Category Op-Ed | VenusPlusX

Back To The Future

Lance Shields
Installation: “Cosmic Kisses Illuminated”
slurl.com/secondlife/ North Dolores/202/61/23/
Flickr/creative commons

My blog break turned out to be a bit longer than it should have, sorry. But if you have been following the Twitter/venusplusx feed you know I’ve been very busy with activists everywhere as we see, finally, an energizing of the forces for good despite the pain of getting to our destination. And it is and will be painful, very painful for a while, make no doubt, but there’s a new inter-sectional majority able to co-envision the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not a mirage, it’s real. A new day is here.

More than at any point in history, our past and present are showing us what we do NOT want to bring into the future. We are now capable of uniting across the world as never before to rescue our planet from the coercive and inhmane systems which enslave us, and at the same time to build, collectively, a survivable culture comrpising humane and voluntary systems devoted to universal safety and peace. (See our Manifesto for more.)

The midwifery of our pain is delivering a new cohesiveness, a new world consciousness, an energized generation of young people who can speak with one voice. VenusPlusX’s mission calls for the end racism and sexual and gender oppression, and equates the fulfillment of that mission with The New Age of Sexual Freedom, as the singular bedrock to all other freedoms because it is the only one that encompasses all other freedoms. For this reason, we are always concerned with the inter-sectionality of all issues pre-empting or otherwise inhibiting this new age, such as Fundamentalism/Xenophobia/Racism/Discrimination, World Poverty/Income Inequality, Climate Change/Migrations/Immigration, etc.

#CharlieHebdo and #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie) are trending today as we witness another tragic example of this inter-sectionality, this time in Paris, a terrorist attack against free speech. Attacks on any type of freedom come from fundamentalist extremists who have distorted their own religious teachings (Islam/Judaism/Christianity) to excuse their ignorance and hatred of “other.” Fundamentalist extremists are only concerned with killing or otherwise disappearing certain groups of people they are primitively afraid of, whether in Paris, Uganda, or onMain Street USA. Even Right Wingnut and Xeonophobe Laura Ingraham‘s cynical spin on today’s Paris attack is itself an example of fundamentalist extremism. There is no evidence of mental capacity in her vitriol; if there was a shred of it she would soon discover the intellectual impossibility of her own words. By contrast, editorial cartoonists across the world responded loudly and clearly, showing the power of truth.

#BlackLivesMatter has been a fragile meme under constant attack by the #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter crowd who just don’t get it. These individuals have been conditioned culturally to reject all matter of “other” and fear everyone. These are the people who want to go backward in history instead of forward, and by resisting progress, including the evolution of their own thoughts, they have effectively created their own minority that will soon be irrelevant to the march towards racial justice.

#NetNeutrality is fast coming to a head, and, just like #ClimateChange, it’s another battle of corporations versus people. Preparation to fight these issues has never been more focused, organized, and energized.

Likewise, we are prepared to rectify #Immigration and #IncomeInequality by demonstrating the economic rewards of opening rather than tightening borders, and at the same time taking joint responsibility for the physical welfare of all people. Fewer and fewer of us can stand still thinking of those who are suffering under these coercive systems right now, children going to bed fearful, hungry, and often homeless.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately, and as always will welcome your feedback. The inherent inter-sectionality of each of these hashtags can be negative or positive, but we are beginning to see factual proof of the arc of progress that is capable even of transforming great pain towards the legacy of all that is good. Count on that and stay busy.

Be strong now because things will get better.

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How Days of Action Work in Addressing Police Bias and Anti-Transgender Violence

Today in hundreds of cities and towns across the world transgender and gender-nonconforming people and their allies pause to honor our fallen heroes. The Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) was founded in 1998 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith—a transgender graphic designer, columnist, and activist—to memorialize the murder of Rita Hester in Allston, Massachusetts. It occurs annually on (or around) November 20, and its overarching goal is to bring attention to the continued violence endured by the transgender community with the hope that together we can end such violence and intolerance.

Not long ago, Washington, DC, found itself in the midst of an epidemic of violence and murders against transgender people. The rates had been steadily growing over 10 years and suddenly we suffered 4 murders in less than 3 months. (The increase in discrimination was perhaps due to a backlash against the migration of many transgender people to DC, from Virginia and elsewhere, wanting to live in a city that had, and still has, the country’s most comprehensive human rights protections for gender-nonconforming people.)

