Democrats are slightly right of center being more conservative that most the the population, and the Republicans are super-super-far-rightwing being more conservative that a substantial number of their loyal voters), and the only way he can talk about this law and have any hope of future electoral success is to emphasize his own Christian beliefs.
But that’s the point that needs to be hammered home: the laws and the issues that people are wailing and gnashing their teeth about under the label of religious freedom aren’t even consistent with the teachings of the religion they’re trying to defend. Not only do the laws not preserve freedom, but they’re contrary to the teachings of Christ:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”
—Matthew 5:38-42
Jesus didn’t say, “If a same-sex couple asks you to do your job and issue them a marriage license, declare them unclean and turn them away,” he said “Give to the one who asks you.” And these folks who are proclaiming their belief in Jesus as the reason they refuse to sell cakes, or give out licenses, or allow a trans kid to use the bathroom, might want to review Matthew chapter 6, where Jesus says not to make a big show of your religion, and that the people who do that aren’t going to be going to heaven, but somewhere else…
ETA: As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, speaking as a former evangelical, btw: ‘Fessing up, part 2.
I figured that I would look into the story later, fully expecting to find out that the statement he’d made was more complicated than the headlines make it. Well, it is, but the contradiction isn’t as blatantly obvious as that previous time. “I think that the Church not only should apologize to the person who is gay whom it has offended. … But we must also apologize to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children exploited for labor. It must apologize for having blessed so many weapons.”
There are several qualifiers in there, and I could quibble over a lot of them, but the real hypocrisy is a bit more meta. He thinks that the Church should apologize. Really? I wonder if he has thought of mentioning it to the person who is in charge of the Church; you know, the person who has the power to actually apologize. And more than apologize, the person who, in theory, has the power to make infallible statements that come with the stamp of approval of god?
Has the pope actually told the pope what he thinks?
The other contradiction is a little less funny. The statement, and his following comments, make it clear that he is referring to the church apologizing for things that it had done in the past, as if its teachings are not still, present tense, causing harm to queers, and women, and so on. Biblically, you don’t ask for forgiveness until after you have stopped committing the sin. The church (both the Catholic Church and a whole lot of people claiming to speak for god in other denominations) is still bearing false witness against queer people, still describing us as sinful and disordered, and so on.
You have to rescind those lies, aspersions, and condemnations before you apologize for them.
And I want to make something very clear, here. Theologically, a sin is an intentional and voluntary action. All of the medical science (yes, all of it) agrees that homosexuality is not a matter of choice, it is an innate characteristic. In other words, it isn’t voluntary. When a sincerely held religious belief is contradicted by scientific fact, then it isn’t faith, it is delusion.
When any religious leader insists that homosexuality is a sin, they are bearing false witness. The Bible also insists that slavery is a good thing, yet no Christian religious leaders (not even Pope Emeritus Benedict) are calling for a return to slavery. They now all handwave it and say that the slavery comments in the Bible are because of the culture at the time, and therefore aren’t a commentary applicable today. Or they try to claim that the Bible’s comments on slavery are really about god advising people how to deal with a situation that shouldn’t exist but that cannot, at present, be rectified. They insist on that rationalization even though the Apostle Paul wrote one entire book of the Bible about how a Christian slave owner should treat his Christian slaves (spoiler: at no point did he say that people should never treat other people as property).
The sections of the Bible that are usually read to condemn homosexuality are a lot less clear than its teachings on slavery. Yet members of the religious right are willing to contort themselves to claim that the Bible’s clear endorsement of slavery doesn’t exist, while pretending that these few mostly ambiguous comments on fidelity, temple prostitutes, and so on are indisputable statements about people who love other people of the same gender.
And every time this pope has said some things that the press latched onto to wildly report that the Church was softening it’s stand on queers, later statements and officially issued proclamations re-iterate the original position that we are disordered, sinful, dangerous, et cetera. So, no, I’m not awaiting whatever comes of this comment about apologies with bated breath.
Ernesto Vergne prays at a cross honoring his friend Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado and the other victims at a memorial to those killed in the Pulse nightclub mass shooting a few blocks from the club early Friday, June 17, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)I’m going to be an emotional wreck because of the Orlando shooting for a while. Usually on Saturday I’ll post a few news items that I would have included in Friday Links if I had found them in time along with more commentary than links usually get in the Friday post. Or I post links to stories with new developments related to a story posted previously, also with more commentary.
