I love Mara Wilson so much.
Day: June 15, 2016
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I think we really need to reaffirm now that no amount of homophobia can be acceptable in our culture. There is no such this as harmless or victimless homophobia. All homophobia contributes to violence against us. You can not “disagree” with lgbt people’s “lifestyles” without supporting the rhetoric and legislation that puts us in very real danger.
Disagreement is not violence…
“Disagreeing” with LGBT+ people’s right to exist, right to live safely, right to full protections under the law, and right to equal treatment within society IS a violence.
You can disagree with a lifestyle without wishing that person harm. You can disagree with a lifestyle and respect the person. You can disagree with a lifestyle and love the person. There should never be hate but everyone doesn’t have to agree with everyone’s lifestyle.
See, and here’s the thing: it’s not a “lifestyle.” It’s not like all LGBT+ people are vegan hippies who moved to a commune. This isn’t a choice we’ve made for how we are going to live.
It’s who we are. It’s an integral part of our identity.
I can not be sub-divided into some “straight version” of myself PLUS an added layer of queerness that you can separate me like a stubborn LEGO to justify your bigotry.
If you disagree with me BEING bisexual, then you disagree with me EXISTING. You disagree with me being alive. And that IS a form of harm. No respect, no love can be built on a situation where you “disagree” with my right to be alive.
There’s also some stuff going on that’s similar to some of the rape joke issues. When you’re willing to talk publicly about disapproving of LGBT+ people, the kinds of folks who are potentially getting violent will hear that as you supporting them. When you say you disapprove of us, there are people out there who hear you saying that they should kill us. Do you really want to be sending that message?
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Colombia Just Affirmed That Same-Sex Couples Can Get Married
Colombia Just Affirmed That Same-Sex Couples Can Get Married
Congratulations to all my Colombians and thank you too everyone who fought for this, we finally made it!
Mexico and Colombia in the same day, this is amazing and wonderful and I may cry tbh fwhorgijt
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“Do you have to shove it in our faces like that?”
This started out as a reply to this post, but it got long, so I thought I’d better just make my own.
I read the news that morning on my phone, while my girlfriend snuggled against my back, still half asleep. I had the same impulse– to delay telling her as long as I could. To let her morning contain at least a few more minutes of peace.
Then I told her, and I turned and sobbed in her arms.
My husband and his girlfriend came home later that morning so we could all go to brunch. As we were getting ready to go, he asked me how I was doing. My reply was, “Did you see the news?”
He nodded silently, and I sat down and sobbed again in his arms.
We joke sometimes, my partners and I, about going out to restaurants and shocking people. My boyfriend, girlfriend and I all holding hands together, or kissing each other one after the other. The worst that has ever happened in our little liberal enclave in Seattle is a dirty look or two. We always laugh.
It never occurred to me before now that our public show of love could make targets out of people we don’t even know; that those mental calculations mentioned in another post I just reblogged contain vastly, infinitely more variables. That some bigot could become “enraged” by us and be “set off” to commit mass violence. (Those words, as if we *did* something to bring it on ourselves, a million echoes of you must have done something to anger him, if you’d just be quiet, if you’d just not flaunt it in our faces.) That afternoon I actually had the thought cross my mind of “maybe I shouldn’t go out, what if an event here is targeted too.”
That’s how terrorism works, of course. That’s what terrorism is constantly trying to do to people of color, to Jewish people, to women, to disabled people, to queers. Be afraid, be hidden, be silent, and if you won’t be silent we’ll hurt you, kill you, destroy you if that’s what it takes to silence you. Make you not exist.
(I had a point. I think maybe I got lost.)
What I’ve got left is this: we ARE gonna flaunt it in your faces. We’re gonna keep shoving it in everyone’s faces until we are allowed to just fucking exist.
I am here for absolutely every marginalized group to keep flaunting it in my face and yours and theirs and everyone’s until we are all just allowed to goddamned exist without having to justify or defend our presence or our lives.
You do what feels right to keep yourself safe, always, but if you’re out there flaunting your existence in my face, I’ll be out here cheering for you.
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I’m not crying you’re crying
Always remember the 9/11 Search and Rescue dogs.
So many of them became depressed and distraught because they were trained to find live bodies, and when they kept finding remains, their handlers and other rescue workers began to hide in the wreckage so the dogs could do live finds.
These dogs provided immeasurable help to those that were working the scene, bringing great emotional support just by being around the rescuers.
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(via naigeyboy)
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Black lawyers likely to face harsher scrutiny than their white counterparts.
By Lisa Wade, PhD
At Vox, Evan Soltas discusses new research from Nextoins showing racial bias in the legal profession. They put together a hypothetical lawyer’s research memo that had 22 errors of various kinds and distributed it to 60 partners in law firms who were asked to evaluate it as an example of the “writing competencies of young attorneys.” Some were told that the writer was black, others white.
Fifty-three sent back evaluations. They were on alert for mistakes, but those who believed the research memo was written by a white lawyer found fewer errors than those who thought they were reading a black lawyer’s writing (see above). And they gave the white writer an overall higher grade on the report. (The partner’s race and gender didn’t effect the results, though women on average found more errors and gave more feedback.)
At Nextion, they collected typical comments:
This is just one more piece of evidence that the deck is stacked against black professionals. The old saying is that minorities and women have to work twice as hard for half the credit. This data suggests that there’s something to it.
Lisa Wade is a professor at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
It’s annoying that nobody believes black people until science confirms it … but it’s really satisfying to have things like this confirmed by science.
I’m sure this is true for every profession.
New study confirms water is wet.
