Category Archives: My (largely correct) political views

Pete, Gavin, Rahm: Trans people deserve our respect and full legal protection to be – and participate in society as – who they are. And we deserve a Dem who gets this.

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There have been a rash of chickenshit Dems stepping back from full support for trans rights – against the terrifying backdrop of Trump administration cruelty and legacy media pseudo-scientific, pearl-clutching anti-trans polemics. This is appalling. Right at the point where Trump is failing on so many fronts, and where they should be preparing for a 2028 campaign laser focused on Trump’s destruction and looting of our economy, his grotesque personal failings, and the band of bozos he has put in charge of our government, we see Sistah Souljah-level circular firing squad on basic values. 

We will win by having spines, calling bullshit, bringing flamethrowers to knife fights,* attending and heckling at red state town halls, and clearly enunciating policies that will make people’s lives better. 

So here is my personal list of the trans-rights-related principles that I will expect in our Democratic nominee:

  1. Trans women are women; trans men are men; non-binary people are non-binary.
  2. Call people by the names and pronouns they prefer.  This issue has the highest noise to signal ratio in all of politics right now.  If Michael says “call me Mike,” call him Mike.  If Michael says “call me Ann,” call her Ann. See how easy that is?   
  3. Trans women should use women’s restrooms and trans men should use men’s restrooms.  Do you really care who is peeing in the next stall over?  Really? And if we we’re worried about assault, we need to start by protecting women from the conservative white dudes who keep assaulting them, not trans women needing the restroom.
  4. People should compete on sports teams aligned with their actual gender, that is they ones they themselves identify, whether or not it lines up with the one on their birth certificate. First of all – and I know this will be the most controversial thing in this post – they’re just games!  I know the science supports the concept that trans women who have taken the generally prescribed hormones will no longer have an advantage over AFAB women but fundamentally, these are kids playing kids’ games. Let them play.  At the more elite levels, the concept that hormones are the only advantages is laughable. People win Olympic medals because they have physically extreme bodies and all the time, money, and sponsorship necessary to exploit those physical advantages. I will never be in the WNBA not because it’s full of trans women but because I’m 5’2″.

So Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Rahm Emmanuel listen up:

We are the party of human and civil rights.  We will not win by diluting this.  Apologize for your lapse, embrace full rights for our trans siblings, and fight like hell for our country.

*It’s a metaphor — to clarify before the FBI knocks.

Solving White Snowflake Censorship and Affirmative Action in One Go.

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Here’s how we solve the White Snowflake Censorship problem and the Supreme Court May Outlaw Affirmative Action for BIPOC* problem at the same time: All colleges and universities — especially those elite ones that conservative politicians still want their kids to attend — adopt a Historical and Cultural Literacy Exam. 

The HCLE will require applicants to demonstrate knowledge of:

  • American history as it actually occurred, rather than as regurgitated to coddle White Snowflakes.
  • Literature by and about BIPOC people, LGBTQIA people, people with disabilities, and people whose families arrived here within the last two generations.
  • Current events including police violence against BIPOC people, discovery of mass graves at Native American boarding schools, and conservative attempts to subvert our system of government.
  • Science including, y’know, germ theory.

Next, and here’s where I’m not at all kidding and am trying to think how we can make this happen:  create an open access curriculum to prepare for this exam, including access to all the banned books and excluded history that are currently causing massive meltdowns among white snowflakes.  Interested students, and especially students of color in conservative states, will have the opportunity to learn the curriculum needed to pass the HCLE and, not coincidentally, to be a well-educated human in 2022. 

Conservatives love to whine that colleges and universities skew liberal.  Well, yes:  knowledge is not a both-sides-have-a-point sort of thing.  To paraphrase the great philosopher Stephen Colbert, the facts have a liberal bias.  Just own this, Higher Ed World!  Lean into it.  Put the liberal back in liberal arts.  You have a product that rich white folks will lie, cheat, and steal to get:  use that power to help keep the country from driving off a fascist cliff. 

