Thoughts and Prayers ... and nothing else

Yesterday, a little amendment about anti-discrimination protections for LGBT employees of federal contractors failed in the House. Yesterday. Two days after Orlando.

What are Republican "thoughts and prayers" worth, again?

Mood: ANGRY

All Are People

I've seen a number of posts, comments, and even articles saying that it shouldn't matter that the people at Pulse were gay. We shouldn't divide ourselves up. It was, in the words of Mark Longhurst on Sky TV, a crime against “human beings” who were “ trying to enjoy themselves, whatever their sexuality."

This sentiment may be a wonderful one. BUT. This is not the time to trot it out (and that goes a hundredfold for people who have nothing but hate for LBGT people in their daily lives and politics).

When Marc Lépine walked into the École Polytechnique in Montreal and killed fourteen women, twelve of whom were engineering students, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who were studying engineering". He was deliberately killing women.

When Dylan Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and killed nine black church-goers, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who were Christians". He was deliberately killing blacks.

And when Omar Mateen walked into Pulse in Orlando, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who go to clubs." He was killing LGBTs.

As soon as we say that the victims of a crime shouldn't be described as what they are that made them the target, we are begging off from confronting what it is that our society does to make people into misogynists, racists, or homophobes. Also, we remove our ability to understand what just happened. Julia Hartley-Brewer, another panelist on the Sky show, said that the killer probably hated her, “a gobby woman”, as much as he did gays. Maybe. Maybe he did; he seems to have also hated Jews and blacks. But dammit, he didn't walk into a Curves and start shooting, just like he didn't walk into a bar in his own town of Port St Lucie, or a black club or a synagogue. He walked into Pulse. Maybe he did it because he knew Pulse and knew who would be there; maybe he did it because he might not be noticed for a while (Port St Lucie has gay bars). The point is: of all the groups he hated, it was gays he decided to kill.

And pretending that he didn't target gays, or that Lépine didn't target women, or that Elliot Rodger didn't hate women and the men who "got lucky with them", means we're just saying that oh, gosh, crazy people kill people and what are we going to do about it.

Omar Mateen didn't kill "people". Omar Mateen killed gay people. It's important to acknowledge that.


ps - people's reactions to Owen Jones's argument and actions on that video are illuminating, I think.

A few thoughts on Orlando

When we have lax gun laws and one major party demonizing a group of people and several religions ditto including prominent leaders (or at least people claiming to be the public face) of those religions making public statements about how that group deserves death and then a month dedicated to that group of people, this shouldn't be a surprise. Abrahamic religion taught this guy to hate (though they aren't the only ones who preach it) and the NRA-GOP alliance put the weapons in his hands.

They also put them in the hands of the guy who was headed for the LA Gay Pride march, though he never got a shot off.

Gay people are marginalized at best in the homeland of those religions - yes, Israel included - and that makes them a great target here; it's easy to stir up hatred against the Other. (Look how NC legislators cloaked anti-labor laws in trans hate.) Bronze Age religious texts have no place in the laws of an Information Age nation.

Good guys with guns were there. Fifty-plus still died.

Thoughts and prayers don't solve anything (I feel like I've said that before). Legislation is what is needed.

PS And no, I will not pretend that transwomen were his target, Latinx or not. Pulse is a gay bar, not a trans bar. "Two men kissing" are what set this guy off, apparently.

Wil Wheaton nails it

"Shoutout to pro-gun Republicans who took a break from passing anti-LGBT laws to offer thoughts and prayers to LGBT victims of gun violence."

(Thanks, Kathie, for the exact quote.

What Happened in North Carolina

This is a must read summary of the twelve-hour rollback of civil rights in North Carolina.

One of the worst parts of the bill is that it absolutely takes the teeth out of whatever protections it didn't gut. If, for instance, you suffer from racial discrimination in housing, you are expressly barred from going to court over it.

It's a grab-bag of anti-LGBT and anti-workers laws, with provisions that mean no locality can do anything about anything, from minimum wage to LBGT protections. And it took them just 12 hours from first calling the special session to signing the bill.

Breathtakingly brazen.

Vote Blue in November, from the top of the ticket to the bottom.

Conjunctions are cohesive

In one way, after is a temporal con- junction. But reading after as because is so common, it's its own logical fallacy - post hoc ergo propter hoc, "after this therefore because of this".

And that makes its use - particularly in headlines - very problematic. This particular headline (Vatican Fires Polish Priest After He Comes Out as Gay to Reporters) begs to be read as "he got fired because he came out as gay".

But that's not what happened. He got fired because he's bragging about having a sex life. If he'd paraded a woman around the same thing would have happened, and a nice tame celibate gay priest would be a coup for a church that claims it loves gays as long as they don't, you know, act that way.

Goodbye, Yogi

“Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.”

