Louisiana School Won't Allow Star Female Student to Wear Tux to Prom
Claudietteia Love, one of the top students at her high school, is being denied the right to wear what she wants — and she says it’s because she’s LGBT.
Neal Broverman
www.advocate.com/youth/2015/04/05/louisiana-school-wont-allow-star-female-student-wear-tux-prom
Frank Pignanelli & LaVarr Webb: A colorful political landscape is budding this spring
Happy Easter! Spring is busting out all over with flowers and tree blossoms. Not to be outdone, the political landscape…
Gov. Jindal weighs in on religious freedom debate
Governor Bobby Jindal weighs in on the religious freedom debate as a Louisiana legislator introduces a bill that would refuse to recognize same sex marriages.
www.fox8live.com/story/28725907/gov-jindal-weighs-in-on-religious-freedom-debate
Our Corporate Saviors
What are we to make of the fact that some big corporations are turning out to be the relative good guys, on issues as varied as same-sex marriage, the environment and even (to a limited extent) workers’ wages? Last week, the governors of Indiana and Arkansas were forced to back down and dilute bogus “religious freedom” laws intended to shelter discrimination against gays and lesbians, in large part because their corporate bigwigs told them to stop embarrassing the state and scaring off business.
In Indiana, these included the Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, the Indiana Pacers and even the Indy 500. In Arkansas, the pressure came, among others, from (shudder) Walmart, whose executives urged the hapless governor, Asa Hutchinson, to veto the bill.
Meanwhile, Walmart has been insisting that its suppliers meet green energy standards, and McDonalds’ new CEO took out full-page ads announcing that its owned and operated franchises (about one in ten retail McDonalds) will pay a buck over the local minimum wage as well as offering paid vacation and sick leave. Walmart has also announced some (meager) wage hikes.
What gives here? Are big corporations the new custodians of social conscience?
Hardly. If you take these one at a time, a few things are at work. For starters, most big corporate executives are more cosmopolitan than the religious far right, and they also worry mightily about reputational damage.
Corporate executives sometimes internalize changing public values. Outside the South, most large corporate executives are reasonably comfortable with diversity. In the 2003 Grutter v Bollinger case, where the Supreme Court narrowly upheld race-based affirmative action, 65 top corporate executives signed an amicus brief extolling the benefits of racial diversity.
But if you go a step further and ask the source of the corporate change of heart, for example the reputational risk in the case of discrimination against our LGBT sisters and brothers, it’s not that corporations were in the forefront of this cause. Rather, gays and lesbians built a movement.
The movement, and its effect on public opinion, came first. A majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage. Once public sentiment had shifted against discrimination, the corporate elite followed.
Courts helped in a few cases, beginning with Massachusetts in 2003, where the state Supreme Judicial Court first legalized same sex-marriage. But mostly, courts followed rather than led public opinion. If the Supreme Court ducks this issue, and declines to overturn state laws allowing same-sex marriage, it will be mainly because the Court doesn’t dare put the credibility of the institution at odds with rapidly changing public sentiment.
But the movement came first.
To be sure, it’s terrific that corporate leaders do not want to get in front of this freight train. Their role further marginalizes the religious right, and amplifies the tacit splits in the Republican Party (good luck, Jeb Bush.)
And if you compare the rollback of the fake religious alibi for discrimination with, say, McDonalds’ token action on wages, you can see just what difference a movement makes. LGBT activism has produced massive change. Labor activism is making a modest comeback from a full-scale assault by organized business.
Labor unions and other local organizers have been making a stink about the dismal wages paid fast food and other retail workers. Lower unemployment rates also make it harder to get good employees to work for a pittance. So outfits like McDonalds decide to make a virtue of necessity and pat themselves on the back for paying a bit more.
They hope that these gestures will take some of the wind out of organizing drives. But moves like these should teach the opposite lesson–namely, that pressure works.