Most of today’s links are things that made me cry, not because they’re about something awful, but because the story is about something wonderful and loving that people have done in response to something awful. Two of the links were sent to me by one friend. After the second one I replied back, “You keep sharing things that make me cry. Don’t stop.”
Some people are either outright ignoring the fact that this happened in a queer club, on a Saturday night, during Pride month, and otherwise was clearly a hate crime. Many of the jerks trying to further the myth that Islam is attacking America or freedom or whatever. Never mind that of the last thousand or so mass shooting in America, two were committed by muslims, and the other 990-some have been committed by white Christians. Anyway: The Other Group Mourning The Orlando Massacre: LGBT Muslims.
Orlando shooting prompts outpouring of blood donations. It’s a good thing all these straight people feel such compassion, seeing how gay men are banned for donating blood. Some pedants point out that technically gay men are allowed to donate blood if they swear they haven’t had sex for an entire year, but as one of my local TV stations reported, Some Seattle blood banks still ban all gay men from donating even if they meet the no-sex in 12 months criteria. I bring this up because the vast majority of medical experts agree that the 12-month rule is ridiculous. Straight people can (and do, lots more than you think) carry the virus that causes AIDS, and no one has suggested a 12-month ban on them. Also, a lot of bi people are closeted, and some so closeted that they would never admit it even in a confidential medical situation, so they’re not going to say. And all blood donated is screened precisely because people may not know that they’ve been infected or may lie about their sexual activity for the reasons stated above.
Enough about that. Another of the “it’s not a hate crime” craziness has been a claim that it can’t be a hate crime because maybe the shooter was a closeted gay man. First, if you don’t understand that a society in which the phrase “closeted gay man” describes a real phenomenon, then nearly all queer people live with a lot of internalized homophobia because of societal pressure, you’re really in a deep state of denial. Also: FBI ‘Increasingly Skeptical’ That Orlando Shooter Was Gay and Closeted.
The case that he was a closeted gay man was built on the fact that he had a user profile on at least one gay hookup app, and reportedly had been seen in the club previously, angrily drinking alone and sometimes becoming belligerent. Oh, and one old college classmate thinks he might have been gay and might have hit on him once. We already know that at least one of the conversations that shooter had on the hookup app with a local gay man consisted of the shooter asking, repeatedly, “what are the most popular gay clubs” and “where could I find the biggest crowds of gay people?” This would hardly be the first time that someone planning an anti-gay hate crime used a hookup app or online gay chat services to scout out potential victims. Or hung out at gay clubs to get the lay of the land. And the old classmate? Please! Both gay and straight men misread signals all the time.
Alabama state government is awash in corruption, scandal, and criminal investigations. Diagram by John Archibald | jarchibald@al.com (Click to embiggen).Alabama is a mess. Yesterday the Speaker of the House was found guilty of 12 of the counts of corruption out of the 23 he had been indicted for: Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard is guilty, but that’s not all. According to the state constitution, the moment he was convicted of a felony he ceases to be in office. This would be a big deal in any other state, but right now in Alabama, it is only one in a number of crazy stories involved the heads of branches of Government: Scandals Embroil Alabama Governor, Speaker and Chief Justice.
It’s just a mess:
So Mike Hubbard, the self-proclaimed architect of the GOP takeover of the Statehouse, the consensus most powerful man in Alabama politics, the standout with his hand out, was convicted on 12 of 23 counts of using his office to fatten his own substantial wallet… Gov. Robert Bentley is hip-deep in his own sorta-sex scandal, facing the threat of impeachment and federal investigation. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore may get gaveled out of office for the second time, because his idea of “ethics” is disobeying the law…
—John Archibald, writing for AL.com
See, the governor has been in trouble for a while because of a sex scandal that involved misappropriation of fund. He’s a very anti-gay, pro-family, moralizing scold who was having an affair with a married staff member. Before proof of the affair surfaced (in the form of recordings of very family unfriendly phone call), he was already under investigation for doing things like using a state-owned jet to fly the staffer and himself to Las Vegas to attend a Celine Dion concert, among other questionable uses of public funds and resources. The staffer with whom he had the affair was given salary increases that raised eyebrows even before rumors of the affair surfaced. In a separate issue, the husband of the staffer, who is also a state employee, received a very large raise in a year when no one else in the entire agency he worked at received even a token increase in salary. That’s only scratching the surface on the governor. I’ll come back to him.
