Also known as a Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger), one of the very many we have on property. All photos are 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
From January 1st, 2017, transgender will no longer appear on Denmark’s definition of mental illnesses, the Ministry of Health has confirmed.
The move would make Denmark a groundbreaker if the World Health Organisation (WHO) does not make a similar move before the autumn, news agency Ritzau reported.
“At the moment, transgender is listed as a mental illness or behavioural problem. That is incredibly stigmatising and in no way reflects how we see transgender people in Denmark. It should be a neutral diagnosis,” Social Democrat health spokesman Flemming Møller Mortensen told Ritzau.
“The WHO is currently working on a new system for registering diagnoses. It has been working on it for a very, very long time. Now we’ve run out of patience, and want to send out a signal saying that if the system is not changed by October, then we in Denmark will go it alone,” said Mortensen.
Full Story Here. A huge shout-out to Denmark, for realizing that every day of waiting increases the stigmatization of transgender people, and wanting no part of that any longer. Now, the rest of the world needs to catch up.
I love Mourning Doves, they are beautiful, and their song is soothing. I’ve missed them. We used to have a large number of them on property, then the Eurasian Collared Doves moved in. This year, the Mourning Doves have finally come back. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed how calm and responsive Mourning Doves are to shutter clicks. They are very curious about them, and often responsive. I hope we have Mourning Doves nesting on property once again. Zenaida macroura. All photos are 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Carl Gallups, a far-right pastor who has been embraced by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, spoke with Charlottesville, Virginia, radio host Rob Schilling on Friday about the Obama administration’s recent directive on transgender rights in public schools, which he said was the sign of the impending End Times and a possible clue about something wrong in Obama’s “personal life.”
“For years I’ve been saying, ‘Look, look, we’re living in very prophetic times,’” Gallups said. “Israel is back in the land, Russia and China are in the Middle East, ISIS has exploded, Christianity is being exterminated, on and on down the list you can go … And so, now, we turn to what Jesus said in Luke 17. He said, ‘Look, in the very last days before my return, it’s going to be just like it was in the days of Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah, the spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah will sweep the planet.’ And we’re watching that happen before our eyes.”
He said that “it’s not just Christians” who are upset about policies allowing transgender people to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity because even “ultra-liberal people … don’t want their little six-year-old girl molested in the bathroom because some hairy guy decides he feels like a girl that day and follows their little pretty little girl into the bathroom under federal decree.”
[…]
Earlier in the interview, Gallups speculated that there is “something” in Obama’s “personal life that would cause him to be absolutely fixated upon this sexual deviancy and this danger to our children and this perversion and insanity and this whole fixation upon this radical transgender movement.”
He hinted that this “something” might have to do with pornography, noting that the president’s official Twitter account, which is run by staffers at the Organizing for Action organization, has been found to follow some porn stars among the more than 636,000 accounts it follows.
“So, it’s demonic,” Gallups said, “and there obviously is a fixation upon this with the man in the White House now.
The San Francisco State University Pow Wow, held annually in the spring, set a bit of history on May 15th as the first non Two Spirit pow wow to include the Rainbow Gay Pride Flag.
According to this year’s Head Dancer, Aidan Dunn (Osage), “the SFSU Pow wow committee has decided to de-gender their dance categories. For instance, the category formerly known as “Women’s Fancy Shawl” will now be simply ‘Fancy Shawl’. Most people probably won’t notice this difference, because it won’t cause any big changes in the way the dance categories work–but inclusive language matters a lot, because it can be used to include or exclude,” said Dunn.
Dunn said that changing a few words would enable pow wow organizers to open the circle a little wider to embrace more community members.
“This allows pow wow dancers to dance in whatever category they are called to dance, even if it isn’t what we might expect for their gender. SFSU is taking a bold step toward making Two-Spirit, LGBTQ, and gender-nonconforming pow wow dancers feel welcome in the arena. The Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS) Pow wow took this step last year but, to my knowledge, there are no ‘straight’ powwows anywhere in the US or Canada that currently do this.”
[…]
The inclusion of the Rainbow Flag in Grand Entry proceedings represents the inclusion of Two Spirits in the proceedings and that the circle welcomes all respectful gender expressions.
[…]
Additionally, the BAAITS pow wow, the first public LGBTIQA+ pow wow on Turtle Island, has been generating more and more success as early 3,500 dancers attended the festivities held at Fort Mason this past March.
Some family arbors at pow wows on the West Coast have displayed the flag as a sign of solidarity to the community or to identify LGBTIQA+ safe spaces. The University of Saskatchewan was the first to include the flag at a pow wow in Canada.
The day before Grover Cleveland took office as the 22nd president of the United States, Congress passed the Major Crimes Act of 1885, providing for federal jurisdiction over seven major crimes committed by Indians on their own land.
The act came in response to Ex Parte Crow Dog, an 1883 Supreme Court decision that upheld tribal sovereignty over criminal matters. The case, which marked the first time in history an Indian was tried for the murder of another Indian, began in 1881 when Crow Dog, a member of the Brule band of the Lakota Sioux, shot and killed Spotted Tail, a chief on the Rosebud Sioux reservation.
In a unanimous and condescending decision, the Supreme Court found that federal courts lacked jurisdiction over Indian-on-Indian crimes on reservation land and that Brule law—not federal—governed the reservation. Subjecting Indians to federal law, the court ruled, would “impose upon them the restraints of an external and unknown code” that Indians lacked the ability to understand.
“It tries them not by their peers, nor by the customs of their people, nor the law of their land, but by superiors of a different race,” the justices wrote in their opinion. Doing so would amount to “measur(ing) the red man’s revenge by the maxims of the white man’s morality.”
Congress reacted to the ruling with the Major Crimes Act, claiming the high court undercut federal efforts to assimilate Indians into mainstream America. The act placed under federal jurisdiction the crimes of murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, maiming, rape, incest and assault with intent to commit murder.
The act was one of three devastating measures enacted during Cleveland’s first term in office that undermined tribal sovereignty and robbed Indians of land. Cleveland in 1887 signed the Dawes Act, which authorized the President to divide Indian land into individual allotments. Two years later, he signed the Indian Appropriations Act, officially opening “unassigned lands” to white settlers.
Hat tip to Opus. Amazing, wonderful photos of our president, taken by Pete Souza.