Yogi Berra died yesterday. Here's the NY Times obituary. He was a heckuva ballplayer, including 3 Most Valuable Player awards, and a heckuva person, even if he was a Yankee.

He's well known for his sayings - people keep talking about "mangled syntax" but there's no mangling of syntax here, everything is accurate and grammatical. What's "wrong" - but right - turns on polysemy, the property words have of multiple meanings, and on reference - in "Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours." just who does "they" refer to? Or in "It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.", who is "everybody"?

A few more:

If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

You can observe a lot by watching.

If you come to a fork in the road, take it.

It’s déjà vu all over again.

Ninety percent of the game is half mental.

The future ain’t what it used to be.

Ben Zimmer looks at the language, and here's the baseball.

And one more note: he supported gay athletes: "Respect the game, respect others -- that's what I always learned in sports. Whatever background or whatever you are, it doesn't matter. Treat everyone the same, that's how it should be." That one's not funny, nor hard to parse.

Credit where it's due, yes. And that's not here

In a syndicated column published in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Jay Ambrose tells us that Kim Davis hasn't been given credit for things. He says she has "never discriminated against homosexuals wanting marriage licenses. She has not prevented their marriage plans" and that "Whatever her shortcomings, she has also honestly sought an answer that would work for everyone."

He then hares off comparing her situation to how Denver thought about not letting Chik-Fil-A have a concession in the airport, two totally unrelated issues (yes, it's true: there's no Constitutional right to be able to get a business location!) in the standard conservative's bait-and-switch, but when he does come back to her, he asserts

Yes, she had the right to heed her beliefs, but her official duties resided elsewhere and an answer was to resign. That being said, what she did was not discriminatory; she also refused licenses to heterosexual couples. Her actions did not upend wedding plans; couples could easily cross county lines to get the licenses from other clerks.

Let's pass over the pretence that she's not discriminating by refusing to do her job totally instead of partially. Instead, let me ask Mr Ambrose how much he'd like to drive to the next county to pay his electricity bill or get his driver's license renewed because the county clerk had religious objections to people using power on the Lord's Day or women driving. The people of that county don't pay Kim Davis her handsome salary so that they can get their services one county over.

And let's also ask him just what would happen if every clerk in Kentucky took her stand.

Even he admits that "It is wholly unacceptable at this point to keep marriage licenses from gays, and she may yet have to consider giving up her livelihood." But he still thinks she's some kind of level-headed rational hero.

That's some fine work there, Chief Justice

Chief Justice Roberts says in his dissent:

"Indeed, however heartened the proponents of same-sex marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause. And they lose this just when the winds of change were freshening at their backs."

Just like black people "lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause" in Brown v. Board of Education, and interracial couples "lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause" in Loving, and Republicans "lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause" in Bush v. Gore, and rich people "lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause" in Citizens United and .........

Some fine concern trolling indeed.

The week summed up

(from SPLC)

Uh, hello?

"But no court, no law, no rule, and no words will change the simple truth that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Nothing will change the importance of a mother and a father to the raising of a child. And nothing will change our collective resolve that all Americans should be able to exercise their faith in their daily lives without infringement and harassment." Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced his defiance.

But that paragraph must mean, if it's not pure applesauce, that Texas intends to outlaw divorce for couples with children and mandate remarriage for widows and widowers with children and single mothers.

And it must mean that any church that wants to marry gays has to be able to do it legally, because otherwise they're being infringed.

edited to add this update: Though he disapproved of the ruling, Paxton said that Texas would be following the Supreme Court ruling, and county clerks in Texas began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples on Friday.

and edited again to add this great picture from the Dallas Morning News:

APPLESAUCE it was.

One more time!

YES!

Vote for the Hugos

Have an opinion about the current Hugo kerfuffle? (A few things to read if you don't but think you might want to: John Oneil, Deirdre Saoirse Moen, George R.R. Martin, Annie Bellet, and John Scalzi.) You can still join and vote for only $40.

I'm not really a big con goer (been to three in my life), and I've never voted for the Hugos. Till this year.

That Jewish baker

He will not have to make an anti-Semitic hate-speech cake ... unless he cheerfully makes racist, anti-Muslim, or ant-Christian cakes.

The Jewish or Muslim deli owner? He will not have to sell ham sandwiches ... unless he sells them to Jews or Muslims.

That homosexual baker? He won't have to frost a cake saying gay marriage is a sin ... unless he writes hate speech about straights on cakes he sells to other gays.*

If you sell a product, you have to sell it to everyone. If you don't sell it to anyone, that's fine.

I would ask why that is so hard to understand, but the truth is, I don't think it is. I think there's a segment of the political landscape that profits on whipping Christians up into a frenzy over their supposed victimization. After all, the religion began as a persecuted minority sect and it still teaches that ... hang on. Why aren't Christians happy that they're being "persecuted"? Didn't Jesus teach that meant they were blessed? But I digress.

