We assume because they claim so that the pro-birthers in the country are so because each fetus is a child blessed by God and a blessing to the family, and should be loved and nurtured until birth as children of God, little angels.
They are made in God’s image and likeness and are the greatest gift to humanity.
Except, when they have to get down with legal wording to defend this belief by outlawing all abortions with no exceptions, they reveal it is not about winning for the children, but winning to win.
In the draft decision of the end of Roe v Wade, Justice Alito refers to children as the
“Domestic supply of infants”
available for adoption, and bemoaning that this commodity has
“Become virtually non existent”,
I guess like toilet paper during the early days of the pandemic or bread and milk when the first snowflake falls.
Obviously the fear is that if women in the Unites States don’t keep cranking out the product, excuse me, blessing from God, we will have to go outside the country to find kids to adopt in spite of there already being 443,000 domestically produced kids in foster care.
Statistically, 1 in 50 children in the country are adopted at a rate of around 140,000 children each year.
So, unless we want to have a reserve of adoptable children like we do with the petroleum, we really do not have to keep producing adoptable kids.
Wouldn’t it be nice if children were born into families and in conditions that do not call for adoption, or, if the conservatives and evangelicals would adopt the kids they defend until they are born?
But, this is a business consideration and we need to produce babies for adoption like manufacturers make automobiles in such quantity that every year thousands of late model cars have to be reduced in price to move them on so there is room for the next year’s model.
Besides, if we run out of kids whose education we limit, who will do the work that makes investors on Wall Street rich?
So, because pride “goeth before the fall” and a legion of angels created by a perfect God who you would have expected to have created perfect creatures rebelled against that God and were cast into whatever name is given to the opposite of heaven where, with Lucifer at their head, have spent all of known time trying to screw up God’s other creation, man.
A Flawed product that went so horribly wrong would have one consider if this creating thing was good at all, and what mistakes could be avoided of it were tried again
This same omnipotent God who had no problem killing off a large segment of His human creations with a world-wide floods, killing Egypt’s first born ironically doing that so the Hebrews could escape and go into the desert where among the Ten Commandments He gave them there was one declaring, “Thou shalt not kill,” was somehow incapable of wiping out the fallen angels and starting over like he did after the flood.
Lucifer is now considered to be the devil, or Satan, not really an angel anymore. If this is the case, and an angel can be changed into a devil, would this not be some sort of transitioning from who you were to who you are?
God chose not to kill all the rebellious angels but to turn them into something they had not been that looks the same and maintains all the original features but is no longer an angel.
When He took Adam’s rib and made it into a mate for him, the DNA and chromosomal configuration was the same in both humans because she who we call Eve had Adams DNA and chromosomes so we had two males in the Garden of Eden capable of procreation, they were told to increase and multiply, but this could only be if the DNA and Chromosomes of Adam’s rib were changed.
These were both occasions where God took what something was and changed them into who He actually wanted them to be. For Satan it was oblivion or change. For Adam and Steve, it was changing the gender of Adam’s mate.
He could have simply made a second person the way He made the first one, so there was a reason He did it this way.
Getting back to Adam, God bent down and using clay built Adam.
I have observed people working with clay as I have a friend on Cape Cod connected with Bass River who is a master potter and I have watched her work. She would add more cay where needed, removing what turns out to be extra, and she is constantly squeezing the clay, squishing it around with your fingers, and fondling it into shape. It’s like a massage or tickling session after which the lump of clay on the table becomes a better shaped thing.
Considering Adam began as a random lump clay and only became a human when he was fully formed as more lumps were added and God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and it was then that the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7)”, what happened up to that point was Adam’s gestation from a random collection of clay into a “living being” with that breath.
If Adam were to have been able to feel anything during that period, he must have giggled a lot when the molding of the clay tickled, and one can only wonder how he responded to all the fondling of clay especially in a certain private area that called for creating three appendages with the careful rolling of some clay into a tubular appendage and forming two perfectly round balls as well. That called for a lot of groping, fondling, and tickling to get those done.
Adams was a fully matured adult upon completion, so beyond getting tickled and giggling, did he also get aroused?
Using Biblical logic, it doesn’t say he didn’t.
If he didn’t feel anything such a question is stupid, but, considering that everything in the whole Genesis story until the expulsion that related to Adam and Eve became integral parts of humanity. Their original sin, the first one every committed, and this by people who had no knowledge of the binary existence of the two opposites, good and bad, correct and incorrect with no idea of something being a bad because that knowledge came only when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and only then new it existed. Because Eve got Adam to eat the apple, all women have labor pains. For some reason God gave Adam superfluous nipples of no use, an odd thing since he made Adam first so they must have had a purpose, or why?
Did God get distracted and lose where he was in the process and assumed when He saw them he had already hooked them up?
And, according to all the religious pictures, He also gave Adam and Steve belly buttons when they never had umbilical cords.
But, guys, we have nipples.
We also know God only created a human counterpart because He had noticed Adam was not attracted to the other beasts like, apparently, He assumed he would be. And when He had done that, the only way that the two of them could have grandchildren is if they and their offspring were all involved with multigenerational incest.
But, getting back to the Adam being made thing, If Adam felt nothing as he was being formed, would not this same trait be passed along like Original sin, useless nipples, the pain of childbirth, and snakes with no legs?
So, the usual argument that the human fetus responds to external stimuli, such as pain, very early in development, and that therefore it is more than simply a congealing group of cells, would not be consistent with what is in Genesis, unless, again, God made some major changes to improve the flaws in the creation by an omniscient and perfect being.
Adam just lay there until God breathed into him, so the claim that human fetuses are viable after the second full trimester is also inconsistent as the inerrant word of God only described him as the dust of the earth into which, once fully formed and ready to go, God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”.