Then there is the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court, Roy Moore. Moore has been suspended from the bench pending an ethics investigation over orders he wrote instructing judges in the state not to obey the U.S. Supreme Court ruling which made marriage equality the law of the land. Moore was previously removed from office over his refusal to remove a gargantuan granite Ten Commandments monument from the state courthouse (in addition to insisting on starting court sessions with a prayer and other activities). Alabama voters returned him to office when he ran for election again the next time he could. If he is removed again, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if Alabamians don’t re-elect him yet again.
There are several other problems. The Lt Governor, Kay Ivey, former state Treasurer, has been dogged by questions about why the state’s pre-paid college tuition program suffered a loss of $408million in value under her watch. There are, therefore, people worried about whether she is up to the job of filling the governor’s job if he does resign or is impeached. The threat of impeachment had been held at bay for a long time by the Speaker of the House, but it was also hampered by those worries about the Lt. Governor.
The governor also has managed to force some members of state law enforcement out of their jobs to delay and complicate the investigation into the allegations against the him. Oh, and that recording of a sexy phone call between the governor and the staff member? It wasn’t because law enforcement was tapping his phone. No, the governor’s wife had long suspected her husband was having an affair, and she left started secretly recording him to get proof!
One of my favorite odd details of this whole mess, if you see any news stories list the governor’s name this way: “Governor Doctor Dr. Robert Bentley” the second use of doctor isn’t a typo. Back in 2010, because he was running with the campaign slogan, “Alabama’s economy needs a doctor,” Bentley tried to get his medical title (he’s a dermatologist) on the primary ballot, but Republican party rules forbade nicknames, and they said that also mean titles, even if they were legitimately earned. So Bentley went to court and had is name legally changed to “Dr. Robert Bentley.” Some of his opponents made some very funny comments about what kind of person legally changes their name to look better on a ballot, and he then legally changed his name back to “Robert Julian Bentley,” but a lot of Alabama pundits like to remind voters of the temporary name change by using the longer title.
The legislature is so corrupt, and corruption has been a way of life in Alabama politics for so long, that no one knows what’s going to happen next. Maybe Ambrosia Starling, the drag queen who emerged as one of the most articulate and unflagging criticism of Judge Roy Moore is available to fill one of those vacant offices: Ambrosia Starling on Roy Moore: ‘It takes a drag queen to remind you liberty, justice is for all’.
“Complaining about political correctness: It’s just inoculating the public to get used to, and feel reluctant to call out, more racism, sexism, and homophobia.” BettyBowers.Com (click to embiggen)In the game of chess, it is traditional at the end of the game for the loser, upon realizing that the other player has placed their king in checkmate, to tip the king over and concede the game. The point of the game is to protect your king and take the other player’s king. If the other player has maneuvered you into a place where no matter what move you make, your king will be taken, you’ve been defeated.
I never liked that bit about tipping my own king over and conceding the game. I’m not merely saying that I don’t like to lose (because no one does), what I had was a visceral revulsion to the idea of surrendering. I think when I see that I’m in checkmate, I should move my king, and then the other person should be the one who moves one of their pieces in and takes the king. And technically you can do that, but a lot of chess players consider it gauche to do so. You’re supposed to be civilized and logical and recognize that you have been beaten. When I was in my teens I once had a much older chess player lecture me about what an insult it was to insist on taking my last move and make him take the king. Another told me that taking my final move signaled that I wasn’t smart enough to recognize my loss, and therefore not being smart, I was not an opponent anyone would care to play against.
I don’t think that guy was terribly happy when I replied,“If you can’t tell until the very last move how good a player I am, I’m not sure I’m the one whose intelligence is in question, here.” (For the record, I beat that guy the first time we played, it was our second game where he discovered my idiosyncrasy, so, having beaten him once, I don’t think he could say I didn’t understand the game).
I was never great at chess, and I suspect my inability to dispassionately end the game without one player actually taking out the other player’s king is a symptom of why. And it’s all probably related to why my single favorite moment in all of cinematic history, is the second time Captain Kirk says, “I don’t like to lose” in The Wrath of Khan.
