But Without the ‘War on Drugs’, How Many, Self-Declared Morally-Upstanding White People Would be Forced to Find Jobs That Are Actually Beneficial to Society?

How many indeed?

How Many of You Have Been Allowed to Work at the Same Place for the Last Sixteen Years?

I’m just askin’:

Since 1995, Candace Gingrich-Jones has served as a key advocate for issues of importance to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community.

Translation: Ain’t No Trans Freak Fit To Lead Any Gays Any Day, Any Way For Any Pay – And While You’re At It, Why Aren’t You Kissing Our Collective Ring For Letting You Pretend To Be Equal To Us?

My question regarding ‘Equality’ Maryland’s hiring of Lynne Bowman as interim E.D.:

Were any trans people considered for this interim position?

That was it.

That was the entirety of the comment.

It was a simple question.

Now, the word “simple” also comes to mind with respect to the following response to that comment – a response from Anonymous:

Do you want it to be mandatory that a bisexual was considered for the position? What about gay men? As small as the trans community is, I should be asking what about mandatory consideration of Catholic Japanese gay men. The notion that a trans person has to be considered for every job opening at EQMD is absurd. It’s impossible to get anyone highly qualified to take on these jobs and you want us to limit ourselves to a group that is less than 1% of the population. Talk about putting agenda over sense.

Again…

“Simple” is applicable – but only as part of a compound word.

Now, lets take this apart, shall we?

Do you want it to be mandatory that a bisexual was considered for the position?

In a word, yes.  And the amazing thing is – now I know that you’ll have trouble grasping this, but do try – you might be able to find a very competent trans woman or trans man who is also bisexual!

Really!

What about gay men?

Well, what about ’em?

Appletini?

Now…

As small as the trans community is, I should be asking what about mandatory consideration of Catholic Japanese gay men.

Well, this calls for my overall response to Brave Anonymitymeister: Thank you for contributing to my dissertation.

The notion that a trans person has to be considered for every job opening at EQMD is absurd.

Well, I’d like to say that the notion that a (presumably) gay someone from the brave (presumablygay) recesses of (presumably gay) anonymity can’t see that trans people are rarely considered for such jobs – and, for all practical purposes, trans women never are – is “absurd.”

I’d like to, but I can’t.

Its just typical.

But, we have yet to get to the money shot:

 It’s impossible to get anyone highly qualified to take on these jobs….

Yes, there we have it.  We see what gays really think about a concept more scary to them than trans people working for gays: them working for trans people.  Clearly, in their worldview, no trans people could possibly actually be qualified for any position in GayWorld™, so even our most meager of requests to be considered even for grunt work in the Gay Rights Industry™ is an imposition on the ever-so-important time of those who really matter – meaning that our demands to be considered for executroid  (and other non-grunt) work is akin to party crashing Kate and Willie’s shindig and demanding that Liz give Phil a blow job to entertain the inbred and other denizens of class obscenityat the reception.

Not, of course, that we haven’t known that for years (or, in light of a certain something or another having gone on for ten years now, perhaps decades would be more appropriate.)

A Question for Pat Robertson

Dear Marion:

What is your explanation as to why your alleged deity opened his can of tornado whoop-ass and aimed it at good, clean, christianist, gay-hatin’ Alabama?

Not enough lynchings lately?

No front-row seats for the apostles at the Lynyrd Skynyrd concert?

Not enough effort put in into that attempt to re-animate Bear Bryant’s corpse? 

Not enough effort put in into that attempt to re-animate George Wallace’s corpse?

Seriously, we all would like to know.

Sincerely,

Everyone on the planet who has a functioning brain, particularly everyone in the French Quarter of New Orleans (you know, the gay-est part of NOLA but the part least touched by Hurricane Katrina?)

Why America is Dead – Period: Christianists Expect People Not to Point Out the Fact that the Moon Reflects Light and Has No Light Source of its Own

As disturbing as this theocratic insanity is, its actually not a self-executing punchline:

Bill Nye, the harmless children’s edu-tainer known as “The Science Guy,” managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own.

But don’t tell that to the good people of Waco, who were “visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence,” according to the Waco Tribune.

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they’d always suspected.