Certainly to claim a fetus can feel pain, would be choosing science against the word of God.
So, in genesis, we have two examples of God using a process of transitioning, or not if we can accept it actually was Adam and Steve, an example of intergenerational incest that lasted for more than just the second generation and at rabbit velocity as the only way of fulfilling the divine command to go forth and multiple, God a Perfect being incapable of error having to clear the board of all playing pieces with a flood and then relying ,once again, on incest this time to restart humanity, generational and unnecessary things being passed on from the first to all humans like nipples for everyone, useful or not, original sin, labor pains, and having to wear clothes that were somehow a never mentioned requirement as, mysteriously, Adam and Steve realized they were not wearing clothes, something they knew nothing about, were never told about, and never saw once they bit the fruit (not an apple).
Yet in spite of all that, especially the things mentioned and passed on as part of the human condition, somehow a gestating fetus can feel pain a scientific claim, and Bible Thumpers reject science.
Although they claim the Bible as the origin of laws and the arbiter of the human condition, they cannot even get their source material to stop contradicting itself.
God tells us not to kill, and we are told that killing a fetus is murder and anathema to God.
The the big flood killed every man, woman, child, and fetus outside Noah’s family.
The same thing happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, indiscriminate killing which, obviously, included innocent fetuses guilty of nothing.
If He didn’t kill fetuses Himself, he often had humans do it like when He told the Hebrews,
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
And thus, God got land for Israel.
Three times he went after the Canaanites whose land He then gave to the Hebrews as if unaware that other people were already there, after they followed His orders and killed men, women, children, and the unborn.
Even in the New Testament He did not change his habit of killing people for the flimsiest of reason as when the Holy Spirit smote Ananias and Sapphira who did not tell Paul how much they actually got from the sale of their property.
Yet, in arguing against a woman’s right to have control of her body, the claim is made that not only does God not condone killing, but He especially does not abide it when it comes to fetuses, at least the ones He hasn’t gotten around to killing Himself yet.
If you are keeping score, those who claim that killing a fetus is satanic and the work of the devil ignore there is no Biblical account anywhere when the devil killed anyone. He tempted, but he allowed others to choose.
God just crept up and actively killed people on multiple occasions.
Perhaps, instead of claiming abortion goes against the will of God as it is murder, they should use Satan as their benchmark as he has a better record in that regard.
Our laws are based on logic and our country is based on clearly written wording, thoroughly researched and defended arguments, and specific, unarguable language.
To base them on a confused story of how we got here while ignoring the actions of a God who does not set the best example and seems to change His mind on a whim when it comes to killing babies, seems to be setting us up for disaster.
But they do have one act of God, or command at least, on which they can justify why they are concerned for the unborn but not the child after birth.
“Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks” Psalm 137:9.
You can’t dash little ones until after they are born.
Save the fetus. Splatter the child.
Let’s stick with civil laws based on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and avoid laws based on a fickle God whose actions and decrees are inconsistent.
Apparently greatly out of touch, I thought it was important.
Spread from May 10, 2022, through May 18, with two gatherings each graduation night, the high school seniors of Oklahoma City Public Schools will graduate as the first class to have gone from grade 1 to grade 12 with Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity protected in the district’s student policies dealing with bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination with no negative effects on the school system or the education of students.
Fact is, it was actually a positive influence not only for those students directly affected by the inclusion, but other students who were kept from committing stupid actions and saying stupid things that could come back on them while they learned about the peers they thought they knew.
Thinking this was an important milestone and knowing what it took to arrive at this point, I sent write ups and copies of my relevant blogs so that this local milestone could be celebrated by the greater GLBT Community.
To that end, I sent notices to a number of Transgender organizations, and to local, state, and national GLBT organizations and publications as well as to the University of Central Oklahoma with which I have a connection, and which would be receiving some of those graduates as freshmen and this could make for some interesting studies about the existence of inclusion vs where there is none.
The University responded within a day acknowledging receipt of my email and suggesting this be included in an upcoming curatorial interview, and, after saying it was a story of interest, the Gayly, the local regional Gay Rag, in time for the news to be read before graduation week, printed one of my relevant blogs in the April print edition.
The rest have remained silent, in spite of my resending the information two additional times and being assured by two national organizations that someone would be getting back to me each time without that actually ever happening.
In the early days of the advocacy, on a Christmas visit home, I had gone to the office in the Massachusetts Statehouse where Governor Weld had established an office to deal with Gay student issues and used what I got from there as part of my research. I also had poster for the youth suicide prevention organization, the Trevor Project, whose poster I had in my classroom and whose continued placement I had to fight for. Considering that while one organization worked to make schools safe and welcoming for Gay students while the other works to prevent the number of teen suicides that plague the Gay Community, I was rather surprised that neither has responded.
The Oklahoma Gazette that had given very positive and supportive coverage of the effort to get the school district policies more inclusive, had not responded to anything sent.
Local, in state organization such as Freedom Oklahoma, a GLBT advocacy organization and SISYU, an organization addressing the needs of Homeless people ages 14-24, then high school and trade school or college have also failed to respond.
A lack of a response from the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD were not a surprise as the former had responded to a request for help in 1999 when the reaction to advocacy was over the top Homophobic, and, yes, that includes the strict meaning of phobia, not with the requested advice and resources by asking for donations with their only involvement having been to keep sending requests for donations, but otherwise ignored me, and the latter turned down any help because Oklahoma City did not have the name draw that would result in a nationally trumpeted win, and said they were looking at a similar situation in a more notable state when, to my way of thinking, a victory in the Buckle of the Bible Belt regarding inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in school policies would have been a much more significant win than one in a location where wins in favor of the Gay Community were becoming common. GLAAD chose instead to go with a court case in another state and lost because the judge ruled that as the teacher had put his display out in the public school hallway where students would have been unable to avoid seeing it, he was forcing his “opinion” on the unwilling in a space over which he had no say. Had he placed his Pride display inside his classroom, as I had done, the ruling would have gone the other way as the teacher controls the classroom and what is in it is not strictly on public, forced display.