*****

*White Affirmative Action (WAA) will continue to be just as legal as it has been since 1619 — in the form of legacy admissions, admission of kids whose parents have their names on a classroom building, and admission of kids whose parents play golf with the admissions director or some guy with his name on a classroom building.

 

Putting the fence to good use

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Wooden fence with "#BLACKLIVESMATTER" and a blank poster board stapled to it, photographed from across a residential street.

We first used our fence in 2004 during the Kerry campaign, which led to some interesting back and forth after someone tore down the sign.  First, my angry and self-righteous initial response.

Me (white lady, brown hair, flowered sundress) standing by a sign that reads, "Republicans do not respect private property or free speech! Republican thugs ripped down our sign and vandalized our fence."

After cooling off a bit, I put up blank posterboard and invited people to use their words rather than tearing down others’ words. This resulted in some great free expression, including thanks for the signs, anger that I had accused republicans of tearing down the first sign, accusations that DU frat boys tore down the first sign; accusations that DU frat boys suck; random graffiti; and (my favorite) a long note from a Japanese person expressing that this was one of the things they liked about our country.

We cranked it up again in 2008 urging people to caucus for Obama.

Wooden fence with poster reading "Barack Obama. Hope. Courage. Vision. Caucus for Obama. February 5, 2008"

Didn’t feel — what?  motivated?  the need? — to do anything in 2016.  Now the moment calls for #BlackLivesMatter.  I suppose later this summer, it will call for a Biden-Abrams poster.

I enthusiastically support [Biden/Sanders] and you should, too!!!!!

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I’m going to go full-on unfiltered bitch on everyone.  My Warren sisters – we get one more day to grieve; my fellow Dems who are deeply unthrilled with the remaining choices – you get one more day to gripe.

Then we all pivot to VOCALLY/VISIBLY ENTHUSIASTICALLY SUPPORTING THE FIELD AND THE EVENTUAL NOMINEE.

Why? Because we don’t save our country from Trump by “holding our noses and voting.” We save our country by inspiring the 91,739,344 people who didn’t vote last time to get their asses to the polls.

It’s true that of the 327,000,000 people in the U.S., neither Sanders nor Biden would have been my choice for president. (My choice would be Julie Gonzales, followed closely by Stacey Abrams and Elizabeth Warren.) But that’s not how it works.

You know how to do this. You’ve had dinner at a friend’s house and happily, enthusiastically, eaten and even praised food that — if you were being honest — would have skipped the dog’s dish and gone straight to the compost heap. But there was a higher value: your love for your friend.

That’s where we are now. For the love of our current and future fellow Americans, for the love of the people at the border and in camps, for the love of the law that Trump’s courts would destroy, for the love of the earth, for the love of the truth, we need to happily, enthusiastically eat the dish called Democratic Nominee.

Every time you say something enthusiastic about Biden or Sanders, you are saving the country.  Your capes await you.

Super hero capes including Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Batman, and Iron Man

You know who I feel bad for? Alger Hiss.

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Alger Fucking Hiss.  Egghead State Department bureaucrat thrown in jail for his fairly tenuous Soviet contacts.*  Also Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Lester Cole and others blacklisted in Hollywood for Communist “sympathies.”  Pete Seeger — my musical hero — who was a member of the Communist Party and went to jail for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Image: middle aged white man in a suit jacket with a banjo case over his shoulder.

Pete Seeger arrives at court for sentencing with his banjo over his shoulder, April 4, 1961. Source: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002709318/

Every schmuck who was called before HUAC and stood their ground or didn’t.  Every government employee — like my Grandpa Clarence Blau —  whose loyalty was questioned for the job they held, a newspaper they subscribed to, a meeting they attended, or a petition they signed.  Every American whose FBI file Herbert Hoover created and padded.  Everyone who was ever on the receiving end Joseph McCarthy’s or Richard Nixon’s bloviating.

We were terrified of people who read newspapers or sang songs or attended meetings full of other newspaper-readers or song-singers.  We made people’s lives miserable and ruined careers based on false and flimsy allegations.

