Tag Archives: rightwing

There is so much to be pedantic about amidst this horrible news

society, , , ,

13432397_10153874492626137_2143268961484960249_nI was annoyed early on in the coverage of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting that news sites and individuals on social media all kept claiming that the hate crime was the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. The first reason it annoyed me was because the Wounded Knee Massacre on December 29, 1890 was much bigger. About 300 Lakota men, women, and children were shot to death that day. I understand why no politician alive today wants to acknowledge that. It was the U.S. Army that did the deed, and there is political hay to be made by insisting that it was a battle rather than a war crime, even now 126 years later.

Similarly, the Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864 was also a lot bigger than the Orlando shooting: between 70-163 Cheyenne and Arapahoe men women and children were slaughtered. Again, modern politicians don’t want to talk about it, and certainly don’t want to admit it was a crime, rather than a battle.

That’s not the only thing about this horrific crime that brings out my pedantic tendencies. There has also been a lot of debate about whether this is an act of terrorism or a hate crime. As one friend put it: since the earliest reports that had virtually no details called the attack on a gay nightclub a possible terrorist attack, we knew that that shooter wasn’t white. That’s a not-facetious observation of the systemic racism of police officials everywhere, but there is another serious point, here. A lot of people outside the police want to transform this event into an act of terrorism against America, rather than recognize that the native born American man who decided to slaughter 50 queers in a queer club on a Saturday night during Pride month is a hate crime against the gay community.

As another friend pointed out, all hate crime is meant to terrorize. That’s true. That is the moral and legal justification given for even recognizing hate crime as a category of crime. The intent of the criminal isn’t just to harm the person or persons directly attacked, the intent is to frighten similar people. In this case, to put all queer people on notice that there are people out there who will gladly murder us just for being who we are. And literally for as long as humans have had laws (going back to ancient Sumeria at least!), we have always used the person’s intent as one of the ways to gauge the severity of the crime (cf. the only difference between murder in the second degree and not-guilty by reason of self-defense is the intent of the killer, nothing else).

Of course the politicians and so-called religious leaders who have been trying to deny queer people civil rights, objecting to our lives being even acknowledged, have said that we are immoral and dangerous, and so on want to erase us from this tragedy. They have many reasons for this. The most basic is that they just want to erase us, period, of course. But an even bigger reason they want to erase us is because they don’t want to admit that they have contributed to this crime. Every time they say that it is dangerous for kids to even see us, every time they say we are a danger to children just by being in a public restroom, every time they say that god is going to judge America for giving us some rights, every time they say queers are “ultimately destructive to society,” it encourages hatred and violence toward us.

Some religious leaders get it: Florida Catholic bishop: ‘It is religion, including our own,’ that targets LGBT people. And thank you, Bishop Lynch for at least admitting that. But what are you going to do about it?

Others are trying to focus on the shooter’s claims of doing this for the Islamic State. They conveniently want to overlook the fact that this young man was born in New York and grew up here in America. They ignore the fact that the leaders of ISIS long ago said anyone who wants to commit an act of terror in their name doesn’t need to ask permission, and that they will gladly take credit for anything that gets them in a headline, whether they actually had anything to do with it beforehand. This also, once again, conveniently elides over the fact that American evangelical fundamentalist Christians are no less hateful toward queers than radical fundamentalist muslim terrorists: Christian Pastor Celebrates Nightclub Massacre: “There’s 50 Less Pedophiles in This World”. The problem isn’t the Islam or Christianity per se, it is the fundamentalism that’s the problem. The extensive record of radical American Christians preaching hatred for queers is there for all to see.

The ingredients that cooked up this slaughter of 49 queer people are several, yes, but you can identify the big three:

  • Demonizing of queers by politicians, religious leaders, and others
  • Toxic masculinity
  • Easy access to guns

We can do something about all of those things, even though it won’t be easy.

The first requires everyone who doesn’t think queers are evil to confront your elected officials and religious leaders and others during the rest of the year when they make their usual arguments about us. If you’re Christian, tell these other people that they do not speak for you. Make yourself heard. Yes, it means uncomfortably calling out friends and family, sometimes, but we’re not talking about a disagreement over sports teams, we’re talking about the life and death of real people.

The second one is big and complex, but not intractable. First, just let boys be. Speak up when you hear someone tell a boy that he can’t play with that toy because it’s a girls’ toy, for instance.