Transgender Day of Action
Washington, DC
November 21, 2011

Vigil followed vigil and soon it was time for our annual TDOR. But we decided to add on a more immediate and visible Transgender Day of Action to bring this outrageous state of affairs to the forefront of public consciousness and the media and put the police, city officials, and the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, on notice.

In 2011, we started with just 5 people who met once or twice a week to hear directly from survivors of anti-trans violence and police harassment because any action to be effective would have to be grounded in real-world circumstances. We called ourselves the TLGB Police Watch, and eventually represented a coalition that included more than a dozen local organizations which turned these community concerns into goals, a set of demands, and a plan for a day of non-violence civil disobedience.

Within 24 hours after putting boots on the ground, at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters to City Hall and the offices of the U.S. Attorney of Washington, cold cases were reopened, the constitutionality of Prostitution Free Zones was questioned, police training efforts changed, and conference rooms once closed to transgender issues were opened wide.

At an international trans health conference the following spring, we reported out to trans activists from other cities, providing training and materials based on our success in effectively slowing the rates of violent incidents and murders.

Subsequent DC days of actions started popping up at other times during the year, fighting for healthcare access, employment opportunities, and housing nondiscrimination. The number of activists working directly on trans issues in DC right now includes more than 100 people and most of the organizations that were originally part of the TLGB Police Watch coalition.

The important take away is that days of action work and will continue work in visibly fighting this scourge of our community. It is an educational and effective way to make your demands heard and bring about change. The only requirement is your determination to organize across a spectrum of stakeholders, and then show up to do the work. Anyone who wants help in organizing a Transgender Day of Action in their community anytime of the year can tap into our resources and/or contact us for assistance and support.

DC was home city up until about 18 months ago, and tonight my heart and soul (and continuing support) are with all my friends there. Love is what it is all about because it has the power to extinguish hate in our world. Let’s work together to make world a place that is safe for everyone and human rights reign.

George Larcher image
Flickr/creative commons

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in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Transunity & Transleadership by Alison Gardner 20 Nov 2014 0 comments

Part 2: Take Heart, Evidence Pouring In Hourly

Flickr/creative commons

Yesterday, I revisited my pre-election theory that progressives and all non-Republicans will see the greater good of a Republican takeover of the Senate and their increased footprint in the House. And I promised to riff on a few memes to substantiate that soon after. (Part 1 here.)

There’s nothing to fear since these election results are actually bringing about the best time in history to put these special interest jokers on full display and in sharper relief so that everyone, at least more and more people, can see them for who they really are and then respond.

A populist movement is the cure, the only cure. And populism is exactly what radical right-wing conservatives fear the most. These lawmakers and billionaires have made people that aren’t rich and white their enemy, out of fear. Populism is coming, call it our American Spring, because these right-wingnuts are and will remain mentally incapable of solving our most pressing problems.

While all the electioneering goes on and on, populist actions and non-violent civil disobedience are becoming ever more finely tuned to respond to our growing unrest. People are being stirred into action in direct proportion to the growing social and economic injustices wrought by this distinctly American capitalist theocracy entirely dependent on the enslavement of mostly everyone else. We’re not just taking it anymore.

Populists succeed in solving problems by standing up for human rights in spite of the temporal obstacles that haters throw at us. Our successes are in part due to our ability to connect across and learn more from different movements, from the climate and military to immigration and equality rights. We are helping each other make sense of the world. The more goofy the Repubs behave, the sooner we will succeed in making things right for all people throughout the world.

The first two issues the right-wingnuts have no clue whatsoever are matters of life and death: responding to the reality of climate change; and curbing our military, here and abroad. Why are these the first? Well, because there’s not much cause to fight for freedom and human rights if we destroy ourselves and/or this planet before then.

The U.S. military-industrial complex is led by special-interest lobbyists (public and private profiteers). They bring us incursions into dozens of countries, where we have no other business except greed and racism (no wonder Americans are hated), in order to annually justify huge defense spending. Along the way they fill body bags for the most part with unemployed poor people choosing to enlist because there is often no other options.

Likewise, these special interests are militarizing local police forces to control citizen uprisings. And, they stand in the way of police accountability. They are also lobbying lawmakers to harden and lengthen prison sentences to keep the growing number of privatized, for-profit prisons making money for the corporatists while disenfranchising huge swaths of the populace, especially brown and black poor men.

