Silky dark chocolate ganache paired with a thin layer of pure raspberry. (It was like the Raspberry Fairy was wearing a chocolate bra and rubbed her boobs on my tongue)
I started sobbing when I read "The prostitute’s day in court,” one of The Bilerico Project founder Bil Browning's posts from the other day, and learned that residents from his neighborhood association attended a court hearing to ensure that a woman arrested multiple times for prostitution do jail time. These residents were successful, and the woman in question will now spend approximately 218 days in prison. Over seven months in prison. Can people think about that for a moment? What will that mean for this woman's life?
This issue is extremely personal to me. I supported myself for 12 years as a whore, and the practices, politics and cultures of sex work have been crucial to my understanding of and engagement with the world. Sex work has enabled me to structure my time and finances in order to move cross-country half a dozen times, live in half a dozen cities (and a dozen apartments), write two novels (both with sex work as a central theme), edit four anthologies (one about sex work), go on five book tours, help to start several activist groups, and become involved in innumerable direct action activist projects. Equally important, sex work has helped me, an incest survivor searching for home and hope, to negotiate the perilous intersections of sexuality, intimacy, lust, self-worth, longing and desperation with integrity and charm. Sex work has given me the space to envision radical queer alternatives to the violence of the status quo -- in relationships, activism, identity, desire and self-expression.
Has this been messy? Of course! Do I regret any of it? Well, sometimes... But the point is that everything I've learned over the last 15 years (or almost everything, anyway) comes from an active participation in radical outsider queer cultures that have always intersected, overlapped, and interwoven with sex work cultures -- from high-end dungeons to the quickie blow job in the car, Talk to a Model to "massage," streetwork to the kept boy/girl lifestyle.
And everywhere I've lived (but especially in New York and San Francisco), I've witnessed and struggled against the violence of pro-gentrification "neighborhood" associations that always see the annihilation of public sex and sex work cultures as paramount to the success of their urban removal projects. In New York, a group called "Residents in Distress" (RID) aggressively seeks to eliminate queer youth of color, hookers and other “undesirables” from sections of the West Village where these cultures have survived and thrived for decades. In my current neighborhood in San Francisco, a group of property owners and merchants calling themselves Lower Polk Neighbors (LPN), started by a pair of architects who opened their business/home on a notorious drug dealing/hustler block, across the street from a porn shop and virtually next-door to a homeless shelter, now decries the presence of -- gasp -- hustlers, hookers and drug dealers. What was one of their first things they did for the neighborhood? Shut down the needle exchange...
"men hate you." yeah, whatever. that doesn't mean I have to hate me, regardless of whether I exchange sexual activity for money or not.
O'Reilly surprised "there was no difference" between Harlem restaurant and other New York restaurants
Summary: Discussing his recent dinner with Rev. Al Sharpton at the Harlem restaurant Sylvia's, Bill O'Reilly reported that he "couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship." O'Reilly added: "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.'
#
It feels like…I dunno, like a group of NORML activists and anti-War On (Street/Some, depending on who you ask) Drugs from an anti-State Power POV were butting heads against the “Just Say No/DARE” people. and every time there’s a meeting it’s like,
“We’d like to decriminalize marijuana for reasons x,y, and z”
“Do you KNOW how many people meth kills?? Or heroin??”
“I wasn’t talking about meth or heroin. I’m talking about pot. Here’s why–”
“Well, la di da for you, I Just Want To Smoke Pot In My FancyPants Hot Tub, it’s all right if you want to rot your -own- brain and give -yourself- lung cancer, but -innocent helpless people are dying.- Think of the children!! God, you’re so SELFISH. You and your “I gotta get high and that’s all I care about.” What have you done to save people from DRUG-CAUSED DEATH?? What have you done to get people off the street? Huh?”
“Well, first of all, it’s -not- just ‘getting high,’ although I personally don’t see anything -wrong- with that. But, one, I don’t think the State should have so much power over a consensual activity, and two, while some drugs are more dangerous than others, medical marijuana–”
“SHOW US YOUR CREDS!”
“Well, okay, I -was- going to talk about getting medical marijuana to cancer patients, but since that clearly doesn’t count for anything, I’ve taken addicts into my home and helped them detox, helped get them jobs. I helped set up a needle exchange program for heroin–”
“Those don’t help. They actually just lead to more heroin addicts. Studies have shown that.”