The last one is difficult to tackle because one particular lobbying group has managed to delude a sizeable fraction of the public into believing that the only thing any of us mean when we say we want to deal with that is a total ban on all guns. Yesterday I made an analogy between the way we used to say that drunk driving was just as impossible to do anything about as gun violence, and how we have since proven that assertion false. A big part of the change that happened in the drunk driving debate was that we allowed a national bureau to compile nation wide statistics on alcohol-related car accidents. So the very minimum that we should do (and there is no excuse not to) is to lift the legal ban on studying gun violence as a public health issue. Studying drunk driving led people to think of options that had never even been discussed before; options that worked. Let us study it, at the very least!

And let the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives use modern data tacking methods, for goodness sake! Give us the tools to try to figure out how guns fall out of the legal sales system. Maybe 90% of the population (and a bigger percentage of the experts) are wrong that closing the gun show loophole and a couple of other measures that my NRA friends get foaming at the mouth over. The truth is that you don’t know we’re wrong, and can’t prove we’re wrong because you’ve made it illegal to study and compile the statistics. Maybe a measure like the Texas law that penalizes people for not promptly reporting the theft of a gun will deter illegal gun trafficking, maybe it won’t. We can’t know until we’re allowed to study it.

And I’m sorry, I don’t often invoke Ronald Reagan, but sometimes he was right: “I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.” Since this post started out about being pedantic, his terminology was a bit off, but Reagan believed then, and at least 58% of Americans agree with him now, that assault weapons should be banned outright, just as we already ban bombs, grenades, rockets, missiles, and mines. If a civilization requires everyone to be armed and constantly prepared to kill other people, that isn’t civilization.

I’ve ranted enough today. This isn’t just about problems and solutions. This is a human disaster, and real humans died, and many more real humans are hurt and in fear. If we forget that, we stop being human: CNN’s Anderson Cooper Fights Back Tears Reading Orlando Victim Names.

Victims killed in Pulse in Orlando this last weekend.
Victims killed in Pulse in Orlando this last weekend. (Click to embiggen) (Facebook/AP/Reuters/Rex)

They used to insist that drunk driving couldn’t be reduced, either

society, , ,

BryanFuller_2016-Jun-12It didn’t take long after people started reacting on social media to the news the at least 50 people were killed in an Orlando, Florida gay nightclub (and at least 53 were seriously injured) by a lone gunman before the arguing started. I made the mistake of sharing a comment about one very specific gun law that actually would have applied to this gunman’s purchase of the weapons used in the crime just a week or so ago, and commenting about who blocked the bill. And I was immediately accused of calling for the total ban of all guns everywhere, and reminded how badly prohibition worked with alcohol and drugs.

It’s a common argument. There are some problems with it. And those problems are most easily illustrated by looking at the topic of drunk driving. See, I’m old enough to remember when people actually argued that nothing at all could be done to reduce the number of deaths due to drunk driving. People have a fundamental right to imbibe alcohol, it was argued. People will find a way to get alcohol, look what happened during prohibition! The only person at fault is the “nut behind the wheel,” it was asserted, and no law is going to deter an irresponsible person! Just as no law or policy or other external force could prevent stupidity.

Editorials were written making the argument that while the traffic fatalities that resulted from the misuse of alcohol were tragic, no meaningful solution could be enacted—certainly not through the law!

I know, because I wrote one or two such editorials.

The first scientific paper drawing a connection between alcohol use and motor vehicle collisions was published way back in 1904 (it’s a little weird to realize that automobiles have been around that long). A much more rigorous study conducted in Sweden in 1932 is generally regarded as the first to definitively show that alcohol impaired drivers were more likely to have accidents leading to significant property damage, injury, or death than sober ones. But even as more studies piled up, the “nut behind the wheel” argument still prevented anything more than token laws that in many states treated driving while intoxicated about as severely as failure to use a turn signal.

In the mid-sixties several events managed to crack the public’s obstinance enough to recognize that automotive design and road design also significantly contributed to traffic fatalities. Congress created the National Highway Safety Bureau (later renamed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) and gave it the mission to research the causes of highway fatalities and recommend solutions. Most of Congress and the public expected the Bureau only to bring back recommendations for safety regulations of the vehicles and roads, but the science made it clear that more would be required.

During the 70s, due to recommendations from the Bureau, a series of regulations were enacted improving both the safety of the cars and the roads. There was also a concerted effort to educate the public on two areas: seat belt use, and not driving after drinking. Various studies later found that the education campaigns alone didn’t have much effect. The improvements in vehicle construction and changes to road design did not reduce the number of fatalities annually, though the rate of fatalities as a percentage of total number of miles driven annually did go down. Population growth meant the more people were driving, therefore more miles total driven each year. Bottom line: the first decade of safety improvements had only a minimal effect.

