Pam of Her House Blend, wrote an interesting post about the topic gay rights now versus later, which I’ve discussed before. Pam talks about Rachel Maddow’s persistent pressure on the Obama Administration to talk about gay rights and the reaction this is stirring from other progressives:
The panicked “the gays won’t shut up†progressive reaction follows a predictable get-to-the-back-of-the-bus pattern:
* He’s just been in office four+ months, give him a break.
The usual sit down in the back of the bus and shut up, you’re whining argument (haven’t we heard that before – “we have to get re-elected†“watch out for the midterms,†blah, blah). As if we should sit with our hands folded in our laps and let slide the utterly ridiculous non-answers coming out of the mouth of otherwise-articulate Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (the Blend files are filling up quickly) when he’s asked about DADT.
Man, I hope I don’t seem like I’m telling my people to shut up and stop whining. As I’ve said before, I’m conflicted about Obama and gay rights. I really really want to think that Obama is just waiting on the issues because action now would be futile. But maybe, more to the point, it’s just too depressing to think that he might have lied to us. To have admit that after dedicating a chunk of my life and money to get Obama elected, it would be beyond disheartening that he would simply turn his back on his promises for equal rights for LGBT people.
I very acutely understand how having marriage rights denied to me affects me. I understand how the lack of immigration equality makes me live in fear. I also understand that the world is, well, not fair. I understand that because of politics and religion, laws can take a while.
But it’s becoming less and less reasonable to believe that Obama is a “fierce ally” for gays. A fierce ally would stand up for equality. He would commend states for providing equality to LGBT couples. He would be condemn Prop 8 and the California Supreme Court’s ruling. A fierce ally would issue stop-loss commands to intervene in the federal government’s continued discrimination because of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He would say something, anything. You know how actions speak louder than words? The absence of both speaks pretty fucking loudly.
I worry that when I say “give him some time” that I might be falling back on a very bad, paternal idea that Obama Knows Best. For instance, he knows that gays deserve equal rights but he also knows when it’s the right time to let us have them. Maybe after we eat our spinach? Or maybe after he is re-elected?
I really wish someone would directly press the issues of gay rights with Obama. Brian Williams asked a stupid, bullshit question about whether or not he is a “friend” to LGBT people. Um, I don’t want a friend. I want a goddamn fierce ally. And stop asking Robert Gibbs questions too  He and the President clearly never talk about how a whole groups of Americans have their rights granted! and then removed! on a state by state basis every couple of months.
I would love for a reporter to sit Obama down and grill him:
“”You said you are a fierce ally of LGBT people, how?”
“What would you need to have happen before you would stop active discrimination in your military policies?”
“What are your plans for repeal DOMA?”
“Do you believe that ENDA should be passed and what will you do to further that?”
“How is giving same sex couples ‘civil unions’ not an example of ’separate but equal’ treatment?”
“Do you support the UAFA? If not, how do you propose to protect LGBT families in matters of immigration?”
Is this too much to ask?
I found out about Night Control, a band mainly comprised of Christopher Curtis Smith, through Last.fm. I’ve been trying to find more music along the lines of my on-going crushes on the bands Women and Crystal Stilts. I eventually hunted down his album, Death Control, and have been hooked to the melodic shoe-gazing electronic, rock-ish noodlings ever since. No Pain in Pop has two tracks from his latest album.
This would have been more helpful last year, but here is a really great visualization of the credit crisis. If you can follow it all the way through, it’s a good description of what happened:
I also found that the This American Life episode about the credit crisis was really good at explaining what happened… the first one being really brilliant:
The south isn’t always so bad. My mom sent me this video of a very nice looking lesbian singing a funny little song. I’m dedicating this to my boyfriend.
No article that isn’t about the Bush Administration has ever made my blood boil like this article in the Worst Section of the New York Times did this morning:
The article is really worth reading. At first, I assumed it was just another sign of how the Sunday Styles section is the worst piece of trash published by a reputable newpaper. You know, that the Styles section is the lowest form of reporting (bullshit observations of my rich friends!). You really have to wonder about people who write this shit and you have to REALLY wonder about the people who let it be published.
Anyway, then I realized this article was actually just a joke. No one in their right mind could write an article talking about the costs of living in New York (which includes your CHAUFFEUR WITH A GUN and your $45,000 NANNY, obviously) would follow that up with the following paragraph:
The total costs here, which do not include a lot of things, like kennels for the dog when the family is away, summer camp, spas and other grooming for the human members of the family, donations to charity, and frozen hot chocolates at Serendipity, are $790,750, which would require about a $1.6-million salary to compensate for taxes. Give or take a few score thousand of dollars.
Yes. You’re right New York Times, we should feel bad for them. The HANDFUL of executives who are effected by this and drove their companies into the ground so that they needed the Federal government to bail them out will definitely suffer if they only make $500,000 in cash every year PLUS ALL OF THE UNLIMITED STOCK OPTIONS THEY CAN STILL BE GIVEN.
Maybe you hate marriage equality. It’s too hetero normative? (or maybe you are the one random conservative who reads my blog) Well, first of all, don’t be a dick. It’s a little selfish to be obsessed with your own theoretical bs to oppose practical solutions to real people’s current problems.