“Which studies?”
“These studies here. They’ve got graphs and footnotes and academic endorsements and -everything.-
“Okay, those studies there were funded by a pro-abstinence think tank, and furthermore they aren’t in any peer reviewed journal.”
“What is all this fancy talk? You and your ivory tower graphs and footnotes and academic endorsements! We’re talking about REAL LIVES. People are DYING, did we mention?”
“…Look, can we just get back to talking about the pot thing, since we’re clearly just talking past each other when it comes to this stickier stuff?”
“Why do you hate America?”
“AAARRGGGGHHHH” *breaks things*
“You see? You see how irrational and abusive you are? Maybe if you weren’t rotting your brain with all those DRUGS, you’d understand that we’re -just trying to help,- and you’d get out of our way and let us get on with it.”
…lather, rinse, repeat…
It all started in April 1985 when I was asked if I would talk informally on the creation-evolution controversy to the Georgia Tech Faculty/Student Christian Forum. I agreed to do so.
Normally, when addressing such an audience as this, my talk emphasizes how religion and science supplement each other. Since I have a background in religion, I also discuss the origin, meaning, and significance of the Old Testament. This talk was intended to be no exception.
However, a week later, at the end of April, I was asked by the meeting organizer if I would mind having a local creationist opposite me so that there could be an informal exchange. "Fairness" was used as the reason. Having previously debated several local creationists in the Atlanta area, I had no misgivings. So I agreed.
A week later I was informed by the meeting organizer that an out-of-town creationist would be in town at the time of the talk. It was then suggested that I debate him. By now I was getting concerned—but rather than withdraw and thereby foster propaganda that I was afraid to debate the creationist, I again agreed.
On May 16 I received a letter stating that the out-of-town creationist was Walter Brown. A brochure listing his qualifications was enclosed: he is a mechanical engineer and director of an organization whose purpose is to "bring glory to our Creator." He debates suckers like me all over the country. By this time I was upset, but more was to come.
A week before the debate, slated for May 30 (during final exam week at my university), a packet of materials arrived including:
1. An agreement to debate (which prohibited the discussion of religion and stated that the creationist was to speak first)
2. A descriptive list of suggested support personnel for such a debate.
3. The text of before-and-after questionnaires for the audience
4. A suggested stage diagram (where the moderator is placed on the same side with the creationist)
5. A copy of Brown's now famous The Scientific Case for Creation: 108 Categories of Evidence (which lines up against evolution an array of mostly physical and chemical technicalities that take a lot of time to research and refute)
The agreement to debate is illustrative...
After receiving the above material, I reminded the organizer that I had originally agreed only to a small informal meeting with a Christian organization, that now this had grown to a full fledged formal debate, with religion prohibited, in a large auditorium with the public invited, and that if he wanted me to participate there would be no more preconditions, no questionnaires, and no more trickery. He seemed to back off, but that may have been only because he had already emptied his bag of tricks on me.
Such maneuvers appear to be common.
... Dr. Brown opened our debate with the standard creationist line of argument. At the end of his allotted time, he posed a number of questions for me: an obvious strategy to gain the offensive and keep the opposition busy. I didn't fall for it.
In my opening remarks I included a brief account of how I was manipulated into the debate and the nature of the creationist preconditions. Audience reaction indicated a lack of approval for such creationist machinations. I then pointed out that this exchange could not be a typical scientific debate in which participants are stimulated to test ideas in the field or lab. Rather, this was to be a philosophical discussion in which nothing would be settled; that even if all of Brown's arguments were answered he would probably say the same or similar things to other audiences later, as creationists consistently do. I added that, for these and other reasons, many scientists feel that such debates are a waste of time.
Next I proceeded to explain the nature of science: reproducibility, rejection of authority, concern with the physical world, description of how the world works by statements, testability, falsifiability, universality, and so forth. The scientific approach was contrasted with other ways of viewing the world. One example I used was law, which is based on authority and precedent, is variable from court to court, concerns itself with personal interrelationships, is "moral," and so on. (The example of law is useful because most people can accept it more easily than if religion is selected. Once the example of law is in place, however, religion can then be compared with it and both together contrasted with science.) I used art as another perspective, saying "Heaven help the person who has an appendectomy by a surgeon who studied anatomy under Picasso." ...
