Arizona Passes Bill Legalizing Bigotry

Don't like "teh gaii"?  Arizona's got your back!  As long as you couch your bigotry in "religious freedom" terms, it's okay to refuse to do business with the LGBT community and treat gays like second-class citizens. The Bible tells these upstanding "Love Thy Neighbor Christianists" so!  


"SB 1062 permits discrimination under the guise of religious freedom. 

With the express consent of Republicans in this Legislature, many Arizonans will find themselves members of a separate and unequal class under this law because of their sexual orientation. 

This bill may also open the door to discriminate based on race, familial status, religion, sex, national origin, age or disability. 

 "Legislation of this kind has been attempted this year in Kansas, South Dakota, Tennessee and Idaho. Each of those attempts failed after prominent members of the business community spoke against the measures. While our state continues to recover from the public relations nightmare of SB 1070, the Republican supporters of this bill are willing to elicit the inevitable backlash and boycotts that will result from its passage." 

 
Remember when bigots used religion to defeat interracial marriage? How'd that work out?


"The Lovings were supported by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Japanese American Citizens League and a coalition of Catholic bishops.

In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving had married in Washington, D.C. to evade Virginia's anti-miscegenation law (the Racial Integrity Act). Having returned to Virginia, they were arrested in their bedroom for living together as an interracial couple.

The judge suspended their sentence on the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return for 25 years. In 1963, the Lovings, who had moved to Washington, D.C, decided to appeal this judgment. In 1965, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile, who heard their original case, refused to reconsider his decision. Instead, he defended racial segregation, writing:

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix."

The Lovings then took their case to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which invalidated the original sentence but upheld the state's Racial Integrity Act. Finally, the Lovings turned to the U.S Supreme Court. The court, which had previously avoided taking miscegenation cases, agreed to hear an appeal. In 1967, 84 years after Pace v. Alabama in 1883, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that:

"Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

The Supreme Court condemned Virginia's anti-miscegenation law as "designed to maintain White supremacy".


The bigots in the Republican Party of Arizona may have a small victory in their soon-to-be-passed law that codifies legal discrimination against a group of American citizens, but it will eventually be overturned as unConstitutional, and the GOP will look like the confused and misguided, hiding-behind-"religion" bigots that they truly are in this matter.

I hope a national movement to boycott Arizona as a state for conventions, vacations, sports, and other activities will be the result of this stupid unAmerican, unConstitutional law, should Tea Party GOP Governor Jan Brewer sign it into law.  Maybe the citizens of Arizona will then face the consequences of their shameful bigotry.

However, I sincerely doubt it.




Thursday 2/20/14, 7:30pm EST: The Arizona House just passed this bill tonight. The fate of anti-LGBT segregation in Arizona now rests in the hands of the state's Tea Party Republican governor, Jan Brewer, who has five days to decide whether to sign or veto it. 

Four Score and Ten

This morning I began my 70th year of breathing and as it's inevitably another year closer to the cessation of that respiration, I like to acknowledge both disturbing facts by beginning something new.  I bought a new motorcycle and coincidental to February being Black History Month as well as the month of my birth, I began to read a new poet: Derek Walcott. 

Of course I mean new to me.  I've never been without a motorcycle for almost 50 years and Walcott won the Nobel Prize for literature over 20 years ago and is hardly new to anyone literate.  But a personal discovery, a new love,  is a rejuvenating thing even if others discovered the same thing long ago. 

Old men do look backward as they have less to look forward to.  I remember the first time I heard "Chicago" blues on a street corner along Maxwell Street on Chicago's South side. To a kid brought up on classical music it was a revelation from which I was swiftly whisked away, but firmly imprinted is the vision of three black men dressed in black, with electrified instruments, black with mother of pearl and white smiles and eyes remarking on who that boy was, looking at them as though they were the most amazing thing I had ever heard.    Maxwell street was a black man's world in the 1950's.  So was the Caribbean when I  'discovered' it a few years later, so inviting, so mysterious and wonderful yet, like a parallel universe removed and inaccessible.  Even now I go back as often as I can. 

