Tag Archives: religious right

Weekend Update 8/27/2016: Homophobic pastor is a child molester… surprise?

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Top 5 Reasons Churches End Up in Court. Surprise, Sexual abuse of minors is the number one reason five years running! Source: ChurchLawAndTax.com (click to embiggen)
Top 5 Reasons Churches End Up in Court. Surprise, Sexual abuse of minors is the number one reason five years running! Source: ChurchLawAndTax.com (click to embiggen)
It’s happened yet again. Homophobic pastor has been saying reprehensible/non-Christian things about queers, and now he’s been arrested: GEORGIA: Pastor Who Said Pulse Victims “Got What They Deserved” Arrested For Child Molestation. Maybe this is what all the whacky anti-gay preachers and other so-called leaders of the religious right mean when they say that people who speak out against queers are being arrested? They’re just leaving out the part where the arrest isn’t for their anti-gay beliefs?

For several years Dan Savage ran a recurring column at the Stranger called Youth Pastor Watch, where he would publish stories of youth pastors convicted of sexual molesting (usually) underage church members of either gender. And I’ve linked to and commented on the phenomenon of both anti-gay religious leaders and anti-gay political figures who have later been caught up in sex scandals, again, usually involving underage victims. Savage has also frequently said, “If children were sexually molested at Dennys’ restaurants as often as they are assaulted at churches, it would be illegal in all 50 states to take your children to Dennys’.” It isn’t that all religious people are child molesters, but most child molesters find communities willing to turn a blind eye toward their suspicious behavior among organized religion.

A perfect example is the story of former New Jersey Assemblies of God paster Gregorio Martinez: American Preacher Molested a Teen Boy, Then Fled 2,000 Miles. Martinez was convicted of sexually molesting a 13-year-old member of his congregation, and between the reading of the jury’s verdict and the sentencing hearing, he fled the country. For many months no one knew where he was.

A couple of reporters working for the news site NJ.com got a tip, and when they presented it to their editor, he authorized a trip to Honduras to try to catch the guy. Note! It wasn’t U.S. law enforcement who went looking for him, it was a pair or reporters! By the time the reporters located the church where Martinez had been working, he had fled again. But here’s the truly astounding part: the reporters learned that 1) Martinez was given a job at another church based solely on the recommendation of one other pastor—no other vetting was attempted, but even worse, 2) with several church members googled the pastor and learned he had been convicted of molesting children in the U.S., the response of church leaders was to claim it wasn’t their responsibility to report a criminal wanted by a foreign country!

Unfortunately, after he fled, it was discovered that Martinez had molested a 15-year-old boy there in Honduras. Martinez was eventually captured, but only because the reporters from New Jersey filed a lot of stories that got a lot of attention online about their attempts to find him, which shamed the law enforcement people into taking action.

I’ve also posted before links to stories about how many times various churches have lobbied for laws that shield child molesters from prosecution:

As I said of anti-gay politicians and vocally anti-gay religious leaders many times: “I really don’t understand why anyone, particularly in the media, doesn’t immediately assume that a legislator or prosecutor or governor or preacher who pushes for anti-gay bills has a scandalous sexual secret. I mean, when someone can create an entire web site devoted 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!”

It has happened so many times, that I’m getting a little impatient at both law enforcement and the media. Seriously, if the media just moved a few resources into looking into the backgrounds of the most vehemently anti-gay religious leaders, all the evidence indicates that they would find dozens of scandals. Scandals generate ratings, right? I’m at the point of saying that not looking into these guys should be considered a breach of journalistic ethics. I’m sorry, the evidence is fairly clear: the more they preach against queers in the name of Jesus, the more likely they are to be sexual predators.

Emphasis on predator. Real people, often children, are victims as institutions such as these churches and the Republican party enable these molesters. And as I said when I posted one of these weekend updates on a related topic, the sexual dysfunction and community denial and cover-ups are not a bug, they are a feature of the rightwing ideology.

And speaking of nice, loving Christian politicians: ‘I lost. The ni**er won’: Alabama GOP mayor gets racist on Facebook after losing to black candidate. Okay, so not every single Republican is racist, but most racists seem to be Republican.

Speaking of people claiming to be religious, I love this article from the Washington Post: Where in the Bible does it say you can’t be transgender? Nowhere. I’ve done the article one better in past posts and pointed out that the Bible seems to be pro-genderfluidity (or maybe agender?):

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
—Galation 3:28

But then, I actually read the Bible all the way through more than once—unlike most of the people on the anti-gay right.