Hell, I’m sort of sorry for the Rosenbergs, even if they were guilty.

Why do I feel bad for the entire spectrum — from pale pink to bright red, from folk singer to spies?  Because none — not one — of those individuals stood on stage before a worldwide audience and handed over our country to the Russians.

*****

*According to my Granddaddy Clen, Hiss was framed by Whittiker Chambers.  Granddaddy probably had a rip-roaring case of OCD, undiagnosed.  He spent much of his adult life gathering files and articles, creating maps and timelines, and filling stacks of 3×5 cards about this conspiracy.  This will mean something to approximately 16 living humans.

The straw ban is the white liberalest thing ever.

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Image: two drinks sitting on a wooden picnic table: a beer without a straw and a margarita with a straw.The effort to ban plastic straws is everything that’s wrong with ableist white liberalism in a nutshell:

  • It’s a policy built on emotion
  • about animals
  • that solves a tiny part of an enormous problem
  • by imposing on a marginalized part of society
  • without listening to the lived experience of those folks
  • letting big corporations make bold declarations of solidarity
  • without holding accountable those and other corporations that cause the real problems.

The disability rights movement needs names for ableist dorks equivalent to “Becky” and “Chad.”  Suggestions?

Update:  I love the suggestion of “Wally” the White Ableist Liberal.  Thanks, MontanaBradley!

Dos and don’ts of building an inclusive Democratic party.

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Image: photo of woman with brown skin and shoulder length brown hair in a striped shirt, facing the camera smiling.As I’ve written before, I was a very enthusiastic about Saira Rao’s campaign for Congress in Colorado’s CD-1.  She ran on a progressive, inclusive platform, and received endorsements from a wide and diverse range of people and organizations.  Her opponent — the incumbent Diana DeGette — was, IMHO, out of touch and did not really give a rat’s ass about civil rights and, in my specific experience, disability rights.

 

Rao was working hard — and successfully — to make the Democratic Party the inclusive party it needs to be to move forward.

On Tuesday, Rao lost to DeGette, but got 30% of the vote — having started six months ago with no name recognition.  It was an amazing, energetic, inspiring campaign, touching the lives of people who had given up on the Dems as a relevant force in their lives.

It would have been the perfect time for DeGette to reach out to Rao and her voters.  That’s what we so desperately need in these frightening, divisive, Trumpian times.

But no.

“It really didn’t turn out to be a very strong challenge, did it?” DeGette said in an interview Tuesday night.

Seriously?  I’m not sure DeGette could have found more alienating words if she’d stayed up late and hired Alienating Words Consultants.  This is now *not* to build an inclusive party and how — in more purple districts — how to alienate the coalition we need to win in November and in 2020.

But the good news is, Saira Rao and her supporters are not going away.  She’s starting to organize for 2020 and will keep working for progress in the meantime.  Sign up to join her and keep track of this inspiring new political force.

These cute puppies want you to vote on Tuesday!

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Image: close up of fluffy golden retriever puppy looking into the camera.This cute puppy says: Get out and vote on Tuesday! Vote for Saira Rao! Vote for Cary Kennedy! We can have better Democrats, starting this fall, and continuing the blue wave in 2020. But it starts this Tuesday, June 26, here in Colorado, when we have the privilege of voting for some pretty amazing progressives:

These women are our future.

Remember all those times you held your nose and voted Dem because wtf they’re better than Image: another cute golden retriever.the alternative and, you know, The Court! The Court! I feel like I’ve voted for a lot of centrist mediocrity on those grounds. Bill Clinton. Al Gore. John Fucking Edwards fer pete’s sake. And Hillary Clinton, too. And here in CD1 in Colorado, I would dutifully check the box for Diana DeGette every two years because, well, why not? A reliable D vote and no viable alternative, but also no discernible fucks given about the communities I give a fuck about.