They went for a big-name location in a more northern and urban state and lost what they could have won in Oklahoma City.
Also of no surprise was the lack of response from the principal of the school I had been teaching in during the majority of the advocacy and certainly during the most difficult times of it, the Superintendent or the school board.
Since I get their posts on Facebook, I also sent information and write-ups to Joe.My.God, Queerty, and Buzzfeed.
Nothing.
Considering the importance this milestone would have for students in the state of Oklahoma, I notified every Gay Pride Committee in that state assuming that this would be a matter of Pride. The only responses each time were requests to like the page.
Finally, I wrote a letter based on a summation of my blogs to the Daily Oklahoman, the newspaper that during my time in Oklahoma was rated by the Columbia School of Journalism as the most conservative newspaper in the United States and had been supportive of the administration as I was Gay and Union, two demons in that part of the country, but which, after initially opposing inclusion for the usual political and religious excuses, saw, as more things came out regarding questionable administrative actions that amounted to spreading falsehoods about Gay people in general and me in particular, twisting school policies to support their actions and making false, and obviously so, attacks on me as a person, after reviewing my collected documentation at a meeting of the education reporter and editor became an ally .
I considered writing to the Oklahoman a long shot. If the Gay groups weren’t interested, why would they be?
An editor got back to be the very afternoon I had sent my email and attachments asking If I had submitted that particular letter to any other newspaper. My responding email that assured that it wasn’t, was followed by a second email within minutes asking what descriptor should follow my name, and I accepted the one they offered as it was a good one and had a bit of an unseen edge to it, and then received a third email concerning some editorial detail and requesting a head shot that they ultimately did not use which was good as all the other letters had head shots, but mine did not and stood out as it was different.
The letter was printed within a few days in their Sunday edition. Sundays are good days to have letters published as a lot of people read Sunday papers thoroughly.
The least likely entity to show any interest in the Class 0f ’22 Milestone was the one that published the news, prominently on the opinion page.
Starting tonight, May 10, 2022 the first class of students to have gone through twelve years of school with Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression and during that time none of the predicted evils took place.
Inclusion caused no harm.
The lack of response is bad enough as it implies this milestone is either of no importance or it is in the Buckle of the Bible Belt when it would have been better if it was in a place favored by the national groups, but it is made worse by the fact that during the past year, while Oklahoma was promoting bathroom bills and rules about Transgender students because of all the assumed ills that would come about, no one representing the interests of GLBT students pointed out that for the twelve years of inclusive language in the school policies of the capitol city in which the debate about sports, bathrooms, and a high school understanding of genetics was being held in the legislature chamber, there had been no problems and none of the predicted harm took place.
Instead, they engaged in a call and response routine where one side lied and the other simply told them they were lying, but never presented the facts to counter the lies with the 12 years of evidence to the contrary.
Did not banning Trans kids from playing sports ruin sports?
Were there any bathroom issues?
Did reading books with “Homosexual Themes” become required reading in the schools?
Did the Gay kids takeover the schools, making every event a Gay one?
The answer is no.
Yet because those fighting these bills do not present the evidence, it appears to the politicians and public that the assumed evils are inevitable when the evidence shows it is not.
As of May 18, 2022, the seniors from North West Classen High School walking the stage to get their diplomas will end a 25 year chapter from original request to the first class to graduate with inclusive language their whole education career.
Most will not know the milestone they reached and their silent role in history mainly because it is ignored by the very people who should be celebrating them.
Perhaps as a way to rectify the apathy, those fighting these new restrictive bills will honor these students by presenting the evidence they produced when the other side lies, instead of pouting about the lies or coming across like the meme with the yelling lady and the cat.
The small minded might say that these things haven’t happened yet, but will, however, the reality is they had predicted immediate Sodom and Gomorha before and it just did not happen. Their only excuse, like those who keep rescheduling The Rapture is to continue saying that someday in the future there will be one incident that causes an easily addressed problem, just wait no matter how long it takes.
We claim that there is a separation of church and state, and there is this debate about how much this is a Christian nation or a secular one. However, regardless of where you stand on the issue, the one thing that both church and state share is the practice of claiming what was meant by people long dead and who cannot be consulted except through seance which allows anyone to claim they know what the Founding Fathers actually meant by anything they had said or written just as religions do with their origin personalities because somehow they just know.
“When he said the sky is blue, what he was actually saying was…….”
If this were a nature blog, I would now write that this particular trait is most often seen within large gatherings of creatures wearing red hats and golden crosses hanging from their necks on thin chains.
While in the Second Amendment the Founding Fathers were somehow able to anticipate future forms of weaponry, including ray guns, in days when each bullet fired had to be loaded just before firing, somehow after Abigail Adams had told her husband that in the founding deliberations to not forget the women, it never dawned on them that women just might want the same rights that men had then or someday in the future.
In recent news about the leaked SCOTUS Roe v Wade presaging an end to legal abortions, what the Founding Fathers thought about this is extrapolated from a limited understanding of their religious beliefs while ignoring their philosophical ones.
They referred to an unspecified creator as the endower of human rights and mentioned God nowhere in the Constitution except in the formal rubric of dating, “In the year of our Lord”, and all men being created equal was not a Biblical concept but one by Locke and Hobbes, two secular philosophers.
According to the leaked SCOTUS draft,
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”
What did the Founding Fathers actually think about abortion?