Weekend Update 8/13/2016: Bigotry comes in many forms

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“There are worse things in the world than a boy who likes to kiss other boys.”
“There are worse things in the world than a boy who likes to kiss other boys.” (click to embiggen)
We’re another step closer to seeing the end of the so-called National Organization for Marriage. Over the last two days alone, Brian Brown, the current head of this anti-gay organization, has sent out follow-up emails to the organization’s usual begs for donations lamenting the lack of response. Except lamenting isn’t quite the right word: Brian Brown To Supporters: Thanks For Nothing, Losers.

Thursday’s email from Brown began with calling his donors pathetic: “We’re only 17% toward our goal of receiving 1,500 membership contributions of at least $35. That is pathetic.” And when that tactic failed to get the desired response, he followed up by called his donors quitters: “I really don’t believe — I just can’t imagine the thought — that NOM’s members have quit fighting for God’s institution of marriage. And yet, only 256 of you have responded with an urgently needed membership contribution during this critical period.”

Three years ago I wrote about how the organization was going in the red and only surviving by taking “loans” of several millions of dollars from a related religious education non-profit: In the hole, still digging. The money from the religious non-profit was raised under rules that forbid it being used for political advocacy purposes, which means that an outright transfer is illegal. However, as long as they call them loans they can. I wish that the IRS would investigate them over this, but we all know they won’t.

Not only are donations drying up, but they’ve been getting ever more pathetic turn-out for their March for Marriage events in Washington, DC, in 2014, then 2015, and earlier this year. I agree with Joe Jervis, who predicts that NOM will merge with the equally anti-gay World Congress Of Families, which just so happens to have hired Brian Brown as their new president. He’ll continue peddling hate, just mostly in countries where the message finds more sympathy.

Not that there aren’t still haters right here in America: Trump and Rubio Attend Florida Rally That Mocks LGBT Pain. Not only did they attend this anti-gay hatefest, but they did it two months to the day after the Orlanda gay nightclub massacre. Classy. Trump comes under fire for anti-lgbt conference Trump, of course, keeps claiming that he’s going to be great for gay rights. He also keeps promising evangelicals that he’ll appoint supreme court judges that will overturn marriage equality. Trump also wants the repeal the law that forbids religious non-profits from endorsing candidate: ORLANDO: Trump Tells Hate Group Meeting That Winning Presidency Will Get Him Into Heaven [VIDEO].

Of course, not all homophobia is as obvious and frothing as the people at NOM or the Liberty Council or similar organizations: Daily Beast’s Olympic Grindr Story Slammed as ‘Dangerous,’ ‘Homophobic’. I realize NBC is trying to appear unbiased, but they should have revised that headline to “Daily Beast’s Homophobic Olympic Grindr Story Slammed as ‘Dangerous’.” If you don’t understand why the Daily Beast’s story in which a straight editor created a fake profile on a gay hook-up app and tricked a bunch of Olympic athletes (many of them from countries where they can be put to death just for being accused of being gay) into meeting is inherently homophobic, read this: Grindr is not a gay sex peep show for straight people: If our dating rituals are weird to you it’s because you denied us the luxury of normality in public for so long. I could go on about it, but over at Slate openly gay Olympic athlete Amini Fonua said it best: Do you realize how many people’s lives you just ruined without any good reason but clickbait journalism?

And let’s not forget the self-loathing gay people who enable their own (and our) oppression: LGBT Rights Opponent Newt Gingrich To Address Log Cabin Republicans.

Fortunately, hate is a losing strategy. Love trumps hate. Let’s end this on a happy note and remember that love wins: These beautiful portraits of LGBT couples embracing will melt your heart.

Weekend Update 7/9/2016: anti-trans law not going to ballot, shooter stopped

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Copyright NBCI posted my first Weekend Update just over two years ago because there had been a lot of new information coming in the day before about one of the stories I had linked to in that week’s Friday Links. I didn’t originally intend it to become a regular thing. I do skip it some weeks. But most weeks I wind up feeling I need to post some follow-ups to some of the previous day’s news. Before I get into the unpleasant story, let’s take a moment to rejoice:

Backers of I-1515, the initiative to restrict which bathrooms transgender people can use, have told Washington state officials they will not turn in signatures by the Friday midnight deadline! Thank goodness. We keep referring to this as a transgender bathroom initiative, but it did more than that: it overruled a state finding that Washington’s existing non-discrimination law and certain portions of federal law required access to public bathrooms consistent with a trans person’s gender identity; it also forbid state agencies to make any such rulings in the future; it also forbid cities and counties from enacting their own transgender non-discrimination laws; it forbid any school (private or not) allowing any transgender student to use any bathroom other than a private, single-person bathroom; and finally, it mandated a $2500 bounty be paid to public school students who caught any transgender classmates using any bathroom other than the one that “matched” the gender the student had been assigned at birth.

None of us had any doubt the law would stand up in court if passed. Several of its components are identical to laws and policies that federal courts have already ruled violate Title IX of the United States Education Amendments of 1972 (also known as the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act). The state constitution requires that initiatives cover only one topic with a very narrow focus, and multi-part initiatives similar to this one have been struck down in the past for violating that requirement.

But in our state, initiatives that gather enough signatures are almost always placed on the ballot regardless of how unconstitutional they appear, under the reasoning that the people can reject the initiative if they think it is unconstitutional, and courts can examine the law in full after it is enacted if need be.

Past experience indicates that when an anti-gay initiative is on the ballot, the amount of harassment and hate crimes in the state go up, as the haters are whipped into a bit of a frenzy by all the advertisements and misinformation. Fighting an initiative takes time and effort away from other worthy causes, and it if did pass, fighting the initiative in court is also costly. And as we’ve seen recently with the Brexit vote in Britain, sometimes when a vote like this passes, it convinces the haters that everyone agrees with them, and the hate crimes and harassment continue.

So, this news Anti-Trans Campaign Fails To Collect Enough Signatures To Advance is wonderful and deserves a round of applause!

Politics_PR_2016-Jul-08In less pleasant news, the Dallas shooting situation was still happening Thursday night when I finished the yesterday’s Friday Links, so there has been a lot of developments. Among the details that I think people have still missed: there was only one shooter, not several. The shooter was not the person whose picture was plastered everyone as a person of interest, and whose picture remained on the police web site for nearly 24 hours after the police had already determined he wasn’t involved. Five officers total died. The Black Lives Matter organization was quick to condemn the shooting. The demonstration was peaceful. The sniper was killed by a remote controlled robot that the Dallas police obtained from the military supposedly for bomb disposal purposes.

Alton Sterling was a felon. Philando Castile was a ‘good man.’ None of that should matter. Whenever a black person dies in police custody, the press seems to put all effort they can into digging up information about the person’s past, as if that has anything to do with the use of force at the time of the killing. It doesn’t matter if Sterling had a criminal record, in the video he was clearly not struggling and was not a threat to anyone. It doesn’t matter the Castile was an exceptionally wonderful man and pillar of his community, having a broken tail light is not a valid reason to be executed by a cop, let alone be denied medical attention and allowed to bleed out while his wife and child watch, with the cop pointing his gun at them.

And let’s not lose sight of this issue: FBI’s warning of white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement nearly forgotten.

Police harassment of people based on racial profiling and other criteria that should have no bearing on how the citizen is treated isn’t a new problem. We mostly know about more cases now simply because nearly the entire population carries phones with cameras and the ability to uploads pictures and video to the world wide web from just about anywhere. There have been attempts to deal with the misuse of force by some police even before the era of the smart phone. We should revisit those attempts and figure out which things worked: The Blazer Experiment.

There are things that we can do as individuals. Here are some: How to be a white ally: Fighting racism is your responsibility — start now.

I’m glad that the suspect was stopped before any more cops were killed, but I’m not at all comfortable with the continued militarization of police: Use of robot in Dallas highlights tactical opportunities, ethical questions for police.

Then, of course, there is the man who was not in any way involved in the shooting, but whose picture was plastered all of the world as a suspect, and the stupid reasons that it was: The Case of Mark Hughes, Or Don’t Carry at a Protest. “Hughes may have been totally within his legal rights. But his actions were really only barely less stupid than the jackasses who terrorize folks at the local Bennigans or Home Depot by ‘legally’ walking into a public establishment with an AR-15. Why do you bring a rifle to a peaceful protest? I get it. You do it as a message of self-assertion and power in the face of dehumanization and powerless. It’s still stupid; it’s not the right or a safe way to send that message.”

I’ve spent almost two hours on this post. That’s enough. I’m going to go post more cute cat pictures to my twitter, and then get back to Camp NaNoWriMo.

Weekend Update 7/2/2016 – Neither free nor religious

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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.

Finding ways to make their hating of the sinner sound compassionate

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Francis-Cartoon-8The pope made news again, saying that in light of the Orlando shooting, the Catholic Church owes queers an apology: Pope: Church owes apology to gays (and they’re not the only ones). The news came while I was in the middle of a busy weekend including both the Locus Awards and the Pride Parade, so I didn’t have time to dig into it. I assumed that this was another instance of the press taking part of a statement out of context, as they did three years ago with all the “who am I to judge” headlines that said the pope was in favor of gay rights, when what the pope actually said was more along the lines of, “Who am I to judge a person who claims to be ex-gay and does a decent enough job of staying in the closet as to give me plausible deniability?”

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.

There’s a new study out showing, once again, that simply saying these things about us causes actual harm to our health, both mental and physical: What Happens When Gay People Are Told That Homosexuality Is A Sin?

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.

Why thoughts and prayers are worse than inadequate

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A cartoon drawn by Patt Kelley and posted from his twitter account (@pattkelley) More of his work available at www.pattkelley.com (Click to embiggen)
A cartoon drawn by Patt Kelley and posted from his twitter account (@pattkelley) More of his work available at http://www.pattkelley.com (Click to embiggen)
When horrible things happen, the first reaction of some people is to say that their thoughts and prayers are with who ever is suffering because of the events. It sounds nice. It makes the person saying it appear to be concerned, without actually costing them anything. It is a poor substitute for actually being helpful. This cartoon, which Patt Kelley recently shared on the topic, shows a person on fire, and another person holding a garden hose and spraying water into a bucket rather than putting out the fire. The person with the hose offers prayers, when a means to actually do something about the pain, suffering, and death is right there in his hands.

People insist that there is nothing they else they can do, but frequently they’re wrong. There are things which can be done. Things within the power of the people making that statement. Congress critters of the conservative sort are especially liable, here (but not the only ones). And I don’t just mean in passing laws, though that could often help.

The very same congresspeople who sat in Republican caucus recently and prayed that gays are “worthy of death” made a big show of talking about thoughts and prayers while a lot of the public was up in arms about the Orlando shooting. It didn’t stop them from killing an amendment to extend job discrimination protections to queer people. It didn’t stop them from voting down an amendment to tighten (but hardly close) the so-called gun show loophole. It doesn’t stop them from attending rallies with pastors who call for the death of gays. It doesn’t stop them from telling their supporters that letting trans children use the bathroom that matches their gender identity is dangerous.

They’re not just withholding a water hose. They’re the people who have been splashing gasoline in the direction of every queer person they could for years. They’re the people who handed matches out to lots of people and said, “I don’t condone violence, but god says queers are monsters.”

Thoughts and prayers is more than just a means to look like you care when you don’t. It’s more than just a means to appear helpful while you do nothing. It’s more that just a means to make people focus on your piety rather than the problems of others.

It’s also an attempt to establish an alibi.

If they offer thoughts and prayers, then clearly they can claim they had no idea that all their anti-gay rhetorical was going to encourage another to attack queer people. If they offer thoughts and prayers, then clearly they can also claim that they had no idea that all the anti-trans hysteria they’ve whipped up over bathrooms would make gender nonconforming kids hate themselves to the point of considering suicide. If they offer thoughts and prayers, than clearly they can claim it’s not their fault that queer people grow up filled with fear and self-loathing, driving some to self destructive behavior, while driving some to turn that violence toward others. Clearly, they say, it isn’t their fault that anyone would listen to all the hate they have been spewing and act on it.

Why would anyone ever think they wanted that?

Weekend Update 5/28/2016: Haters show true colors

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"The call volume for Trans Lifeline [suicide hotline] has doubled since HB2 was passed. This shitty law has a body count."
“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?

Weekend Update 5/21/2016: Ringtone Rhapsody and Beyond

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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):

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

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:

Oklahoma lawmakers call ‘state of emergency’ to stop trans kids from using the restroom.

Transgender bathroom bills introduced in Oklahoma Legislature.

Oklahoma introduces measure to impeach Obama over bathroom rights.

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.

Speaking of good news: South Carolina Senate blocks Berkeley anti-transgender bathroom ban. This is the second time since this trans bathroom mania began that South Carolina legislators have killed one of these kinds of bills.

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:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Anti-trans bigot demonstrates that bullies are cowards… (duh!)

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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!)
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.

But if we fight, we can win. We will win.

http://mediamatters.org/embed/210426

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here to watch the clip from Matthews’ show.)

Weekend Update 4/23/2016 – Republican child molesters, redux

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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.
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.

In case you forgot, Hastert has been indicted for illegally trying to conceal millions of dollars in hush money payments to try to keep the public from learning that when Hastert was a High School football coach he molested at least four of the boys under his supervision. Oh, and he’s also been indicated for lying to the FBI about what all the financial shenanigans are about: Dennis Hastert’s secret gay ‘misconduct’ is even worse given his terrible voting record on gay rights and Dennis Hastert Molested At Least Four Young Boys: Prosecutors.

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?