And I spent a lot of time trying to talk my more progressive friends out of doing dumb things like voting for Ralph Nader* or Jill Stein. Those things remain dumb, and I remain right, but I also felt that they had a point; that we had a lot of entrenched, white, privileged, mediocrity** carrying the D flag year in year out. At worst, this silences and alienates voters of color, voters with disabilities, and other marginalized voters; even at best, it bores the crap out of everyone, until our eyes glaze over and we . . . just . . . don’t . . . vote.

{Image: A golden retriever with a goatee of snow around his mouth.}No más! Throughout Colorado and the nation we are getting the opportunity to elect better, more progressive, more enthusiastic Dems. Dems unafraid to call bullshit. Dems willing to call out racism, sexism, cronyism, and mediocrity. And then do something about it. Here are just some highlights:

 

But none of this happens — our bright future of a more progressive, more grassroots, more activist Democratic Party doesn’t happen — UNLESS YOU VOTE!

This is our future!  Let’s all get out and
VOTE! THIS TUESDAY!

Image: Golden retriever puppy sticking her tongue out at the camera.

******

*Love you, Robin. Miss you, Laura.

** Into which category Nader and Stein emphatically and ironically fall.

“Toxic masculinity is killing us.”

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Renée Graham wrote a thoughtful and terrifying piece in yesterday’s Boston Globe entitled “Toxic masculinity is killing us.”

Literally and figuratively, toxic masculinity is killing us: Mass shootings. Domestic violence. Fatal fraternity hazing. Rape culture. Workplaces and schools turned into cesspools of sexual harassment and assault. This is not consigned to one race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic level. Feral masculinity affirms itself every day through violence and domination.

It is a detriment to social and political progress, our mental health, and physical safety. The deleterious result is a nation under siege by those compelled to affirm their power by any means necessary.

I had been thinking about this, especially in light of several recent stories about fraternity or football hazing resulting in severe injuries or death. All involve bizarre, sadistic rituals and near-fatal and fatal levels of alcohol. And we only know about them because someone died or was horribly injured.  Two things struck me as I read these articles:
  • The non-fatal version of this must go on thousands of times a year, in precisely the institutions we’re counting on to turn adolescents into adults; and
  • When they’re not busy play-acting at sodomy or abusing and photographing the almost-corpse of their classmate — or engaging in other, violent but non-fatal rituals — these young men likely present as upstanding citizens-to-be.   

They’re the ones we praise on the field on Sunday and offer summer internships to, not the ones we kill for wearing a hoodie or having a busted tail light or failing to leave a movie theater between showings.

At Penn State, a pledge drinks too much, falls down a flight of stairs, is dragged to a sofa, and left to die of his injuries.  And there was a camera:

There was the seemingly callous handling of Tim Piazza’s body, as when a brother lifted Tim’s arm and it thudded back onto his chest, or when another brother poured liquid on his face, or when a brother slapped his face three times, or when a brother tackled someone onto him, or when Tim kept rolling off the couch but his body showed no reflex reactions, or when another brother struck his discolored abdomen with an open hand. Then there was the response to his condition: Beta brothers strapped a heavy book bag on Tim’s unconscious body to keep him from rolling onto his back and aspirating on his own vomit, a phenomenon with which they were sufficiently familiar to have a name for it: “backpacking.” There were intermittent signs of animation: Tim twitching, Tim vomiting, Tim bare-chested and moving his legs, the backpack affixed to his body. There was the brothers’ disconcerting failure to seek help. When brother Kordel Davis arrived, 28 minutes after Tim’s fall, he looked at Tim’s head and began pointing at it agitatedly and arguing to his fellow Betas, according to interviews conducted by police, that they needed to call 911. A brother was then seen on the video shoving Davis across the room.

After Beta’s brothers and pledges had headed off, Tim Piazza was seen alone in the video, at times on all fours and clutching his abdomen, at times managing to stand and stagger, only to fall again, repeatedly, sometimes face-first onto the hard floor or into sharp objects (a table corner, a banister finial). At 6:49 A.M., a pledge named Qobi Quainoo sat on a sofa opposite Tim and watched him groan, fall off the sofa, and get to his knees and bend forward, rocking and clutching his head. Quainoo began to record a video of this on his cell phone, according to the presentment, and left the house at 7:12 A.M. (Quainoo did not respond to a request for comment.)