In 1748, Benjamin Franklin adapted the British book The Instructor, a manual for everything from arithmetic to caring for horses’ hooves, to be more relevant to the colonies.
Accordingly, he made changes throughout the book with place names and inserting colonial histories, but he also added some things that weren’t in the original and asserted his new edition was “better adapted to these American Colonies, than any other book of the like kind” noting in the preface that he changed or omitted parts of the original because
“in the British Edition of this Book, there were many Things of little or no Use in these Parts of the World: In this Edition those Things are omitted, and in their Room many other Matters inserted, more immediately useful to us Americans.”
One such addition to make the book more relevant to the colonists was the inclusion of some of The Poor Planter’s Physician, a medical pamphlet published in 1734by John Tennent, a Virginia doctor, and, I am sure, judging by his reputation, was included because it was important to Franklin and to many others in the colonies.
Population growth was important to the colonies, but too many kids in one family could ruin that family’s ability to support itself, so the number of children in a family was important but too many could cause problems. You may have needed a kid to replace a lost child because they were needed to help the family, but an extra kid was a burden especially in places outside the big cities like Boston and Philadelphia.
Because of this, Franklin included Tennent’s formula for dealing with the interruption of Menses because of a pregnancy. Considering this book was meant for people throughout the colonies to learn reading, writing, arithmetic, and other basic information, such an inclusion would imply that there was a need for this information by the general public.
Tennent prescribed Angelica, an herb known to be an effective abortifacient in the early stages of pregnancy and had been known as such for thousands of years, and his formula included several herbal abortifacients known at the time.
Franklin’s addition to the original Tennent formula included attention to potent herbs with careful dosages to treat the “misfortune”, and he added the caveats that patients
“shou’d be cautious of taking Opiates too often, or Jesuits-Bark”,
and
“nor must they long for pretty Fellows, or any other Trash whatsoever.”
Being a scientist, Franklin insisted on careful attention to measurement and counting, asked the preparer to work with repeated multiples of three, and insisted that education may end certain wayward practices of some of the women who needed to use the elixir, so he recommended
“a branch of education for our young females.”
It would seem incorrect to assume the Founding Fathers opposed abortion or that
“a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”
It was generally practiced enough for Franklin to have made it more safe in his book as his herbs did not have certain bad side effects.
It is also interesting that Benjamin Franklin had determined that learning how to end an unwanted pregnancy had equal standing with the need to know how to read, write, and do some figuring. Otherwise, would he have not made a separate pamphlet in his printing shop to keep the topics separate and without the implication of their being of equal importance?
To Franklin, not only was abortion necessary and acceptable, but knowing how to induce one was necessary in colonial America.
Justice Alito’s claim in his leaked draft decision that “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion,” but its accepted and Ben Franklin-approved method was known and practiced before, during, and after the founding of this country.
If it were a bad thing or at least unacceptable to proper society, being as it was a not uncommon practice, certainly something against it would have been said or written down somewhere during the founding of the country.
All we have is Benjamin Franklin’s book.
To Franklin, ending an unwanted pregnancy was no better or worse than Arithmetic.
Some have argued that if something is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution it can not be considered a right and to do so would call for a lot of stretching and verbal gymnastics.
During the arguments for and against marriage equality, those opposed to it claimed that with its not being in the Constitution, there was no right to same sex-marriage.
Although in the Second Amendment the Founding Fathers established the right to bear arms, they did so at a time when bullets were loaded manually, each one between firing yet did not mention AR-15s which somehow still get included in the broad term arms
However, any type of marriage in any form is also not mentioned in the Constitution, so if laws are based on the one man/one woman concept, this is bad practice as the right to marry is not in the Constitution in any form, so the established laws concerning marriage and who can be married and receive the civil benefits from it, should also be challenged.
The right to Heterosexual marriage and all the legal benefits of it are not mentioned in the Constitution, but there it is.
The first Amendment might clearly state that “ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exer cise thereof”, but it does not specifically state that religion should hold sway in America, or that it can be proselytized or that laws must be based on it. Claims of this being a Christian nation and that Christianity is predominant and solely to be considered in the making of laws are extra-Constitutional actions as they are not specifically allowed or even mentioned. Laws based on this foundation also need to be challenged.
You can exercise your religion freely, but imposing it on others is also not a right enumerated in the Constitution, yet, while the Supreme Court upheld the right to discriminate against fellow citizens in the name of religion, forced and favored religion is not an enumerated right.
Jesus said that if his disciples were rejected by a town, they were to leave and shake the dust from their sandals and He had this whole Caesar to Caesar/ God to God thing. Neither in His teachings or in the Constitution does it say people must force their religion on others by any means necessary which in the present United States means forcing certain religious beliefs on everyone through legislation regardless of their God-given free will, that which separates us from the animals.
Where is this right in the Constitution?
To claim that actively approaching people in their homes, schools, workplaces, and residences interrupting their lives is part of the free exercise of religion seems to be taking a broad interpretation of a very simple word, “exercise” and, adding meanings as convenient, the broadness of the interpretation of these promoters of special rights for religion, should also be re-examined.
Jesus did tell His followers to exercise their religion by praying in private, doing good works, and loving others as yourself. He did not demand conversion through legislation or brow beating.
The “if it isn’t specifically mentioned it cannot be construed as a right” works both ways.
But here, we have a Founding Father dispensing a remedy for the “misfortune”, and this would seem to clarify that Samuel Alito’s statement that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” is wrong.
This same Justice who belongs to a political party that abhors the intrusion of foreign law in U.S. court decisions, ignores this Founding Father in favor of foreigner, Sir Edward Cooke who, in 1644 declared abortion to be a crime, and was big in the witch hunts under Charles I.