This terrible trend will only end if we stand up with each other and say, “No more gain based on someone else’s pain.” We can do it. We are doing it. Find organizations and people in your community to work with or otherwise support. Maybe start with CodePink and anyone in Ferguson, Missouri, these days.

Climate change, and the physical results which are already with us today, is a chief threat to life on this planet, and something that the well-financed, capitalist theocracy is incapable of dealing with.

These right-wingnuts are not just climate-change-deniers, they are science-deniers. The christianists deny science so much they fight to stay blissfully uninformed of reproductive health so they can still call Intra-Uterine Devices (IUDs) “built-in abortion factories.” They don’t know how babies are made but they are determine to have the final say. When it comes to climate change they also fight to stay blissfully in the dark but with even more serious repercussions.

Repubs will always have the handful of scientists they can point to but these are just .001% of all the scientists who are telling us it’s practically too late to put off the degradation the burning of fossil fuels has already caused. Even allowing the science-deniers the luxury of believing that burning fossil fuels aren’t the culprit, everyone must get busy with the results of climate change now upon us: more lightning strikes, hurricane-tornados, lack of clean water, and loss of coastal square miles and assets, increasing exponentially as long as the fossil fuel capitalist elites control our economies. Yes, we have to move to a renewable energy economy but we are already engaged in the mass relocation and economic disruption that will continue to escalate to epic proportions. Consider that rising sea levels caused by the melting ice caps is already causing small island populations to abandon their lives because their fresh water has been compromised by salinization. (If you haven’t already, read Naomi Klein’s new book, a scholarly page-turner, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.)

We are on track to meet the goals the newly-elected President Obama set to reduce the effects of greenhouse gasses by the government, the largest energy consumer by far. Despite the political criticism from the Repubs, Obama used these same benchmarks to the U.S. as a whole this week to prompt China to set its goal, its first, to raise renewable energy sources to 20% by 2030. The recent UN report on climate change, which lays the groundwork for more significant agreements internationally in Copenhagen next year, and a newly invigorated climate movement have the power to curb capitalism in favor of planetary survival.

Make sure you are a part of it. If you can’t become an activist, do things in your local community to make it more earth-friendly, in one step healing us and raising awareness.

There are so many examples of how right-wingnuts will strip themselves bare as they fail these tests of leadership, and I could go on and on, but they will have to wait for a subsequent article. Next up is net neutrality because we cannot allow corporations to silence us and omit us from the debate for their own financial gain.

For now: get busy!

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in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 14 Nov 2014 0 comments

Take Heart, Evidence Pouring in Hourly (Part 1)

Photo by Håkan Dahlström
Flickr/creative commons

The far right believes they have a chance
to remake the world into the christian,
capitalist theocracy they have always wanted.

Even liberal media says, “If they win
this election cycle
they will do things that would
reverse history for 75 years!”

But none of that’s going to happen.

Just before the U.S. Election a week ago, I put forth the theory that non-Republicans should not fear, in fact we ought to take heart — that the probable Republican takeover the Senate and their increased footprint in the House were going to be good things for progressives. This is the right time in history to put these jokers on full display and in sharper relief so that everyone, at least more and more people, can see them for whom they really are.

Since the election, I’ve taken particular delight in just how fast and furious the Republicans are continuing to repudiate their reputations and dispel their humanity in the things they do and say. The timeline for their backward thinking to be completely expunged here and abroad has been immeasurably upstepped. The circumstances for progressives to act boldly have arrived.

Check the bread and circus for yourself. Don’t take my word for it. Assess for yourself the relative levels of buffoonery in whatever issue Repubs haplessly find themselves talking about, from the climate, the military, technology, you name it. Nothing they do or say suggest any understanding of the inherent equality of all people, of history, or even how our government actually works.

The only measurement we have, the one that matters, is the amount of special interest cash that is always involved. Whenever and wherever we follow the money, it leads to what’s rotten. Fortunately, these rotten cavities of entrenched special interests, rewarding corporate elites at everyone else’s expense, also offer a crystal clear roadmap for populists and all activists devoted to economic and social justice.

Some of my musings on this subject can be found in Part 2, tomorrow, and I would enjoy hearing from you if you too see it for yourself and want to share, here or on Facebook. (Maybe I should start numbering each of their rabbit holes for posterity.)