It's 1955. You can stand on the corner listening, you can tune into WVON in Chicago on that homemade radio and hear Buddy Guy and Bo Diddley. WJJD might play some white guys playing more or less sanitized versions they had begun to call Rock & Roll.  I could wander in December around still British Nassau, much farther than from the cold and grimy North than it is now,  but always it was looking through the knothole at the 'real' world and never having a ticket to the game.

Caribbean born Derek Walcott, Poet, playwright and painter is no less a porthole but also a door into a wider world for me, if sadly a reminder of  my own inescapable mediocrity and it's a world far  wider than his native St Lucia where the sun always shines and the iceman ventureth not and where the impossibly blue water crackles in the wind and washes up my childhood like waves on the sand.

 One step over the low wall, if you should care to, 
recaptures a childhood whose vines fasten your foot.
And this is the lot of all wanderers, this is their fate,
that the more they wander, the more the world grows wide. 

Indeed it does.

SLUT SHAME, VICTIM BLAME, and IOKIYAM

May I assume readers are familiar with the acronym, ‘IOKIYAR?’ Translation: ‘It’s okay if you are Republican,’ which means you can excuse any transgression if the transgressor happens to be one of your good ole boys. Does the same adage also apply to sexual assault? The answer is “yes” if you happen to be James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal:

What is called the problem of "sexual assault" on campus is in large part a problem of reckless alcohol consumption, by men and women alike. (Based on our reporting, the same is true in the military, at least in the enlisted and company-grade officer ranks.) 

Which points to a limitation of the drunk-driving analogy. If two drunk drivers are in a collision, one doesn't determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver's sex. But when two drunken college students "collide," the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault. His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him.

Does the penis unzip the zipper and violate the woman all by itself with no intervention or accountability by its owner? If memory serves, there is no excuse for drunk driving in a court of law – but "it's okay if you are male" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. There will never be drunk justice until the day a good ole boy becomes pregnant.

For decades, sexual predators have used every excuse in the book to beat a rape rap, often accusing their victims of provocative dress, flirtatious behavior, or a disreputable reputation.  In short, slut shame!

Here is James Taranto promoting 'victim blame' with another 'get-out-of-jail-free' card for the good ole boys. What next: Partisan spin to exonerate murder? This is outrageous!

National embarrassment and publicity hog,

George Zimmerman, has had his pathetic dream of making money off of the death of his victim, teenagerTreyvon Martin, cancelled.

So there's reason to believe there is some hope for this celebrity-crazed culture, and perhaps Zimmerman will finally descend into the ignominy he so richly deserves.




"A victory was earned today for the memory of Trayvon Martin, as promoter Damon Feldman announced today that due to public outrage, the George Zimmerman celebrity boxing match has been canceled."

 Feldman tweeted:

"Featuring George Zimmerman in the ring fighting an African American opponent was an attempt to exploit racial tensions for profit. It was also the height of disrespect to Trayvon Martin. 

Turning a young man’s murder into a cash grab was wrong. Zimmerman said that he would donate his cut of the purse to charity, but he still stood to profit off of the fight. 

It is obvious that Zimmerman is looking for ways to cash in on killing Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman wants to advance his celebrity, and the media attention that he would have gained from this fight would have done exactly that. 

 Only a group of heartless sociopaths could cook up a scheme like this, but hundreds of thousands of people stood up for decency. You said no. You put the pressure on, and you were successful. 

 It looks like George Zimmerman is going to have to get a regular job to pay his bills, because millions of Americans aren’t going to let him make money off of the fact that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin."

Dishonest Abe

I remember chuckling, in an itchy trigger finger sort of way last month when the local paper ran a "what I'd like to see in the headlines in 2014" article.  Of course they couldn't resist printing some of the tamer veiled threats to Obama, but the one item that sticks in my mind was the wish by one witling that MSNBC would admit it was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

Of course that idea, or meme if you prefer, was crafted by the Bizarro-World team at the RNC as a counter to the accusations against Fox News whose relationship to the Republican party is more easily documented than their lies.  The idea of the best defense being an offense is behind it and offensive it certainly is whether you hear it from  Lyin' Bill or Glenn Beck or Rush of the infected Rectum -- or from any of the flies that buzz around their cloud of stink.