The black teen at the center of a furor over legal racism remained behind bars - though charges against him were thrown out Friday - because the judge and prosecutor didn't come to a bail hearing yesterday, his lawyer said.
"We showed up. There was nobody there," said Bob Noel, lawyer for 17-year-old Mychal Bell of Jena, La. "No DA, no judge."
A woman who answered the phone at District Attorney Reed Walters' office said he had no bail procedure on his calendar.
A massive protest is planned for Thursday in tiny, rural Jena on behalf of Bell and five co-defendants who are known as the Jena 6. Other rallies that day include one outside Brooklyn Borough Hall.
"To imagine that in 2006, 2007, we're still fighting these fights is just incomprehensible," said Assemblyman Darryl Towns (D-Brooklyn) at a Jena 6 rally at City Hall yesterday.
An appeals court on Friday threw out the conviction of Bell, who was charged as an adult with attempted murder last year for punching a white classmate in a schoolyard scuffle.
The charges were later reduced to aggravated battery, a charge the appeals court said should have been dealt with in juvenile court.
Noel had filed a motion to have Bell released - or his $90,000 bail reduced - while the prosecutor mulls whether to appeal the overturning of Bell's conviction. He has two weeks to decide.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Washington should step in.
"We needed federal intervention to get into school in Little Rock [in the 1950s] and we need federal intervention now," he said.
All six black Jena football players were hit with heavy charges after a white student was punched and kicked at Jena High School on Dec. 4, one of a series of racial dustups that began when white students hung nooses in a school tree.
White students involved in similar fistfights were shown leniency.
Bell is the only one who has been tried. The other blacks still face trial on charges that are widely seen as overly harsh.
Organizers say at least 10,000 demonstrators will flood the mostly white town of 3,000 people.
Councilman Albert Vann (D-Brooklyn) organized yesterday's New York rally to keep the pressure on Louisiana prosecutors and set the stage for Thursday.
"There's a national spotlight now on Jena," he said.
Seperatism is of course a key point within the matrix of the utopianist's thought, the idea being that we should make a unique little protected habitat for the revolutionary, in which noble revolutionary gate keepers would ensure that no stray weeds from the outside world would seep in and corrupt the society from the inside.
...Strangely enough, radical politics doesn't quite work like that, and the utopianist's attempt to find a cheap short cut to a revolved society cannot, a priori, work, due to the most important part of the revolution being the journey, not the destination.
Which is less a physical place, or a building or a city or nation but rather a completed mandala imprinted on the path that the revolutionary walks, made up by the wake we leave with our tread upon the ground, and which is shaped by the obstacles we meet along the way.
Most gays and lesbians move the sexual taboos they were taught as children just far enough over to accomodate some of their own desire. Sadly, battling homophobia doesn't seem to encourage most of us to look at the bigger picture of sexual repression. Our efforts to improve our status are hampered, not just by hatred of gays, but by the abysmal state of heterosexuality. We are trying to win our freedom from people who can't deal with protecting their own children from AIDS or teen pregnancy, people who seem helpless to stem a rising tide of violence against women and children. Thanks to heterosexual men, more Viagra is being sold than aspirin. And if Pfizer could come up with a drug that would work that well for straight girls, pharmacies would be leveled in the resulting stampede. No wonder straight people see exciting racy images of frolicking gay perverts and get so steamed up and self-righteous. Being at the top of the sexual hierarchy and legally validated is one of the few perks that heterosexuals get, and I'm not surprised they are so reluctant to share.
Coming out is such a hard process that it's no wonder most lesbians and gay men can only manage it once in a lifetime. Coming out begins when we recognize, in a stigmatized Other, something of ourselves. Something disturbing we feel we must bring forward--at first into our own consciousness, then to a community of like-minded people where we hope to find welcome, and finally to outsiders. Coming out transmutes what is loathsome or unimaginable into something valuable and nourishing--garbage into gold, sickness into bread. This is an inherently terrifying experience because it means disobeying the voices of social disapproval (and often self-hatred as well) to risk becoming a more honest, but not necessarily happier or safer or more beloved, person.
