Tag Archives: Civil rights

Equal Justice Under the Law – Unless You’re Gay

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Our Governor is not the worst homophobe in America but he is a contender.

Our Commonwealth is not the worst in its intolerance of gays but it’s got nothing to be proud of either.

In Loudoun County, we have a Board of Supervisors indifferent to the fact that one of its members, Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio, is a gay bashing demagogue.

I wrote each member of the Board of Supervisors to ask them to disavow this bigotry.  Our Board has no shame in its silence. As that old 60s tune went, “Hello Darkness my old friend.”  Janet Clarke wrote she felt no obligation to respond at all.  And she didn’t.  By their silence, may we know them. Continue reading →

Today

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Today, realistic Republicans are secretly praying that the Supreme Court will respond to the arguments presented in the Prop 8 and DOMA cases before it with a broad ruling finding a constitutional right for all Americans to marry the person they love.

That is the only way of avoiding a foreseeable future in which Republicans will be forced to either repeatedly alienate the rapidly growing supermajority of Americans who support equality, or repeatedly betray their own aging base, that angry 36% demanding the “right” to forcibly shove society into still the coat which fitted him when a boy.

If the Court announces a sweeping ruling in June that makes marriage for all the law of the land, GOP strategists can breathe a sigh of relief – they will then be able to deflect the rage of their base toward those nine rogue “unelected judges.”

The alternative future will be a punishing series of state battles over the next four, eight, twelve years and beyond, in which they will not have the luxury of avoiding the issue, however much they might wish they could do so.

In either case, marriage equality is inevitable.

If you want your party to live, pray hard.

Young “Strangers” in a hostile land?

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My Aunt married an immigrant from Peru who became a US Citizen by volunteering as a young man to fight for this nation in World War II.

Uncle Jack was a hard-working, tall, athletic, and distinguished looking man but his Latino accented English and facial features invited discrimination from Nativist Americans.

Jefferson wrote that “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

About ten years later, the promise of this declaration shrunk in the context of our nation’s constitution, hollowed out by excluding coverage of “these rights” to slaves, to women and, basically, to persons without property. Continue reading →

Worst argument ever

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Marriage should be limited to unions of a man and a woman because they alone can “produce unplanned and unintended offspring,” opponents of gay marriage have told the Supreme Court.

By contrast, when same-sex couples decide to have children, “substantial advance planning is required,” said Paul D. Clement, a lawyer for House Republicans.

In their opening briefs, this was the reasoning offered by both Clement in defense of Section 3 of the “Defense of Marriage” Act and Charles Cooper in defense of Prop 8: Because opposite sex couples are burdened with the “unique social difficulty” of frequently producing children by accident, and same sex couples “don’t present a threat of irresponsible procreation,” same sex couples and their children should be excluded from the security and benefits of marriage. This is what anti-equality American taxpayers are getting for $3 million in public funds?

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How “gun control” got its start

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He was a large man, wearing a combat-style uniform, beret, and heavy boots. He stood outside the door, watching people entering and exiting. One witness, who had summoned the police, said that the man’s presence made him feel intimidated, a feeling echoed by others in the building. When asked by a reporter what he was doing there, the man replied that he didn’t understand why they were trying to make it look like he was doing something wrong. He was just standing there, he said, serving his community.

Now, when considering that these witnesses felt “intimidated” by a man in a combat-style uniform standing outside their workplace and holding a nightstick, one might wonder what sorts of things other people might have going on in their lives to make them stand outside a building watching people like that?

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Lock ’em up, even if it doesn’t work

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Well, the guns-for-all – some mental health restrictions apply – “thinkers” may be experiencing cognitive dissonance. That is, if they’ve found time to seriously ponder thought control advocacy. An article in today’s Washington Post describes the state of the art in violence prediction. The analysts parse patients into two groups.

There have been numerous efforts to test these violence-predicting tools in recent decades. For example, Monahan and his colleagues incorporated 106 risk factors into a software interview program and administered it to patients being discharged from psychiatric units in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Of those judged to be low-risk by this tool, 90 percent committed no violence over the next six months. Of those judged to be high-risk, 49 percent committed violent acts.

Where does that leave our thought control advocates? Lock up the high-risk group and one innocent is deprived of his/her liberty for each potentially violent offender. Release the low-risk group and 10% are potential violent offenders. The numbers suck. The NRA wants to hand those numbers to government? Seriously? Could it be hyperbole? Maybe “dark political energy” will smooth out the looming gross injustice. Or, maybe, we should send Wayne LaPierre and his defenders to the corner, with a dunce hat, to pout.

The “culture of life” that kills people

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“It was worse than if the NRA had not spoken at all,” said Gene Grabowski, executive vice president of Levick Strategic Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based issues management firm that has worked with firearms manufacturers.

Meanwhile, during that curious week of self-imposed silence from the NRA, we’ve heard just about every offensive explanation and excuse imaginable for the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut: The gunman could have his way with the elementary school because it was a “feminized setting” without enough “male aggression” (this ignorant assertion made in the face of the heroic actions of the women who hid children and tried to tackle the gunman); this massacre and others like it are the price we must be willing to pay for the convenience to gun enthusiasts afforded by the “almost universally benevolent” Second Amendment; and of course, there was the predictable ranting from the usual suspects blaming an imaginary “war on Christmas,” imaginary “homosexual agenda,” imaginary “end of school prayer,” etc. But in the discussion of a naked propaganda post that managed to go on and on and on about a sustained, lethal assault upon schoolchildren with a military assault weapon without once using the word “gun,” one commenter takes the prize for disingenuous sanctimony by claiming the atrocity wouldn’t have happened if only, if only, we had a “universal respect for life.”

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The War on Women

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Before the war on women continues down the path recently begun by Virginia’s Republican men and a Republican candidate for president, we might do well to review what life was really like for women before the Civil Rights Era and the Women’s Movement.

My first memory is being told by the bank manager where I worked part-time while in college, that my male counterpart (who had barely passed high school with a D average, whereas I was the school valedictorian) deserved twice my wage per hour, because he was a man and I was a woman. No other reason needed to be given.

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Prejudice is not a Realtor(tm) value

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Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

Can you imagine if a Loudoun Realtor were to argue realtorthat they were helping home buyers make an “informed decision” regarding their home purchase by mouthing derogatory slurs about African-Americans and Jews, and complaining that the local government has required desegregation? Because this is the equivalent of that. Professional Realtors have a code of ethics, in part, due to awareness of how such bigotry has been practiced in the past.

Vivianne Rutkowski is a Realtor with Keller Williams on Catoctin Circle in Leesburg. I have contact information for her Broker and Regional Director, but I don’t want to publish it here. Contact me offline if you wish to communicate with them regarding this matter. Miss Rutkowski is bound by the code of ethics adopted by the National Association of Realtors.

I stumbled by accident across this wildly inappropriate, offensive post (it’s captured as it appeared Wednesday, January 25 at approximately 12:45 am) on her professional real estate business blog. I left a comment indicating that I would make sure no one I know would ever use her as an agent, and telling her why. Here are some screenshots of what she thought was appropriate content for a blog on which she presents herself to the public as a Realtor:

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