Category Campaigns | VenusPlusX

Barney Frank: Elder Statesman Or Just a Grouch?

Barney Frank Sharply Criticizes Gay Rights Groups’ Flip on ENDA by Amanda Terkel for The Huffington Post

A handful of groups said last month that they no longer back the Senate-passed version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because of its sweeping religious exemption, which would allow religiously affiliated businesses to fire someone for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The provision’s language goes far beyond religious exemptions afforded under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion or national origin.

Former Rep. Barney Frank’s latest sound-off criticizing the thinking of several leading gay rights organization’s rejection of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (EDNA) followed his public rebuke just last week of President Obama for having “lied” to the American people when he said people would be able to keep their existing health insurance after implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Calling the President a liar was such overreach, I remember thinking at the time that Frank just wanted to get people talking about him now that he has become a private citizen following his retirement from Congress last year. Obama absolutely misspoke as he tried to gloss over this specific criticism. In fact, this applied to only a small percentage of people who had existing plans plans were below the new standards and safety net set by the ACA meant to the improve health of all Americans, prevention being key to lowering future healthcare costs overall. They didnt lose their insurance, but they were forced to upgrade their coverage. It was a failure of Obama in not figuring this out before he made blanket statements, but Frank made no room for nuance, adding nothing to the debate but fueling the right flank and getting his name in the media stream. It was a disappointing display to many people.

Frank has always seen himself as the best spokesman for gay rights, the grand poobah expressing assessments that every lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) person should listen to. He may have had the highest profile platform after he finally came out the closet in 1987, but he has been unforgiving of others with positions that differ from his own.

2011 National Equality March, Washington, DC
Flickr/creative commons

In 2010, when Dan and I were involved in planning the October 2011 Equality March in Washington, DC, Frank was a vocal critic, saying we were wasting a lot of time and energy that will have no real results, just “ruining the grass.” But our hearts swelled as we witnessed hundreds of thousands crest Capitol Hill that day and knew everything was about to change, radically. History proved him wrong very quickly as the march yielded the greatest expansion and upstep in national organizing for equality rights to date.

Now Frank is thoughtlessly disparaging our movement once again by calling LGBT groups “ridiculous” for rejecting this session’s version of the bill just because of its broad religious exemptions, now super-charged in the era of Supreme Court-approved corporate personhood and religious right to discriminate. Again, he argues for the incremental approach, the hoped-for future fix. The rest of us understand there will be no future fix whatsoever, and in fact the successful passage of this bill would formally institutionalize broader discrimination in the work place.

“Having weaker protections for LGBT people sends the message that anti-LGBT discrimination is more acceptable than other forms of workplace discrimination,” said Ilona Turner, legal director of the Transgender Law Center. “

Remember 2007 when you clung to your faith in an incremental approach a few short years ago when pushing for an ENDA that excluded rights for trans people? You thought that version was good enough, too, but at the urging of trans leaders at the time, one in particular, Dr. Dana Beyer, you began your re-education by expanding your congressional staff with the very capable Diego Sanchez (now the national political director for PFLAG, Parents, Families, and Allies United with LGBT People). Only then were you able to see the infinite wisdom of including trans people in any version of ENDA.

Frankly, Mr. Frank, it is your grouchiness that you are revealing when you criticize our current leaders who reject ENDA altogether as “not being for anything that could pass” so we can consider ourselves “cutting edge.” Rather it is your total rejection of more evolved thinking, again, being reactionary instead of trying to educate yourself on all the antecedents, that can be considered “ridiculous.” While you have had a remarkable and admirable public career, these recent comments to the press make you look foolish and thoughtless.

More far-seeing is the work of activists on an all-inclusive American Equality Bill, legislation fashioned after or through current civil rights legislation. Just add SO+GI (sexual orientation and gender identification) has been the rallying cry to add these designations to existing civil rights legislation (right along side 50-year-old protections from discrimination based on gender, religion, national origin, or race) or through a new bill. The organizations rejecting ENDA because of senseless religious exemptions also have in mind the urgency to protect LGBT people everywhere (and every when), not just in employment but housing and healthcare and all other areas of human endeavor.

ENDA, with or without religious exemptions, is too inadequate in its exclusive focus on employment. Support for a singular, inclusive equality bill would also protect LGBT people’s religious freedom by not forcing them to abide by the religion of another person or corporation.

So, Mr. Frank, we ask you to step off. The purpose of all privilege can only be to give it away to the voiceless, not to try and silence those around you. It’s time to expand your horizon again, Mr. Frank, and recognize that the drive for full equality need not, and should not, compromise.

by Jorge Elias
Flickr/creative commons

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Real Democracy Demands Economic Democracy

The Garment Worker
Scott Beale/laughingsquid.com
Flickr/creative commons

“Only 1 out of 8 American households is able to have the American Dream.”

– Richard D. Wolff, author of Democracy At Work: A Cure for Capitalism, and leader of the Democracy At Work movement, appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time

We were told as children that capitalism was good because it supported the middle class. We were sold on the idea as “the American way,” but we all must admit at this point that capitalism has led us to some very bad consequences, burying this country in turmoil by making everyone poor so a few can become rich . . . very, very rich.

Wolff is a heterodox economist and Professor at The New School in New York City, looking more broadly at systems that work for all people, not just the “winners,” the few at the top. Wolff shows us how our capitalist crisis heaps “huge burdens on us for years,” taking issue with Americans total rejection of marxist criticism and other critics who actually had a few good alternatives for how to better approach commerce.

Wolff has become the chief spokesman bringing people to understand why democracy is absent from our economic system.

For example, Wolff explains in the video below how new associations can make substantive change by replacing capitalism with worker self-directed enterprises (WSDEs) wherein workers decide how to use profits.

Upon our relaunch this past spring, our Manifesto for A New Age of Sexual Freedom offered up the formula for real progress: the elimination of old, inhumane, and coercive systems; the preservation of what is old but also humane; and the creation of new, humane, and voluntary systems. We like to catalog progress, taking note when we we see it. Democracy At Work is one of the best examples of this new movement and is worthy of our attention and support. Together, we can make a difference.

Also see: The Silenced Majority by Amy Goodman

in Campaigns / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized by Alison Gardner 05 Aug 2014 0 comments

Adam Lambert’s Post-Gay World

Adam Lambert Is a ‘Killer’ Queen by Daniel Reynolds for The Advocate

Dan Massey and I had a somewhat secret passion for Adam Lambert ever since he sang Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen for his audition on American Idol in 2009. (Can you even remember who came in first to his second place finish?) We once spent a weekend in Baltimore and Washington, DC, attending two of Lambert’s early concerts coinciding with his first album. They were medium-sized venues, and at the last one I got lost finding the restroom only to run in to Lambert, face to face, as he was going out on stage.

Yes, he glowed.

Adam Lambert
Flickr/creative commons

For several years, Dan not-so-secretly finished each of his emails by attaching some of Lambert’s lyrics we were especially fond of, ones like these that captured VenusPlusX’s campaign for a better world.

Welcome to the Master Plan
Don’t care if you understand
Don’t care if you understand
Welcome to the Master Plan.
(“Master Plan”)

And . . .

I was born with glitter on my face
My baby clothes made of leather and lace
And all the girls in the club wanna know
Where did all their pretty boys go?
(“Sure Fire Winners”)

Lambert set out to answer that question, Where did all their pretty boys go? Something we are explaining to each other in our joint search for equality rights.

Lambert has become the personalization of gay is good, slowly emerging as one our most articulate gay icons in the entertainment industry.

[Like last year, Lambert is continuing] “as spokesperson for AT&T’s “Live Proud” campaign. The initiative encourages all people – regardless of sexual orientation – to share memes illustrating their pride through social media channels. Five lucky participants in the campaign, which ends August 10, will have the chance to attend a private event with Lambert in New York. The goal, he says, is ’empowerment,’ and to give others ‘a voice to be what and who they are.'”

Through the AT&T campaign and in practically all of his public statements, Lambert is showing youth what it’s like to just be yourself, no matter who that is, and to not only be proud but to be exceedingly happy that you are you. After all, there is no one in the greater universe that can be that person.

Right now Lambert is finishing up a well-reviewed tour with the band Queen. He inhabits the lead spot formerly held by Freddie Mercury, who happened to have been an openly bisexual artist who died of AIDs in 1991. Mercury lived through some bitter years when being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans (LGBT), especially in the public eye, was a grim affair with mostly everyone else in the closet. The AIDs epidemic changed all of that because it has become a matter of life and death to acknowledge LGBT people.

“I feel like it’s one of the things that I respect about him a lot. He never really made any apologies for anything,” Lambert says of Freddie Mercury. “He just was who he was. And if there’s something I can take from that, it’s that sometimes, especially in today’s world, where we’re at, there’s such a strong statement in just boldly being what and who you are.”

Lambert’s builds on our shared history by heralding the coming ordinariness of being openly gay, a world where we all can live in a post-gay and post-gender, a new age of sexual freedom unimaginable just a couple of decades ago.

Even as the industry continues to close doors on many out musicians, Lambert attests to a noticeable shift to what he terms a “post-gay place.” He maintains that younger generations do not share the stigmas that were more prevalent in Mercury’s day and they refuse to be pigeonholed with labels on their identities.

“This next generation coming up is like, ‘Hey, it doesn’t fucking matter… My sexuality, doesn’t [determine that] this is the type of music I listen to, or this is the type of activities I’m into, or these are the type of people I hang out with. It’s getting to the point now where we’re more mainstream, and we’re allowed to do anything we want, and we’re allowed to be with anybody we want,’” Lambert says. “So there’s not as much segregation… and I think that’s really exciting, because I don’t think it should matter.”

Daniel Reynold’s article today is well worth a full reading.

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in Campaigns / Dan Massey / Key Issues / News of Note / Public Information by Alison Gardner 04 Aug 2014 0 comments

Professor Walt Helps Explain America’s Bankrupt Israeli Policy

Palestine vigil and demonstration
Effi Fuks
Flickr/creative commons

AIPAC Is the Only Explanation for America’s Morally Bankrupt Israeli Policy

As we speak, today, Israel is expanding it ground offensive in Palestine.

[US] politicians and policymakers continue to back a brutal military campaign whose primary purpose is not to defend Israel but rather to protect its longstanding effort to colonize the West Bank.

— Stephen M. Walt, International Affairs Professor
Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government

In a two-parter this week, Israel’s Messy Package (Part 1 and Part 2) I offered up my youthful experience of my own family of “regular jews” to trace the more than 100-year history of what is now known as the Israel Lobby and its agency, AIPAC (American Israeli Policy Affairs Committee). This history is why we support activists worldwide who are helping the Palestinians end the 50-year humanitarian crisis Israel and the U.S. have created, and all those working in support of a two-state solution, something the current Israeli government is committed to fight at all costs.

We pointed you to this wonderful paper from Professor Walt that was published this week on The Huffington Post, but we are highlighting it here especially so that more people will have a chance to read it, and be further armed with the truth about Israel and its relationship with America.

The official name for Israel’s latest assault on Gaza is “Operation Protective Edge.” A better name would be “Operation Déjà Vu.” As it has on several prior occasions, Israel is using weapons provided by U.S. taxpayers to bombard the captive and impoverished Palestinians in Gaza, where the death toll now exceeds 500. As usual, the U.S. government is siding with Israel, even though most American leaders understand Israel instigated the latest round of violence, is not acting with restraint, and that its actions make Washington look callous and hypocritical in the eyes of most of the world.

This Orwellian situation is eloquent testimony to the continued political clout of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the other hardline elements of the Israel lobby. There is no other plausible explanation for the supine behavior of the U.S. Congress–including some of its most “progressive” members–or the shallow hypocrisy of the Obama administration, especially those officials known for their purported commitment to human rights.

The immediate cause of this latest one-sided bloodletting was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli hikers in the occupied West Bank, followed shortly thereafter by the kidnapping and fatal burning of a Palestinian teenager by several Israelis. According to J.J. Goldberg’s reporting in the Jewish newspaper Forward, the Netanyahu government blamed Hamas for the kidnappings without evidence and pretended the kidnapped Israelis were still alive for several weeks, even though there was evidence indicating the victims were already dead. It perpetrated this deception in order to whip up anti-Arab sentiment and make it easier to justify punitive operations in the West Bank and Gaza.

And why did Netanyahu decide to go on another rampage in Gaza? As Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group points out, the real motive is neither vengeance nor a desire to protect Israel from Hamas’ rocket fire, which has been virtually non-existent over the past two years and is largely ineffectual anyway. Netanyahu’s real purpose was to undermine the recent agreement between Hamas and Fatah for a unity government. Given Netanyahu’s personal commitment to keeping the West Bank and creating a “greater Israel,” the last thing he wants is a unified Palestinian leadership that might press him to get serious about a two-state solution. Ergo, he sought to isolate and severely damage Hamas and drive a new wedge between the two Palestinian factions.

Behind all these maneuvers looms Israel’s occupation of Palestine, now in its fifth decade. Not content with having ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 and not satisfied with owning eighty-two percent of Mandatory Palestine, every Israeli government since 1967 has built or expanded settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem while providing generous subsidies to the 600,000-plus Jews who have moved there in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Two weeks ago, Netanyahu confirmed what many have long suspected: he is dead set against a two-state solution and will never–repeat never–allow it to happen while he is in office. Given that Netanyahu is probably the most moderate member of his own Cabinet and that Israel’s political system is marching steadily rightward, the two-state solution is a gone goose.

. . . Continue . . .

in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 25 Jul 2014 0 comments

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 2)

flickr/creative commons

Yesterday, in Part 1, I told my personal family’s jewish history in an attempt to put the existence of Israel into a broader context. Earlier enough, I had dispensed with the myth of my youth, that Israel was simply the world’s and Palestine’s gift to the jewish culture, a safe harbor for Jews following the atrocities of WWII. In fact, Israel was conceived by a militant zionist movement begun in the late 1800s, so it is motive that has to be understood for anything to change.

(We use the word, zionists, as we use the word, christianists, to denote fundamentalists who purport to believe in their respective religious traditions but display none of the characteristics, quite the opposite.)

The early zionists set on their quest to establish a religious state, with eyes on the grand prize: the occupation of the geographical, historical, and religious epicenter of the Middle East. Its big mistake, and the mistake of the US and other countries that helped bring about the 1948 establishment of the state Israel, was that two other major world religions, Christianity and Islam, also lay claim on the same pile of sand, sharing reverence to the same Abraham.

Zionists, however, proceeded and proceed today according to their belief that they are the superior race and religion which has suffered injustices for centuries (more and worse than any other) making them singularly deserving of a special berth in the world, a completely new class of world citizen with complete dominion over their tribal enemies. For starters, that’s just a galling affront to all people and all religions. Logically, adherents to any theoretical superior religion would perforce never resort to violence, and never deny the beliefs or non-beliefs of their neighbors.

Upon arrival in the region, the zionists saw no wisdom in becoming the local peaceniks or diplomatic leaders to bring about world peace (in which case they might today be considered one of the most respected countries in the region and the world). Instead they began an unending and bloody campaign to expand, encroach, invade, disenfranchise, and discriminate against all non-jews in the way, in any way they could. Rather than justifying war as their need to secure their borders, they would do better to ask themselves what they have done to draw the ire of their sequestered and suffering neighbors.

Israel was founded on the basis of religious extremism and discrimination, and has rendered itself indefensible. Just yesterday, Navi’ Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for an investigation into Israeli war crimes.

Israel’s failure to fully enfranchise the Palestinian people from the start, its commitment to stand in the way of any two-state solution, and their institutional religious discrimination set the course for failure. We are now living through the results of these failures, waiting for new, younger, progressive, and humane leaders to take the reins of the Israeli government, and waiting for America to wake up.

The zionists have steadily expanded their movement, now known as today’s Israel Lobby (greater than AIPAC), monolithic in scope, hiding in plain sight, and controlling practically every aspect throughout modern American life. It’s not just the $3 billion a year and technical/military assistance our tax dollars pay for. The Israel Lobby controls the election of congressmen and every presidential election, and, sadly, all media. Unquestioned loyalty to Israel has, unfortunately, always been viewed as being in America’s interests by guaranteeing a permanent base in the region to spread our own nationalistic, capitalistic religion. And, in case we forget, because the existence of Israel happens to coincide with christianist belief that it is necessary for Jesus Christ’s someday return.

The Israel Lobby reminds me of another group: the secretive christianist organization known as The Family (also as The Fellowship) with its 10,000 cells world wide that is also working for religious dominion over its perceived enemies.

So, today, I’m asking some starting questions. We’d like to hear what you think.

1. Why are activists, who are no longer hypnotized by the Israel Lobby rhetoric and working to solve the humanitarian crises underway, so roundly criticized, even from their left flank?

2. Why are so many vocal members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement still blinded by the Israel Lobby’s talking points, failing to recognize our innate solidarity with Israel’s victims?

3. When will America take down the veil and reveal to the world that today’s Israel has no intention of seeking a two-state solution under any circumstance and that’s why it is so ready to resort to untold violence that stifles more moderate Palestinan voices?

Israel has forgotten that diplomacy is a table from which you never get up and leave. No matter what you think about the inferiority of your neighbor, nothing, no thing, justifies violence. There is always a way. You simply need to keep talking until you get to the last word: peace.

I remember my daughter one day when she was 7 years of age exclaiming, “Mommy, mommy, I know what the opposite of war is! It’s creativity!”

It’s not too late to heed the prophetic wisdom of some of our greatest statesmen, such as Dean Acheson in 1947 warning that creating land already occupied by Palestinians would “imperil not just American but all Western interests in the Middle East.”

Also see: AIPAC Is the Only Explanation for America’s Morally Bankrupt Israel Policy

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 1) here.

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As you may have seen in VenusPlusX’s Manifesto and all over this site, we are dedicated to the end of nationalism (racist by nature) and the end of racism (the chief expression of sexual oppression) by fostering progress (universal human rights, global peace). We align with all others who see progress as the the elimination of useless, coercive, inhumane systems of governments, corporations, and religious hierarchy, salvaging parts of our human legacy worthy of respect, and adding new and human and largely voluntary associations.

in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 24 Jul 2014 0 comments

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 1)

“Creating land already occupied by Palestinians would ‘imperil not just American but all Western interests in the Middle East.'”

—Dean Acheson, 1947, statesman and foreign policy expert
for several presidential administrations,
including as Harry Truman’s Secretary of State

In the early 1900s, both sides of my Jewish family fled the Kiev countryside because of the militant anti-Jewish pogroms, leaving dead my paternal great grandfather and my grandmother’s infant sister killed by armed men on horseback who burned their farm to ground. Both my grandfathers were born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They didn’t know each other and didn’t know they would someday each meet and marry women, all four families strangers to each other but all springing from thriving family farms outside Kiev. My mother’s folks sought refuge in Glasgow, Scotland, before most of them came to the US after WWI. My paternal grandmother and her siblings, the oldest was 12-year-old Pincus, came alone in steerage and settled in Hartford, Connecticut. Growing up in this family, we all lived decidedly to the far left of Reform Judaism, anxious to not be so “jewish” as to be noticed, understandably so.

In 1967 I spent the summer in Durban, South Africa, getting to know some of my cousins, the half of the next generation of the Glasgow clan who chose to emigrate to South America instead of America. When I arrived in Durban, one cousin, a young woman close to my age of 19 at the time, was unexpectedly out of the country, much to her family’s consternation, joining the Israeli zionist army who that year expanded the chartered territory of Israel through violence and repression, into Gaza and parts of Syria and Egypt.

Photo by LeftMedia
Flickr/creative commons

That summer, I came to realize that my childhood ideas about Israel were overly simplistic: My US born family were just plain Jews, explicitly not zionists, allowing themselves to adopt the modern myth that the establishment of a modern Israel was a gift from the world (and Palestinians) following the horrors of WWII death camps (rather than an unlawful occupation of another’s country).

Before going to South Africa, my personal radicalization was underway as a deeply embedded anti-Vietnam War activist, so this summertime visit to the shores of the Indian Ocean solidified my life long commitment to pacifism. My quest for world peace is a force within me that always questions why anyone goes to war. Israel is the case study, forcing the question, How could a group, a culture and religion combined, victims of hatred for 100 years, partially eradicated in concentration camps 70 years ago, themselves become purveyors of violence and oppression?

I came to understand that this militant campaign for a Jewish state, dominating control in the Middle East, and especially over Jerusalem’s ancient, holy geographic touchstones, had being going on since the beginning of the 20th century, around the same time as my relatives’ horrors and forced migration from what is now Urkaine. This scheme was doomed from the start because of its underlying motives, not to bring peace but to go to battle if necessary for what they perceived they were owed simply because they believed they represented a race of people who are the most pure and the highest expression of religious superiority. For these reasons only, however delusional, these militant Jews should always hold a deferential berth in the world. Since WWII, this battle has resulted in the displacement and disenfranchisement of an entire population who, ironically, itself shares the same legacy despite not being “jewish.”

Any attempts at forming a theocracy are fate-filled mistakes that only end badly, whether you are talking about Israel or other countries, including in the US where we are suffering under a nascent political theocracy that would enslave its citizens just as surely as those calling for Sharia Law.

The scheme to reign supreme began long before Israel formally declared it independence in 1948, and long before my young cousin risked her life in 1967 to further an expansion throughout ancient Palestine, displacing and killing everyone in the way.

Israel is a state founded and run on the basis of religious extremism and discrimination, and should be fairly dealt with on that basis.

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Israel’s Messy Package (Part 2) which delves into the monolithic Israel Lobby that has long controlled our Congress and decides who can and cannot become President of the United States; and why those who escape Israel’s fancy hypnotism and stand up for the human rights of Israel’s victims — the Palestinians themselves joined by groups such as CodePink and activists worldwide, all the time forced to endure so much criticism, even from their left flank.

Inform yourself further with Alison Weir’s recent book, Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the U.S. was used to create Israel, and websites such as www.ifamercansknew.org and www.popularresistance.org, and, of course, here at www.venusplusx, Facebook/venusplusx, and Twitter/venusplusx.

in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 24 Jul 2014 0 comments

Rounding Out for Independence Day Weekend: 7-minute Video Montage

Closing out a good weekend of reflection, remembering the once cherished America that valued its diversity born of immigration, yearning for the end of hate worldwide. As we wrote over the weekend, the puritans are responsible for the corporatized theocratic fundamentalism today eating away America and trouble spots across the globe; and, how and why sexual freedom is the bedrock of all freedoms and is worth fighting for.

So here’s our little celebration — a montage of some of our best Sexual Freedom Project videos of the last few years.

We send each contributor one of our prized VenusPlusX T-shirts (with our slogan: Sexual Freedom, You Are Born With It) when they send us a video (or an essay, work of art, etc.) expressing what sexual freedom means, or means to them. So get out your phone or video camera and let us hear from you!

This video runs 7:18 minutes. For more videos, click here.

Also: A Manifesto for A New Age of Sexual Freedom (2014)

in Campaigns / Events / News of Note / Public Information / The Sexual Freedom Project by Alison Gardner 07 Jul 2014 0 comments

What? Science? Who Needs Science?

On Monday, we wrote our analysis of the disastrous 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Burwell v Hobby Lobby, which gives greater religious freedom rights to closely held for-profit corporations and less religious freedom rights to natural persons (their words). We also urged you to express your dissent by signing on on to support Planned Parenthood in its defends health care access for women.

Flickr/creative commons

“The decision now says people have the right to ignore science; humans can ignore facts. Science can be contested, disproven, and proven, with experimentation, and the advancement of knowledge. But Hobby Lobby just got a religious exemption from the health care law and basically all science!” — Michelle Garcia at the Advocate

Closely held for-profit corporations comprise 90% of American companies and millions of workers, and companies are now empowered to intervene in the health care access for women and the men that love them by denying coverage for commonly used, FDA-approved pregnancy prevention pills and devices, such as an IUD (intra-uterine device). We fully agree with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the dissenting opinion, warning that the Court is about to enter “a minefield.”

The New York Times previously tried to explain this, and VenusPlusX, Mother Jones, and others such as Garcia do very well in unpacking the bad science behind the decision. These 5 white men in the majority are uniformed and/or intentionally in denial by misunderstanding that the birth control methods they feel are so at odds with their religions interfere with embryo implantation when in fact they simply prevent fertilization.

These science-deniers and extreme-right wing nuts have driven down the Court’s favorability to 30%, and threaten the balance of government. Last month, VenusPlusX, discussed the impeachment of certain Supreme Court Justices, and this should add more fuel to the fire.

Garcia also makes another very good point of why this decision should worry every lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) person. Generations of LGBT activists have always understood that when it comes to progress, equality rights follow women’s rights. Legislation and lawsuits favoring LGBT people are based on this fact, and shows the two movements have be (and should be) inexorably linked for decades.

As a queer woman, it makes me want to shake every LGBT person who doesn’t see the broader implications of this. What if a company could tell employees that they won’t pay for insurance that covers HIV treatment or health care to transgender people because of owners’ “sincerely held religious beliefs”? Justice Samuel Alito, in writing the majority opinion, promised its scope was “very specific.” Still, some of us side with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and foresee a potential onslaught of legal challenges testing the limits.

When I unfurl my brow and relax to get a good night’s sleep I think about the upside of right-wing theocratic extremism — it brings out the voters. The more desperate the right-wing nuts are and the more sloppy they become help focus progressive action. In America, we can use the issues where Republicans fall short (women’s rights, immigration rights, LGBT rights, immigration rights, workers rights, and on and on) to vote them out in November, insuring a super-majority in the Senate will be available there to appoint new progressive Justices as maybe needed in the next few years; and, regaining the House to replace the do-nothing bunch there now.

It’s the political season. Put your boots on the ground to stand up for those whose human rights are under attack. We have to get our own house in order before we can affect similar changes in trouble spots across the world. Two follows one, three follows two, and so on and so on so just take that first step towards change.

See A Manifesto for The New Age of Sexual Freedom to understand why VenusPlusX believes issues like these are of supreme importance.

in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 02 Jul 2014 0 comments

Express Your Dissent!

It is unbelievable that in 2014
we are still fighting about women’s
access to basic health care like birth control.

If you agree — say so. Just click here now
to add your name to the dissent.
— Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood

Photo by James Palinsad
Flickr/creative commons

In a dramatic 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court today chose to side with corporations over people and set a brand new (and untested) precedent that is just the starting gun for more and more corporations claiming religious freedom superiority over the needs of their employees.

(See a LATE BREAKING UPDATE at the bottom showing the already cascading effect this decision is having in the lower courts, in less than 8 hours.)

In Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the right-wing justices vacated a portion of the Affordable Care Act that applies to certain for-profit corporations, giving them superior religious freedom rights. They performed this bit of surgery with a dull hack saw. In the the process they perpetuated a fatal misunderstanding of the difference between pregnancy prevention and abortion.

Protecting the free-exercise rights of closely held corporations thus protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control them. — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito

It was a good day to be a boss. And a very good day for all the lawyers who will now thrive because of the havoc this decision will fuel.

Justice Stephen Breyer and the 3 women Justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayer, and Elana Kagan, dissented in consideration of the tens of thousands of working women who are now unable to exercise their religious freedom, or more bluntly, freedom from the religious freedom of others with whom they disagree. Ginsburg called it, “A decision of startling breadth,” and went on to say . . .

The Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood . . . invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith . . . The Court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield . . .

The longstanding, extreme right-wingnuts’ campaign to dismantle any gains in reproductive freedom is driven solely by their theocratic fundamentalist beliefs that dictate that women shouldn’t control their own bodies, or shouldn’t be wanting to have sex in the first place, and that pregnancy prevention amounts to another form of abortion. Their position is that discrimination against women health care is not discrimination at all — it’s okay for your bosses to know better what you need.

Now it’s up to the Congress to provide a contraceptive work-around, if possible. For now, however, working women have to pay twice, first by their labor which entitles them to health care, and then separately outside of their company’s health care program. For example, a working woman now must pay more than $1000 for a IUD, an intrauterine device that prevents pregnancy, in many cases equal to a month’s pay.

There is an irony here because less available contraception will result in more pregnancies which are even more expensive and more of a strain on women’s overall health and their economic opportunities.

This impasse is a perfect example of an inhumane and coercive system that must be replaced with a humane and voluntary association outside of the influence of governments, corporations, and religious hierarchies. Shall birth control, including abortion, be a matter for the growing theocracy or be a matter between a woman and her health care providers? See A Manifesto for The New Age of Sexual Freedom to understand why VenusPlusX believes issues like these are of supreme importance.

Join us and Planned Parenthood in expressing your dissent so together we can do everything possible to protect and defend women’s health and rights nationwide.

— Some equally bad decisions this session: McCullen v Coakley, stripping buffer zones at women’s clinics; and, today’s weakening of unions, and the worker benefits they sponsor with Harris v Quinn

— Two very good decisions: Protecting personal privacy in Riley v California Ruling, and denying cert rejecting challenge to California’s law banning gay sex therapy.

— When Will We Move to Impeach Certain Supreme Court Justices, Part 1 and Part 2

— When Free Speech Becomes Sedition

— How Right-wing Nuts are Actually Helping Progressives

UPDATE from SCOTUSblog: Acting swiftly in the wake of the Court’s ruling on Monday, and relying directly upon that decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday blocked all enforcement of the mandate against an Alabama Catholic TV network, a non-profit entity. Dozens of cases similar to Hobby Lobby are in the pipeline and now sure to be viewed with more favor.

in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 01 Jul 2014 0 comments

Profit from Pain is Inhuman

I just finished reading a June 23 New Yorker magazine article, “Get Out of Jail, Inc.,” exposing on the crushing problems created by the private probation services which are thriving along with the private prison industry. The article references an important but perhaps overlooked February report from Human Rights Watch, cataloguing the lack of transparency in these services, across the South in particular.

Flickr/creative commons

This 72-page report describes how more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In many cases, the only reason people are put on probation is because they need time to pay off fines and court costs linked to minor crimes. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services.

The New Yorker article tells many sad stories, including one mother who couldn’t find parking near her home because of construction street closing. She got a few parking tickets she couldn’t afford and was eventually arrested and placed in one these coercive probation programs. Under constant threat of being re-arrested and taken to jail (and away from her children and grandchildren whom she cared for) unless she brought cash to the probation center on weekly basis. These services charge very poor people not only their initial debt but large administration fees to maintain these services so as not be jailed. This mother, who initially owed just a few hundred dollars, was eventually dunned over $4000 which she definitely couldn’t pay.

If one of their clients requires electronic monitoring, the fees for surveillance are even higher, and the debtor becomes responsible for all of it.

Citing tighter and tighter municipal and state budgets, the use of these third-party probation services has skyrocketed despite their draconian tactics. So they save money in their budgets by not jailing or putting on probation their own citizens (their job), and instead farm them out to these third-party corporations, both parties profiting on the backs of poor people. Corporations are in the business of making lots of money, no matter who is exploited.

We have written about the scourge of the private prison industry and these probation service companies extend this same conflict of interest. These corporations profit through their inhumane and coercive system. Like the private prison industry, they lobby public officials to their own benefit, and government fails its own citizens by relinquishing its responsibility to do what tax payers have asked them to do.

We urge you to read the full report, and if you can get it the June 23 New Yorker article by Sara Stillman. It will make you want to get off your couch and do something to end these practices.

More: Mass Incarceration: Follow the Money, Part 1 and Part 2.

in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 28 Jun 2014 0 comments

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