“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:
Click to embiggen. (I have found this image on dozens of articles and blog posts about trans issues, but never with an art credit. If you know who made this, please let me know so I can at least credit them!)So, professional bigot Travis Weber (spokesperson for the Family Research Council) was on Chris Matthews’ show on MSNBC last week to speak in favor of the North Carolina law that makes it a crime for trans people to use a public bathroom that doesn’t match the gender on their birth certificates. The other guest was Jennifer Boylan, an English professor and writer who happens to be trans.
No matter how hard Matthews tried, he couldn’t get Weber to say which bathroom Boylan should use. He’s there to defend this law that insists Boylan shouldn’t use the women’s room, but Weber can’t bring himself to say it while she’s sitting right there. It’s almost funny.
I was going to say a lot more about this, but another blogger already hits all the points I want to make:
…[he] can’t bring himself to answer the question. Not with Boylan sitting there—not with Boylan empowered to respond to him directly, personally, publicly, and immediately. Watch as Weber’s bigoted “convictions” and “sincerely held religious beliefs” wilt in the presence of one of the people he’s trying to stir up bigotry against.
And:
Those ridiculous lies [they told about same-sex marriage] won ’em some battles — they carried the day before the Washington State Supreme Court — but they didn’t win ’em the war. Because their lies couldn’t survive us. They couldn’t survive us getting out there and speaking for ourselves, they couldn’t survive the scrutiny of decent and reasonable people, they couldn’t survive our lawyers, and they couldn’t survive satire and ridicule…. The [anti-trans] haters are winning some battles right now, and that sucks, and their hateful rhetoric makes an already dangerous world for trans people even more dangerous. But their “wins” are putting trans people in the spotlight. Trans people are speaking for themselves, disproving the lies, and joining in or leading the joyful mocking of the haters — just as the fight against same-sex marriage put same-sex couples (some half or wholly trans) in the spotlight. We spoke for ourselves, we mocked the haters, we gathered supporters, and we won the war.
I’m not arguing for complacency—we won the fight for marriage equality because we got out there and fucking fought it. We’re gonna have to fight this fight too. And we are fighting it and we are going to win. We are winning.
I didn’t identify the blogger before the quote because a lot of trans people of my acquaintance believe (incorrectly) that Dan Savage is anti-trans.
Regardless of what you think of Dan, this time he is definitely right on this one. The anti-trans bigots are using exactly the same arguments they have used against queer people before to justify denying us marriage rights, to justify sodomy laws, and so on. They claim we are monsters and predators and a threat to children. They raise false alarms and generate panic over things that have never actually happened. And yes, they are winning some battles. North Caroline is one place they have won.
But at the same time, they are losing the war. This bills are bringing more trans people forward. And as the panicked cis-hets see and meet real trans people, see the stories of real trans kids and their families, they are realizing the rhetoric is all lies. A CNN/ORC poll published today found that 57% of Americans disapprove of the North Carolina anti-trans bill. But even more important, only 48% of Republicans support such bills. Now, only 48% disapprove, and somehow 4% aren’t sure, but think about that: less than half of all Republicans approve this latest Republican hot-button issue. Wow.
Oh, and the same poll found that only 49% of North Carolina residents support the law.
It reminds me of one of the most telling stories that happened during the marriage equality fight. Before the Supreme Court ruling, one of the states was debating a marriage equality bill. And the relevant committees of both the upper and lower house of the state legislature scheduled public hearings that same day. So many people showed up wanting to speak and both hearings, that the committee chairs decided it would best to combine the hearings. So they moved both committees to a bigger room.
One Republican legislator who had been staunchly opposed to the bill switched his vote after that hearing. He said because they were in a different auditorium, he wasn’t in his usual spot up near the center of the front, but was off to the side, where it was easy to become distracted by the crowd and not pay attention to the citizens speaking. He said watching the gay and lesbian couples who were waiting their turn to speak interacting with each other and their children was a revelation to him. His whole life, he said, he had thought of gay people not as people, but as sexual acts. He didn’t believe they were actually in love. Watching them, he finally realized that queer people are just people. And that the couples were in love just the same as he and his wife. That they weren’t asking for special privileges. They just wanted the same legal protections for their families that straight people take for granted.
Just from watching them interact with their partners and children in the audience seats of an auditorium. That’s all it took.
We must fight. Make no mistake. And those of us who happen to be cis have to fight just as hard for the rights, dignity, and visibility of our trans brothers and sisters as we fought those previous battles. We have to remember that no one is free until everyone is.
“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.
This is going to be a quickie, since it’s my husband’s birthday and we’re off to do some furniture shopping as well as celebrate. Also, I’m avoiding answering the phone since some of my family members escalated the grieving process to the crying and screaming at each other stage earlier than I expected. I had thought that wouldn’t happen until after the person who just entered hospice care had actually died. But the dying man is a lifelong abuser, so I should have realized he’d drive people to turn on each other at least one more time.