Each time one of them opens their mouth to speak, they show themselves to be, at best, uninformed, and, at worse, delusional. A shady combo of plain greed and stupidity takes over their thinking. It doesn’t appear they’ve read the news or read a book or seem to have studied much in college or since. Add to that the sweaty hysteria of desperate people driven by fear gasping for relevance, it’s almost sad (but not, really).

In VenusPlusX’s quest for a more perfect world of peace and universal equality, where every child born survives with all of its human rights unchallenged, we of course continue to focus on life-threatening issues such as climate change and the military and supporting net neutrality to make sure all voices are heard.

Freedom will not be a reality until we address the most pressing problems, the ones that are direct threats to life on this planet. The good news is that it will be the process of our joining together across borders and cultures to solve these life-threatening problems that will perforce bring about solutions to all the scaffolding issues such as ending racism, sexism, genderism, xenophobia, ageism, income inequality, and unharnessed capital greed.

Solving these planetary problems will re-enfranchise the voiceless of this world, and make sure we do have a world. Get active, do something. If you are already an activist in any area, continue to connect the dots between all of these issues — they are all connected, and all, in the end, are matters of life and death.

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in Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized by Alison Gardner 14 Nov 2014 0 comments

Before the American polls close, NON-republicans take heart

The far right believes they have a chance to remake the world into the christian, capitalist theocracy they have always wanted.

Flickr/creative commons

Even liberal media says, “If they win this election cycle they will do things that would reverse history for 75 years!”

But none of that’s going to happen.

There are only two possible outcomes. Either . . .

The non-republican ground game will send the right-wing nuts an important rebuke. Everyone who doesn’t subscribe to their particular brand of religious and capitalist lunacy are non-republicans, Democrats or not, including those that are conservatives but not crazy. This by far larger majority will hopefully reject the worst of the candidates. The non-republicans are and will be the alternative and more long-lasting just because they are not crazy, or at least less crazy.

Or . . .

The kin to Sharia law, especially with respect to the treatment of women, our home-grown religious terrorists will be given the numerical and ideological reins and have their greatest opportunity yet to self-repudiate their bankrupt ideas.

There is an acknowledgement that it’s too late for these old, white men. Their time has already passed. They may enjoy a few years of influence but all their bad ideas will not last long because they have no survival value. They are already on the ropes and going down. Their opinions are everyday more non-sensical towards the environment, human rights, women’s rights, income inequality, just about everything, and we, the non-republicans are not standing for it no matter what happens tonight.

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in Events / Grassroots / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized by Alison Gardner 04 Nov 2014 0 comments

Shamans Discover Special Interests

The shaman is presented as the intercessor between man and nature spirits
Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra
Flicker/creative commons

A primitive man who lived in a cave a long, long time ago once abstracted the idea that you can make a living, even a very good living as a shaman. He was largely self-appointed to intercede between and on behalf of other men and the existing natural resources. Most important, he consulted on what actions would be good luck or bad luck for individuals, families, and the tribe. This shaman reaped economic wealth and social advantages for his efforts that supported his own survival. The concept of special interest was born.

Special interest people take something, anything, an idea, a water source, or even an entire industry or government or church, and define it apart from the whole for some measure of personal profit.

Anthropologists or others might argue the value of some of these special interests in building the foundation of today’s technologically-advanced world. It may or may not be true that such an incautious approach that ignored special interests was ever warranted; that’s the past and we can’t change that anyhow. But having arrived at world-wide communication, individuals finally can see the special interests laid bare.

For the first time, people power can be active, no longer passive. Humanity is now looking differently at each of these special interests and deciding what’s worth preserving and building upon, those that chiefly consider and benefit the whole without any thought of personal profit. And which special interest systems are inhumane, coercive, exploitative, enslaving, profiteering and need to be left behind in the pre-technological era, their stories to be told someday just like we look at the shaman’s cave wall drawings.

All that profiteering special interests represent is counter to our survival. Their purpose is no more. There is no future in these scaffolding ideas. Without the pall of special interests all around us we will be able to rescue civilization from the impending climatic disaster brought on by men burning fuels for the last hundred years, repossess all of our human rights, and usher in universal plurality in all decision-making, local and global, otherwise defined as Peace.

Become a part of this revolution today.

