When people say it’s a stupid, superficial thing to avoid eating at Chik-Fil-A just because you disagree with the politics of the higher-ups, I assume those people don’t realize Chik-Fil-A profits are pumped into organizations that literally support legislation to execute gay people.
When people are actively spreading bigotry, it’s not superficial to take your business elsewhere.
(via collababortion)
Source: coelasquid
Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Scott Walker: Wisconsin’s Honey Badger
Such a sweeping federal review in this arena does not square with our federalist system of government.
Barbara Jones, federal judge, U.S. Court of Appeals (1st Circuit), 6 June 2012
on ruling the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional on the grounds that it intrudes “upon the states’ business of regulating domestic relations.”
(source)
[U.S. President Barack] Obama has presided over a massive expansion of secret surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. He has launched a ferocious and unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. He has made more government documents classified than any previous president. He has broken his promise to close down the controversial Guantánamo Bay prison and pressed on with prosecutions via secretive military tribunals, rather than civilian courts. He has preserved CIA renditions. He has tried to grab broad new powers on what defines a terrorist or a terrorist supporter and what can be done with them, often without recourse to legal process. The sheer scope and breadth of Obama’s national security policy has stunned even fervent Bush supporters and members of the Washington DC establishment.
Openly gay Latina wins Texas congressional seat
(Courtesy Mary Gonzalez)
Mary Gonzalez told them she was the best candidate to represent them and El Paso voters agreed, but along the way, the 28-year-old doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin broke her share of barriers.
This is a first. Woo!
An openly gay Latina wins a U.S. House seat in a Texas district? And she’s a Longhorn?!
Source: nbclatino
A Parable About America
The first time around in grad school, my class was made of up seven people, one of whom was named Alexei. He was from near Kiev, Ukraine. When he arrived here, he was fresh off the boat: didn’t know much English, had never been more than about 100 miles away from his home. The first year in the U.S. was rough. But he got through it and thrived. Alexei grew up under Communism. He told us that when Chernobyl happened, not far from where he lived, the people in his city didn’t find out for weeks.
One day toward the end of that first year, we were wasting time in the communal office into which we and our desks were packed like proverbial sardines. I casually asked him, “Alexei, what do you like most about the United States”?
His answer remains seared into my mind, years later: “I like that you can go into the stores and there are things on the shelves to buy.”
It was such a striking thing to hear, coming from white bread suburban America, the land of limitless resources. Since then, that sentence has caused me to rethink a lot of the assumptions I have made about our nation, our society, and our culture. And it says something significant about the complacency of our people.
As long as the lights come on when the switch is flipped, as long as gas comes out of the pump when the handle is squeezed, as long as there are things on the store shelves to buy, we Americans will never rise up against the social and economic forces that keep so many of them permanently down.
Americans are like a frog in a pot of water on a stove. Throw the frog into a pot of boiling water, and it will immediately leap out. But put the frog in a pot of cold water on stove and slowly, incrementally turn up the heat, and the frog will swim around happily until it is boiled to death. We are now the frog lazily swimming in tepid water as the heat beneath is is being turned up at an ever-increasing rate. Soon it will be too late to prevent becoming cooked.
“(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” (live feat. Mike Mills and Peter Buck)
Alejandro Escovedo and Friends live at the Continental Club, Austin, Texas, 18 March 2012
Mike Mills, Alejandro Escovedo, DeWitt Burton and Peter Buck (Photo by Chloe Johnson)
Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage Collapses
“Joe Biden’s announcement that he was OK with same-sex marriage may have pushed President Obama into seconding the motion a bit earlier than he had planned, but it doesn’t appear to be hurting him politically. An NBC/WSJ poll shows that 17% of the voters are more likely to vote for Obama as a consequence of his announcement vs. 20% who are more likely to vote for Romney. Furthermore, Obama’s announcement is driving public opinion. A new WaPo/ABC News poll shows that 53% of Americans now think same-sex marriage should be legal while only 39% now say it should be illegal. This is the lowest rate of disapproval ever recorded.”
“What is truly amazing is that to a large extent, Bush’s Brain, Karl Rove, made the Republican opposition to gay marriage one of the pillars of the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. That was not so long ago and now the Republicans are completely silent on the issue. After Obama gave his interview, no high-profile Republican went on the air to denounce him. The electoral potency of the issue is completely gone, and in a historically short time.“
(Source: electoral-vote.com)
Accumulating random crap since 1976! Mostly strange humor, fountain pens, history, politics, LGBT issues, art, odd pictures from my iPhoto library, and irrelevant status updates. I'm an ESTJ. In my day job I'm a scientist or something. And I like boys.