But extreme Denialism: the practice of  fact inversion as a defense, isn't something America invented and it's certainly a documented technique as old as the Hieroglyphics it's documented in.  Losers declare victory, aggressors claim to be victims and traitors claim to be patriots.  So many of us buy it with a smile like cotton candy at the county fair.

When the Government of Japan does it, when the cronies of Prime Minister Abe pretend the atrocities in Asia never happened, that the US was the aggressor, the war criminal and they the liberator of Asian races: when Japan claims victimhood, they insult the millions and millions they slaughtered for sport.  They insult the Americans that died liberating hundreds of millions of victims of Japanese aggression.  German students  are told the truth about their country's history. Japanese students are not and even Americans seem to feel ashamed that we used force to counter acts that sickened the Nazis and aggression that threatened every bit of land wet by the Pacific ocean. How many millions more would have died had the war not ended and particularly if the Japanese had a few more months to complete their nuclear program?

According to friend of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just appointed to the board of governors of NHK, Japan’s state broadcaster, not only did the infamously disgusting Rape of Nanjing never happen but it was the US who forced thousands into prostitution for the troops.  The Kamikaze pilots?  They were pacifists writes Naoki Hyakuta.  The United States and it's allies all used "Comfort Women" as rape victims during WWII said NHK chairman Katsuto Momii.  The ritual suicide of  a right wing extremist in 1993 shows that

 “His Majesty the Emperor has again become a living god.” 

writes another NHK Board member, Michiko Hasegawa.

And of course we ended it by using primitive nuclear weapons and that makes it all true.  I wish it were only the Right Wing Japanese Extremists  who believe the revisionism. The Right is fully engaged in revising all aspects of history and the opposition watches sports and apologizes to the "victims."

Meanwhile the Abe administration forces the rest of Asia, who well remember the war with Japan in detail, toward hostilities and I have to wonder how the rise of the right, that lust for power by any means will affect not only my country, but the world.

 

All Opinions Are Not Equal

What's up with news stories with totally inaccurate attention grabbing headlines? 

For the past couple of days, headlines have proclaimed some variation of the following headline, Obamacare Will Cost 2.5M Workers by 2024. However, if you read the articles, it becomes clear that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did not conclude that the ACA was a causative factor in the decrease of workers. The CBO concluded the reduction in worker hours was almost entirely because of workers choosing to work less. According to the CBO report, “The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in business’ demand for labor."

The problem is straightforward. A lot of people never read past a story's headline so their conclusions are based on a misleading headline. Some of those who read the article have poor reading comprehension skills and come away still believing that the ACA will cause 2.5 million people to lose their jobs. All of these misinformed people like to share their invalid information and the chain of people firmly believing information that is false grows by leaps and bounds. Couple that with the American belief in individualism and that all opinions are equally valid, and ill-informed opinion becomes fact for millions.

I think one of the dumbest statements that I see far too often is, "I'm entitled to my opinion." When people declare, "I'm entitled to my opinion," what they really mean is my opinion is of equal value to all other opinions.

There's no entitlement to be ignorant. If my opinion is that a giant turtle carries the world on his back around the sun, then my opinion has no value; it's worthless. Stating that I'm entitled to have it doesn't make it have merit. It's still worthless and of no value. 

All opinions are not equal. We do ourselves a disservice when we pretend that they are. All we need do is examine how many publicly funded schools in multiple states are allowed to teach creationism under state science education standards as an alternative to evolution. Additional states are poised to pass legislation this year to expand the science curriculum to include creationism.

Replacing intellectual analysis with personal opinion undermines our ability to make decisions based on facts and knowledge rather than belief. Ethics play second fiddle to a mish-mash of personal beliefs and emotions about groups of which we are not a member. A key tenet of our constitution's Bill of Rights is that the government shall not establish or govern religion, yet hot button issues such as abortion and gay marriage that divide us at present, center around the attempt of some Christians to impose their belief system on our system of secular law.