While we’re on the subject of evil, abusive men, let’s talk about one that didn’t raise me…
Betty Powers footnotes former House Majority Leader, Tom Delay’s, letter for us. (Click to embiggen)Hey, so a couple dozen of the people who wrote letters asking for leniency for admitted child molester and former Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, agreed to allow their identities and the contents of the letters made public (which was the condition the judge insisted on before he would look at any of them). That’s a bit less than half the letters the lawyers originally tried to submit under seal: Tom Delay and ex-CIA director among those who ask judge to go easy on Dennis Hastert.
He’s not being charged with the molestation, which drove at least one of the boys to commit suicide, because conveniently there’s a statute of limitations on sexually molesting children: Dennis Hastert Case Renews Debate Over Sex Crime Statute of Limitations. I think Eileen McNamara, a journalism professor at Brandeis University, puts it best in a quote from that last article:
“Why should a rape victim’s access to the courthouse depend on when the crime was committed?” McNamara wrote then. “There is no statute of limitations on murder because no one thinks the passage of time should shield a killer from answering for his crime. Why should perpetrators of the soul-killing act of rape have such a legal escape hatch?”
Why, indeed, do these hypocrites who rail against other people’s sexuality, and use it to deprive queers, women, and others of civil rights, keep being given these escape hatches?
University United Methodist Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma.Ordinarily this post would begin with a declaration of gratitude for the arrival of Friday. Ordinarily this post would also have a lot more links than you will find below. There has been a slow stream of unpleasant health news from my extended family for the last few weeks, only some of which have I mentioned online. Most of the news has involved extended family members. Last night I learned of a much closer member of the family moving into hospice care. Several of my immediate family members are naturally distraught, and I am trying to be supportive. I will eventually go into things in more detail, but I think this is all I’ll say for now.
Meanwhile, here are links to some of the interesting things I read on the web this week, sorted into various topic areas.
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN – Teaser Trailer (HD) {I had no idea that I wanted a remake of this classic, but then I watched the teaser trailer; Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt? Why, yes, I’ll take some!}:
You may be cool, but you will never be Benedict Cumberbatch buying Dr Strange comics while dressed as Dr Strange Cool. (Click to embiggen)Thank goodness it’s Friday! It has been more than a week since the end of my third round of antibiotics, and there has not been a return of the sore throat or ear ache! I think, maybe, it finally worked. On the other hand, two different cousins had seriously bad medical issues pop up this week, both requiring emergency surgery for very different things. So while I may be getting better, not all of the news around me is good.
Meanwhile, here are links to some of the interesting things I read on the web this week, sorted into various topic areas.
When the former Republican Speaker of the House was a high school wrestling coach he sexually molested male students. (Click to embiggen)If you’re an adult queer person trying to live openly in this so-called land of the free, Republicans want to be able to discriminate against you with impunity, while telling you that your very existence is destroying America and that you are going to burn in hell. But, if you’re a retired Republican congressperson who used to molest high school boys (the youngest identified by prosecutors was 14 at the time of the abuse) back when you were a high school teacher (Hastert Molested at Least Four Boys, Prosecutors Say), well then, of course, they want people to forgive and forget: While former House Speaker Dennis Hastert asks for leniency, media recounts corruption allegations. His lawyers have gone so far as to contact the family of one of the boys he molested, and asked them to write a letter asking for leniency because of all the “help” Hastert gave to the man later?
I really don’t understand why anyone, particularly in the media, doesn’t immediately assume that a legislator or prosecutor or governor who pushes for anti-gay bills has a scandalous sexual secret. I mean, when someone can create an entire web site to chronicling the prominent anti-gay folks who are later caught in a gay sex scandal: GayHomophobe.com, it’s time to stop turning a blind eye to the issue!
Visit Mississippi, where “We have an oppressive law to match our oppressive heat,” says Funny or Die.Thank goodness it’s Friday! We didn’t quite get the record-breaking heat forecast yesterday, but we’ve have more than enough pollen in the air all week to make me miserable.
Meanwhile, here are links to some of the interesting things I read on the web this week, sorted into various topic areas.
The Republicans’ Gay Freakout. “OUR infrastructure is inexcusable, much of our public education is miserable and one of our leading presidential candidates is a know-nothing, say-anything egomaniac who yanks harder every day at the tattered fabric of civil discourse and fundamental decency in this country. But let’s by all means worry about the gays!”
Marble Mountain, a themed marble machine “…a large marble machine still under construction. It consists of 25 sections that mesh together to form one kinetic sculpture. Every element is themed (or will be upon completion) to an aspect of my life or to something that I find interesting. Some of the elements include a roller coaster, ski jump, Times Square, Lombard Street, and a skatepark. It took 3 years to get to this point of being able to turn it on and watch it go…”:
!["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 