Even though much of the work here is wedding photography, it reads much more simply as love photography. Maybe Happy! Happy! Happy! photography, too. Whatever it some photographers have, Viet Duc Nguyen has it in abundance. The absolutely stunning locations get to feature as well, and it’s hard to imagine a more beautiful place for a wedding. Click on over and have a look, you won’t be disappointed. You will be busy for a while.
© Viet Duc Nguyen.
© Viet Duc Nguyen.
Helen and Cesar Chavez with six of their eight children in 1969 at the United Farm Workers’ “Forty Acres” property outside Delano. Standing from left are Anna, Eloise and Sylvia. Seated from left are Paul, Elizabeth and Anthony. (United Farm Workers)
Helen Chavez, the widow of Cesar Chavez, who aided the farmworkers union her husband founded by keeping the books, walking the picket line and being arrested — all while raising their eight children — died Monday at a Bakersfield, Calif., hospital. She was 88.
A statement from the Cesar Chavez Foundation said she died of natural causes and was surrounded by family members.
Though notoriously reticent and uncomfortable with media attention, Chavez sometimes found herself in the spotlight alongside her husband, who led the United Farm Workers of America for 31 years. In 1978 she was arrested and convicted with her husband for picketing a cantaloupe field where workers were represented by the Teamsters Union.
Yet at the height of the movement, she remained in her husband’s shadow. She seemed to push past nervousness whenever she spoke publicly. “I want to see justice for the farmworkers,” she told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 1976. “I was a farmworker and I know what it is like to work in the fields.”
The Chavez’s were another major window for me, in early life. They helped me to see past my own privilege, and I was honoured to help work with and for their causes when I was a teenager. Goodbye, Helen, and thank you.
A general view inside the Norwegian parliament in Oslo August 1, 2011.
© 2011 Reuters
Thanks to a new healthcare law voted in by Norway’s Parliament yesterday, the country’s transgender people will be able to self-declare their appropriate legal gender. In the past, they needed to undergo compulsory psychiatric evaluations, diagnoses, and sterilization surgeries in order to be legally recognized as who they are.
The vote makes Norway only Europe’s fourth country to separate medical and legal processes for legally recognizing transgender people.
Already in Denmark, Ireland, and Malta (following a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights), transgender people can legally self-declare their own gender free of any medical assessment or procedures.
[…]
Norway’s new law was introduced in parliament by the Ministry of Health. Healthcare professionals have an important role providing affirmative care for transgender people, free from discrimination and to the highest standard possible. But the process for legal recognition of gender identity should be separate from any medical interventions.
Since the 1970s, Norway has required that the Oslo University Hospital certify to the Norwegian Tax Administration that a “real sex conversion” – based on surgeries and psychiatric evaluations – had taken place. This subjected transgender Norwegians to a bureaucratic nightmare while simultaneously stripping them of their autonomy.
Forty-one states in Europe have legal gender recognition provisions in place. Thirty-five of them require a psychiatric diagnosis to obtain recognition. Twenty-four require sterilisation before recognizing gender identity.
Legal gender recognition has been gaining global momentum as governments start to uphold their commitment to the core idea that the state or other actors will not decide for people who they are.
Countries like Norway are charting a path others should follow. This basic legal dignity cannot come a moment too soon for a minority that shoulders a disproportionate burden of violence, discrimination, and negative health consequences often stemming from the lack of recognition before the law.
Nineteen days after taking office, Benjamin Harrison signed a proclamation opening Indian Territory in Oklahoma to settlers.
Nineteen days after taking office, Benjamin Harrison signed a proclamation opening Indian Territory in Oklahoma to settlers.
The March 23, 1889 proclamation made 1.9 million acres of “unassigned lands” available to white settlers and kicked off one of the most chaotic chapters in American history. At high noon on April 22, a gunshot rang out and an estimated 50,000 settlers crossed into the territory by wagon, horseback, bicycle, train or foot and claimed all the available land before nightfall.
The Oklahoma Land Run came on the heels of two acts signed by Harrison’s predecessor, President Grover Cleveland. The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the President to divide Indian land into individual allotments and the Indian Appropriations Act of 1889 officially opened surplus or unassigned lands to white settlers.
Known for its “boomers,” settlers campaigning for the land to be opened, and “sooners,” those who illegally entered the territory ahead of time, the land rush has become an iconic era in the history of the West. Thousands of Americans gained new hope as they claimed 160-acre parcels and the opportunity that came with land ownership.
