October 2007 archive

Welcome to a weekly roundup of news related to the gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and otherwise “Other” community.

• First openly gay person to have a celestial body named after him?  The honor goes to George Takei, famous for his role as Star Trek‘s Hikaru Sulu, who came out in 2005 and has been working as an LGBT activist ever since – And now his name will grace the asteroid formerly known as 1994 GT9. (h/t Mombian, also mentioned in ek’s Morning News) By the way, if you’ve never seen Takei’s hilarious response to Tim Hardaway’s anti-gay comments, watch it now!
• Senator Barack Obama has called on President Bush to reconsider his veto threat (yeah, right!) against the Hate Crimes Act, which recently passed in the Senate.  Obama was one of the bill’s co-sponsors.  In other candidate news: gaining some ground since his gaffes at the HRC-sponsored debate, Governor Bill Richardson has said he’d refuse an honorary chairmanship of the Boy Scouts of America, on the grounds of their discriminatory policies.
• You know we’re achieving progress when we’re upgraded from comparisons to animal-lovers and murderers to comparisons to… kleptomaniacs!  The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church made the comparison in a speech yesterday in front of the Council of Europe (h/t Towleroad):
  

  Attempts are made to justify homosexuality by calling it a disease, the patriarch said. Yet kleptomania can also be considered a disease, he argued. “Why then no one advertises kleptomania while homosexuality gets advertised via gay parades?” he said.
    “It is advertisement that is being forced on people who are a very long way from it,” Alexy said.

  Dear Alesha (can I call you Alesha?): Your anti-gay speech is also advertisement that is being forced on people who are a very long way from it.  But I suppose we shouldn’t expect better from former KGB, now should we?

More below…

With the publishing of today’s Washington Post poll, I believe the Netroots is at a crossroads. The poll shows Senator Hillary Clinton with a huge lead in the race for the Democratic nomination.  Left blogs have spent an inordinate amount of time on horserace blogging, with a great deal of attention paid to national polls.

Focus on personalities, horseraces and the ins and outs of campaign finance, with many leading bloggers doing their best Charlie Cook imitations, has crowded out focus and activism on issues. Like Iraq. Like not funding the Iraq Debacle.

When the Netroots came to be, it was because of issues, not personalities and political campaigns. Howard Dean and Wes Clark were not supported because of who they were, but because of where they stood and what they said. It was because of the issues.

I have been saying for some time that the Netroots has failed in 2007 on Iraq and in general. That failure is manifest now. Concentrating on the elections of 2008, it has had zero impact on the discussion of issues outside the campaign. Even the impact it has had, like on Hillary Clinton’s position on Iraq, has been pooh poohed.

I have long said it – pols are pols, and will do what they must to get elected. The Netroots needs to realize that its goals on issues do not revolve around particular politicians, but around particular policies and issues. In the fevered coverage of the 2008 campaign, the issues and policies of 2007 have been left behind by the Netroots. And to what end? This wrongheaded thinking now reaches a crossroads. Which road will the Netroots travel from here on out? Let’s hope it is the road that focuses on issues, not personalities. 

On October 27th, United for Peace and Justice is organizing 11 coordinated demonstrations in Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough (no event details are listed for Jonesborough), Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle. (In Los Angeles, this protest is being coordinated with A.N.S.W.E.R)

This is a WesPAC site dedicated to stopping the rush to war in Iran.  You can send a form email (and we all know I always do what Wes♥Clark tells me to).  The campaign is apparently a joint venture by Wes’s Securing America and the Vote*Vets PAC.

This image is from AfterDowningStreet, not WesPAC or VoteVets, but I’m putting it here anyway…

The Green Party of Michigan’s Stop the War Slate is coordinating anti-war leafletting at polling places on election day.

Google ‘stop the war’ and you will get 146,000,000 options…. 😉  Or go directly to a place like DemocracyRising or the Iraq Moratorium site and find millions more ways…

The Morning News is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News THE TOP STORIES

1 Blackwater chairman defends his company
By RICHARD LARDNER and ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 41 minutes ago

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

An update to this earlier essay, the UK Judge reviewing AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH in response to a lawsuit brought by a Dover truck driver, as determined that the film will be allowed in schools as long as the teacher do not endorse it.

I can see it now.  ‘Hey, lads, watch this film but don’t ask me what I think of it, as I am only your professor…’

More below the jump.

Artist: Michael Brown

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 classifed LSD and other psychedelics as Schedule I (no medical use) and effectively prohibited psychedelic research by scientists and mental health professionals in the US.   Now, more than 30 years later, it is still exceedingly difficult to get funding, support, or approval for this kind of research.  The very few studies that are going on today are in some part sponsored or supported by MAPS – the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Drugs.  “[Their] mission is to sponsor scientific research designed to develop psychedelics and marijuana into FDA-approved prescription medicines, and to educate the public honestly about the risks and benefits of these drugs.” 

Sweet Jeebus.

Impeachment is off the table. Defunding is off the table.  And now, it seems that even raising taxes to pay for the war is now off the table. 

Sure, Raising taxes can be scary. Any potentially politically unpopular decision can be scary. But, that’s kinda what leadership is all about.