Coming out ought to be a normal developmental process of differentiation. But we do it in the context of our culture's sex-negative pathology. It resembles or encompasses other stages of adult life that vanilla, gender-congruent, heterosexual people are able to take more for granted--achieving autonomy from the family of origin, undergoing sexual initiation, learning courtship skills and other social skills, forming a relationship, consolidating ties to a friendship network and a community, and (sometimes) clarifying political, moral, and spiritual values that impel us to take action.
...One of the most crucial tasks of coming out is to defeat the shaming voices of self-obliteration and reject the temptation to live for others' gratification and approval rather than our own. By coming out to ourselves, we free up the energy we spent keeping a part of ourselves hidden. By coming out to our kindred spirits, we acquire allies and rewards for integration and openness. We strengthen our little corner of the world, the walled gardens where some of our secrets may be told. By coming out to outsiders, we serve the health of the entire social body. We shut down or at least contest the omnipotence of the institutions that foster stigma; we replace ignorance and invisibility with the faces and lives of real people. We widen and clear the path for others to come out as well.
None of this is meant to imply that the power to come out lies only with the individual. The dangers that greet sexual nonconformity are quite real and at times life-threatening. There are few situations more painful than needing to come out when it is too unsafe to manage it and survive the process. This is a loneliness like no other; it generates a level of stress that can also be life-threatening. Those of us who have come to any sort of sexual sanctuary, however narrow and beleaguered, must never forget those who are prevented from joining us, and we must never stop trying to extend them practical as well as psychic aid.
...Whether willingly or no, stage three of coming out involves service to the body politic. It is as its core an attempt to ease human suffering. And so it has inherent spiritual value...And the attempt to foster kinship, love, and mutual care in the face of hatred and violence is also, I believe, an activity that brings us closer to the divine...
...But there is another side of this: our grim combat with those who hate us. There is a powerful temptation to split and view everything bad as associated with the Enemy, everything good as within our camp. But that is distorted thinking, at best, and self-righteousness at worst. We cannot hope to grow as a community if we punish other people for speaking their sexual truth. Coming out is made more difficult because of the shortcomings of our own community. Some of these defects are not our fault; we may be so marginalized that we have few resources left to comfort one another. But we are responsible for doing better than our opposition, even if the only victory we want to achieve is on the battlefield of public relations.
...Storming the Bastille is a lot more scary than rooting out dissent within the ranks of the revolutionaries. I think, for activists, the paradigm of the farmer or the mason is much more useful than the paradigm of the warrior. If we thought of our work as cultivating the things that we will need to survive in the future or building a shelter to house our dreams, rather than as a war in which we must annihilate the opposition, we might be less combative with one another.
We might also be able to come up with gentler and more effective ways to disarm the fear that can hamper or kill us. When you become aware of how much injustice there is in the world, the enormity of all the suffering that we inflict on one another, it is very difficult indeed to have the patience to slow down and do the hard work of connecting, one at a time, with individual people who need to be educated or at least made aware that they will face resistance if they try to hurt or defame us. And yet this is the only way to guarantee that whatever social policies we manage to change or civil-rights laws we get passed will be implemented or obeyed...
I mean, so much of the evil that men do to one another has at its core the inability of people to empathize with another person's position. Say when you're seven, you find yourself slightly more drawn to Johnny than you are to Jane. This is not a conscious decision on your part, it just happens, it's an instinct like...liking the color blue.
Now in less tolerant times, you were put to death for this attraction. As time went on, this punishment was sometimes reduced to mere castration, or just imprisonment. Until recently this attraction was considered so horrific that society pretty much expected you to lie to yourself about your sexual and emotional feelings, and if you couldn't do that, certainly expected you to shut up about it and go live your life bottled and terrified; and if you would be so kind as to never have any physical closeness with anyone ever, when you were buried you could know that society would feel that you had handled your disgraceful situation with tact and willpower. That was one cheery option--nothing, and then the grave.
Or, you might make a false marriage with some woman who wouldn't know what was going on with you, and you could both be miserable and unfulfilled. That was another respectable option. Or you might kill yourself. There's not a lot of empathy evident in the people who prefer these options.
I mean, I certainly realize how insane it would be to ask a heterosexual to deny his or her natural sexual feelings and perform homosexual acts that went against their nature. If I can have that empathy, why can't others have that same empathy in reverse? I want some empathy here!
[Goes into an affirmation] I am the predominant source of...well, fuck that.
[Throws his note cards over his shoulder, drives on ahead.]
