Gender and Sexuality

Can't Stop Here: DOMA, Immigration, Discrimination, and the Struggle Ahead

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Last week, the Supreme Court, by what seems like divine intervention, struck down much of DOMA and Proposition 8 in one fell swoop. This ruling has created a new pathway to citizenship for same-sex bi-national couples. This is a big step forward in the fight for just immigration reform but it’s just a step. A recent survey of the homeless community in San Francisco identified that over 25 percent of the population living on the streets is LGBT. And thousands of people of color and other minorities have just lost protections around their right to vote. We have come a long way, and we still have a very long way to go.

Inter-Culturalism

The Supreme Court in Action: A Painful Mixed Bag

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Those of us who have grown up in the industrialized Western world have been fed a steady diet of faith in progress, dating back to the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. There may be setbacks, and still, on the whole, we are on a path towards a bright future. I’ve always been suspicious of this tale, and only more so over time. It’s not so much that I don’t see aspects of life that I trust have improved since hundreds or even dozens of years ago. It’s that I also see aspects of life that have gotten worse, some alarmingly so, within that same time period.

Politics & Society

On This Historic Day, Hope for True Love and True Marriage

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On this day when the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and paved the way for same-sex marriage equality in the nation’s largest state—a state, like many others, brimming with undocumented immigrants from NAFTA-ravaged Mexico—I can’t help but wonder if we might really begin the process of redefining marriage, and well beyond the right-wing definition of redefinition: namely, turning the age-old institution that has its roots in patriarchy and proto-rapism, and has never fully unshackled the chains, into a spring of human freedom grounded into universal brotherly and sisterly love.

Politics & Society

Voting Rights Act: Supreme Court Decision Shifts Focus to Congress

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On Tuesday, President Obama expressed “disappointment” in the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which all but eviscerated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and called upon Congress “to pass legislation to ensure every American has equal access to the polls.” Other critics of the ruling, however, were not so temperate in their characterization of what could prove to be a game changer for ongoing efforts to counter voter suppression.

Politics & Society

A Resurgence of Humanity

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Tomorrow my sister Kathie plans to go to a “Moral Mondays” demonstration in Raleigh. She may even participate in civil disobedience there. Because she lives in North Carolina, I’ve been watching the right-wing coup that has been taking place in what has been a relatively progressive Southern state. Big money, corporate sponsors, and entrenched political players are clearly at work here, aligned to make true democracy irrelevant. And yet, in the face of incredible odds against them, people are rising up to say “no.”

Politics & Society

From COINTELPRO to Prism, Spying on Communities of Color

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Despite the Obama Administration’s attempts to define PRISM’s consequences narrowly, it is fair to speculate that the burden will fall unfairly on communities of color. Like domestic surveillance under Ashcroft, PRISM collects electronic communications and also stores information indefinitely, a process which again risks wrongly classifying and targeting communities of color.

Politics & Society

Beyond a Reactive, Piecemeal Approach to Military Atrocities, Sexual and Otherwise

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As a frustrated Senator Gillibrand and her congressional colleagues try to bring greater transparency to the epidemic of sexual assault in the military with utterly piecemeal approaches, we need to set our sights on a far higher goal: disincentivizing wholly amoral men in our society – who have no inner qualms whatsoever with getting paid to make war – from joining the U.S. military in the very first place; amoral men, it must be said, who possess the sheer temerity to constantly assert that they love our country.

Politics & Society

She Held Her Son and Sobbed as I Said, "This Is Not Random."

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In the meantime, these searches and, sometimes, seizures performed routinely at airports across this country have done something more than potentially violate our Fourth Amendment rights: they have conditioned us to accept the invasion of our privacy and person for the sake of security. How far will we let this country go until we, as a public, say that this is enough? That we will no longer allow strange hands to grope our children for the sake of security? That we will no longer allow strange minds to illegally probe our phone records and emails for the sake of security?

Politics & Society

Follow the Money – Who pays for cost for massive NSA phone/data mining?

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My husband and I own an independent bookstore and one of the things I’ve always prepared myself for is what I would do if I ever got handed one of those “National Security Letters,” demanding information about what products our customers bought. The PATRIOT Act allows the government to demand business records if their need for those records involves some kind of terrorist investigation and people receiving those letters not only have to obey them, but also have to remain silent about having received one. Now that the news has broken that Verizon has been turning over ALL U.S. and international phone call records for at least seven years, and that U.S. and British intelligence agencies have also been mining Internet data, one question that always niggled at me came up to the surface the other night at dinner. As is often the case, Derrick is the one who asked “Someone’s got to be making money off of this. Who pays for all the work involved in compiling, storing, turning over, and sifting through those records?”