What problems are those?
Although 19 nations around the world allow their citizens to sponsor their same sex partners for immigration benefits, unfortunately, the United States does not recognize our relationships for immigration purposes. Because of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, even same sex couples which have been legally married in Massachusetts, California, Canada, the Netherlands, or Belgium, will not be able to immigrate based on their marriage. Every day we hear from desperate couples, forced to choose between the partner they love and the country they love, which is why we are fighting to change the immigration law and end this discrimination.
So let’s all try to get the Uniting American Families Act passed! Actually, even people who hate “hetero” institutions can support this because it doesn’t do anything to change the recognition of gay relationships beyond immigration!
To help get this law passed, Immigration Equality suggests:
You can make the bill a success by convincing your Representative to support the bill from Day One. Reintroducing the bill with as many cosponsors as possible will show powerful momentum for the rights of gay and lesbian binational couples!
Please call your Representative and ask them to be an original cosponsor of the “Uniting American Families Act of 2009â€
Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202)224-3121 and ask to be connected to your U.S. Representative.
Tell your representative’s staff:
I am calling to ask Representative ________________ to be an original cosponsor of the Uniting American Families Act of 2009. To cosponsor, he/she must contact Rep. Jerrold Nadler who is the lead sponsor.
The U.S. government discriminates against gay and lesbian binational couples by not allowing us to sponsor our foreign-born life partners for immigration. Because of this, we face the terrible choice of separating from the person we love or leaving our country. As Americans, we should not have to choose between family and country. Please ask Rep. _________________ to cosponsor the Uniting American Families Act of 2009 by reaching out to Rep. Nadler before February 12.
Thanks for asking your member of Congress to celebrate love this Valentine’s Day by cosponsoring UAFA!
I was nicely surprised by an interview with Antony Hegarty of Antony and The Johnsons on my Fresh Air podcast yesterday. Antony is a transgender artist and singer who has a really amazing voice. The songs are all incredibly depressing but wonderful nontheless. Antony is even featured twice in My Favorites of 2008 Mix (which is still available)!
I actually got more of a kick out of seeing the interview with the kids at Penn Square Mall than James’ homophobia. But I’d actually be surprised if James didn’t win the election… I feel like that story would turn out the vote for him.
Also, Kelley Ogle is STILL on the local news? I hope that means Linda Cavanaugh has been preserved somewhere in a jar of formaldehyde…
Seriously, the White House website already has commitments to LGBT indiviuals posted:
Support for the LGBT Community
“While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It’s about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect.”– Barack Obama, June 1, 2007
Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: In 2004, crimes against LGBT Americans constituted the third-highest category of hate crime reported and made up more than 15 percent of such crimes. President Obama cosponsored legislation that would expand federal jurisdiction to include violent hate crimes perpetrated because of race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical disability. As a state senator, President Obama passed tough legislation that made hate crimes and conspiracy to commit them against the law.
Fight Workplace Discrimination: President Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. While an increasing number of employers have extended benefits to their employees’ domestic partners, discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace occurs with no federal legal remedy. The President also sponsored legislation in the Illinois State Senate that would ban employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Support Full Civil Unions and Federal Rights for LGBT Couples: President Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples. Obama also believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions. These rights and benefits include the right to assist a loved one in times of emergency, the right to equal health insurance and other employment benefits, and property rights.
Oppose a Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex Marriage: President Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006 which would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman and prevented judicial extension of marriage-like rights to same-sex or other unmarried couples.
Repeal Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell: President Obama agrees with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and other military experts that we need to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve. Discrimination should be prohibited. The U.S. government has spent millions of dollars replacing troops kicked out of the military because of their sexual orientation. Additionally, more than 300 language experts have been fired under this policy, including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. The President will work with military leaders to repeal the current policy and ensure it helps accomplish our national defense goals.
Expand Adoption Rights: President Obama believes that we must ensure adoption rights for all couples and individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation. He thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.
Promote AIDS Prevention: In the first year of his presidency, President Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma — too often tied to homophobia — that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.
Empower Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS: In the United States, the percentage of women diagnosed with AIDS has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Today, women account for more than one quarter of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. President Obama introduced the Microbicide Development Act, which will accelerate the development of products that empower women in the battle against AIDS. Microbicides are a class of products currently under development that women apply topically to prevent transmission of HIV and other infections.
Not perfect… ahem, Marriage Equality is absent… but a great great start. So happy right now.
I just realized that the only hip-hop I really like (other than Kanye West, Jay-Z and Outkast) is from female rappers or mashups with rock songs. Try as I might, I just can’t get into anything else. In general, I’m bored with self-aggrandizing or songs about having sex with women.
With that in mind, I love this song from Kid Sister that FreeWilliamsburg directed me to:
Or maybe, more accurately, it’s stump sex. Here is a quote from the New Yorker article on the “Joy of Sex” author:
[Joy of Sex author Alex] Comfort had a tendency to focus single-mindedly on a given notion or project at the expense of any kind of balance: while he was a student at Highgate School, in London, he became convinced that he could concoct a superior version of gunpowder. He blew off much of his left hand. By the time he was finished with his experiments, his thumb was the only remaining digit. Later in his life, when he was practicing medicine, he said that he found this claw he’d created “very useful for performing uterine inversions.†After he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, his enthusiasms led him to accumulate six degrees, including a doctorate in biochemistry.