Today a state appeals court threw out the aggravated battery conviction of Mychal Bell, one of the half-dozen black teens facing unusually serious charges for the beating of a white schoolmate amid escalating racial tensions in a small Louisiana town. The Associated Press reports:
Mychal Bell, 17, should not have been tried as an adult, the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal said in tossing his conviction on aggravated battery, for which he was to have been sentenced Thursday. He could have gotten 15 years in prison.
His conspiracy conviction in the December beating of student Justin Barker was already thrown out by another court.
Bell was only 16 at the time of the beating. It occurred after a series of troubling incidents that started when black teens sat under a schoolyard tree that had traditionally been reserved for white students. In response, a group of white students hung three nooses from the tree, an act for which they were punished with a brief expulsion.
Bell's attorney told the AP that he wasn't sure whether his client would get out of jail immediately or face new charges. Four other teens involved in the beating still face adult charges because they were 17 years old at the time of the fight.
The story? Perhaps you've heard about it.
"It began with a seemingly innocuous question. At an assembly during the first week of classes last fall at Jena High School in rural Louisiana, Kenneth Purvis, a junior, asked the vice principal if he could sit under the shady boughs of an oak tree in the campus courtyard. "You can sit anywhere you like," the vice principal replied. Soon thereafter, Purvis and several black friends ventured over to the tree to hang out with some white classmates. According to the school's unspoken racial codes, however, that area was reserved for white kids; Purvis is black. Some white students didn't look kindly on the encroachment: the next day, three nooses hung from the oak's branches.
That provocation, which conjured up the ugly history of lynch mobs and the Jim Crow South, unleashed a cycle of interracial strife that has roiled the tiny town of Jena. In the ensuing months, black and white students clashed violently, the school's academic wing was destroyed by arson and six black kids were charged with attempted murder for beating a white peer. (The "deadly weapon": tennis shoes they supposedly used to kick the white student knocked unconscious by the first punch.) One of those black students—Mychal Bell, the only one of the "Jena Six" to stand trial so far—was convicted by an all-white jury in June on lesser felony charges of aggravated second-degree battery and is awaiting sentencing. He could face 22 years in prison. In the wake of that judgment, a host of national figures—from the Rev. Al Sharpton to the Nation of Islam to the American Civil Liberties Union—have descended on the town to inveigh against racial injustice. Billy Fowler, a white school-board member, has pledged that when the new school year starts, "we're not going to see black and white anymore. It's going to be right or wrong." But, says the Rev. Raymond Brown of Christians United, which has been working with parents of the Jena Six, "Jena does not want to come up to the 21st century. They are living deep in the past."
Decades of suppressed racial hostility spilled forth at the appearance of those swaying nooses. Word spread quickly that day; before long, scores of black students congregated under the tree. "As black students, we didn't call it a protest," says Robert Bailey Jr., one of the Jena Six. "We just called it standing up for ourselves." School officials convened an assembly in early September, where local District Attorney Reed Walters appeared, flanked by police officers. "I can be your best friend or your worst enemy," he told students, warning them to settle down. "With a stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear."
...Understand something. It is the year 2007. Where we joke about, “Where is my flying car? My monorail? The 3.5 jet-packs per family we were promised?”, mocking the progress we were supposed to have made, based on futurists predictions.
It is the year 2007. And as much as we may try to think otherwise, we live in a country where White teenagers will still fight over who can, and who can not sit under a fucking tree during recess at school, based on the color of their skin. For all the crowing about the “browning of America”, and how the kids are un-learning the racism inculcated in the American fabric, this incident should give every one of us pause.
Pause because it speaks to the reality of what we're actually confronting here.
If these kids...these supposedly, rapidly blind-to-color kids will fight over a scraggly patch of grass, don't stand here and try to tell me that their fathers and mothers—the generation presently in control of this country—aren't actively fighting Black folks' inclusion in the more important arenas of participation in the American mosaic.
Do not look me in the face from my TV, and tell me from your visit to New Orleans Mr. President, that Kanye West—crazy as he is—was wrong. The carnival that is American Idol, where “Ohmigosh! Look at all those talented Black people doing so well—aren't they doing so well?” isn't enough of an anesthetic to numb me to the constant, pounding ache that is the reality of not being Black in America—but rather, what dealing with the perceptions from others about one's being Black in America does to you.