The labor movement, however, has been pummeled for more than three decades, ever since Ronald Reagan made a big symbolic deal in 1981 of firing striking air traffic controllers. A stronger workers’ movement, not just of minimum wage workers but of all wage and salary workers, would compel corporations to offer a lot more than an additional dollar an hour.
By the same token, the strength of the environmental movement produces a nice rendezvous with Walmart’s cynical desire to change the subject to anything but wages. So Walmart becomes a champion of green supply chains. Once again, the movement came first.
Yes, there are a handful of corporations whose founders are genuine progressives, outfits like Ben & Jerry’s or the Body Shop. But for the most part, corporations sometimes pursue decent policies not because CEOs are progressives but because they are responding to pressure–either the direct pressure of campaigns for better wages or LGBT rights or the indirect pressure of changing public opinion. But someone had to go to the trouble of organizing such pressure.
There is one other paradox here. Despite the presence of the occasional corporation using its influence for the social good, for the most part the record of corporate America as a whole is a disgrace. Look at any legislative effort to improve the environment, or wages and working conditions, or to secure rights, and you find organized corporate power on the other side.
If America has become the sort of society where regular people are insecure and the Tea Party rebellion is one of the reactions, the corporate domination of our democracy is one of the major causes. So the corporate big shots get to win both ways. They dominate the process of rule-setting that leads to a very frustrated 99 percent — and once in a while a few of them get to play the role of enlightened, endearing moderate.
Can anything change this cynical pattern for the better? Well, yes. It takes a movement.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a visiting professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility.
Like Robert Kuttner on Facebook.
Wading into the endless Gaelic debate
On it goes, with no indication of ever coming to an end. Gaelic football is over, gone, done and dusted, and the apocalypse is upon us, writes Michael Moynihan.
Faith school fears as union says teachers must promote gay lifestyle: Leaders call for 'positive portrayal of same sex …
The National Union of Teachers said MPs had a duty to tackle ‘homophobia’ but Simon Calvert from Christian Institute (pictured) warned some teachers would have to act against their beliefs.
Rihanna Blasts 'Religious Discrimination' Laws During Indianapolis Concert
The singer made her feelings very clear.
Neal Broverman
The Fight Rages On . . . in the GOP
It’s not over. True, Indiana and Arkansas have backed down from “religious freedom” laws that legitimize anti-gay discrimination. And the U.S. Supreme Court may rule this year that same-sex marriages are legal in the entire country.
But even then it won’t be over. One sentence in the 2012 Republican Party platform is likely to stir up the controversy all over again: “We reaffirm our support for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.” That Constitutional amendment would nullify any Supreme Court decision.
A lot of Republicans want to get rid of that provision in order to bring their party into the 21st century. Nearly forty percent of Republicans support same-sex marriage, including over sixty percent of Republicans under 30. “Any political candidate who is perceived as anti-gay at the presidential level will never connect with people under 30 years old,” a Republican pollster warned last month.
On the other hand, the religious right is threatening to walk out of the convention if that plank is removed. Evangelicals are talking about mobilizing “an army” to keep the Republican party from backsliding. All of the potential Republican candidates for President next year oppose same-sex marriage, and they all endorsed the Indiana “religious freedom” law. When the Indiana legislature modified the law under pressure, Jeb Bush quickly embraced the compromise. He was for the Indiana law before he was against it.
The big surprise was that the backlash to the law came as a big surprise to Republicans. “Was I expecting this kind of backlash? Heavens no,” Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) said after a boycott Indiana movement sprang up across the country. “This is a bill that in ordinary times would not be controversial,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) said. “But these are not ordinary times.” For many Republicans, “ordinary times” means gays in the closet and same-sex marriage unimaginable.
What happened was really a backlash to a backlash. The religious freedom laws proposed in more than a dozen states this year were a backlash to the growing acceptance and legalization of same-sex marriage. The laws were supposed to be a consolation prize to conservatives: same-sex marriages may be legal, but you can still refuse to grant them equality.