So I have a lot of sympathy for my fellow Bernie Sanders supporters who have been angry that one media outlet explicitly called the Democratic nomination one day before California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota weighed in. I get it. Really, I do. But it isn’t the evidence of either corruption or incompetence that many of my fellow Sanders supporters are trying to make it out to be…Continue reading You need to pick your dragons…→
“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? …How can I shoot them poor people, Just take me to jail.” One of Muhammed Ali’s statements when asked why he refused the draft. (Click to embiggen)I used to say that I was old enough that I remembered when three-time world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammed Ali still fought under the name Cassius Clay. I recently learned that that probably isn’t true. The reason I thought so was that, after Ali converted to Islam and changed his name in 1963, all sportscasters (with the exception of Howard Cosell—another great in his own right) refused to call him by the name—for several years! So I watched boxing matches on TV where the announcer and commentators called him Clay, even though that was no longer his name.
I had a bunch of other news links and such gathered yesterday after posting Friday Links that I had planned to post as weekend update this morning. But Muhammed Ali died last night. And he deserves a post all his own.
Muhammed Ali represented a lot of things. The best obituary I’ve found for him today is by Dave Zirin posted at The Nation: ‘I Just Wanted to Be Free’: The Radical Reverberations of Muhammad Ali. Zirin does a great job explaining the many ways Ali shaped the discussion of race, equality, war, peace, and even religion during the 60s and 70s.
The big one was his refusal to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. He made a lot of statements about it, before he was arrested and after his initial trial. One is quoted on the meme I included at the top of this post, but here’s another:
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”
When he was drafted in 1967, he reported at the induction station as ordered, but he refused to step forward when his name was called, and declared himself a conscientious objector. When he was warned that he was committing a felony by refusing to step forward, he repeated his statement to take him to jail. He was arrested and stood trial. The jury deliberated less than a half hour before convicting him. His lawyer appealed, and Ali was released pending the appeal. Ali was stripped of his Heavyweight Championship title, had his passport revoked, and was systematically denied licenses to box in every state.
Federal appeals courts all upheld the conviction and it went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1971 in an 8-0 ruling (Thurgood Marshall recused himself from the case), Ali’s conviction was overturned. By that point, public opinion had shifted considerably against the war, and some have tried to tie the court’s decision to that shift. Possibly, but the court’s reason for overturning the conviction was pretty simple: the draft board had never given a reason as to why they refused to grant him conscientious objector status (which would have had him serve in an unarmed capacity). The law required that the board cite at least one of three reasons why objector status is refused, and they never did.
The evidence of the shift in public opinion toward the Vietnam War in general and Ali in particular actually came a few months before the Supreme Court ruling: 1) in September 1970 a federal court ordered the New York State Boxing Commission to reinstate Ali’s license, and 2) in August 1970 the City of Atlanta Athletic Commission granted him a license to box. In October of that year Ali returned to the ring, defeating Jerry Quarry after three rounds. Ali then defeated Oscar Bonavena in December at Madison Square Garden, which set him up to take on then reigning heavyweight champ Joe Frazier. It was called the Fight of the Century for many reasons, one being that neither Frazier nor Ali had ever been defeated in a professional fight.
Ali was famous for trash-talking his opponents, which reached some odd heights in the lead up to this match. Frazier and Ali were both African American. Ali had been raised on a “two-mule farm” in Kentucky, while Frazier was the 12th child of South Carolina sharecroppers. But Ali kept saying to the press that the only people rooting for Joe Frazier are white people in suits, Alabama sheriffs, and members of the Ku Klux Klan, while claiming that Ali was fighting for the kids in the ghetto. At one point this caused Frazier to remark within earshot of several reporters, “What the fuck does he know about the ghetto?”
Whether Ali knew anything about the ghetto, I can attest to the fact that racists like my dad and his Klan friends (yes, my dad had friends who were klansmen, though every time my Grandpa derided him for it, he insisted that he wasn’t a member; I don’t think Grandpa believed him any more than I did) were all rooting for Frazier. I know this because, while watching football with my dad was never a fun experience when I was a child, we somehow managed to watch boxing together just fine. He didn’t mind answering questions about what was happening when we watched boxing. I’m not sure why. So the most positive sports memories I have with my dad are all around boxing bouts. I’d watched boxing a lot with Dad before the Fight of the Century. I was ten years old the first time Ali fought Frazier, and I watching the whole thing with Dad. It was a little surreal, watching my dad cheer Frazier on.
