I haven’t done one of these in a while, but it seemed like a good time to let people know what’s going on in the world of queer politics and activism. I’ll try to post these more regularly again, but my schedule’s still a little sporadic to fix a concrete posting time. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy, and if you have other news blurbs that I’ve missed, please feel free to add them below.
The liberal media is stoking the flames, with noted leftist rag The Wall Street Journal posting an unequivocally positive editorial, “Gay Marriage is Good for America”:
In 2008, denying gay Americans the opportunity to marry is not only inhumane, it is unsustainable. History has turned a corner: Gay couples – including gay parents – live openly and for the most part comfortably in mainstream life. This will not change, ever.
Violence against the transgender community rarely makes the evening news, but the case of Duanna Johnson is so extreme that people are starting to pay attention. While being booked for alleged prostitution in Memphis, a police officer called over to her:
Actually he was trying to get me to come over to where he was, and I responded by telling him that wasn’t my name – that my mother didn’t name me a ‘faggot’ or a ‘he-she,’ so he got upset and approached me. And that’s when it started,” Johnson said.
I can’t do justice to what happens next: you need to see the video for yourself. WMCtv provides the full security clip, so you can see that it’s not being taken out of context (the incident in question starts around the 1:30 mark.)
One police officer let go, another put into an office job, and a pending investigation with support from the FBI. But the Memphis police is being flooded with complaints that this was not an isolated incident. Do we laugh or cry at something like this?
“It made me sick,” [Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin] said Thursday. “I was infuriated. I notified the FBI because they needed to investigate to see if this person’s civil rights were violated.”
If this person’s civil rights were violated???