Sure, Franklin was as British at the time as Cooke had been in his, but the thinking of one is 100 years older than the other and so lacks knowledge attained during that 100-years, and, while Cooke’s thinking led to witch hunts, Franklin’s thinking led to the United States.
The truth of the matter is that with Benjamin Franklin including the formula for an abortifacient in an instruction book on basic knowledge available to the general public of any age, and let’s face it, a lot of kids, abortion has been here throughout the history of this country and was promoted and made safer by a Founding Father so, a right to abortion is deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.
I would like to know from Alito and his ilk, if we should stick with a Founding Father or make the opinion of a 17 Century witch hunter precedent in this country?
While the rights of GLBT people after years of struggle to have our rights endowed by our Creator recognized by other men were under assault by the previous administration, it seemed to be acceptable as the GLBT Community was the only group of people losing its rights and so it was of no real import to the general population.
I mean, c’mon, these were Biblical abominations whose private lives and loves are just plain ickey.
In my life-time there was a seminal moment when it became clear that the Us/Them standard was convenient to the Us side as it was the other that suffered, but totally unacceptable when some of what was to be limited to them began to leak into the us and all hell broke loose.
During the heaviest days of Covid, we were asked to be sympathetic to those who were separated from their family and friends who could not visit them as they died alone in hospital rooms or while locked inside nursing and convalescent homes. The last look at family and friends as the patient was brought to the room never to be seen alive by the people left standing there was a crushing story. We heard one tale after another of how dehumanizing it was, how destructive to people that they died isolated and alone. It was dehumanizing and everyone should be outraged.
During the heaviest days of the AIDS epidemic, this sort of treatment was just fine because those people, well, they didn’t deserve respect, recognition of their humanity, and treatment. They could die alone and isolated because. Well, “they aren’t us.”
Turned out AIDS was affecting all groups of people but the convenience of believing who was getting it in spite of it’s being a virus, allowed it to spread until those who tacitly allowed the Gay genocide or turned a blind eye found it was their problem too and demanded something be done about it.
During the last administration while the GLBT Community was fighting to keep the few rights it had finally been granted by Man who, apparently, assigned themselves the position of determining who the “All” is in “All men are created equal”:
Within hours of the Inaugural Oath, the pages on GLBT rights and recognition were removed from government websites, including the White House, hours after the 2017 inauguration.
Transgender workers lost protection from discrimination they had under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were taken away from Gay workers
The Supreme Court ruled that merchants can refuse service to Gay people and gave them permission to do so in the name of religion.
Protections at school for Transgender students were erased.
Transgender citizens’ serving in the military was threatened.
GLBT people were slated for removal from the U.S. Census and the Department of Health and Human Services decided to no longer collect information on senior GLBT people.
A large number of well-known ant-GLBT judges got appointed wkth expected results.
The Department of Education claimed that school policies allowing trans youth to participate in sports consistent with their gender identity violated federal law and threatened the withholding of funds.
Health and Human Services proposed removing explicit protections for GLBT people in healthcare programs by excluding them from protections from discrimination based on sex stereotyping and gender identity, and created a new office to defend physicians and other medical professionals who decide to refuse care to GLBT patients, and also proposed a federal regulation that would strip away nondiscrimination requirements and would permit all HHS grant recipients to discriminate against GLBT people while continuing to receive federal funding.
Title IX rules related to schools’ obligations to address sexual harassment, including sexual violence was eliminated.
4-H programs were encouraged to remove a policy specifically welcoming GLBT kids.
The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule to permit emergency shelters to deny access to transgender and gender nonconforming people who are homeless, and then canceled a scheduled survey on LGBTQ homelessness.
The Trump Administration changed the rule so the children of same-sex couples born abroad via surrogate would be considered “born out of wedlock”, making it more difficult to obtain U.S. citizenship.
HSSdefined sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by birth, and instructed agency staff, including the CDC, to stop using the word “Transgender” in official reports.
And if the individual actions did not carry the day,
the administration opposed the Equality Act that would guarantee non-discrimination protection s for GLBT.
For four years the Rights of GLBT people were on the chopping block, and the outrage was limited to just those who would be the ones losing their rights, respect, and dignity.
Now, a leaked draft of the upcoming SCOTUS ruling on abortion shows that this practice has Niemöllered and now, the White, heterosexual population cannot believe that people could have rights taken away. What was tacitly accepted relating to the loss of other people’s rights, is now a most horrendous thing because it now has come to affect them.
Yep, they came for you.
Perhaps, as might have been when it came to the disparity of the treatment of Gays during the 1980s and the demand for empathy during Covid, and now with the majority heterosexual population facing a loss of a right that has been recognized for years and which the non-theocratic majority of the country has assumed was theirs since its having been recognize, in the future, those who have now experienced the fear of losing a right and knowing that on a date certain they will lose it, these suddenly horrified people will work with others to get and maintain rights as they now see no one is immune for the fanaticism of those who do not agree with something with which they do.
This might be a unifying wake-up call that in spite of differences, we should all be looking out for each other and each other’s rights.
Having your rights taken away does not apply just to GLBT people anymore and, actually, never did.
Welcome to our world.
In an odd, reversed way, Gays and Straights have attained equal treatment under the law.
As May begins, we need to prepare ourselves, to brace ourselves, for the commercialization and, hence, the discounting of the meaning of the Rainbow Pride Flag as corporations who usually donate to far-right conservative organizations and politicians during the year begin to start slapping rainbow flags on all their products to attract younger Gay people who get all excited seeing a rainbow Pride Merch display in a store that is surprising and then assume that is a sign of an ever-widening acceptance like fish assuming those worms descending from the surface are gifts of love and acceptance.
Walmart is seen by some to be Pro-Gay because they have items with rainbows on them with many being just designs based on the primary colors of the rainbow even as they have no relevance to Pride and its meaning.