Around 10 A.M., two brothers found Tim’s shoes and started looking for him. They found him in the basement, breathing heavily, bare-chested, his hands clenched, his skin cold, blood on his face, his eyes half open. They took him upstairs. For the next 42 minutes, a shifting assortment of brothers stood around, shaking Tim, attempting to put a shirt on him, trying to prop him up on the couch.

What follow then details the attempts to clean up and cover up the crimes.

A fraternity at Baruch College takes its pledges to a remote cabin and puts them through a physical gauntlet called “The Glass Ceiling.”

Deng was the last of his pledge class to go through the Glass Ceiling. He made it through the first two stages, but in the middle of the third he got up unsteadily after one tackle. Then, according to testimony later given by Li, the pledge assistant Kenny Kwan, starting 10 to 15 feet away, ran at full speed into Deng and slammed him to the ground. Deng did not get up.

Li, 21 at the time, would later tell prosecutors that Deng was making ‘‘groaning sounds.’’ According to Li, Sheldon Wong, who was 21 and the pledge educator, picked Deng up and, with others’ help, carried him inside the rental house. Charles Lai, who was 23 and Deng’s Big, told detectives that Deng’s body felt ‘‘straight like a board.’’ Fraternity members stripped off his clothes, cold and wet with frost, and laid him down by the fireplace and covered him with a blanket. At 5:05 a.m., the police timeline indicates, one brother called his girlfriend, a nurse, to ask what she thought could be causing Deng to be so unresponsive. Eight minutes later, another brother Googled ‘‘conscious’’ and ‘‘unconscious.’’ At 5:55, a fraternity brother named Revel Deng texted a friend four times to ask about his grandfather’s fatal fall down the stairs. During this period, none of the three dozen brothers in the Poconos called 911. Nobody summoned an ambulance because, according to a statement given to detectives, someone had looked up how much it would cost and determined that the price would be too high.

Around 6 a.m., Wong, Lai and a third brother drove Michael Deng to the emergency room

Gruver died at a hospital on Sept. 14 after Phi Delta Theta members found him lying on a couch at the fraternity house. A witness told police that Gruver was “highly intoxicated” when fraternity members laid him on the couch and left the house sometime early that morning.

Around 11 a.m., members found Gruver still on the couch with a weak pulse and couldn’t tell if he was breathing, police said. Two people drove him to a hospital, where he died that day.

And two football hazings involving sodomy, one in high school,

Jordan Preavy had it all as a junior in high school after making the football team. But that dream quickly became a nightmare for the 16-year-old when he was sodomized during a hazing ritual.

Witnesses told police Preavy’s head “snapped back and he looked pained,” yelling “No!” and “Get off,” as he was assaulted through his clothes with a broomstick by at least two older teammates in 2011.

Nearly a year later, just weeks after his 17th birthday, Preavy killed himself.

Then there’s the Christian college where the victim, a football player,
was kidnapped last year from his dorm, had his arms and legs bound with duct tape, and was beaten, peppered with anti-Muslim slurs, stripped to his underwear, nearly penetrated by a foreign object, then left half-naked in a baseball field as temperatures dipped near freezing.
These are the perps:
Photo array of head shots of five white men with short hair in football jerseys. Caption reads "Five football stars at Illinois's Christian-focused Wheaton College are accused of kidnapping, beating, and attempting to sodomize a freshman."
Having recalled reading these various articles, I went to find them by googling “fraternity hazing deaths.” There’s a Wikipedia page that lists them — since the 1800s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_United_States
What does it mean for these boys’ treatment of women and gay men that sodomy is used as a symbol of dominance, ingrained into them to belong to a new family just after they’ve left their birth families.
I have no answers.  Perhaps if high schools and colleges were led by grown-ups who set positive examples and banned all hazing — and enforced the ban full time, not just ad hoc after death or injury?  But could colleges do this without endangering their endowment?  And thus it perpetuates itself.

