You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2010.
Not good Queens.
From the New York Daily News:
A transgender woman was found dead in her ransacked Queens apartment on Tuesday, her naked body sprawled across the bed, police said.
Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar, 29, born Edelbuerto, had not been heard from since Friday.
Please see this awesome video at Lawrence.com.
Homophobic Oklahoma State Senators passed a bill last week that accidentally takes hate crime protections away from religious institutions and individuals. They had, of course, intended to strip queer people of their federally-mandated hate crime protection, but f’ed up due to what appears to be a careless typo.
Schadenfreude is a dish best served in excess.
From the Oklahoma Daily:
A bill intended to remove hate crime protections from gays and lesbians actually takes away rights from everyone else because of a “legislative error,” according to one lawmaker.
Oklahoma State Senate Minority Leader Andrew Rice, D-Oklahoma City, said when the Senate passed Senate Bill 1965 on March 10, it eliminated hate crime protections for race and religion.
The bill states local law enforcement agencies should not enforce any sections of federal law under hate crimes statutes listed under Title 18 U.S. Code Section 245 unless they are in correlation with Oklahoma’s hate crimes laws.
But the protections for sexual orientation and gender identity in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes, which passed Congress last year, are not listed under Section 245, but Section 249
“The bill in its current form doesn’t take away rights from gays and lesbians,” Rice said. “It takes away rights for religion and race.”
Sigh. Yet again, tiresome Kansas State Representative Lance Kinzer, a man, is leading the way in attempts to restrict women’s reproductive choices and her decisions regarding her own health.
His current hobby horse is finding ever-more invasive and paternalistic ways to take away women’s ability to obtain late-term abortion. He has found that outlawing late-term abortion altogether won’t fly, because then some women who need such abortions merely to survive might die, and he’d have a PR nightmare on his hands.
So he has refocused on eliminating the mental health exception to the general late-term abortion ban (late-term abortions are banned in Kansas except for “irreversible impairment of a major bodily function”). Mental health has been ruled by courts as possibly meeting this exception, and Kinzer is incensed.
From the Topeka Capital-Journal:
Kinzer argued that getting rid of the mental health exception fit with the state’s “legitimate interest in protecting life.”
“What we have here is a baby, a baby if given the chance would be able to live on its own outside its mothers’ womb,” Kinzer said.
What about the state’s interest in protecting the life of the woman, you idiot!? AAAAArg.
Oh, but friend-of-women Kinzer isn’t done yet. Oh no, he and his pals have more ideas about how they can improve women’s lives by intruding into their personal business and restricting their medical options.
From the Wichita Eagle:
[A] second proposal would require doctors to provide an exact medical diagnosis justifying a late-term abortion in their reports to the state.
It also would allow a woman or her family to sue a doctor if there was evidence that her late-term abortion violated the law.
Nice guys. Real nice. Totally constitutional. I, for one, would relish the opportunity to report ALL my doctor’s visits to the state! Because my health and the medical procedures I undergo are totally the proper business of Lance Kinzer, et al. So can we work on making this bill equal? I have a feeling men are going to really pissed to so be cavalierly left out of this life-protecting measure. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose, no?
I am speechless. All I can do are give you a few quotes from this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story:
In a groundbreaking report released Monday by a leading economic research group, social scientists turned a spotlight on the grave financial challenges facing an often overlooked group of women, many of whom could not take an unpaid sick day or repair a major appliance without going into debt.
…Among the most startling revelations in the wealth data is that while single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts), the median wealth for single black women is only $5.
…Married or cohabitating white women have a median wealth of $167,500. Married or cohabitating black women have a median net worth of $31,500.
…”If wealth was based on hard work, African-Americans would be the wealthiest people in our nation,” [Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Gap Initiative] said. “It’s not about behavior. It’s about government policies. Who does the government help and who is it not helping?”
New York City has a real subtle way of expressing its feelings towards its public housing inhabitants:
This snapshot was taken at a Brooklyn public housing development. Though it looks like it, the word “jail” and the jail details are not the work of a clever and/or mean-spirited sticker-er, but actually are printed directly onto the playground material, i.e. came that way from the manufacturer. I.e. these items were deliberated ordered, were received, and were erected all by people who knew they were ordering a play jail for the children of color that live in this public housing development in a part of town where police harassment is common, and police murder of locals (of color) not unheard of.
Who can name all of the things wrong with this scenario?
TRICK QUESTION! It’s impossible because there are infinity number of things wrong with it.
NYCHA (NYC Housing Authority): Just getting them poor kids of color ready for their place in society.
Via blackandbrownnews.com. H/t Cynthia.
Here’s the NYT article.
I think this video is neat:
From Our Families Count, an organization whose mission statement is:
Our Families Count aims to educate and motivate all LGBT Americans and households to be visible in 2010, and to take part in the 2010 U.S. Census.
Via Queers United.
Recent Comments