Jena brings it all sickeningly home. Teens. Kids. Decades at least, removed from the last picnic/lynching to take place in their neck of the woods, by so-called decent people, somehow knew, in their stupid little turf battle, just what mega-trope, what ultimate nullifier to go to to let those wandering n*ggers know that they meant business about keeping one's place. And then, when those Black kids defiantly said “Better check your calendar, motherfuckers. It is the year 2007!”, those Black teens saw the second wave, the real shock troops—those silly, turf-crazed White kids' parents, jump up with the old-school, authority smackdown all too familiar Post -Reconstruction, to uppity/not-having-it Black folks...
Arctic ice melt opens Northwest Passage
By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press Writer 13 minutes ago
PARIS - Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.
The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.
The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ice levels has already opened up a slim summer window for ships.
Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Center, said that Arctic ice has shrunk to some 1 million square miles. The previous low was 1.5 million square miles, in 2005.
"The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected," Pedersen said in an ESA statement posted on its Web site Friday.
Pedersen said the extreme retreat this year suggested the passage could fully open sooner than expected — but ESA did not say when that might be. Efforts to contact ESA officials in Paris and Noordwik, the Netherlands, were unsuccessful Saturday.
...Researcher Claes Ragner of Norway's Fridtjof Nansen Institute, which works on Arctic environmental and political issues, said for now, the new opening has only symbolic meaning for the future of sea transport.
"Routes between Scandinavia and Japan could be almost halved, and a stable and reliable route would mean a lot to certain regions," he said by phone. But even if the passage is opening up and polar ice continues to melt, it will take years for such routes to be regular, he said.
"It won't be ice-free all year around and it won't be a stable route all year," Ragner said. "The greatest wish for sea transportation is streamlined and stable routes."
"Shorter transport routes means less pollution if you can ship products from A to B on the shortest route," he said, "but the fact that the polar ice is melting away is not good for the world in that we're losing the Arctic and the animal life there."
My issue is with classism and elitism masquerading as victimhood and solidarity. It is not about Bitch PhD as a person or a blogger. Please try to at least get the basic facts right if you plan to point people to my blog as I am tired of having to explain it to them when they arrive.
My blog isn’t about smack downs it is about discussing oppression and until now the people who read it have been able to have a civil and productive conversation. I resent that this episode means those days might be gone. So much for standing up against the tide.”
When shame leads to self-hate and inaction it is a pointless emotion. When shame stems from abuses that only perpetrators should carry and yet society expects from the survivors it is a function of patriarchy and should be shunned. But when shame signals a warning that you have done something wrong, you have fallen down, then use it as an opportunity to stop doing that, get up, brush yourself off, own your mistake, and forge a new way.
*nod* I know people have talked about the difference between a “shame” and a “guilt” culture, but for the life of me I can never remember which is which.
In psych there’s this notion of “optimal” shame as an essential part of the socialization process, I remember from child development class. Basically, it’s like the littlest Bear. Not enough of it and the kid never really gets to grow, doesn’t learn sie can fix hir own mistakes (just that someone will be along to clean um hir mess), or basic empathy, which is actually hir loss as much as anyone else’s, because well, that’s actually a rather lonely and disconnected place.
At the other extreme, if you’re too heavy-handed with the shaming it can crush the kid’s spirit. Interestingly enough it can lead to the same sorts of coping mechanisms as too little shaming, i.e. narcissism. It can also make you a kind of Bontsha the Silent, someone whose spirit is just kind of crushed, who stops asking for or even imagining that sie deserves anything better than whatever comes to hir.
From another angle, I’ve often pondered to what degree one’s cultural and religious baggage influences how we deal with shame/guilt, even if on the surface we don’t identify with the religion or culture of our upbringing. For instance, more and more lately I’ve been thinking that maybe part of the reason why I don’t “get” certain approaches to various political movements, i.e. this weird sort of interpretation of “the personal is political” (I am thinking in particular of someone who announced that -anyone- can do social work or practical work to help women, -real- feminism is an “in your soul” thing) might -possibly- have something to do with, my own cultural/religious background, secular humanist Jewish, doesn’t really grok the whole “faith, not works” thing. Yeah, guilt we get, and we can overdo it, but mostly what I learned wasn’t “you have already sinned in your heart, and that’s just as bad as the deed;” what I learned was “what you DO and how it affects OTHER PEOPLE is what matters. You fucked up? -Go fix it.-” THAT is “atonement,” not self-flagellating or…
mm, then again, here it is Yom Kippur-ish (which I -always- forget about), and I don’t suppose fasting is particularly about anyone else but one’s own spiritual process. Still, on the whole, I’ve generally thought of My People as rather eminently pragmatic, for good or for ill.