Frazier beat Ali by decision. My dad’s only disappointments with the match were that Ali hadn’t gotten knocked out, and that dad hadn’t found anyone willing to bet against Frazier for the bout. A few years later, after Ali had won many more bouts, lost one and got a broken jaw out of it, and won some more, Frazier and Ali had a rematch, which Ali won. Dad had found someone to bet with this time. To say that he was pissed off at Ali’s win is putting it mildly.
Dad refused to watch Ali fight George Foreman for the world championship. He said boxing wasn’t any fun when it was only black guys fighting (he didn’t say it so politely, though). So I watched the Rumble in the Jungle with Grandpa, instead. Partway through the match, I remember telling Grandpa that I thought I was becoming an Ali fan. At the end of the match, Grandpa talked about the kind of endurance and bullheadedness it took to survive Foreman’s impossibly powerful blows, and told me he was an Ali fan now, too.
After winning the World Heavyweight Boxing championship that second time, he went on to more matches, most of which he won (Ali’s win by decision over Chuck “The Bayonne Bleeder” Wepner is the bout which Sylvester Stallone said inspired the film Rocky), before losing the title to Leon Spinks in a split decision, then win it a third time. After retiring, he even tried to win the world championship for a fourth time in 1980. Though everyone knew that his health wasn’t really up to it. His performance in the loss to Larry Holmes caused Stallone to describe it ringside as “like watching an autopsy on a man who is still alive.”
CNN has posted a lot of good videos (including a great interview with one of his daughters) along with their obituary: Muhammad Ali, ‘The Greatest,’ dies at 74.
Ali’s daughter, Maryum, said that her father, despite his very arrogant public persona, was always surprised long after his retirement, when strangers would come up to tell him how much he had inspired them, or how his life had convinced them to abandon the racism they’d been raised in. “He was never certain that people would remember him.”
“The call volume for Trans Lifeline [suicide hotline] has doubled since HB2 was passed. This shitty law has a body count.” (Click to embiggen)Last week I skipped a bunch of links I’d gathered for my weekly Friday Links post because I was getting a little too outraged just reading some of the headlines. I wound up including four of them in the follow-up post, along with a bit of better news related to one of them.
This week wasn’t quite as bad, but I also made an effort to spend less time browsing certain news sites just to avoid a bit of that. And this time I missed a couple of links that I meant to include, but somehow omitted:
Why the conservative war against transgender rights is doomed to fail lays out nicely why demographics are already against them. Yes, they’re winning some victories and causing more than a bit of pain, but they also have less public support than they believe. Even in North Carolina, which is fighting hard to protect its anti-trans law, less than half the voters support said law.
But crazy people will continue to say crazy things: Louie Gohmert: No Gay Space Colonies! I wasn’t aware that anyone was proposing a queer space colony, but Texas Republican Louis Gohmert is ready to stand agains this imminent threat. He says if Earth is ever under threat of destruction by an asteroid, Congress needs to make sure we don’t waste any resources putting queer people or queer animals on the space ark. Never mind that Gohmert has voted the gut the space program time and again, so the likelihood that if we detected such a threat that we would be able to assemble and launch such an ark in the time we had is exceedingly low.
And for anyone who is trotting out the argument that queer folks aren’t oppressed in our society, or at least are much less so than other groups, let’s remember that this happened this week: U.S. House Republicans read ‘death to gays’ Bible verse before voting against LGBT rights law. He was actually leading the caucus in a prayer, and quoting from a translation of the Bible that converts some text that in the original greek does not explicitly reference homosexuality into rather explicit hate speech. So this congressman was actually publicly praying for the death of gay people. And while some Republicans walked out of the meeting in protest, most didn’t. And as noted in this article, when contacted for comments, not one single Republican has apologized.
But they don’t hate us. How can we possible think that?
Gizmodo brings us this little story of pianist Tony Ann who has created a short piano piece that incorporates the music of several popular ringtone, transforming them into brief melodic themes that are woven together into a song. It’s pretty cool!