But the rush also set the tone for Harrison’s presidency, which was marked by similar land grabs and last-ditch efforts by Indians to hold on to their territory.
During Harrison’s four years in office, six states were admitted to the Union, including four during his first year alone: North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington and Montana. Idaho and Wyoming were admitted in 1890.
Harrison also forced the Sioux Nation in the Dakotas to divide into separate reservations and relinquish 11 million acres of land, and the Crow to give up 1.8 million acres of land for general settlement in Montana. As more Indians accepted land allotments, Harrison also opened to white settlers “surplus” lands acquired from the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations and the Sac and Fox.
[…]
Harrison was less inclined to preserve the lives and ways of living Indians. In his first message to Congress, in December 1889, Harrison called Indians an “ignorant and helpless people” whose best chance at survival was assimilation.
Reservations were generally surrounded by white settlements and the only way to manage the Indian was to “push him upward into the estate of self-supporting and responsible citizen,” he said. Adults should be located on farms and children should be enrolled in school.
“It is to be regretted that the policy of breaking up the tribal relation and of dealing with the Indian as an individual did not appear earlier in our legislation,” Harrison told Congress. “Large reservations held in common and the maintenance of the authority of the chiefs and headmen have deprived the individual of every incentive to the exercise of thrift, and the annuity has contributed an affirmative impulse toward a state of confirmed pauperism.”
Indians viewed these policies as campaigns to take their land, and some sought answers from spiritual sources. In the winter of 1889, a Paiute man named Wokova had a vision of the Creator and the dead of his nation. When he returned from the vision, Wokova encouraged his people to work hard and live peacefully with the white settlers, promising that “eventually they would be reunited with the dead in a world without death or sickness or old age,” Stephen Cornell wrote in his 1990 book, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence.
Wovoka also brought back a ceremonial dance he said would bring about this transformation. Known as the Ghost Dance, the ceremony quickly spread to other tribes, including the Sioux at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Burned by a legacy of broken promises, the Sioux adopted the Ghost Dance and “gave to the prophecies a hostile content: In their version, the whites were to be annihilated by a massive whirlwind,” Cornell wrote.
Government officials in Washington, fearing the ceremony could incite violence, sent military troops to Pine Ridge. Leaders of the Ghost Dance movement retreated to the reservation’s isolated northern boundary. In the early morning of December 15, 1890, agents surprised Chief Sitting Bull and tried to arrest him. When Sitting Bull resisted, agents shot him at close range, escalating tensions between the Sioux and the U.S. military.
On the morning of December 29, 1890, soldiers from the Seventh Cavalry perched on a hill above Wounded Knee Creek and shot unarmed men, women and children. An estimated 146 Sioux and 29 soldiers were killed in the infamous Wounded Knee Massacre, which marked the last time the U.S. militia systematically slaughtered Indians.
Harrison, who had a reputation as “the human iceberg,” took no responsibility for what happened at Wounded Knee. He honored the Seventh Cavalry for their distinguished service, and 20 soldiers later received the Medal of Honor for their part in the massacre.
In his third message to Congress, a year after the massacre, Harrison admitted that the Sioux had some “just complaints” stemming from the reduction of rations and the delay in receiving government services. But, Harrison said, “the Sioux tribes are naturally warlike and turbulent” and posed a threat to white settlers near the reservation. The “uprising” was handled with a militia that prioritized the “thorough protection” of the settlers and “of bringing the hostiles into subjection with the least possible loss of life.”
During his final year in office, Harrison commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. In a proclamation issued in July 1892, Harrison appointed October 21 as a general holiday set aside for citizens to “honor the discoverer and their appreciation of the four completed centuries of American life.”
Former Major League Baseball player Curt Schilling, who was recently fired from his ESPN analyst position for a transphobic Facebook post, joined conservative radio host Rick Wiles on his show on May 18, where he attacked ESPN and its parent company, Disney, claiming that his firing was just another case of white Christians being marginalized in America.
“I don’t want to sound like a victim because I’m not trying to sound like a victim but I think the only thing people now acknowledge publicly is that it’s okay to infringe upon or talk down on white Christians,” Schilling said.
“We all knew this was coming,” he continued. “The Scripture’s pretty clear on what’s gonna happen with us, to us, and about us in, you know, many parts of the Bible.”