Okay, well, I’m hoping he didn’t blow any other things off in his pursuit of perfecting sex.
Seven Pounds struck me as a horror movie. A.O. Scott agrees: “For all its pious, earnest air, ‘Seven Pounds’ cries out to be remade as an Asian horror movie, so that the deep, creepy grotesqueness of its governing premise might be allowed to flourish, rather than to fester beneath the surface.â€
Case A) “I am going to harass and belittle you, Mr. Blind Guy, and stalk you at restaurants, then force you to be grateful for the abuse every time you see a child smile through MY EYES which were cut out of my head and put in yours. Bwahahahahah!â€
Case B) “You, Madam, with the heart problem, I am going to ride in as your Knight in Shining Armor to take care of you, romance you, make myself indispensible to you, insinuate that we can have a fairytale life together, then run out on you after our first night of love to commit suicide. Then I will make sure no one else can ever live up to my memory by tricking you into taking MY HEART to beat inside you for the rest of your life. Take that for f’ed up, Joss.â€
And then she goes to LOOK INTO HIS EYES WHICH WERE CUT OUT OF HIS BODY, which is so f’ed up it took everything I had not to scream and run out of the theater. How could anyone think a monumentally creepy scene such as that was possibly heart-warming? It came off like a scene out of the Twilight Zone. In fact, the whole movie came across as an episode. I am baffled by how many people read this screenplay and thought it was a good idea.
Furthermore, the first requirement for a recipient to benefit from this madman’s largesse is that they be “good†in his opinion. What if Ben were a homophobe or a bigot? What if one of these people dared express an opinion other than the milquetoast views palatable to mainstream movie audiences? Woody Allen’s character is “good†because he doesn’t stand up for himself against a vicious, creepy, abusive caller. Whatshername is good because she is a wimpy artist who symbolizes her down-home, old-fashioned values by printing with an old-fashioned printing press, refusing to figure out a way to act like an adult and support herself with modern machinery when it breaks down.
It seems the movie is saying a good person can’t be a smart, friendly, ambitious corporate executive who builds his own aerospace engineering company himself and is devoted to his girlfriend, but who made a mistake. (A mistake that results in a tragedy, but one the law obviously didn’t find worth prosecuting, I might add.) Is a 5 second text message a sin so heinous the only suitable karmic restitution is suicide? For example, it’s not like he was getting behind the wheel after an all-night bender, where he had the choice over hours to get off the path to the mistake.
There is just so much wrong with the movie. Seven Pounds was utterly terrible.
I have to issue a warning to all of you out there in the world because I love some of you and don’t really hate the rest of you that much.
I, unfortunately, had to see “Seven Pounds” on Christmas. It’s a Will Smith movie. I assumed this was a pretty clear indicator that it would be bad and–like all his movies– melodramatic and heavy-handed. I was originally going to see Benjamin Button or Slumdog Millionaire. But since one was THE Christmas movie and the other one is an “ethnic film” in Knoxville relegated to one small screen for the whole city, both were sold out.
Spoiler Alert: This Will Give Away the Movie, which you should never see anyway.
“Seven Pounds” is— surpsise!!!– the weight of the heart. The movie is suppose to be suspenseful or confusing but about thirty minutes into it becomes painfully clear that Will Smith’s character accidentally killed his hotty wife and six other people. Now he’s trying to save the lives of other by giving out his organs, possessions and bodily fluids out to deserving folks.
I think this was suppose to be unclear until the end so when he kills himself with a jellyfish (never explained) you are like “Oh my God, that’s so crazy and amazing and surprising.”
The reality is that you figure this out at the thirty minute mark and for the next two more hours you are left to watch him litterally and figuratively “give his heart” to Rosario Dawson. This is one of the rare movies where I started cheering and chanting for the good guy to kill himself.
Moreover, of the eight people I saw the movie with, I was the only one besides my dad who did not fall asleep in the almost totally empty theater. But my god did I try. I shut my eyes for as long as possible and day-dreamed I was in a better movie.
In the end, Will Smith gives away his heart (DO YOU GET IT??? HE HAVE HER HIS HEART!!!!) to Rosario Dawson and his eyes to a blind Woody Harrelson. Once she realizes all the crazy ass-shit he did, she goes and finds Woody so she can LOOK IN TO HIS EYES ONE MORE TIME. “You really have his eyes.”
The movie is so fucking awful, I don’t even know how someone could have read the script and thought ‘Wow, this is a really touching, albeit predictable, suicide story full of over-wrought metaphors that’ll be a great Christmas blockbuster!”
I was nicely surprised by an interview with Antony Hegarty of Antony and The Johnsons on my Fresh Air podcast yesterday. Antony is a transgender artist and singer who has a really amazing voice. The songs are all incredibly depressing but wonderful nontheless. Antony is even featured twice in 