Between 1982 and 1997 is when things took off. Congress made a lot of federal highway money dependent on states enacting more uniform laws about such things as the blood alcohol level that qualified as legally impaired, minimum age for legally purchasing alcohol, and bringing real penalties to bear for the drivers who were caught. Education and treatment programs were mandated, and regulations about the sale and serving of alcohol to individuals were enacted. All of these actions, along with activism and education campaigns from groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, combined to do what the PSA campaigns of the 70s alone couldn’t do: the public’s attitude about drunk driving (as measured in surveys) changed, and (more importantly) the number of alcohol-related crash fatalities went down about 10% by 1990.

This prompted the non-profits and government agencies working on the issue to set a goal of reducing the number by another 20% by the year 2000—a goal we hit in 1997! Something that we said we couldn’t possibly do, and for all the same reasons that we are currently told are why absolutely nothing can be done about mass shootings and gun violence in America.

Is a total reduction of alcohol-related crash fatalities by 30% a complete elimination of the drunk driving problem? No. But if we could have fewer multiple-victim shootings next year instead of more, that would be a good start.

I am not proposing a ban on all gun sales. I never have. I’m a former NRA member, myself, for goodness sake! And no serious proposals I have seen have called for that, nor for anything even close to that. The big problem we have right now is that the moment any of us say anything about trying any of the measures which have already been demonstrated to work, people start howling at us about prohibition.

I was told yesterday that the 50 queer latinx lives snuffed out in Orlando yesterday were less important than the right of a dealer to sell an assault rifle to someone on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. I was told that me being angry about an industry lobbying group blocking even one reform bill that would have applied exactly to yesterday’s murder case was rude. I was told that pointing out that the NRA is more concerned with protecting the profits of the gun manufacturing industry than promoting responsible gun ownership was rude.

When I was challenged, I did get rude, yes. Fifty queer people were murdered yesterday in what was actually a quite preventable crime, and I’m not allowed to ask that maybe a measure supported by 90% of the population in the country should be given a try?

Fifty queer people were murdered, and yes, I’m taking it a little more personally than some of the earlier shootings. Maybe it’s a failing on my part that I didn’t get as angry before. But just because I’m taking it personally does not mean that I don’t have a point. We can tweak regulations and close loopholes without destroying freedom—we did it to reduce drunk driving, we can do it to reduce gun violence. Just because there isn’t a single, elegant solution doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything.

But we have to be allowed to actually try.

Weekend Update 6/11/2016: His idea of ethics is disobeying the law

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Alabama state government is awash in corruption, scandal, and criminal investigations. Diagram by John Archibald | jarchibald@al.com.
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’.

I feel a Tingle, tingle, tingle…

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Puppies in tin foil hats
Puppies in tin foil hats (Click to embiggen)
It’s Hugo voting season again, and as I’m reading through the stories that have been nominated, I’m once again confronted with a number of choices that were placed on the ballot by the bloc-voting scheme of the Rabid Puppies. I’ve had at least one friend ask why I even care, which I suppose is a legitimate question. There are several reasons, but one of the biggies is this: it has been demonstrated that being nominated for a Hugo can have a significant impact on the sales figures for a book and/or author who was not previously really well known. In other words, folks who are mid-listers and below receive an immediate improvement in sales when they are included in the short list for the Hugos. If such a person goes on to win, there is a bigger increase in sales. And many authors have attested to the fact that when they won at a point when their career was struggling, that agents or editors who previously hadn’t shown any interest come knocking at the door.

Because no one has ever taken the equivalent of exit polls when people leave physical bookstores or log off of online stores to determine why people buy specific books, we have less hard data about the long term effects winning awards on someone’s sales. Library data indicates that books which have won the Hugo, Nebula, or Clarke awards have much higher circulation rates (more people check them out, they remain on the shelf for shorter times between check-outs, et cetera). Some marketing research seems to support the idea that when browsing, people are more likely to pick up and look at book that says “award winner” on it than those that don’t.

Which is all to say that one of the reasons I care is because getting nominated or winning the award can significantly benefit a writers’ career, particularly one that is not otherwise well known. So spiteful schemes to push works of dubious quality onto the ballot causes actual harm to the people who otherwise would have made the short list. Super spiteful schemes, like this year’s Rabid Puppy slate, which push material that the organizer chose precisely because of how bad it is, are even worse.