I worked at a local discount retail outlet in a resort area during the off season when I first moved back to Massachusetts after retirement. Regardless of the holiday, all the chatchkies and googahs relevant to one holiday would be packed up in the warehouse where the nonperishable and non- time window sensitive items were packed away until the following year, with plush animals, like Easter chicks, getting tossed into the clearance bin as heaven knows what they would be collecting as they sat in boxes for ten month in a dark, dank warehouse, while the perishables would arrive within days of the store preparing for the next holiday. The public might be surprised when holiday materials suddenly appear months before a holiday not knowing they were not just shipped there but are, to a great extent, some of the same items they saw last year, and will again the next depending on sales.
All the Easter things that would appear to be fresh during the Lenten season were the same things that had been on the shelf unsold during the most recent season and spent 10 months out of the year in boxes in the holiday area in the warehouse until they were needed again.
That little cute Eater chick, if it could age with the years, would actually be so old as to outlive a chicken’s normal life expectancy. There was nothing religious about the Easter and Chanuka detritus sitting in those ignored boxes for 10 months a year.
Every year a shipment of New England Patriots merch would arrive at the beginning of the season and would be put out for sale, but while they were being bought and sold, another box of Patriots outerwear sat yearly in the warehouse only to be brought out if the Pats won the championship and the Super Bowl cleverly omitting any year so they could come out of storage when needed.
The long and short of it was that the merch had no meaning beyond its purpose to make profit.
The merch for Gay pride does not mean acceptance but profit, that spikes for one month because ATT that supports One America News throws a Rainbow onto its logo.
The Community itself is not immune to this and shamefully uses Pride to raise money.
Gay and Lesbian bars used to be places of refuge in an unfriendly world. Whether a high-class dance club or some dive mixed in with derelict buildings in the dying parts of towns, they were places where a Gay or Lesbian person could go where they were welcome.
And, before anyone gets rhapsodic about going to where “everyone knows your name”, in the bars back then no one really knew your name only the sobriquet used in that bar. I knew three Garys, Crazy Gary, Pawn-Shop Gary, and Gimpy Gary. I assumed they were al, really Garys , but none of them might not have been. It was a year after I received a Facebook posting of the death of someone I supposedly knew in another state but whose posted name I did not know, that I found out one of the Gary’s real names.
At holiday times, the bars were places where those who were rejected by family replaced the one that rejected them with their chosen family. It was also a place to go after a holiday with family where you could be relaxed and not have to speak in code or deflect the potential grandmothers’ asking when you will give them grandchildren with questions about your on-going bachelorhood.
Cities had a variety of bars with some always having cover charges to get in, a subtle way to discriminate by class among ourselves, but most only doing so on special occasions with many bars not having cover charges, becoming spaces for not only the disenfranchised, but the poor or down on their luck among us. Although the owners might prefer that anyone in the bar should be buying drinks, having been there themselves, they know that some people are there for community and cannot afford a drink.
In my favorite bar of all time, the clientele was so eclectic that some lowly, down on his luck person could be sharing a drink with the judge they had just faced during the day., or during a drag show I could turn to the person near me to make a comment and end up assuring a school district administrator that his secret was safe with me (and it still is).
This bar never had a cover charge.
All charity events there raised money from the tips of the female impersonators, and, as it turned out after each fundraiser, a large amount of money, often more than was raised at a cover charge bar for the same cause. None turned away from the door when they saw a cover charge sign, and once in and sufficiently lubricated, patrons were very free with their tips. People were free to wander in and out, and usually had their bar-hopping bring them back to this bar.
But, when a special event charges an entrance fee, sometimes the price of two drinks, in a town with only one Gay bar, or few, alternatives for these people to go to aren’t there, so, they are excluded from the community.
It might be one night, but a person might have needed that one night.
Such fundraising cover charges come on weekends when people, whether rich or poor, want to go out with friends, but they lose money as people walk away from a $10 cover charge rather than come in and while enjoying the evening give a tip or two to the entertainers. I have seen people who I know to have been on tough times come to the cover chargeless bar, buy one drink, and after hanging around a bit, tip the entertainer on the way out. That was a lot of mite for the widow to give, and the simple gesture was silently enormous.
It was one more dollar for the charity, a dollar it might not have gotten.
As we ignore the historical realities of 1969 in the scramble for heroes, with each decade since 1969 a new group within the GLBT Community claims it was someone with whom they identify who got the whole Stonewall Rebellion started. Even as two such icons had repeatedly pointed out that they either weren’t present the first night or only arrived long after the event had begun, if they were there at all, as we praise the street kids who took care of the street part of the night while also praising those who were handling things inside the bar, in spite of the significance and meaning of that event it is these very people we lock out to raise money in their name and who are not welcome in the A-Gay events.
The first time I walked in a Pride Parade it was in Boston in the 1980s. The route went from the Fenway area, down Boylston Street to the Boston Common for the festival and speeches. In the area in front of the final police car signaling the end of the parade and the last official contingent, people could join in the march to the Common. I was living in the Fenway neighborhood at the time and made a huge bedsheet sized cartoon of the building in which I lived and some of the residents hanging out the windows or around the building and we stepped behind the last contingent marching as the Queens of Queensbury, the street the front façade of the building faced.
Can’t do that now.
There are fees.
There are too many bars that allow Rights and Community support networks to hold fundraisers during Pride Month when they have the rest of the year to raise funds, and in so doing exclude those who cannot pay the cover, or choose not to, like myself, because I will not pay to celebrate my Pride and my life experiences and triumphs.
They know the patrons will be there, so why not milk the cash cow., the captive audience
You can choose to spend your money at Walmart if you so choose, but you do not have to. You can walk in and walk out without having purchased anything. You are not forced to go in and buy some loosely relevant rainbow motif bearing item before you can continue shopping.