Famous Cellphone Ringtones Played On The Piano (Tony Ann Arrangement):
Yesterday a friend asked why I didn’t include anything about Oklahoma Lawmakers Passing a Bill Criminalizing Performing Abortion among the rest of the Friday Links. As I explained in the comments, their was so much ridiculous and outrage-inducing news out of Oklahoma this week (and a few other places), that on Thursday night while I was assembling the Friday Links post I reached a stage where I was seething. I was literally shaking so hard with rage that I could not sit still at the keyboard. I kept getting up and angrily pacing back and forth, muttering about how ludicrous it was. So I skipped over a chunk of the links I had bookmarked for the week and tried to move on to calming news.
Oklahoma was not one of the states I lived in as a child, but both my dad’s and Mom’s side of the family came from there, and I had a lot of relatives living there back in the day. My husband grew up in communities in Missouri and Oklahoma, and many of his closest relatives still live there. The upshot is that I have emotional ties to Oklahoma and keep hoping that it will become a better place than I recall it being. (While I was telling Michael about this update, he said, “There are reasons I always say that Oklahoma is a great place to be from!”) So here are a few other links that I could have included about Oklahoma yesterday:
Since then, there is some slightly better news. Midday Friday, the governor of Oklahoma vetoed bill that would criminalize abortion. And that’s nice. Unfortunately, she didn’t veto it because the law is blatantly unconstitutional. Nor did she veto it because the decision whether to have an abortion should be a matter of conscience for the woman involved. She vetoed it because the law failed to identify the definition of “medically necessary to save the life of the mother” which is the one exception in the law. It probably didn’t hurt that every expert agreed that the law would make it impossible for any OB/GYN to practice in Oklahoma, since any miscarriages or any tubal pregnancies that a patience experienced could be charged under the law. The governor explicitly said that she hopes a president will soon appoint judges to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v Wade and make abortion illegal at a federal level.
So it isn’t great news, just less awful than it originally appeared.
While we’re on the topic of improving news, some months back when the first trailer for the next Star Trek movie went up, it was pretty cringe worthy. It was blatantly obvious that whoever edited it was thinking, “Guardians of the Galaxy was a goofy comedy action movie that was a blockbuster, so how can we edit this to make it look like it is also a goofy comedy action movie?” The new trailer just dropped, and thankfully it looks much, much better:
“Dennis Hastert committed crimes against children and must be made responsible.”Following up on a story that came to a conclusion the same week I was dealing with a death in the family: Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Dennis Hastert, was caught paying millions in hush money to try to keep the public from learning that he had molested at least five teen-agers while he was a high school wrestling coach. Because of a statute of limitations on child sexual assault, he couldn’t be charged with those crimes, only with the crime of trying to circumvent certain tax and financial laws, and for lying to the FBI about what he was doing. He has since been sentenced to 15 months in prison: Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert ‘Deeply Ashamed’ as He Faces Accuser at Sentencing.
I’ve written before about his hypocritical conduct in Congress: being anti-gay, trying to shield another child molesting congressman from prosecution, promising the parents of a murdered gay teen he would fight to get a federal hate crimes bill passed and then doing everything he could to kill it (and succeeding), and so on. He’s since been showing up at his court appearances trying to look frailer and more pathetic—first with a cane, then a walker, now being wheeled to the court in a wheelchair. Maybe he is sick, but it is also a common ploy to try to play for sympathy. In any case, the judge certainly wasn’t swayed. Among his remarks during the sentencing, the judge noted, “Nothing is more disturbing than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘Speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.”
While he was pleading for a more lenient sentence, Hastert contacted a lot of his former colleagues to write letters to the judge asking for leniency. I think it’s pretty horrible (but not that surprising) how many of his former Republican cohorts wrote such letters. On the other hand, he may have made things worse on himself with one of those requests. One of the people he asked was a former Illinois State Legislator… who happened to be the brother of one of the boys Hastert had molested. Not surprising, the legislator declined to write to ask for leniency, but the incident caused the brother who had been molested to go public about it. Including making a statement to the court about the abuse.
Fifteen months isn’t much punishment for the things that Hastert as done, but it’s a good start.