We have many issues confronting us that we must address as a nation and as a part of the world. Climate change is a reality, not an abstract theory. Access to clean water, clean energy, and clean air are essential to the survival of all of this planet's inhabitants. Working together is necessary, but to do so we have to develop diplomatic strategies and policies for resolving our differences and not fall back on wars and police actions as problem solvers. We need to work collectively on solutions to these issues, not cling to opinions shaped by misinformation and narrow belief systems that we have elevated to the level of absolute fact.

A quick note to George Will

The following was sent this morning to George Will's email address at the Washington Post, without pictures, and with the web pages supplied as footnotes instead of links (which might have redirected this to his spam folder).

Dear Mr Will,

I realize that Fox News is now paying your paycheck, so perhaps you're no longer allowed to look at any other news outlets, but, despite your conservative views, I've always felt that you were reasonably intelligent. If nothing else, you seem capable of forming coherent sentences and spelling things correctly, and these days, that counts for a lot.

However, you might be surprised to learn that you've entered some sort of information bubble. I saw your appearance on Monday's Special Report with Bret Baier, and it appears that there are some facts that you seem to be entirely unaware of.

When you said that the IRS targeting of conservative groups was one of the three biggest political scandals in the last 40 years, this lack of data became openly apparent. And while I hate to argue with a journalist of your extensive experience, I found humor in your statement that "this is not being perused and the president knows that. Hence his sense of weariness and boredom as he discussed this with Bill O'Reilly."

No, Mr Will, he was bored by it because it was a manufactured non-scandal. You see, the simple fact is, this is an example of the IRS actually doing its job, and investigating whether these groups were breaking the law; the simple fact of the matter is that political organizations do not qualify for the tax-exempt status that these groups had applied for.

Let's start from the beginning. The tax code gives us a number of different classifications based on what we do. One of them, a tax-exempt status, is designated 501(c)(4), and it's defined as "Civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare, ...the net earnings of which are devoted exclusively to charitable, educational, or recreational purposes."

This allows groups to be formed to construct basketball courts for inner-city kids, build a gym for a high school, set up after-school reading programs, operate food banks, or any other activity that can be defined as "social welfare." And it goes further: to prevent people from arguing that defeating a politician would qualify as "social welfare," the IRS specifically excludes political organizations from this particular tax-exempt status.

(ii) Political or social activities. The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.

Now, here's where the story gets a little weird, Mr Will. You see, the reason that the IRS appeared to be targeting conservative groups was because of a slick little piece of misdirection. You only saw that the IRS investigated conservative groups, because the Congress only looked into the IRS actions when they involved conservative groups, and actively ignored any investigations of liberal or progressive groups.

The Treasury inspector general (IG) whose report helped drive the IRS targeting controversy says it limited its examination to conservative groups because of a request from House Republicans.

A spokesman for Russell George, Treasury's inspector general for tax administration, said they were asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) "to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations."

See how that works? I mean, you're a classy guy, Mr Will - you were rocking that bow tie for years after most people had abandoned it, because you felt it gave you a certain old-fashioned gravitas, I guess. So I feel certain that you would disapprove of me referring to a sitting member of Congress as a "lying bag of fuck." That, however, is the immediate reaction I get from this little revelation.

(Now, to be fair, a full listing of the groups under investigation could, at first glance, possibly have given someone the impression that conservative groups were being targeted: after all, since two-thirds of the groups approved for tax-exempt status since 2010 were conservative, you'd expect a larger percentage of them to fall under scrutiny. However, that is very different from the blatant spin that Darrel Issa put on things, isn't it?)

But after all, once even Mitch McConnell abandons a smear campaign, it's pretty clear that the whole thing has just collapsed.

Perhaps, to avoid making yourself look like a hack or a paid shill for Fox "News," you should try to restrict your comments to that nebulous realm we call "facts," instead of just repeating the latest talking points being handed out by liars and partisans? And maybe by doing that, you can come out of this with at least a small shred of the dignity you've been clinging to for years.

Don't you think that would be a good idea?

