Tag: civil rights

Courage

There is zero legal or Constitutional reason why this stay has been sought by the Obama Administration.

Thank you, Dan Choi, for standing up for the truth and for equality.

DeMint’s GOP would install Morality Police in Public Education …

Ed Schultz covers the latest DeMint Plan

Ed then interviews “openly gay” Rep. Jared Polis (CO);

and then “openly blunt” Rep. Alan Grayson (FL), to get their takes on this new DeMint Lunacy.

A Time to Speak:

This is a lesson for school children and teens brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Teaching Tolerance program. It frankly, in these days, needs to be learned by more adults it seems then children, though those same adults, parents, granparents and other relatives, friends, neighbors, strangers and talking heads of many media outlets are showing just wasn’t learned, nor wanted to be, when they were young!

A Speech by Charles Morgan

On Living With Idiots, Or, An Open Letter To Islam

Dear Islam,

You know, it seems like every time I write a letter I have to begin by apologizing for not having written in so long, and that’s the case again today.

We only get a few days of real summer up here every year, and I was out having fun at golf tournaments and doing a bit of climbing around the local hills-and you know, I do love doing a bit of nothing at all from time to time-but while I was away, things have gotten even crazier than usual around here…and I’m sorry to say, you’ve been on the pointy end of the crazy stick, which is something that never should have happened.

Things have been so nutty that you’re probably thinking America has something against Islam-in fact, you might be wondering if we have something against our own Constitution.

Well, we don’t, most of us, and I’ll take a few minutes today to help y’all understand just what is going on in this country.

Are We Finally Ready for an Honest Discussion on Race?

I appreciate the opportunity now laid before the American people to have a long overdue discussion on race.  Prior opportunities like these have come and gone but, pardon my skepticism, I still don’t think many of us are willing to commit to it.  Doing so would explode a variety of myths, particularly ones held by those who enjoy patting themselves on the back for a job well done.  Jobs this complex cannot be undone by one movement alone.

Faith=No Muslims. Charity=No Government Spending. Hope=No Obama.

cross-posted from Sum of Change and check out Pam Spaulding’s post at PHB for more thoughts and discussion.

Yesterday we sent cameras to Glenn Beck’s 828 rally and Al Sharpton’s rally and march. We posted a handfull of videos from each. But first, a personal comment, if you don’t mind. My parents and grandparents were civil rights activists (not to mention anti-war activists and labor organizers). On the same grass where we stood yesterday, my mother stood 47 years ago to watch Martin Luther King Jr. declare his dream for the world. I highly doubt anyone will remember yesterday the way my mother remembers 47 years ago.

We will begin with Beck’s event::

On Organized Fearmongering Revealed, Or, “Lock Up The Kids…It’s The Gay!”

The airwaves (and the print and blog waves, for that matter) are filled with the news that a Federal Judge in California has declared that State’s Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional, which could clear the way for the resumption of same-sex weddings in the State.

Ordinarily, this would be the point where I would present to you a walkthrough of the ruling, and we’d have a fine conversation about the legal implications of what has happened.

I’m not doing that today, frankly, because the ground is already well-covered; instead, we’re going to take a look at some of the tactics that were used to pass Prop 8, as they were presented in Judge Vaughan’s opinion.

It’s an ugly story-and even more than that, it’s a reminder of why it’s tough to advance civil rights through the political process, and what you have to deal with when you’re trying to make such a thing happen.

On A Pair Of Victories, Part Two, Or, DOMA Ruled Unconstitutionally Irrational

We are back, just a bit late, to wrap up the discussion we began about the pair of rulings issued in Boston by Federal District Judge Joseph Tauro this week that declare the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional.

In the first half of the conversation, we examined the ruling in Commonwealth of Massachusetts v Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), today we examine the companion case, Gill v Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

I don’t usually tell you the end of the story at the beginning, but this time I will: there are a lot of happy Plaintiffs this week, and the Federal Government, as Defendant (whom I will refer to as “the Feds” from time to time), is not so happy at the moment.

As with last time, there’s a lot of ground to cover, and the sooner we get to it, the better.

How to throw Rosa Parks off the bus, by John Stossel and Rand Paul

STOSSEL: because private businesses ought to get to discriminate.

~snip~

(I)t should be their right to be racist.

“I want my country back”

Back to when? 1963? or 1910? or 1810?

When Rosa Parks was thrown off of a bus for refusing to sit in the back in accordance with discriminatory Jim Crow laws it helped begin the Civil Rights movement.

It was racist then, and it would still be racist now.

Except, of course, if you are a libertarian or a Republican.

   In the last 24 hours, both Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul and Fox News Corp employee John Stossel have made the case that it is OKAY to throw Rosa Parks off the bus if it is owned by a private business.

more below the fold

May 20, 1961: The Freedom Rider Story

In light of what’s been going on in this country, the past couple of years especially, and a highly reported so called populist movement, themselves calling the participants ‘teabaggers’, but really a very loud and even with some media and political ideology backing a minority of the population, I bring you this in the subject title and below.

 

Teabaggers, Confederate Flags, and Wishful Thinking

Though I no longer live there, I suppose I will always be a Son of the South.  Where I grew up, a strong sense of solidarity with the Lost Cause of the Confederacy still existed, which to me was more a romantic ideal of what might had been then any desire for Round Two of the conflict.  I always felt it to be analogous to the sort of people who support a particular sports team that is always a heavy underdog and spend much time waxing poetically between themselves about close losses.  “If only”, these attitudes seemed to say.  “If only.”  So on at least one level I think I can understand the mentality of the Teabaggers, since their resistance to Progressive reforms is often tied to a profound sense of nostalgia for some golden age long past and likely never to return.  The particularly irony, of course, is that this epoch they reference never really existed in the first place.

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s decision to denote the month of April as Confederate History Month and the controversy surrounding it reminds me of the political back and forth that raged when my home state of Alabama was contemplating removing the Confederate flag from the top of the Capitol building in Montgomery.  Then, as now, many of the same arguments were heard.  After years of debate, the flag was at last taken down.  South Carolina is the last of the southern states to keep the flag flying, but even so, several other Deep South states incorporate the design into their own state flags, having faced massive popular backlash when they threatened to remove the pattern altogether.  

On Email Gay Bashing, Or, ENDA’s Already Getting Ugly

It wasn’t but a couple of days ago that we had a conversation about The Fear and the emails that are used to spread it, and I figured with that out of the way we had dealt with the topic, and that we’d move on to new things.

Well, we would be moving on, Gentle Reader, if it wasn’t for the fact that an email came in today that was so ugly, so disturbing, and so indicative of what we are about to see as the battle over the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) begins to heat up (ENDA being possibly the next “big contentious thing” that this Administration hopes to accomplish), that I had to interrupt my story schedule to bring it to your attention.

Load more