No…

This is the punchline:

This story originally appeared in the Waco Tribune, but the newspaper has mysteriously pulled its story from the online version, presumably to avoid further embarrassment.

http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2006/04/06/04062006wacbillnye.html

Well, I guess I was wrong about one thing.

Apparently Morgan Meneses-Sheets’ post-‘Equality’ Maryland gig wasn’t with HRC after all.  Apparently it is with the McLennan County, Texas, tourist bureau – doctoring news stories so as to make people with brains think that Waco actually supports the concept of sanity.

“I guess this blows EQMD’s ‘we don’t want any out of staters getting involved with our campaigns’ right out of the water.”

The title of this post is the bulk of a comment that Tom Lang made to the following Queer Channel Media item, noting that Lynne Bowman would become ‘Equality’ Maryland’s interim executive director on Monday:

Bowman has served as director of programs and services for the Equality Federation, a national association of state LGBT groups. She is also a founder of Equality Ohio and most recently served as campaign manager for Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher’s U.S. Senate bid.

“During Lynne’s time with the Equality Federation and as executive director of Equality Ohio, Lynne consistently demonstrated strong, visionary leadership,” said Rebecca Isaacs, executive director of the Equality Federation in a statement.

…

“Equality Maryland is thrilled to have a nationally known and respected leader at the helm of the organization,” the group said in a joint statement to the Blade from Chuck Butler, board chair of Equality Maryland, and Patrick Wojahn, chair of the Equality Maryland Foundation.

Nationally known?  What exactly is the standard for determining that? ‘Known by a majority of the caviar-snorters on the HRC gala committee’?

Nationally known…

But not from Maryland…

and not a person of color…

and not a trans person…

Three strikes and…………………………………………………………..

Can We Just Go Ahead and Trade Oklahoma For a Future Draft Pick?

Seriously.  Osama?  Its yours if you want it.

In fact, forget the draft pick.  Do you have a few extra goats?

Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern, a Republican, made questionable remarks in the wake of a measure seeking to ban affirmative action programs advancing in the state, Tulsa World reports.

According to the local outlet:

Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don’t work as hard and have less initiative.

“We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school? I’ve taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”

And in other news, an unnamed reality-based politician introduced a bill of attainder against Phyllis Schlafly for opposing the E.R.A. based on the fallacy that women have a ‘right’ to not work.

Memo to the Louisiana Legislature: ‘Eugenics’ is not a French Female Name

It is, however, what at least one Louisiana legislator is wanting to enshrine as state law:

Louisiana State Rep John Labruzzo (R) has introduced “feticide” legislation to ban all abortion in his state and sentence women and doctors who violate the ban to 15 years hard labor. The law would make no exceptions for cases of danger to the health of the mother, incest or rape, and would essentially be an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade in the state of Louisiana.

In previous attempts to manipulate, penalize and reward women’s reproductive choices, Labruzzo has also suggested Louisiana law should pay poor women to be sterilized and well-to-do women to crank out more financially secure kids into the American gene-pool.

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied…

It also could include tax incentives for college-educated, higher-income people to have more children, he said.

So….

Getting some more taxes out of those who have gamed the system to become immorally wealthy by exporting jobs and thereby ensuring that even many of those who are college-educated have no incomes at all was never an option?  You just decided that it would be better to pack up your entire state and transport it to 1935 Germany?

Ohh…

And before there’s a fit of Godwin’s Law intonations, do bear in mind that the New Orleans suburb represented by LaBruzzo is the same one that David Duke represented during his brief tenure in the Louisiana Legislature in the early 1990s.  It isn’t a Godwin’s Law violation to invoke Nazi Germany when you’re actually talking about Nazis – old or new, uniformed or white-sheeted – and Former-Rep. Duke has left Metairie as a permanent Godwin’s Law exception (I won’t pile on by noting what Duke’s immediate successor to that seat, a predecessor of LaBruzzo’s has done; but, I will note that there is no “Godwin’s Diaper Law.”)

I’m just history-in’.

Where the T Isn’t

I’m just sayin’.

Where the T Should Not Be

From an op-ed by NCLR’s Kate Kendell in today’s Bay Area Reporter:

The sole purpose of DOMA is to discriminate against same-sex couples.