[…]
“The only positive I’ve seen in this administration is the sale of firearms has gone through the roof in the last seven and a half years because law-abiding citizens are arming themselves to protect themselves from what feels to be every bit that the tyrannical government, the Second Amendment was created to protect us against,” Schilling said.
Wiles claimed that “the left is pushing us towards civil war and they don’t realize we have all the guns.”
“The left is pushing a civil war that they would never fight,” Schilling said. “They don’t have the guts to stand up.” He then claimed the left wants the government to fight in the civil war for them, as, unlike conservatives, “they want the government to do everything for them.”
Right Wing Watch has the full rant.
Stuart Shepard. Family Policy Alliance.
Stuart Shepard, of Family Policy Alliance, descended into incoherence when trying to express how much transgender people are victimizing and oppressing all the normal humans.
Shepard claimed that transgender people reject the existence of a God who creates everyone with purpose in mind. “When you reject the idea of the ability to know what’s true, you’re essentially rejecting God,” he said. “You’re saying, ‘You put me in the wrong body,’ if you accept that there’s a God, or, ‘There can’t possibly be a God so none of this matters and everything is fluid and unknowable therefore.’”
[…]
Regarding the federal government’s protection of transgender individuals’ rights, Shepard said, “All of these, I mean every time you see it, they say, ‘Well, this is about discrimination.’ Well, their solution is to discriminate against all of us who don’t accept that point of view. It is a discriminatory act that they’re proposing, but they don’t even see it as that.”
He said of transgender people, “They just can’t get to that view of the world to realize that their own actions are discriminatory at the most private level possible, with the other humans that we share this country with.”
Ultimately, Shepard said, accepting transgender rights will undermine the traditional family structure and create chaos. “It comes down to this rejection of everything that’s come before, the idea of mom and dad and male and female and marriage or not married, about all of those things, they want to throw it all out,” he said. “…They want to bring us to a state, essentially of chaos where whatever you feel about anything is acceptable, and we all just think and feel the way that we do about everything, including the most foundational elements of culture and society: the family.”
“There is a deeper question here of, ‘What can we know is true if you can’t even know whether your child is a boy or a girl, what can you know?” Shepard said. “I mean, what’s left that is knowable? And that’s where we’ve gone. We’ve gone from an understanding of everything to be found through science to this understanding of, ‘Everything I know is what I feel. I feel this way. Therefore, it is. And you can have your own feelings and feel the way you do.’”
Hey, Stuart, about knowing the gender of your child? It’s pretty easy, you just listen to your child, they know what gender they are. There are good parents everywhere who could have clued you into that little bit of knowledge. As for this “understanding of everything to be found through science”, how did science get in the word salad? I thought this was all about god. You should stick with god, Stuart. You really wouldn’t like what science has to say about, well, pretty much everything.
![Shutterstock. [The Right-minded people at College Fix couldn't bother with a credit.]](https://i0.wp.com/freethoughtblogs.com/affinity/files/2016/06/AS.jpg?ssl=1)
Shutterstock. [The right-minded people at College Fix couldn’t bother with a credit.]
Equip yourself to answer pro-choice arguments compellingly and winsomely in any setting. Recognizing that an abstract approach to bioethics is insufficient, Oklahoma Wesleyan University is proud to be one of the few universities in the nation committed to equipping the next generation of life-affirming apologists, politicians, and pregnancy center executives.
“Applied Bioethics at OKWU is the most important pro-life training you will ever receive…I went from the frustration of finding myself flat-footed in conversations about abortion to being thoroughly equipped to winsomely answer arguments in ways that are life changing. Don’t pass up this opportunity to take your ministry to the next level and begin making abortion unthinkable in your community.” – Jody Ward (Project Manager, Women’s Care Center, Baltimore, MD)
Nationally recognized pro-life organizations are partnering with Oklahoma Wesleyan University to offer certifications in pro-life training and ministry essentials.
My emphasis there. Winsomely? I take this to mean they’re trying for a folksy Huckabee type of approach and argumentation. Perhaps they think they can simply charm people into a rabid anti-life position.
From the Right-Minded College Fix:
OKWU is also studying the “feasibility” of expanding the program into a full-blown bachelor’s degree that prepares students for “vocational work in pro-life apologetics, political consulting, or for an executive role” in pregnancy help centers and medical clinics, according to the program website.
