Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/gender-and-sexuality/page/6/)
About struggles to be who we are, and to love each other across the categories.
Mormon leaders said they would not change Church policy on its position on marriage for same-sex couples and the relationship of LGBT people within the denomination. They once said similar things about its policies on people of African heritage and the Church. The church’s efforts to temper its discrimination against such groups is way past due.
This may be fine that Exxon Mobil Corp. has ever-so-reluctantly, though finally, added LGBT workplace protections. However, Exxon Mobil Corp. remains one of the primary environmental polluters in an industry that threatens the Earth and life as we know it. What good are workshop protections in a corporation and in an entire industry that has granted no such protections to our planet?
I was in El Salvador with a group of Rabbinic and Graduate students who are Global Justice Fellows with American Jewish World Service (AJWS). I was privileged to be the scholar-in-residence for the group. For nine days in early January we travelled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet with a few of AJWS’ partner organizations who worked as human rights defenders and advocates in the areas of transgender rights, sex workers’ rights, and gender based violence.
After finding out that the deceased was a lesbian, a pastor at New Hope Ministries in Colorado stopped Vanessa Collier’s funeral in the middle of the service. If Pastor Chavez considers his actions as representing some sort of hope, new or otherwise, I prefer no hope at all.
If you are old enough for an AARP card, you ought to know that confidence and sexiness are not functions of the length of one’s skirt or the height of one’s heel. Confidence and sexiness are states-of-mind
‘Therefore, I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people’ —Coretta Scott King
I would like to provide a bit of a historical retrospective as we begin to enter the sweepstakes for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I do this for the purpose of assessing whether Republicans remains attached to the policies of the past or has evolved and moved forward in terms of issues related to LGBT equality.
“The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was. They’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something”
Yet while marriage is an important right that carries many benefits, opening the nuptial doors hardly signals the eradication of homophobia or misogyny. In twenty-nine states, it is still legal to discriminate against the LGBT community in employment, housing, and education.
I will never forget the first time I saw Leslie Feinberg speak—New York City, 1996. The auditorium was full of young people like me who had read Stone Butch Blues and wanted to hear about gender and queerness. Leslie spoke about those things, but also about war and labor struggles and racism and U.S. militarism, refusing to deliver the narrow single-issue politics that the mainstreaming gay rights discourse had trained us to expect.