It is totally wrong and choiceless if you could not enter unless you bought something first.
Pride may come with a corporate price tag, but it should not come with a GLBT Community 0ne. No one should have to pay to celebrate Pride with friends especially when limited venues lock people out.
Irony is when an organization whose mission is to be a support to the GLBT Community, all of it, is responsible for the sporadic exclusion at the bar to raise money to help the very people they have locked out.
My simple desire is that we to stop charging people for inclusion in Pride specific activities where few venues are available, buy your Pride merch where it is always available, resist being the deer in corporate headlights, and stop being part of or supporting of the sacrilegious and insulting commercializing of Pride.
It began as a riot, not a party, and it was begun by the people who cannot afford expensive merch and cover charges.
I would really like to meet some of those young people who in 2016 told me that they either did not vote, were unregistered because, ya’know, things come up, or voted for Trump in order to send the older people a message, so I could ask them how this whole Roe v Wade thing worked out for them since they are of the age where such a procedure might be needed which the older people they allegedly taught a lesson to are way pass.
I spent my adult life involved in politics, labor activism, and social justice promotion with a concentration on the Gay stuff and have seen the highs and lows of the process.
I was in a room at the Parker House in Boston with some Union people and progressive politicians and activists when the Republicans came down from their gathering a few floors above us to loudly taunt us like they were the bullies in the school yard because Reagan was just declared the winner.
Most were not Boomers.
I was there when the seed for all the damage about to come from the Reagan administration and its aftermath was planted, the root cause of a lot of the modern problems now visited upon the young.
I have stood in rooms when votes went right and in others when they went horribly in the wrong direction.
I left Boston in the mid-Eighties where Gay rights had been slowly coming along, but where even the most minor thing done by a gay person or couple, the mere holding of hands for example, was still considered a bold, political statement. I arrived in Los Angeles where things were further along but still not where the Constitution should have had Gay people and where, although freer than most places, most Gay activities no matter how innocuous, like a birthday party of a Gay co-worker celebrated by other Gay people from work, were still largely underground and under the RADAR things.
By the time I left, a lot had come about and Gay life was closer to what it should be.
I arrived in Oklahoma and lost many of the civil rights I had gained through having actively worked to gain them and had had on both coasts, basically starting over in the fight.
But, I knew what it was to live without my rights, how hard the struggle had been to get the basic rights we had to that point, what the difference was between having and not having those few rights, and how precious having them was and how vigilant we needed to be to ward off the assaults of those who, beyond not wanting us to have our rights, would also like all of us dead through disease or federal execution if the Christian Street Gangs don’t get us first in Jesus’s name.
I was there before Gay rights and as we got some. I was also in a position of losing the rights I had won elsewhere but were not yet recognized where I landed.
I was deprived of my rights, fought for and won my rights, but, because I went to a particular state, was stripped of them, so I know from experience of the cycle from not having to having to losing.
Imagine living in one state fighting, again, to get the same rights you had already fought for and won in another state. In the Boston/L.A. situation it was not so much gaining or losing rights in one place or the other, but, rather, both places were somewhere along a moving line of gaining rights. At some point, while one city might have gotten something first, like marriage equality, in time they both arrived at the same place.
Oklahoma was entirely different as the progress was more laborious, greatly opposed, and came with loss.
Now, I am back in Massachusetts where all the rights I had fought for through the years are set and actively protected by the people and the state.
Basically, I went from working to get even the basics to getting more complicated rights recognized (the difference between being allowed a drink in a bar and getting married) to having to fight for what I had already had elsewhere but lost where I was, and, now, I am where all those rights at whatever stage they had been or are in other places, whether partially or fully recognized, are here for me to enjoy.
“Well done thou good and faithful servant.”
I did the running of the race and the fighting of the good fight.
But experience teaches, and that which has been won can be lost if people are not vigilant or they have become too complacent.
After Massachusetts had had marriage equality for eight years before I moved back, while others might have taken no real notice of it, I was amazed the first few times I heard someone openly and in a public, mixed crowd refer to his husband with everyone acting normally as with any spousal introduction.
I had to get used to that. Where I had come from that term was just nicer than partner, lover, or roommate, but lacked any legal or community meaning beyond the couple. Here it meant something, but with that came a bit of status quo.
To some, after 18 years, there has always been marriage equality so it, like the Right to Choose, is here to stay.
So, it really disturbed me in 2016 when the Gaybies were saying they would vote for Trump for two main reasons.
First, they had bought into his claim that he was the best friend of the Gay Community, much more so than Hillary, so with him as president, they could continue exercising those rights that we would have had earlier if the older generation of Gays had worked hard enough when they were young.
Second, because we older people had screwed up the world, we needed to be taught a lesson.
I spoke with too many young people who were not registered, chose not to vote because what good would it to anyway, or voted for Trump to shake up the old people, the ones who had seen him on TV going back to the 1970s and knew who he really was.
We then saw him appoint extremely anti-GLBT people to positions that matter to the GLBT Community, issue GLBT rights-limiting executive orders, and go after the Transgender Community like they were the third grade teacher who humiliated him by sitting him in the corner and having him take responsibility for his actions. His obsession was pathological.
By the time I was 70 years old, we had a Supreme Court with an extremely conservative bent because Trump got to appoint three justices even if it took all sorts of political machinations to do it, and they are in a position now to revisit certain previous SCOTUS decisions and undo them.
Things like marriage equality, military service, employment, health care, housing, and basic needs.
Now, compare the time I have remaining on this earth to that of the young people who had intended to teach us elders a lesson as if we are one, monolithic group.
Who got served?