I think someone doesn’t understand how quote marks work. I know that’s on the petty side, but it’s bothersome. Why is feasibility in scare quotes? Moving past that, this is on the seriously depressing side. Fake clinics already proliferate the landscape, and there are plenty of professional liars staffing them already. More are not needed, winsome or no.
While OKWU says applied-bioethics credits earned by students will be transferable, it’s still working out the details because the program is “in the very early stages,” England told The College Fix.
It ran a pilot session last summer after “a group of highly-respected pro-life voices put the curriculum together and began looking for a university to take the idea and run with it,” she added.
One of those voices was Scott Klusendorf, founder and president of the Life Training Institute. If Christian students want to simply keep their faith through college but not make a larger cultural impact, “then we are in trouble,” Klusendorf told The Fix in a phone interview. Students “need to be able to make a case for the pro-life view in one minute or less if necessary,” he said: “There is no major out there anywhere that is teaching people to do this.” Klusendorf teaches an ethics and abortion course that examines “the toughest critics of the pro-life view, the academic critics,” and equips students to answer their objections, he said.
If you can cope with it, there’s a 45 minute video of Klusendorf giving one of his talks in the UK at the site, along with Sribd documents describing the Ethics of Abortion online class. Apparently, Mr. Klusendorf can’t limit his arguments to one minute.
A gorgeous Cardinal from Kengi. Female, Cardinalis cardinalis. Click for full size.
© Kengi. All Rights Reserved.
Christian street preachers clash with authorities (YouTube/Buddy Fisher)
Naturally, Christians showed up at the Reason Rally to do some preaching. It takes time to get to the clash between the U.S. Park officers and the preachers (around the 9:00 minute mark), so I listened to a fair amount of the standard nonsense, mostly about hell, but there was one interesting bit. The preacher (who is, I assume, Buddy Fisher) is carrying on about us decadent atheists, how we love our sin, our drunkenness, our sex outside marriage, our…muff diving. The preacher seemed to realize that he may have skittered off the rails a bit with that one, and quickly moved to a different tack. Back to more of the same old, if we’re just a bag of chemicals, there’s no love, yada, yada, yada, some odd stuff about Hemingway being an authentic atheist because he killed himself, and before long, the park cops show up. They are quiet, and polite, and explain that the preachers have a choice of two different locations to where they can move. Oh no. No, no, no. Preacher whips out this paper, and explains this court case, and that they have The Heckler’s Veto! You can’t make us move! Magic Court Papers! (I think the court case was Bible Believers v. Wayne County.) They keep arguing, the video ends.
Oh look, here comes the continuation! A description on the second video reads: ”Part 2 of unlawfully being removed from the Reason Rally 2016 in Washington DC. Officers Burnett and White unlawfully remove Christians from an event that is free and open to the public being held by a group of atheists with a non-exclusive permit. Their permit allows them to set up the stage, amplifiers, etc, but does not give them the authority to remove us from public property. Atheists are cowards and the police ignore the law.”
Via The Blaze.
Scott Adams. Wikipedia Commons.
I’m, uh, short on words here. I’m sure Mr. Adams feels he is relevant, and other people must feel that way too, but relevant to political discourse? I was unaware that he mattered when it came to politics. Except as a voter, of course. I don’t know if this clever, assholism, or possibly a mental issue of some sort.
…“This past week we saw Clinton pair the idea of President Trump with nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you tremble in fear,” Adams wrote on his personal blog.
Adams, who last week said he realized Donald Trump was no “crazy clown” but was actually a master of persuasion, said Clinton’s new line of attack would personally, specifically and certainly imperil him in a racist eruption against white people.
“The only downside I can see to the new approach is that it is likely to trigger a race war in the United States,” Adams said. “And I would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him. And obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator, including anyone who wrote about his persuasion skills in positive terms.”
[…]
“So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety,” Adams said. “Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.”
Via Raw Story.
A wonderful box of delights from Marcus Ranum has been picked up. Handmade soap (more importantly, bloody soap!), handmade cream, handmade incense, which I’m burning now – it’s intoxicating, everything beautifully wrapped with tags. Going by my experience, pestering Marcus for delicious and fun things is seriously worth it. Thank you so very much, Marcus!
