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.
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We are continuing to process the horrific hate crime that occurred in Orlando, and looking for ways to help and show support and solidarity. @revelandriot is producing this t-shirt in honour of the victims, their families and the survivors, with 100% of proceeds going to organizations helping to support them as they re-build their lives and strengthen their community. http://smarturl.it/rrpulseshirt – Link to purchase in bio.
From @revelandriot about the shirt:
With deep respect for the victims we seek to honor them and never forget their names. With deep respect for Pulse, the night club that was a sanctuary for so many LGBTQIA+ people, we seek to honor this place with a graphic inspired by its name.
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Why defense attorneys aren’t cheering Brock Allan Turner’s wrist-slap
Ken White was once a US Federal Prosecutor, but he’s also served as a defense attorney, and when he was defending clients, he routinely told the judge about the ways in which his clients were good people, and what talents they had.
That’s just what Brock Allan Turner’s attorney did, too, and so convincingly that Turner will not serve a meaningful prison sentence, though he is undisputably a rapist who irrevocably harmed the survivor of his crime.
White explains why defense attorneys do this: to transform “your client even momentarily from an abstraction or a statistic or a stereotype into a human being with whom the judge feels a connection.” But he also explains how judges are supposed to have the judgment to put limits on that connection, to empathize with the crime’s survivors, and to do what’s right.
White says that Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky failed in this duty, that he “rendered good defense attorney practice irrelevant.” That much is obvious, but White goes on to unpack the systemic reasons for Persky’s dereliction of duty, and how this resonates through the whole justice system.
People throw around the word “privilege” a lot, and it’s easy to see its evidence around us, but what White does here is expose its mechanism, and that’s an important addition to the debate.
https://boingboing.net/2016/06/08/why-defense-attorneys-arent.html
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Earlier today, a friend remarked: “I don’t understand. The way you are reacting, it’s almost like you knew someone in the club.”
Here’s the thing you need to understand about every LGBT person in your family, your work, and your circle of friends:
We’ve spent most of our lives being aware that we are at risk.
When you hear interviewers talking to LGBT folks and they say “It could have been here. It could have been me,” they aren’t exaggerating. I don’t care how long you’ve been out, how far down your road to self acceptance and love you’ve traveled, we are always aware that we are at some level of risk.
I’m about as “don’t give a shit what ANYONE thinks” as anyone you’ll ever meet… and when I reach to hold Matt’s hand in the car? I still do the mental calculation of “ok, that car is just slightly behind us so they can’t see, but that truck to my left can see right inside the car”. If I kiss Matt in public, like he leaned in for on the bike trail the other day, I’m never fully in the moment. I’m always parsing who is around us and paying attention to us. There’s a tension that comes with that… a literal tensing of the muscles as you brace for potential danger. For a lot of us, it’s become such an automatic reaction that we don’t even think about it directly any more. We just do it.
And then… over the last few years, it started to fade a little. It started to feel like maybe things were getting better. A string of Supreme Court decisions. Public opinion shifting to the side of LGBT rights. Life was getting better. You could breathe a little bit.
What happened with this event was one of two things that are pretty dramatically demonstrated by how Matt and I are reacting to this. Matt came out fairly late, during the golden glow of the changing tide. He’s never dealt with something like this. It’s literally turned him inside out emotionally because all that stuff he read about that was just “then” became very much “NOW”. For me, I’ve had some time to adjust to the idea that people hate us enough to kill us. Matthew Shepherd was my first real lesson in that. So this weekend was a sudden slap in the face, a reminder that I should never have let my guard down, should never have gotten complacent… because it could have been US.
Every LGBT person you know knows what I’m talking about. Those tiny little mental calculations we do over the course of our life add up… and we just got hit with a stark reminder that those simmering concerns, those fears… they probably won’t ever go away. We’ll never be free of them. Additionally, now we just got a lesson that expressing our love could result in the deaths of *others* completely unrelated to us. It’s easy to take risks when it’s just you and you’ve made that choice. Now there’s this subtext that you could set off someone who kills other people who weren’t even involved. And that’s just a lot.
That’s why I’m personally a bit off balance even though (or because, depending on how you look at it) I live in Texas and was not personally effected by this tragedy. Don’t get me wrong: nothing will change. I will still hold my husband’s hand in public. I will still kiss him in public. We’ll still go out and attend functions and hold our heads high.
But we will be doing those mental calculations for the rest of our lives. Those little PDAs you take for granted with your spouse. They come with huge baggage for us. Every single one is an act of defiance, with all that entails.
So do me a favor. Reach out to that LGBT person in your life. Friend, co-worker, or family. Just let them know you are thinking of them and you love them. That will mean the world to them right now. I promise you.
Because I can’t express myself like he does. Share with anyone who doesn’t understand.
This. Please don’t let this die.
Cause we are going to.
