Grassroots

Whitehouse.gov petitions: What the people really want


Earlier this month Whitehouse.gov (the official site of the White House) launched “We the People”:

“Welcome to We the People on WhiteHouse.gov. This tool provides you with a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.”

Any petition created within the first 30 days, that reaches at least 5,000 signatures, will receive an “official response”. This has incredible potential. It gives the Internet hivemind a way to bring what they actually care about to discussion. Guess what the people want?

  1. 34,223+ “Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol.
  2. 20,375+ “Abolish the TSA, and use its monstrous budget to fund more sophisticated, less intrusive counter-terrorism intelligence.
  3. 16,930+ “Call an Investigation into Allegations of Prosecutorial & Judicial Misconduct in the Case of Sholom Rubashkin
  4. 12,763+ “Edit the Pledge of Allegiance to remove the phrase “Under God”.
  5. 10,594+ “Allow Industrial Hemp to be Grown in the U.S. Once Again
  6. 10,381+ “Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents
  7. 10,178+ “Legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana.
  8. 9,586+ “Stop Interfering With State Marijuana Legalization Efforts
  9. 8,689+ “End the destructive, wasteful and counterproductive “War on Drugs
  10. 8,537 + “Remove “In God We Trust” from currency.
  11. 8,400+ “Restore democracy by ending corporate personhood.
  12. 7,998+ “Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

I don’t see any hate petitions, or faith petitions, nothing commercially motivated. These are generally issues that I care about and ones that don’t always receive the most coverage. Even if the corporate media shies away from an issue, tools like this bring them back up. If these petitions get the attention they genuinely deserve, then it could be a huge step forward for our country. In reality, our government isn’t ignorant to these things; someone has an agenda that involves marijuana being illegal and the TSA making travel inconvenient and degrading.

We don’t know what the “official response” will look like, but right now these petitions are educating people and creating a valuable sense of urgency.

Sign up, contribute, and spread the word.

Grassroots: Take action (updated 10-25-11)

This is a 10-25-11 editor’s update.

Washington, DC’s TLGB Police Watch Coalition of concerned citizens and organizations has now scheduled the first street action, a Transgender Day of Action (TDOA, November 7) in conjunction with the planners of DC’s Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR, November 20), to end DC police bias against trans folks.

While the TDOR has been held for two decades to honor those who have lost their lives in the struggle for full equality, this year everyone is cooperating to express in unison the community’s urgent need to rid itself of discriminatory practices in the police force and in city government. The trans community’s leaders have worked ably through the years, and we are starting to see some significant changes but the pressure from the public must remain strong until these practices are irradiated completely from life in our nation’s capital. AG

Recent coalition partners are Rainbow Response, Transgender Health Empowerment, and Gender Rights Maryland, who join DC Trans Coalition (DCTC), Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), GetEQUAL DCThe DC Center for the LGBT Community, Gays & Lesbians Opposing Violence (GLOV), Woodhull Sexual Freedom AllianceCedar Lane UU Church LGBT Task Force, and VenusPlusX.

Please let us know if you would like to be a part of this coalition to end police bias in DC. 

The grim numbers attest to the cost of unregulated hatred of vulnerable minorities when civil government fails:

  • Over a ten year period, eight trans women were murdered in Washington, DC, out of a population of 600 thousand. No place in the nation had a larger proportion of its population murdered in anti-trans assaults.
  • In the same period, ten trans women were murdered in California, out of a population of over 37 million. No other state in the union had a larger number of trans murders.
  • One in seven trans murders occur in DC. One in 500 Americans live in DC.
  • DC’s clearance of murders is a paltry 50% and in the trans community it is only 20%.

Local DC activists working in coalition have launched “TLGB Police Watch” to plan and strategize around concerns of the TLGB community-at-large. Their goal is to put well-aimed and -vetted “boots on the ground” to bring pressure on city government, the Metropolitan Police Department, and Congress (because we don’t have Home Rule in DC) and draw the attention of the public and the media to this gruesome national tragedy.

The coalition is expanding daily and we invite you to join. It consists of individuals and local and national organizations, such as DC Trans Coalition (DCTC), Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), GetEQUAL DCThe DC Center for the LGBT Community, International Socialist Organization (ISO), Woodhull Sexual Freedom AllianceCedar Lane UU Church LGBT Task Force, Rainbow ResponseTransgender Health EmpowermentGender Rights Maryland, and VenusPlusX,

Everyone is working together to complement inroads community leaders are making in direct conferences with Mayor Vincent Gray and Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier, while making it perfectly that the entire community is unified in its rejection of anything short of instituting an emergency response plan to bring relief to these murders. DC has the best in the nation human rights laws for LGBT residents, but this alarming murder rate against trans and gender-nonconforming residents reveals that we cannot .

The Office of the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) must be forced once and for all to disrupt the existing anti-LGBT culture which every day leads to their employees’ non-compliance with the D.C. Human Rights Act, the standards for basic cultural competency, and existing police procedures and special orders. As Alison Gardener previously reported elsewhere, “Chief Cathy Lanier calls this, ‘willful negligence,’ on the part of her officers, and admits that police discipline and training has fallen short and endangers public safety.” We already know this pathological, undisciplined, willful negligence increases the likelihood of even greater violence and discrimination against our community.

TLGB Police Watch is putting the “T” first, in demanding systemic and sustainable change throughout Washington, DC. If you would like to work with us or familiarize yourself with what we are doing for problems in your own city, please contact columbia@venusplusx.org and reference TLGB Police Watch.

Change must come now, before more lives and families are shattered because of TLGB discrimination and violence against our community.

Why sexual freedom is the bedrock of all freedoms

(También en Español)
Our sexual pleasure response is completely individual. When we feel it, those precious moments, we experience unbridled exhilaration that is at the same time indescribable by mere words, even in great art or poetry.

There is only one way to replicate this experience of unrestrained freedom and that is to recreate — re-create increasing favorable circumstances to plug in at a healthy pace. Although sexual pleasure exists by definition in a time and space all one’s own an imperative to share it and enhance it with others is built in. Studies have demonstrated over and over again the irrefutable benefits to mental health, prosperity, and longevity of a life regularly punctuated with the desired number and rate of pleasurable encounters. This inviting pressure brings people into relationship, the midwife of personal growth.

These cumulative states of sexual pleasure, those knowings of  at-one-ment in the universe, can be mutually acknowledged as both a singular experience and the bodily guarantee of true pluralism. It is the one authentic human experience that virtually all other humans agree exists, and no other experience comes close to this criteria. Pluralism leads inevitably to democracy and the extension to more and more people their birthright to pursue sexual freedom and all other freedoms that emanate from this mutual acknowledgement of each other’s immutable bodily freedom in the form of sexual pleasure.

Our own sovereign portal to experience physical pleasure and love in infinitely inexhaustible manifestations makes possible a mutuality of individual autonomy that is expressed as true pluralism and the quest for universal equal rights for each person without qualification. Everyone shares that inner experience of freedom to the same extent everyone else does and is why civilizations progress in making all freedoms universally felt in society.

This inner experience of sexual pleasure is what joins together each and every person on earth, an organic unity all of us can recognize and agree is important, even a type of magic, that makes our world better day by day.

Party on.

Creative Commons images by: rileyroxx, DavidSpinks, and Lori_NY