Join us this fall in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the National Hispanic Cultural Center for the very first Indigenous Comic Con! Featuring Indigenous creators, illustrators, writers, designers, actors, and producers from the worlds of comic books, games, sci-fi, fantasy, film, tv, and graphic novels. The Indigenous Comic Con seeks to highlight the amazing work that brings understanding about the Indigenous experience to the world of popular culture! The action begins Friday afternoon and continues through Sunday evening!
Everyone is welcome!
Red Wolf creator, Award-Winning Native American Comic Artist & Designer from the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, Jeffrey Veregge will be one of many special guests at this year’s Indigenous Comic Con.
With a growing number of Native people making comics and designing videogames as a way to revitalize their languages, one great way to break down stereotypes is a Native-centered event. The inaugural Indigenous Comic Con on November 18-20 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, hopes to do just that.
“There are a lot of Indigenerds out there,” said Indigenous Comic Con artistic director and Laguna Pueblo member, Dr. Lee Francis IV. “We joke about that word, but the idea that Native People, Indigenous People, get to participate in pop culture…We wanted to create a space of celebration and say ‘Hey. We are in these spaces.’ A lot of wonderful creators are doing some incredible work in these areas. It’s time to celebrate that.”
After a year of planning and a joint sponsorship between Francis’s Native Realities Publishing and A Tribe Called Geek, the organizers selected the November 18-20 date and the site of the comic con at Albuquerque’s National Hispanic Cultural Center, 1701 4th St. S.W. Francis said the NHCC has the facility requirements as well as a long history with hosting Native poetry and other indigenous workshops.
At press time, the keynote panelists scheduled are Jeffrey Veregge (Port Gamble S’Klallam), the artist for Marvel Comics’ Red Wolf, and Arigon Starr (Kickapoo), the creator of Super Indian Comics. Other events include an exhibition hall, live music and cosplay contests.
In the FAQ section of their website, there is a disclaimer about the cosplay and costumes that states “no Tontos or other Indigenous stereotypes.” Although this Comic Con will be fun, the panels will not shy away from serious subjects such as stereotypes, marginalization and the issue of Natives being “historicized.”
[…]
“Our approach is to be very positive,” Francis said. “We’re looking for positive images. We’re vetting the folks that we want to come in. We’re not going to be bringing in folks that were in a random Indian movie. We want folks who are going to be thoughtful about the portrayals, whether they’re a comic book creator, an actor, someone doing games or science fiction. Being very thoughtful about the work that they’re putting into the world because of all these stereotypes and historicizations. The sheer number of folks we’re trying to get on panels and the conversations that we want to spark, I think, are going to address those negative representations of Indigenous people in pop culture.”
New York City Commission on Human Rights
“Use the restroom consistent with who you are,” say the ads, sponsored by the New York City Commission on Human Rights. They will appear in subway cars, bus shelters, phone booths, newspapers, and more. The ads will also run in ethnic newspapers in Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Russian, and Bengali.
“In NYC, it’s the law,” the ads say. “No questions asked.”
The campaign, which will cost $265,000, comes after transgender people filed complaints with the city about being barred from restrooms and facing other types of discrimination in places of public accommodation.
Seth Hoy, spokesperson for the Commission on Human Rights, told BuzzFeed News in a statement that the agency “has investigated such cases in the past and continues to receive and investigate complaints where individuals are harassed or denied entry to restrooms because of their actual or perceived gender identity.”
That sort of discrimination is illegal in New York City.
New York City Commission on Human Rights
In December, the commission released enforcement guidance on gender identity protections under the city’s 2002 nondiscrimination law, making clear that transgender people are entitled to access restrooms consistent with their gender.
Mayor Bill de Blasio followed up in March with an executive order directing agencies to provide access to single-sex facilities without requiring people to show identification or other documents that verify their gender.
The ads feature trans New Yorkers, including Alisha King and Charles Solidum.
“Bathroom discrimination is a regular occurrence for the transgender community,” King said in a statement. “So much so that many of us avoid even using public restrooms to begin with. I sincerely hope these ads help people understand that transgender people are just people just like you. We just want to use the restroom safely and be treated with respect.”
Via Buzzfeed.
This time, it’s Peter Rabbit Jesus. Yep.
Miss Paragreen added: “My brother-in-law and my sister were both having a look at it and we both said ‘Yeah, that’s Jesus’.
Why is it always Jesus? Looks like the figure is wearing a little pillbox hat. Maybe it’s the Queen.