I’ve no qualms with that statement.  It accurately distills the statutory language as well as the hundreds of pages of transcripts of Congressional hearings and debates from 1996.

The problem is that the paragraph which contains that sentence begins with this one:

DOMA was passed in order to express moral disapproval of LGBT people.

No.  It was passed in order to express moral disapproval of lesbians, gays and bisexuals.  The fact that plenty of the eels who were slithering around the U.S. Capitol had no use for trans people either is actually irrelevant; the fact that a handful of the members of the  anti-gay horde who helped to manufacture DOMA in 1996 had, in previous years, supported state laws which provide for legal recognition of change of sex is….

well, in gay circles, it tends to be forbidden knowledge, not to be spoken of in polite company (you know, like the overwhelmingly anti-trans employment practices of Gay, Inc.)

In those hundreds of pages of transcripts of Congressional hearings and debates from 1996 you’ll strain every aspect of your being attempting to find any references to trans-anything.  Granted, if you look hard enough, you can find one or two oblique, non-substantive references to trans-something-or-another.  However, as to what Congress actually was targeting, let’s look at a 2005 opinion from the Board of Immigration Appeals:

There is no question that a valid marriage can only be one between a man and a woman. Marriages between same-sex couples are clearly excluded.

This interpretation is further supported by the legislative history of the DOMA. The House Report specifically states that the DOMA was introduced in response to a 1993 decision of the Hawaii Supreme Court that raised the issue of the potential legality of same-sex marriages in Hawaii. See H.R. Rep. No. 104-664, at 2-6 (1996), reprinted in 1996 U.S.C.C.A.N. 2905, 2906-10, 1996 WL 391835 (Leg. Hist.) (citing Baehr v. Lewin, 852 P.2d 44 (Haw. 1993) (remanding for application of strict scrutiny under the Hawaii equal protection clause to the question of the denial of marriage licenses to same-sex couples)). Throughout the House Report, the terms “same sex” and “homosexual” are used interchangeably. The House Report also repeatedly refers to the consequences of permitting homosexual couples to marry.

However, with regard to one of the specific issues we are facing in this case, i.e., whether the DOMA applies to invalidate, for Federal purposes, a marriage involving a postoperative transsexual, it is notable that Congress did not mention the case of M.T. v. J.T., 355 A.2d 204 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 1976), which recognized a transsexual marriage.1 Nor did it mention the various State statutes that at the time of consideration of the DOMA provided for the legal recognition of a change of sex designation by postoperative transsexuals. Rather, Congress’s focus, as indicated by its consistent reference to homosexuals in the floor discussions and in the House Report, was fixed on, and limited to, the issue of homosexual marriage.

Furthermore, a specific statement in the House Report’s section-by-section analysis provides support for the conclusion that Congress did not consider transsexual marriages to be per se violative of the DOMA. According to that statement, “Prior to the Hawaii lawsuit, no State has ever permitted homosexual couples to marry. Accordingly, federal law could rely on state determinations of who was married without risk of inconsistency or endorsing same-sex ‘marriage.’” H.R. Rep. No. 104-664, at 30 (emphasis added). As noted above, M.T. v. J.T., supra, and the statutory provisions in several States recognizing a legal change of sex after surgery were in existence at the time the House Report was issued.

We therefore conclude that the legislative history of the DOMA indicates that in enacting that statute, Congress only intended to restrict marriages between persons of the same sex. There is no indication that the DOMA was meant to apply to a marriage involving a postoperative transsexual where the marriage is considered by the State in which it was performed as one between two individuals of the opposite sex.

Of course, the BIA isn’t the SCOTUS – but the legislative history of the federal DOMA is not the legislative history of an act that in any way targeted trans-anyone as trans-anything.  And saying that the federal DOMA “was passed in order to express moral disapproval of LGBT people” recklessly disregards the only good thing that trans people – particularly transsexuals – have to show for the quarter-century of complete exclusion from the national gay rights agenda: A politico-legal history that, if acknowledged and respected, shows that transsexuals’ post-transition legal identities should not be wiped out by laws designed to attack gays and lesbians.

But what do I know?

I’m just a transsexual woman.

I learned long ago where my opinions – and all facts supporting them – matter and where they don’t.