Which brings us to one of this year’s nominees: “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” by Chuck Tingle. Tingle (not his real name) is a niche erotica author who produces a lot of really weird erotic fiction that is clearly not meant to be taken seriously. He had never even heard of the Hugo Awards before his nomination was announced, and had to have it explained to him by an interviewer who was asking him for a reaction. His immediate reaction was to say that he despite getting nominated for an award because of it, he is definitely not in favor of bloc voting.

Tingle said his son told him he needed to look into the folks behind the puppies, especially Vox Day.
Tingle said his son told him he needed to look into the folks behind the puppies, especially Vox Day.
He has since educated himself on the topic. This inspired a series of Gif- and video-illustrated tweets mocking Vox Day, the racist & misogynist guy running (and profiting off of) the Rabid Puppy campaign.

Tingle also wrote a new “book” for the occasion: “Slammed In The Butt By My Hugo Award Nomination.”

That wasn’t the end of his trolling of the Sad and Rabid Puppies. He has since asked Zoe Quinn, who is hated by the puppies and their allies the GamerGaters, to attend this year’s WorldCon and if Tingle’s story should win, to accept on his behalf and give a speech about whatever she wants. So if the puppy loyalists vote for Tingle’s story, they give one of their most hated people another public forum to talk about the issues they hate being talked about: Weird porn author who was dragged into Hugo Awards mess pulls off epic troll.

He didn’t stop there. He realized that despite the fact the Vox Day has managed to use the Rabid Puppy campaign to radically increase traffic to his blog and publishing site, and to sell more books to the sorts of racist, homophobic, misogynist fans who apparently previously didn’t know how to find them, Vox had never purchased the Rabid Puppy web domain. So Tingle bought it and set it up as a site to mock Vox and to promote some of the authors that Vox has so often publickly denigrated: Chuck Tingle thwarts devilman Vox Day, buys TheRabidPuppies.com for HARD buckaroos.

sometimes devilmen are so busy planning scoundrel attacks they forget to REGISTER important website names. this is a SOFT WAY of the antibuckaroo agenda but is also good because it makes it easy for BUDS WHO KNOW LOVE IS REAL to prove love (all).

please understand this is website to take DARK MAGIC and replace with REAL LOVE for all who kiss the sky.

Tingle hasn’t just turned his unique satirical eye toward the puppies. His commentary on the transphobic bathroom laws and similar nonsense, “Pounded In The Butt By My Irrational Bigoted Fear Of Humans Who Were Born As Unicorns Using A Human Restroom” is available (as all of his delightfully weird titles are) on Kindle.

I don’t think that there is anything particularly award-winning about “Space Raptor Butt Invasion,” but Tingle’s actions are definitely award-worthy. I know I’m not the only regular Hugo vote who is considering putting Tingle’s story above No Award on my ballot because he’s been both a good sport about this, and so delightfully entertaining in his take down of the Rabid Puppy ringleader. And for a man who finds many weird ways to put the phrase “pounded in the butt” into story titles, he’s been much more civil in his attacks on Vox Day than Vox has ever been to anyone.

If you want more details on Tingle’s campaign against the bigots: Satirical erotica author Chuck Tingle’s massive troll of conservative sci-fi fans, explained.

When I first started to draft this post, I had more information and links about the Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies, but I think that Cory Doctorow was right on the money when he recently said, “the two groups who want to kill the Hugos call themselves “Rabid Puppies” and “Sad Puppies” for fantastically tedious reasons you can look up for yourself if you care to.” Re-hashing the reasons they’ve launched these campaigns and the inconsistencies and contradictions in their arguments is tedious. We’ve all written way more about it than they deserve.

Tingle’s bizarre and hilarious response reminds me that life, reading, and storytelling are far too important to take seriously. It’s much easier to enjoy a good story if I laugh about something frivolous first than it is if I’ve been ranting about someone being a jerk.

So I’m going to go read another of Tingle’s stories, then get back to the serious work of reading and writing sf/f.

ETA: Chuck Tingle isn’t the only person who writes silly stuff that is more worth your time than the rantings of outraged people. May I humbly suggest:

Monster Mashed by Grave Robbers from Outer Space, or

John Scalzi Is Not a Popular Author And I Myself Am Very Popular

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 5/14/2016: Molester going to prison

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“Dennis Hastert committed crimes against children and must be made responsible.”
“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.”