In 1968, Fr. Daniel Berrigan traveled to Hanoi with historian Howard Zinn to bring back three American prisoners of war. Then he and eight other Catholic priests concocted a batch of napalm and used it to burn 378 draft files in the parking lot of the Cantonsville, Maryland draft board as a protest of the war. (Click to embiggen)There were a number of items that I had queued up for Friday Links that I didn’t include yesterday because I was trying to post a few less outrage-inducing things. I didn’t intend to also leave Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s death out of the links. His obituary link happened to get lost in a cluster of political stories:
Berrigan was a Catholic priest who was also a peace activist who wound up on the FBI’s most wanted list and spent some time in prison because of his anti-war activities during the Vietnam War. He continued his anti-war efforts throughout his lifetime, but he also won some notoriety for ministering non-judgmentally to AIDS victims in Greenwich Village in the 80s, when most of the Catholic hierarchy was busy condemning gay men.
If only more the of the church’s leaders were like Berrigan. The world is a slightly darker place without him.
Now I need to segue from talking about a peace activist who clearly loved his neighbor, to talking about a hate monger who clearly doesn’t.
I think it’s important to know just how long and how determinedly Moore has been defying the law he has sworn to uphold: Way back in 1993 Judge Moore drew criticism for displaying a wooden Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom, and insisting that each session begin with a prayer. This eventually led the ACLU to file a lawsuit in 1995. This led to a series of rulings and counter-suits, sometimes with appeals being thrown out on technicalities. At each stage Moore vowed to never stop the prayers and never remove the plaque. The state supreme court allowed the appeal that reached them to languish without ruling, effectively allowing Moore to have his way and preventing any appeal. Ethics complaints were filed against Moore, but eventually came to nothing.
Trading on his high profile in the media because of the case, in 2001 Moore campaigned for Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court runnng on the idea that the law must come from god in order to be legitimate, and this being Alabama, he won. And immediately began construction of a massive granite Ten Commandments monument to install in the rotunda of the state courthouse. The Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, and other organizations filed suit.
Before that case was resolved, Moore incited protests and controversy by writing in a 2002 ruling about a child custody suit that it was better for a child to be put in the care of a heterosexual father despite that father having a history of child abuse, than to allow the mother (who had come out as lesbian) to have the child. Again, ethics complaints were filed which came to nothing. The other justices had simply relied on Alabama’s anti-sodomy laws in the ruling. When the U.S. Supreme Court threw out all anti-sodomy laws in 2003, the child custody ruling became moot.
The court rulings on the massive monument went against Moore, but he refused to obey the orders. Ethics complaints were files against Moore, and this time he was found in violation and removed from office. Moore sued the ethics commission, but lost.
For a while Moore made overtures to try to seek the Republican nomination for President, but instead wound up running for election as Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court yet again. And yet again, he was elected. Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made marriage equality the law of the land, Moore has fought it: issuing an order declaring that the ruling only applied to the specific states who were sued in the lawsuits the Supreme Court had consolidated for their ruling. Trying to get the rest of his State Supreme Court to issue a similar ruling. And sending messages directly to probate judges telling them that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling is not legal.
And so various people, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have filed ethics complaints against Moore, and Moore has been temporarily suspended while the commission investigates the case. Moore is, like every other anti-gay so-called Christian out there, claiming to be the victim in all of this. He insists that the charges aren’t real ethics complaints, but are politically motivated. He has accused the Judicial Inquiry Commission of falling under the sway of “a professed transvestite, and other gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals, as well as organizations which support [the homosexual] agenda.”
Right. And Moore doesn’t have an agenda at all, despite saying: “God gives rights and the government’s role is to secure those rights. When governments [sic] dismisses god out of the equation and pretends to get rights, we suffer accordingly.”
The charges against him, by the way, aren’t merely that he is defying the U.S. Supreme Court order and issuing improper orders to try to enforce his defiance. The complaint also cites his endorsement and other support (using the resources of his judicial office to promote and fundraise for) a non-profit corporation founded by his wife for the explicit purpose of promoting and enforcing acknowledgement of god in law and government.
We can all hope he gets removed from office soon. I suspect it is far too optimistic to hope that if so, he stops causing trouble for queer folks and anyone else who doesn’t share his religion.
!["The call volume for Trans Lifeline [suicide hotline] has doubled since HB2 was passed. This shitty law has a body count."](https://fontfolly.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/tumblr_inline_o5ws1otzea1rict0a_540.jpg)
Font Folly 