SEA CLIFF, N.Y. — A Miami woman who was a former contestant on the reality show “Top Chef” was beaten by attackers yelling anti-gay slurs, her lawyer said Tuesday.
Josie Smith-Malave, a lesbian who was featured on Season 2 of the Bravo channel show, was among a small group of women asked to leave a Sea Cliff bar over Labor Day weekend, lawyer Yetta Kurland said. About 10 young people followed the women out and began screaming anti-gay epithets, spitting on them and then beating them, Kurland said.
The women, who had been on Long Island to attend a friend’s birthday party, suffered bruises, and one received injuries to her head. One of them had a camera taken in the attack.
Smith-Malave, who is in her early 30s, is openly gay, Kurland said. Her sister, who is straight, also was beaten.
Smith-Malave is a former sous-chef for the Marlow and Sons restaurant in Brooklyn. She has played for the New York Sharks of the Independent Women’s Football League.
Most people think of hate crimes as being exclusively against persons based on race, ethnicity or gender, but hate-based crimes against gay, lesbians and transgender people are equally rooted in our history and just as heinous.
Since the 1980's, the U.S. Legislature has passed a series of laws to help combat bias-based violence. Unfortunately, hate crimes based on sexual orientation have increased since 1995.
Forty four states and the District of Columbia have anti-hate crime laws, however only 24 states and the District of Columbia include sexual orientation in their legislation.
Gays hurt civil rights movement
Homosexuals have never been forced to sit in the back of the bus. They are as privileged a group as any. To compare their attempts to affirm deviant sexual conduct to the legitimate discrimination claims of true minorities is a sham," said FRC Director of Cultural Studies Robert H.
Knight - FRC's CultureFacts, July 28, 1999, http://www.frc.org/culture/cu99g4.html
Gays are like liars and cheaters
" 'Homosexuality is a decision, it's not a race,' White said. 'People from all different ethnic backgrounds live in this lifestyle. But people from all different ethnic backgrounds also are liars and cheaters and malicious and back-stabbing.' " - Reggie White, Associated Press, March 25, 1998.
Gays compared to serial killers
"If we discovered that being a serial killer or a sociopath was genetic, though we might not blame the serial killer or sociopath for being so, we certainly would not allow him to act up his serial killing or sociopathological disposition." - http://www.afa.net, Homosexuality in America: Exposing the Myths.
Gay civil rights could lead to slavery, cannibalism
"The demand is that homosexuality be endorsed and promoted with the full power of the law. This would require us to abandon the standard of nature, the one standard that can teach us the difference between freedom and slavery, between right and wrong. Once we abandon the standard of nature, what is to forbid us from resorting to any violation of nature that we may please? Why should we not return to slavery, if we find it convenient? Or the practices of incest or adultery or cannibalism?" - http://www.claremont.org/pubs/miah.htm
Gays are disgusting and diseased
"The disgusting details of the homosexual lifestyle explain why so many diseases are present in the homosexual community." - http://www.afa.net, Homosexuality in America: Exposing the Myths.
Gays want to silence Christians, and blame them for all crimes against gays
"the real motivation behind such hate crime laws is to silence Christians. Gays will now feel free to blame any crime against a homosexual on Christians" - AFA ACTION ALERT via email, 10/16/98
Research indicates 31% of gay youth were threatened or injured at school. These experiences have a devastating impact on the educational success and mental health of youth. Anti-gay prejudice affects straight youth, too. For every gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth being harassed, 4 straight students were harassed because they were perceived as being gay or lesbian...
The current law does not protect three groups that are particularly vulnerable to physical attack: women, the disabled, and homosexuals. President Clinton commented at the time: "All Americans deserve protection from hate."
Almost a decade has passed since Shepard's crucifixion. Many versions of a federal bill to expand hate-crimes protection to protect women, men, heterosexuals, bisexuals, homosexuals, transsexuals and disabled persons have been proposed, discussed, but not succeeded.
