Grassroots

How are you celebrating Religious Freedom Day?

The idea of religious freedom was conceived as a shield protecting against government overreach when it comes to religious matters. All Americans, be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, and so on, should have the freedom to practice their faith or worldview free from burdensome government regulation or required participation; faith and other individual thoughts are private waters that government shall not wade in except in extreme circumstances. Religious freedom by its nature must include freedom FROM religion to maintain its integrity as a concept. We see efforts by Religious Right groups and the US Catholic bishops to take ...

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

The American Bison Captures An Ailing US

American Bison photo by Dan Dzurisin Flickr/creative commons

There are many examples around lately of inverse logic and intellectual disconnect but few capture it as well as what is going on with the mighty American Bison. On the one hand we can herald the US Senate for backing the American Bison as our national mammal. No animal is more worthy, more connected to our early heritage. There were originally 6 species of bison globally, and now there are only two, the American Bison and the Steppe Bison, and many of these have been interbred with cattle. By the 1800s, the number of American Bison had declined to ...

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

VenusPlusX Is A Conversation

Columbia, seen here in the Statue of Freedom atop the US Capital, is Venusplusx

Dan Massey and I founded VenusPlusX in January 2011. Since then we were often asked, "Which one is X?" to which we answered, jokingly, "it's not polite to ask." We were and are as one in our commitment to make a better world. Our inspiration for the name, VenusPlusX, was a 1960 sci-fi book, Venus Plus X, which is about a gender-neutral future society. Sexual freedom is our theme, specifically A New Age of Sexual Freedom, because it comprises ultimate freedom, the final freedom that will be acknowledged, and the only one that can ensure all preceding freedoms. Full sexual freedom signifies ...

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

The Trail of Tears Continues

Photo by Hammerin Man Flickr/creative commons

There is no end to United States' fatal exploitation of America's indigenous peoples. First the wholesale genocide of 95% of native Americans, the holocaust at the founding of the USA. Indian schools that shattered families came next followed by the granting and taking away of promised land, and the concentration camps called reservations where healthcare and educational opportunities are denied. Our government's invasion of sacred lands on behalf of corporate fossil fuel production are part of this disastrous tapestry, all speaking to humanity's inhumanity. Congress speaks of reconciliation but never backs it up, and has so far ignored formal ...

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

Guest Moses Mworeko Reflects on Coming Out

Moses Mworeko Long-time member of the VenusPlusX family

If you don't say it, it will burn you.

I usually think of coming out as repentance or seeking forgiveness for harboring,  consciously or unconsciously, a guilty act or feeling. A guilty act or feeling boils and sometimes kills us inside, unless it's let out into the universe. When we are in charge of letting this out, coming out, we choose the universe's consequences.

My brother sometime back reminded me of what our grandmother used to say..."Waba otakigambire nikikwotsya," literally, "If you don't say it, it will burn you." She was talking about the consequences of harboring guilty feelings. You feel ...

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in Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Public Information / The Sexual Freedom Project / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

The Implosion WILL Be Televised

by KAZ Vorpal Flickr/creative commons

The very depravity of what's now pouring from their mouths is doing all the work for us. Back from traveling, I am fully enjoying how US Republicans have answered my prayers, and then some. The self-immolation of their influence occurs hourly now, and I've got the marshmallows. The long-ago right wing has been completely co-opted by the political religious right. These fake christianist profiteers want to destroy our democracy to speed their promised white, male christian sharia. They are motivated by greed, not faith, to protect the fortunes of an entitled elite. They relish the idea of constitutional crises and ...

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in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 1 comments

No More Right Wing, Just Religious Right

"It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it."

That quote is from 1981, and its prescience comes from an unlikely source: evangelical superstar Billy Graham. No one was or is more embedded in the religious fundamentalist culture, but even he foresaw the coming perversion of religious-based politics. Through this summer, I have been equating the religious right with the GOP because every Republican elected and appointed official has by now been completely co-opted by their science-denying, punishing, and harmful agenda. ...

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

Meditation on Labor Day

Replica of 1886 union pin via Jim Forest Flickr/creative commons

Thank you Laura Clawson (@LauraClawson) for demonstrating in two simple charts that income inequality is reduced in direct proportion to the rise of worker power and self-determination through unionization. The union density that followed WWII through the 50s caused the only dip in income by the top 10%. This is why unions are considered a threat to corporate power and that is why our corporate-controlled government and courts have worked so hard to diminish unions and the right to organize. Like electric cars and railroads so beneficial to the people at large, unions threaten the ruling oligarchy's fat purse. Progressive activists ...

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

White Supremacists Want To Rebrand #BlackLivesMatter

By AllNiteImages Flickr/creative commons

Special thanks to writers Julia Craven (@CurlyCrayy) and Nick Wing (@nickpwing) for 5 Things To Tell Anyone Who Blames Black Lives Matter For Violence Against Cops. Predictably, Fox News has called out the crazies to gaslight the Black Lives Matter movement and rebrand it as a hate group and murder movement. All of us have to do everything in our power to counter this hateful misdirection designed by, made for, and spread by white supremacists. Please read Craven and Wing's whole piece, if you haven't already, because it so well diffuses the myths used by white supremacists ...

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

The Sexual Confusion of the Religious Right

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In connection with our campaign to #VoteOutTheReligiousRight, I wrote The Christian Fundamentalist's Erotic Dream to help pull the sheets off of the perverted sexuality at the root of the religious right's distorted politics, their utter mendacity. In that post, I quoted Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, who sums this up succinctly. "[T]he erotic dream of Amreican fundamentalism is a restoration of a cleansing of impurity, a nation without sin, an empire of the personal as political . . . "Today’s Christian conservatives define themselves as apart from the world, and ...

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