Obama is considering a drug czar who opposes needle exchange programs. Needle exchange programs are very effective HIV prevention tools and help slow the spread of of other diseases such as Hepatitis C.
Not long before the Transgender Day of Remembrance police brutally beat Duanna Johnson, a transwoman. She was found dead recently. Sublimefemme links to a powerful post about mourning by queenemily.
This is not Pride. This is remembering our dead. This is not something you can make fucking upbeat and acceptable and call “awareness.”
Grace the Spot has a useful guide for surviving and possibly even enjoying a holiday with your family.
Luxury handbag designers tell their customers not to buy counterfeit bags because they come from places that horribly exploit their workers. Well, turns out the factories of Prada, Mulberry, Louis Vuitton, Samsonite, Aspinal of London, Nicole Farhi and Luella are pretty horrific too:
Workers earn poverty wages, work long hours, and suffer from a variety of health complaints linked to poor health and safety conditions. They complain that there are not enough toilets for all the workers and those that exist are filthy. The only drinking water is from a hose on the toilet floor.
Justin tries to find the best time to drink coffee.
Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes’ failure.
Democrats, homophobia isn’t ok.
Actors, sexism isn’t ok.
Princeton has their own version of Proposition 8 – and it’s just as silly as the one in California.
Sublimefemme has an awesome post up about femme invisibility, prompted by the response to Lindsay Lohan.
There seem to be two dominant schools of thought about Lindsay’s sexuality, both of which turn on the “problem” of her femininity. The first position, which I’ve written about before, is that she couldn’t really be a lesbian because, hell, just look at her! The other position is the inversion of the first. It claims that Samantha Ronson is a real lesbian (hell, just look at her!) and Lindsay wouldn’t chose a girl like that unless she was herself really queer. In this reading, it’s the butch’s supposedly irrefutable lesbian appearance that provides evidence for the femme’s queerness. However, in both cases, queer femininity is fundamentally framed not just as a contradiction in terms but as a disappearing act.
Tags: aspinal of london, democrats, descartes, duanna johnson, exploitation, factory, family, femme, gender, hate, homophobia, leibniz, louis vuitton, luella, mulberry, needle exchange, nicole farhi, obama, poverty, prada, proposition 8, samsonite, sexism, spinoza, that's queer, trans |
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Proposition 8 in California passed last Tuesday. The proposition overturns a recent California Supreme Court decision recognizing same-sex marriage by ammending the state constitution to say “”Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” This was heartbreaking news for many LGBT people across the country. We wondered how one group could make so much progress while another took such a huge step back.
Then the news came that California African American voters, who’d overwhelmingly supported Obama, had voted in favor of Proposition 8 70% of the time. I was so hurt when I heard that. Why would people that understood discrimination vote to take away civil rights from an entire group of people? Especially when exactly the same arguments were used to deny interracial marriages until the late 1960s:
1) First, judges claimed that marriage belonged under the control of the states rather than the federal government.
2) Second, they began to define and label all interracial relationships (even longstanding, deeply committed ones) as illicit sex rather than marriage.
3) Third, they insisted that interracial marriage was contrary to God’s will, and
4) Fourth, they declared, over and over again, that interracial marriage was somehow “unnatural.”
So I’m angry and confused and wish our schools taught history better. But I was even angrier when I heard about this over at Pandagon:
Los Angeles resident and Rod 2.0 reader A. Ronald says he and his boyfriend, who are both black, were carrying NO ON PROP 8 signs and still subjected to racial abuse.
Three older men accosted my friend and shouted, “Black people did this, I hope you people are happy!” A young lesbian couple with mohawks and Obama buttons joined the shouting and said there were “very disappointed with black people” and “how could we” after the Obama victory. This was stupid for them to single us out because we were carrying those blue NO ON PROP 8 signs! I pointed that out and the one of the older men said it didn’t matter because “most black people hated gays” and he was “wrong” to think we had compassion. That was the most insulting thing I had ever heard. I guess he never thought we were gay.
Responding to ignorance and hate with ignorance and hate makes the situation a lot worse. And in this situation, people were alienating members of their own community.
A few days ago, I posted this AP story on my facebook with the caption “The media finally does some fact-checking.” The reporter did some research on some of the statements Sarah Palin made about herself and Barack Obama and found several, well, lies. A person I grew up with commented on the post. If it’s too small to see in this picture, I’ve reproduced it below.
You are a spiteful, arrogant little liberal. Tell me, why do you hate life and those who want to preserve our culture? Did your mom and pop not love you enough in Caswell? Go eat some wheat grass and shut the hell up. Your quasi science, your media, and cultural bias shows through as much as the fact you’d be a full blown lesbian when you were 15.
These kinds of responses remind me why I left the south. While I do miss many things about my first home, the racism, homophobia, sexism, and anti-intellectualism don’t make it a place I could ever live again. When faced with evidence that something they believe is false, many spew hatred and seek to silence other voices. I went to school with this person and know that he isn’t an idiot. However, he doesn’t counter anything in the article with evidence or rational argument. He just tries to insult me and “shut me the hell up.”
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