In addition to spending 15 months in prison, with two years of supervision afterward and being forced to register as a sex offender, Hastert is being fined: Former Speaker Dennis Hastert Pays $250K Fine Linked to Sex Abuse.

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.

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?

Weekend Update 4/16/16: Republicans shielding sex criminals (again and again and again)

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I’ve written a few times about the case of former Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, who has pled guilty to charges of trying to illegally conceal large cash transfers he made to pay millions of dollars in hush money in order to prevent the public from learning that while he was a high school wrestling coach he molested at least four of the boys under his supervision. The sexual assaults occurred long enough ago that due to a statute of limitations on such crimes, Hastert can’t be charged with the molestation. (Which prompted the Daily Show to point out, “You’d think something as awful as molesting children would have no statute of limitations”, because things like parking tickets have no statute of limitations, for example.)

There was one interesting little twist this week as Hastert’s sentencing date approaches: The judge in Dennis Hastert’s hush-money case says that if the former House speaker wants letters of support considered during his sentencing, they must be made public. Hastert’s lawyers have drummed up 60 letters of support from various people asking the judge for leniency. However, those letters have been submitted under seal, keeping the identity of the letter writers and the contents of the letters private. Presumably because most of the people (if not all) who wrote the letters only agreed to do so on condition of anonymity. Because no one, particularly no elected official, wants to go on record supporting a child molester. The judge has rightfully pointed out that ordinarily such leniency pleas are part of the public record.

I’ve been harping on Hastert because he was an anti-gay politician when he was in Congress, going so far as to, after promising the parents of Matthew Shephard (who was murdered in a gruesome hate crime) to help pass a hate crime’s bill, actually did everything in his power to kill it (and succeeded). Some reporters have tried to claim that Hastert wasn’t that anti-gay, or at least not as anti-gay as some of his fellow Republicans. Michelangelo Signorile begs to differ: How Dennis Hastert Demonized Gays as Predators While He Was the True ‘Super-Predator’

The records show that Hastert’s office kept a legislative file titled “Homosexuals,” filled with policy statements from social conservative groups like the Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Research Council that criticized same-sex marriage and Clinton administration efforts to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. The file also includes a 1996 Weekly Standard article, “Pedophilia Chic” that warned that “revisionist suggestions about pedophilia” were being embraced by the left…

…What was curiously not in Hastert’s files, according to the Politico report, was anything about the scandal that enveloped former GOP congressman Mark Foley, who was exposed in 2007 for having sent sexually explicit messages to teenage boys in the House page program. Hastert in fact was accused of dragging his feet in dealing with Foley’s activities, his office having known about it for months but either covering it up or simply not acting with the speed expected from the office of a House member who was so concerned about child predators.

New York Daily News front page breaking the scandal
New York Daily News front page breaking the scandal (click to embiggen)
Hastert, of course, isn’t the only Republican who demonized some people’s sexual lives while engaging is sexual misconduct himself: Cosponsor of Tenn. Transphobic Bill Accused of Sexual Harassment Not just accused—the accusations have been around for months—what has finally happened is the Attorney General’s office has found sufficient evidence against GOP Rep. Jeremy Durham that the rest of the legislature felt compelled to act, and has exiled him to an office in another building and essentially quarantined him from any contact with woman on any legislative staff position. I am very amused at Think Progress’s headline earlier this week about it: The Surprising Sexual Harassment Scandal Accompanying Tennessee’s Anti-Transgender Bill, because the only thing that any reasonable person should find surprising about this is that his fellow republicans have taken any action against their fellow family values champion at all.

And remember those statute of limitations laws in various states that shield child molesters, while letting other, far less severe crimes be punished many many years later. You want to know how those laws came to exist? Disgraced Former NY Assembly Speaker had affairs with at least two women — one a lobbyist, the other a former assemblywoman, court papers show According to records unsealed this week, former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver had affairs with two women, one of whom is a former aide turned lobbyist who was hired by the Catholic Church to pressure legislators against a bill that would have extended the time period in which victims of molestation could sue their attackers. Sheldon dropped his support for the bill once his former aide/mistress began lobbying against it. So the sex criminals being shielded were pedophile priests whose victims didn’t speak up while they were still children. Again.

And I have to ask once again, why do any of us ever take any of these anti-sex, anti-gay politicians seriously? There is not one single case of someone using a trans rights law to try to sexually assault someone, but there are hundreds of cases of anti-gay, pro-family elected officials molesting children, sexually harassing or assaulting people, having extramarital affairs, taking their same sex “photographer” who also happens to live with them on taxpayer-funded junkets, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.