Civil rights are not that hard to grasp. And neither is the difference between "Congratulations" and "Go to Hell."

* That video thing making the rounds of conservative sites? False equivalency. Making a cake that says "Congratulations Brian and Peter!" is not the same as making a cake that says "Gay Marriage Is Wrong".

Let's be clear about this:

You know the joke Lincoln used to tell? "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."

Let's be clear about this. Calling Indiana's law an RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) like the federal law and the other state laws doesn't mean (pace the Washington Post and a bunch of other places) doesn't mean that it actually is like those laws.

Here's an excellent article from the Atlantic explaining why. The bottom line:

The statute shows every sign of having been carefully designed to put new obstacles in the path of equality; and it has been publicly sold with deceptive claims that it is “nothing new.”

Or, in a longer excerpt:

... the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack: “Is there any difference between Indiana's law and the federal law? Nothing significant.” I am not sure what McCormack was thinking; but even my old employer, The Washington Post, seems to believe that if a law has a similar title as another law, they must be identical. “Indiana is actually soon to be just one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,” the Post’s Hunter Schwarz wrote, linking to [a] map created by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The problem with this statement is that, well, it’s false. That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes. If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.

The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.

What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage.

Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this matter? Well, there’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply “because the government is not a party.”

Remarkably enough, soon after, language found its way into the Indiana statute to make sure that no Indiana court could ever make a similar decision. Democrats also offered the Republican legislative majority a chance to amend the new act to say that it did not permit businesses to discriminate; they voted that amendment down.

So, let’s review the evidence: by the Weekly Standard’s definition, there’s “nothing significant” about this law that differs from the federal one, and other state ones—except that it has been carefully written to make clear that 1) businesses can use it against 2) civil-rights suits brought by individuals.

PS: Over at Slacktivist, Fred puts it succinctly:

Indiana’s new law is not an attempt to hold statutes restricting religious liberty to strict scrutiny. It is, rather, a reaffirmation and expansion of the obnoxious logic of the Oregon v. Smith ruling that the real RFRA was written to correct. And it goes beyond that, to grant this power to discriminate not just to the state itself, but to private businesses and business owners.

One thing about Indiana's law to bear in mind

Indiana has no state anti-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation. Thus, this law enables such discrimination.

In fact, when amendments explicitly denying such discrimination were proposed, they were rejected.

Because that discrimination is what this bill is about, Pence and his corps of supporters notwithstanding.

Fun fact: Georgia was advancing similar legislation, though they had be pretty creative to get it through their state Senate. But when people got a look at what was happening to Indiana, they got an anti-discrimination clause added in the House. And the bill died.

Here's a great exchange: Sen. Josh McKoon (R): “That amendment would completely undercut the purpose of the bill.”
Rep. Roger Bruce (D): “That tells me that the purpose of the bill is to discriminate.”
Sen. McKoon: “It couldn’t be further from the truth, no sir.”

One Reason

Cyd Zeigler asks:Why isn't Michael Sam in the NFL? (We all know why.)

The players were cool with it - by all accounts he was very well-liked by the Cowboys, Rams and Missouri Tigers players. The fans were cool with it, Sam receiving applause from his home fans and during away games and selling lots of jerseys. While there was plenty of media attention on Sam, there was no media distraction from having him on the teams.

"He wasn't available to the media that much during training camp," said Howard Balzer, a St. Louis NFL stalwart and Pro Football Hall of Fame voter. "There were a couple times national media came in and they didn't make him available."

If rejection by the fans or players, and the projected media distraction, simply didn't materialize in Dallas or St. Louis, where was the Armageddon that, by the admission of SI's anonymous sources and the CBS Sports rankings, would befall any team that brought Sam in? Where was the discord that would suddenly erupt in the locker room?

When I was a kid, I always outsmarted myself in multiple-choice tests. I'd always get it wrong because I over-thought the question every time. In my adult life I've learned that the most obvious answer is generally the right one.

The answer to the question I've posed to so many - Why is Michael Sam not with an NFL team? - is also likely the most obvious one: because he's openly gay. Defensive ends with the same size and the same speed - yet with less production in college and the NFL preseason - are in the NFL and Sam is not because he's gay and he just won't stop being gay.

Read it all to see the mounting evidence, especially the comparisons with other players who did make it.

Sign of things to come

I do not construe homosexual rights as human rights

So said Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey. (R), of course.

This is news why, exactly, I sense you asking. I'm glad you did. Congressman Smith has a new job in the new Congress: chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations.

Yeah. "Global Human Rights".

Happy happy joy joy.

Alabama!

still not tired!!!!