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Climate Change Dangers Are ‘Higher Than Ever’: UN Report
Full UN Climate Change Report

in Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Transhuman Erotic Freedom / Uncategorized by Alison Gardner 02 Nov 2014 0 comments

Yes, it’s come to this

Flickr/creative commons

As reported last night by Rachel Maddow (see video below), at the urging of an anti-abortion religious group, the School Board in Gilbert, Arizona, is tearing out pages from a high school honors biology book. It is the first action taken after a law in Arizona passed two years ago that requires all textbooks “to present childbirth and abstinence as preferred options to elective abortion.”

The offending page, which simply discusses that abortion exists as a factual matter, something that is rightly part of the national curriculum for all Advanced Placement and other students hoping to enter college equipped with a complete education and able to compete on a level playing field.

Cutting out this page, retracting information previously available to students, is stupid and exceedingly counter-intuitive (see map below), whether in a biology textbook or in the context of sex education.

In this case, Rachel Maddow comes to the rescue by securing the domain, ArizonaHonorsBiology.com, to make this page available in perpetuity. But what about the next time and the next time after that?

This is similar to what we are witnessing in the state of Texas, where access to sex education is severely limited, and where social studies and history textbooks are being censored or in some cases rewritten to falsify facts (such as wiping out all mention of slavery, that it ever existed).

What will be next? Tearing out pages that mention homosexuality? marriage or cohabitation without children? the achievements of people of color? The answer is: Yes, more page-tearing and book-burning is in our nation’s future if we don’t start paying more attention to elections, starting at the local level.

We bring attention to this especially because it demonstrates the horrible repercussions of the theocratic fundamentalism now permeating American politics and law, retarding our progression towards a fair and just society.

These are not the first or only examples of censorship within our schools, and we are poised to see more of this retrograde behavior wherever right-wing nuts can gain a foothold, from local school boards to congress and possibly the White House itself someday.

These founts of poor decision-making are operating out of fear. They don’t believe women should ever have control over their reproductive health or equality rights, and think they are “protecting children” when they are actually hobbling them.

Complete sex education is the only thing that actually protects teenagers.

Center for Disease Control, 2012

Free access to complete sex education is a human right. To withhold it is blatant child abuse when you consider the actual facts and repercussions.

Research proves that these programs are entirely ineffective. As a matter of fact, unwanted pregnancies and STDs including HIV are more prevalent in areas in the country that limit all sex education to abstinence-only programs. So these misguided lawmakers are not just wrong in purpose but wrong in deed.

Please go the polls on Tuesday (and every Election Day) and vote these people into the dustbin of stupid history.

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More on sex education here.

in Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Sex Education / Uncategorized / Videos by Alison Gardner 01 Nov 2014 0 comments

Working Towards a Clean Energy Economy

Flicker/creative commons

As we reported last week, tomorrow, November 1, kicks off “Beyond Extreme Energy Week of Action” in Washington, DC, and cities across the United States and abroad, and we hope you will somehow participate in or otherwise support these efforts.

Did you know that the U.S. government is the largest energy user at $25 billion per year? Perhaps by coincidence today, Performance.gov has released information on how 38 federal agencies plan to overcome their vulnerabilities to reduce their emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, and implement other government-wide plans, to meet goals set by President Obama in 2010. It is currently on track to achieve the 28% reduction in 2020.

While the administration is working toward a clean energy economy, it is not doing enough to foster the switch to renewable energy. The Department of Energy is still focusing on curbing emissions rather than eradicating the special interests who maintain a stranglehold over dirty energy industries.

These vulnerabilities are stark, according to The Washington Post.

The Department of Health and Human Services cites “more frequent or worse extreme heat events” that it calls “the leading weather-related cause of death in the U.S.”
The Department of Agriculture warns of a “100% increase in the number of acres burned” in wildfires by 2050, further draining its budget because of the added fire suppression expenditures.
NASA says about 66% of its assets are already within 16 feet of being lost to rising sea levels.

It’s doubtful Obama will ever get credit for being the first president to make climate action a top priority, but that shouldn’t stop his administration from doing more about the scourge of dirty energy, the overall enemy of climate protection.

Most important, stay informed and take action.

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in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 31 Oct 2014 0 comments

Ethical Prostitution

19th Century German Sex Worker, Anna Dorthea Hansen
Flickr/creative commons

As a follow up to yesterday’s discussion of the decriminalization of sex work, take a look at this video of a sex worker ally drilling down to the issues. While perhaps relying too much on sensational memes based on unreliable data that says most sex workers are sex-trafficked children, she makes a durable case for the complete decriminalization and legalization of sex work.