Do you live in a bubble? Yeah, me too!

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You’ve probably seen some version of the NPR bubble quiz.  It was published in March, 2016, but has been making the rounds on Facebook again.

It’s prefaced like this:

There exists a new upper class that’s completely disconnected from the average white American and American culture at large, argues Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist and author.

Of course, if it’s based on Charles Murray’s work, it gets an automatic 5-star bullshit rating, but I took it for fun, and learned that I’m pretty bubblified:  my father was a lawyer; I’ve never owned a pickup truck; and I can’t identify military insignia.  I’m saved from total hermetically sealed oblivion by the fact that I have had friends who are evangelical Christians, have purchased Avon products,* and am pretty sure Tim would have gone fishing in the past five years if it weren’t so inaccessible.

Why is it, though, that we only think of educated middle-class liberals as living in a bubble?  And those in Murray’s white suburban Christian bubble as defining “American culture”?

Want to see if you are part of “American culture” as millions of people outside the exurbs of the south and midwest experience it?  Take the official ThoughtSnax Bubble Quiz!

Do you have any close friends or family members who rely on a wheelchair to get around (full time; not just at the airport)?**

Have you ever been unable to shop, dine out, or patronize an entertainment venue because of architectural barriers?

Have you ever been unable to enjoy a movie, play, concert, or sporting event because of communications barriers?

Do you consider people with significant disabilities who do ordinary things like work, shop, or dine out with friends to be “inspirational”?

Do you regularly interact professionally with professionals of other races or national origins?

Do you have any friends who are gay or lesbian?  Trans?  That you know of?

Do you know what “trans” means?

Have you ever been mis-gendered or dead-named?  Do you know what this means?

Have you ever read a book, article, or poem by any of the following?

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Dan Savage
  • Laura Hershey
  • Viet Thanh Nguyen
  • Stephen Kuusisto
  • N.K. Jemisin
  • Junot Diaz
  • Marjane Satrapi
  • Philip Pullman
  • Jhumpa Lahiri

Have you or anyone close to you ever feared for their life, health, or safety at the hands of the police?

Have you or anyone close to you ever feared for their life, health, or safety if pending Republican “health” “care” legislation were to pass?

Do you know any Jews?

Do you know any Jews as personal friends, not just colleagues or professionals?

Do you know who any of these people are?

  • Fred Korematsu
  • Maysoon Zayid
  • Stella Young
  • Audre Lorde
  • Justin Dart
  • Sarah McBride
  • Bill Lann Lee
  • I. King Jordan
  • Bree Newsome

Have you ever had anyone attempt to proselytize you or convert you to their religion?

Do you have an education that you’re proud of?

Have you ever experienced discrimination on the basis of your race, sexual orientation, gender/identity/expression, disability, or national origin?

Has anyone ever assumed you were:

  • the nanny?
  • the help?
  • the aide?
  • unable to speak for yourself?
  • not married to your actual spouse because you’re the same gender?
  • not married to your actual spouse because one of you has a disability?
  • a different religion, nationality, or gender because you don’t look like they assume people of your religion, nationality, or gender should look?

Have you ever been on the receiving end of a “bless your heart!”

Are you sick and tired of non-disabled, straight, cis, white, Christian conservatives acting all superior because you answered “yes” to many of these questions?

UPDATE (from my astute and perceptive sister-in-law, Terri Robertson):

Have you ever been subjected to harassment because of your gender?

Have you had your reproductive or sexual health choices questioned?

Do you dress based on fear?

Can you walk by yourself in a parking garage without fear? Can you walk anywhere by yourself without fear?

UPDATE II (from my astute and perceptive step-sister-in-law*** Annie McQuilken):

Have you ever had your parenting skills questioned in public because your kid didn’t look or behave “typically”?

******

*The quiz did not require me to have used these products.

**You knew that would be first, right?

*** My parents did not supply me with any sisters, but luckily we have an extensive blended family that provided a few.