I know I can survive without certain rights as I had already lived most of my adult life without them. I might not like returning to the way it was, but I did get to fight for the rights and then finally get to enjoy them, and my life after those rights will not be as long as that before those rights.
My generation is about to punch out and leave the factory to the new employees.
What lessons did we old people learn?
We had marriage equality, we worked for it, the appeal of which will come with a multitude of complications because of combined property and other assets that are part of a legal marriage and will have to be dealt with legally if existing same-sex marriages aren’t grandfathered in while all future such marriage will just be partnerships with fewer rights and legal marriage assets.
We learned that, regardless how long or short of a time, we had rights. However, the people coming after us may not have the right to make and enforce contracts, to inherit, purchase, to lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property because, well, they’re GLBTQ+ and people will work to take rights away.
We also learned we were not incorrect in thinking we needed to learn more about the world than what our friends tell us because they had heard it from a friend of theirs.
We also learned that it is true that the price of freedom is vigilance.
The latest news from the Supreme court is the shot across the bow. A victory for the Anti-Choice, the anti-women should control their bodies more than the men should crowd in this case will embolden people to go after anything with which they do not agree or have chosen not to understand, and more people will lose rights they may very well have assumed were permanent while we aged Cassandras ran around the beach warning about that big unexplainable horse on wheels.
Barret, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch got added to the other conservative justices on the Supreme court as a result of teaching a lesson, a lesson that was not carefully thought out, the baking soda volcano that would have looked so much more spectacular if the new chemical used instead of boring baking soda had not produced a cyanide gas that harmed many and killed some.
Protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline have taken place in a number of locations because of worries about the pipeline’s impact on the environment and its proximity to Native American holy sites. Indigenous people from around the country, as well as the Sioux tribal nations, were vocal in their opposition to the project.
The Dakota Access pipeline was originally planned to go North of Bismarck, North Dakota, but was rerouted south away from the city that is majority white to the Native American land.
When a mining disaster left the coal company in Harriman, Tennessee, with 4 million tons of unusable coal that needed to be removed, It was shipped 300 miles away from the majority White area of Harriman to the majority Black town of Uniontown, Alabama.
A pipeline as part of a joint venture between the Valero and Plains oil companies had its route altered so that as it approached Memphis, Tennessee, from the West, rather than continue straight across to join the pipe coming from the East, it did a Southern loop through the Black Communities south of the city to go right back up to join with the rest of the pipeline.
That is the part of town where the less picturesque things are hidden in the background while they make the city hum and where they got built because they would otherwise be distasteful in the White areas to the North.
The huge loop brings the pipeline through a drinking water well field in southwest Memphis from which Black residents along with several nearby industrial businesses get their water. Unlike many major cities, Memphis’s water is all ground well based, so subterranean aquifers are important, and that is why, instead of going straight across where the White areas are, it loops around through the Black areas.
Louisiana has its Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is lined with oil refineries and petrochemical plants and whose residents are predominantly Black with a cancer rate 50 times higher than the rest of the country.
If you have ever driven to or from New York City on I-95, you have had the pleasure of driving the Cross Bronx Expressway the, the Sisyphus rock of highways that cuts through what used to be a very multicultural part of the city, more so than any other area, which is now a center for asthma cases.
Hospitals in Asthma Alley deal with five times the national average and 21 times the rate of other New York City neighborhoods there.
Every October, Pahokee, Florida, faces the arrival of “black snow”, a thick level of soot from sugar burning that pollutes the area. It is the time of year when farmers legally set their fields on fire to burn down everything but the cane which results in major pollution hitting predominately Black communities. This causes respiratory distress, increased asthma cases, and compromised immune systems.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) were dumped into a Cheraw, South Carolina, creek up to the 1970s. When Hurricane Florence hit in 2018, some of the remaining chemicals were disturbed and got into people’s houses and yards and causing the closure of a local playground because of the pollutants found in the soil after the storm.
Flint, Michigan, for those who feel that time heals all wounds, is still not healed. Because the city government did not take the proper steps when changing its water source, hundreds of children and adults were exposed to lead poisoning of from April 2014 to December 2015.
It became obvious over time that this problem was so easily dismissed because a majority of those affected were low-income people of color.
In 1978 liquid contaminated with PCBs was dumped along 240 miles of road in North Carolina. While cleanup was taking place, it was decided that it would be stored in a toxic waste facility in Warren County where it would affect the health and drinking water of the local Black community.
The 98% Hispanic Community of Harris/Manchester in Houston, Texashas become a concentrated region of oil refineries, chemical plants, sewage treatment facilities, and hazardous waste sites where up to 484,000 pounds of toxic chemicals are released throughout the area from 21 surrounding Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) facilities yearly. Because of then high levels of lead found in the children of a local elementary school, the school was forced to shut down and move its location.
Although known for its pollution what is not so widely known about Los Angeles is that Black, Latino, and low-income residents are more likely to live near oil and gas wells that spew toxic pollution and are more likely to live among power plants, oil refineries, and landfills.
Lived there.
Seen it.
The most polluted zip code in Detroit is 71% Black and the air pollution is so bad the sky often has a fiery orange glare. A 250-acre tank farm that has been expanding over several decades has received over 15 violations for surpassing federal and state emission guidelines in the past seven years.
Regardless of the city, county, or state, all these locations have one major thing in common. The people were there first, and the polluters moved in in later when the demographics of the area were settled.
In my present town a recent kerfuffle over the impending presence of a waste disposal site revealed a subtle prejudice about placement as the proposed location was not in a usual spot, but further North in the city by its border with the next town which unfortunately put it right in the middle of a white, picket fence, semi-rural area of the city.
Although intended to be unspoken, the NIMBY attitude slipped out and from a very unexpected person.