Social acceptance and legalization of sex work is the key to ending sex-trafficking, not its cause. Sex-traffickers are involved in organized crime and should be pursued and punished vigorously; if they disappear so will their victims. But unless society can recognize a separate and growing sex work industry based on voluntary participation, we will not be able isolate and end the scourge of international sex-trafficking.

The first encounter society has with a voluntary sex worker need not be the result of police and the court system, nor their only portal to adequate support, healthcare, and other medical social services (more here) .

Sexual healing from an out-of-the-closet industry is not a bad thing, and will go a long way to ending sexual oppression.

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Reminder: Win one of VenusPlusX’s prized t-shirts for making a video, writing a poem, or creating a work of art as part of our Sexual Freedom Project, on this subject or any other related to sexual freedom, contact: columbia@venusplusx.org. (More videos, here.)

in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / The Sexual Freedom Project / Videos by Alison Gardner 30 Oct 2014 0 comments

Decriminalizing Sex Work: The Work Ahead

Highly-acclaimed, reader-supported news site, Truthout, has once again zeroed in on a pressing matter of social justice, the continued criminalization of sex workers. Mike Ludwig‘s news analysis, well worth a full read, weaves together several different threads of this issue in terms everyone can understand.

Ludwig points our attention to “a great leap forward” in New York’s state court system that has introduced 11 new prostitution courts called Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs). These new courts were designed to treat arrested sex workers as “trafficking victims” deserving of medical and social services instead of jails, and to focus instead on the traffickers.

Flickr/creative commons

Sounds good on the surface, right? Except that sex workers have been protesting this controversial new model because: a) its premise is based on unreliable and very narrow data; b) actual data collected by sex workers rights organizations, such as the Red Umbrella Project’s recent report, “Criminal, Victim or Worker?” were flatly rejected; and, most important, c) ignores completely the need to decriminalize sex work to begin with.

Balder Rosado, a member RedUP, told Ludwig that this new court model improves what it replaced but the issue remains that access to these services necessarily starts with an arrest by police.

Not every sex worker is a sex traffic victim as anti-trafficking advocates would have us believe. For many, it is a private and personal choice that should not by criminalized in the first place, and if “treatment” is required to help those who are trafficked or otherwise coerced, it should be within a non-criminal, non-police model.

Shira Hassan, a harm reduction and transformative justice specialist in Chicago, told Ludwig . . .

. . . [A]nti-trafficking advocates often push for laws and special courts that reduce the penalties prostitution defendants face, in the name of “decriminalization.” These efforts are not about decriminalization, she said. They are about “changing the process by which someone is criminalized.”

“Criminalization is about racism, it’s about your neighborhood, it’s about how you are dressed,” Hassan told Truthout. “It’s about policing.”

The needless criminalization of sex work unfairly targets poor people of color and is as unconstitutional as “stop and frisk.” As Ludwig notes, “Police can stop individuals for ‘loitering with intent’ if they are doing as little as wearing revealing clothing or hanging out in the wrong part of town.”

HTICs can only be called a diversion program, at best. They only serve a small number of those arrested, and only a small proportion of these people actually want and need medical or social services. And the HTICs to do not prevent re-arrest for simply walking in the same neighborhood where the first arrest took place thereby nullifying the HTIC’s decision. Only a minuscule number of traffickers every get arrested.

Ludwig quotes advocate Sienna Baskin from Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York:

“If the emphasis is changing to be about offering services and other income options to people who are doing sex work, and intervening in violent situations, and giving people what they need without [harming them], then we need to stop criminalizing them.”

I will add another disturbing dimension, one that Ludwig overlooked or chose not to include: The retired judge, Judy Harris Kluger, who helped develop these HTICs is using the very same faulty data to promote her new business providing the services that the court recommends, reaping financial benefits from the state. Worse still, there no regulations or public standards for non-profit, short-term service providers like hers. Unfortunately, privatization schemes and conflicts of interest now pervade our justice system. Mass incarceration itself is a testimony of how special interests have managed to lobby lawmakers to privatize probation and electronic monitoring services and the prison-industrial complex itself. When will special interests like these, that thrive on increased criminality and the personal pain of others, be brought to justice?

To learn more, get involved in your community to protect sex workers rights. The decriminalization of sex work will begin the end of sexual oppression, a first step towards a world of equality and peace.

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in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 29 Oct 2014 0 comments

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