Republicans claim they backed down in Indiana and Arkansas because of a “perception problem.” The religious freedom laws were “damaging the Republican brand” and “hurting the image” of their states. That misses the real message: in the New America, it is no longer acceptable to stigmatize gay people.
Or African-Americans or Latinos or Asian-Americans or Jews or Muslims or working women or single mothers or the unchurched (the nearly one in five Americans who have no religious affiliation). Those groups, along with millennials and educated professionals, comprise the New America coalition that came to power with President Obama. All of them (except African-Americans and Jews) represent growing shares of the U.S. population.
What holds the coalition together is a belief in diversity and inclusion. The Democratic Party, which used to be deeply divided by social and cultural issues, is amazingly unified today. It’s Republicans who are facing internal dissent. And who are being thrown on the defensive on issues like gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, immigration and climate change.
Republicans represent the Old America. The Old America may be losing influence but it’s not giving up without a fight. The issue it’s rallying around? Religion. Today, the best poll question you can ask to find out how an American votes is “How often do you go to church?” Regular churchgoers vote Republican. Non-churchgoers vote Democratic.
The United States remains the most religious advanced industrial country in the world. That’s because many of the groups that immigrated to this country came seeking religious freedom. So the most religious people came here. Religion usually puts Democrats on the defensive because they don’t want to be seen as the godless party.
But Democrats have learned they can fight back by rallying around diversity and inclusion. It works, as we just saw in Indiana. Republicans were shocked — shocked! — to discover that gay issues have become just a big a political minefield as race.
'Beyond' Is The Queer Sci-Fi Anthology You Need To Be Reading
For a lot of LGBT-identified people comics, science fiction, and fantasy were their first experiences being transported to faraway worlds where being different meant being special.
The stories of being chosen for a greater purpose or discovering hidden powers within mirror the experiences so many of us have coming to terms with our identities and coming out to loved ones. As much as queer people may identify with Marvel’s Inhumans or DC’s meta-humans, the number of actual gay, bi, and trans characters is relatively small. Sfé R. Monster is working to change that one panel at a time.
Beyond is an anthology of 26 comics collected from 18 writers and illustrators all featuring queer characters whose sexualities and gender identities are as plainly stated as their super powers. In an interview with io9 Monster, who’s editing the book, explained that a shared desire to see queerness normalized in sci-fi inspired him to spearhead the project.
“Sci-fi and fantasy have infinite potential for all sorts of diversity,” he said. “[I]t has always baffled me that these stories that accept aliens and magical dragons without question still struggle when it comes to featuring anything more than cisgender, heterosexual casts of characters.”
The stories featured in Beyond wouldn’t be the first comic books to feature queer characters travelling to fantastic lands, but Monster and his co-editor Taneka Stotts set out to do something different with the anthology. Often times queer (especially trans) characters are depicted as tragic or their identities are made out to be more magical than their surroundings. Beyond, Monster explained, wasn’t interested in those stories.
“When we put out the open call for submissions for Beyond I stressed that we were looking for diverse stories, and, to my absolute joy, that is something that everyone contributing a story to the anthology embraced with verve,” said Monster. “The thing I love most about Beyond is that giving people the go-ahead to create stories about diverse genders and sexuality gave them a space to tell stories that many of them have always wanted to tell, but felt there was no market or audience for.”
Charles Pulliam-Moore
www.towleroad.com/2015/04/beyond-is-the-queer-sci-fi-anthology-you-need-to-be-reading.html
Iowa's LGBT laws considered progressive
DES MOINES — One way Rich Eychaner measures Iowa’s progress in the treatment of gay individuals is how often his life is threatened.
muscatinejournal.com/news/local/government-and-politics/d3da93a0-405a-5e43-88e0-d638dbc1bd3c.html
You must be 18 years old or older to chat