Sincerely,

Bill Minnich (Albuquerque, NM)

Rightwing America: Crown Thy Good in Brotherhood No More

Perhaps readers may recall this advertisement:



Originally known as the Hilltop ad commissioned by Coca-Cola and performed by the New Seekers, this one-minute spot become so popular it was re-recorded and released as a full-length single in 1971. The song became an immediate hit - reaching #1 in the U.K. and #7 in the U.S. respectively.  The song offered a thoughtful message for a more introspective time.

Yesterday - on Super Bowl Sunday - Coca Cola aired a new one-minute spot to invoke the successful “feel good” message of the original Hilltop song. It showcased the patriotic hymn, America the Beautiful performed in several languages – English, Arabic, and Spanish. How times have changed!

In 2014 - unlike 1971 - no good deed remains unpunished. These days, any message that appeals to our higher angels brings out the hate brigade. Here is the rightwing reaction to Coca Cola's latest ad:

"A truly disturbing commercial" (Allen West);

“[The ad] features gay people” (Michael Patrick Leahy of Breitbart);

“Coca Cola is the official soft drink of illegals crossing

the border” (Todd Starnes of Fox News).

Virtually overnight, irredentist outrage inspired a Subway-style boycott designed to bully and dissuade Coca Cola, or any corporation, from promoting the moral message of "crown thy good in brotherhood:"

Finally, these latest YouTube comments reveal the truly repugnant side of today’s rightwing movement:

Jose Blanco (5 hours ago) “Multiculturalism is a code word for White genocide.”

Sonny Bagwell (6 hours ago) “See, the jews who run all ad agencies have been brainwashing Americans for DECADES now. This is why we have no morality left."

In a sense, the rabid reaction reveals the unholy alliances between disparate factions within today’s GOP - mainstream conservatives, libertarians, nullification Tea Partiers, Dominionist theocrats, neo-Confederates, and their chorus of bigots, racists, and anti-Semites.

For the moment, I will withhold any reference to gratuitous and unpleasant stereotypes. However, I will not refrain from offering this advice to our conservative and libertarian friends: Beware the company you keep lest you be judged accordingly!

Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door

Something (O)CT(O)PUS wrote in his tribute to Pete Seeger about going to Newport Folk Festival and hearing all those wonderful artists brought up this memory.

It's Saturday night.  If I had some, I'd smoke one, then sit back and enjoy this, and I hope you all will too:

Net Neutrality

I thought this might be a worthwhile topic for a TGIF post.  As an online community, we are the ones who benefit most from free and open access to the World Wide Web; yet this topic has received scant attention on our discussion boards.  Briefly, here are the issues that will impact our future:

High speed Internet access is provided by only a handful of service providers - Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox, as examples - which transfer our data from one end of the network to another.  We expect full transparency, meaning we do not want these firms to analyze, manipulate, package, or prejudice our communications in any way. 

Earlier this month, however, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned two rules on a technicality:  One that barred broadband providers from charging extra for data access, and one that prevented them from blocking access to lawful content.

The implications of this decision are troublesome.  Without these rules, Internet providers may screen everything we send across Cyberspace – our web log posts and comments, our emails, videos, broadband telephone calls, and social media conversations.  An unregulated Internet means any provider may censor our content, or prejudice delivery of our content by speeding up or slowing down transmission, or charge extra.

These are by no means straw man concerns.  In the past, there have been several abuses by Internet providers that have censored content for self-serving purposes, most noteworthy:

AT&T – Jammed censored a performance of the rock group Pearl Jam in 2007 because the company disapproved of the group’s anti-Iraq War message;

Comcast – Blocked video-trading applications ostensibly for the purpose of easing Internet traffic – except for the fact that Comcast discriminated against an entire class of users during non-peak hours – because Comcast is in the business of selling online video;

Verizon – Cut off the text-messaging system of NARAL Pro-Choice America, stating that Verizon would not service any group “"that seeks to promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users;"

Telus – Blocked Internet subscribers from accessing a website run by a union that was on strike against Telus.

These abuses can happen to you.  If you care about this issue, here is what you can do:  Petition the FCC here.

Update: How you will pay for Internet services once net neutrality is gone: