I went out for a drink stroll before the crushing crowds completely take over the neighborhood. It was pretty fucking amazing.
The sound of NYPD helicopters—ever-present over any sizable gathering, especially in lower Manhattan—are being drowned out by the DJs. :D
Please enjoy some pics, plus this playlist which I have artfully entitled: Music heard and/or inspired by what I can hear out my window. [Read more…]
It’s a beautiful day in NYC. Sunny skies all day, with a predicted high of 85F. If you’re celebrating Pride here today, I hope you find joy, connection and solidarity among friends, old and new.
Stay safe out there. Take care of each other. There are too many haters among us.
Feel like exercising your constitutional right (while it lasts…) to click links? GOOD!
Click on over to Freethought Resistance, then click the link to CREDO* Action’s petition to Congress to ban conversion therapy. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA33), sponsor of the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, says of the legislation:
It says it is fraud if you treat someone for a condition that doesn’t exist and there’s no medical condition known as being gay. LGBTQ people were born perfect; there is nothing to treat them for. And by calling this what it should be, which is fraud, it would effectively shut down most of the organizations.
As a California state senator in 2012, Rep. Lieu was also instrumental in passing a similar law, the first of its kind in the nation. Just last month, the California law withstood a final appeal to the US Supreme Court based on a “religious freedom” argument. In the wake of the high court’s rejection, there is some momentum on which to capitalize here: the national legislation has been referred to committee in both the House and Senate.
Come on, you godless heathens! You know you enjoy trampling the “religious freedom” of bigoted fraudulent assholes at least as much as I do. Get your click on.
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*CREDO Mobile is a lefty activist mobile company: every month it allocates a portion of its revenue to various activist non-profits, as voted and allocated by its customers. (CREDO is, for example, Planned Parenthood’s largest corporate donor.) Consider switching to CREDO as your mobile carrier, and stop funding anti-democratic donors like AT&T that fund conservatives. They offer a lot of the same deals on phones, contract buyouts, incentives, fees, etc.
OMFG you guys! I cannot help but think that I have found among the Irish pagans the place where I truly belong!
When I read the email exchanges posted by Pagan Federation Ireland on their Facebook page, I shouted hallelujah! (<-It’s a relic of my xtian upbringing. Obviously, I will have to learn what my new fellow Irish pagans are supposed to shout in similar situations.)
[CONTENT NOTE: harassment, abuse, assault.]
I’m sure you’ve seen some of the various online accounts (like this one) of violence, harassment, assault and abuse, after the worst elements of our society were emboldened by the election of perhaps the most despicable human being I have known of in my lifetime. Not all of these stories make it to a hashtag much less a news story, and I have a sickening feeling there are orders of magnitude more of them that don’t than do. Here is one from a dear friend of mine, posted here with permission (names and other identifying details have been altered):
Some of you may know Tony as a frequent and frequently excellent commenter at various sites on FtB. He now blogs ferociously at The Orbit. As a gay black atheist living in Florida, Tony is subject to multiple intersectional marginalizations that many of us will never experience, and of course the crap economy only amplifies these effects. He has been struggling off and on with joblessness (although there is a bright spot of hope on that front in the not-too-distant future), and is a few hundred dollars short on his rent this month. If I can help it, I would not like to see “homeless” added to his burdens.
I know that times are tough for many of us, and no one should feel obligated to give what they do not have. But if you can spare just a few dollars, they really do add up. Despite the ugliness that plagues our movement on a regular basis, there is also goodness and strength in this community. I think it’s important to put our social justice talk into action when it really counts, such as when one of our own finds himself in need.
Please donate whatever you can to Tony via PayPal here.
And Tony has another problem you can help with: he likes squirrels. I KNOW RIGHT. I have been trying desperately to enlighten him on this urgent matter before the coming Squirrelpocalypse, but he remains under the spell of the enemy rodent menace and has so far proven resistant to my pleas.
So when you donate via PayPal, there is a space below the amount that says “Write a note (Optional).”
Make it good. :D
#deathtosquirrels
[CONTENT NOTE: Orlando mass shooting and related issues; rape; mental health. No violent images or graphic descriptions.]
I was quite literally rendered speechless upon learning of the tragedy in Orlando Sunday morning. I cannot say I was surprised, though; mass public shootings in the US have been increasing, and it’s no secret that conservatives have been cranking up the hate against the LGBTQ community (just as they have against women, immigrants, religious minorities, the poor, the disabled, etc., and of course none of this is a coincidence). But I did (and do) feel traumatized—as in anxious, dissociating, difficulty concentrating, overwhelming sadness and anger, waking through the night with my heart pounding, super fun stuff like that. For an artist and writer who uses art and writing to process life and the world around her, such a state is nothing short of devastating. (<-See? Dissociating. I just referred to myself in the third person for no fucking reason FFS.)
I don’t write a lot about my personal life online, for many reasons I won’t go into here. But in this case some of that is relevant, and I think perhaps worth sharing.
(Part 1 is here.)
[CONTENT NOTE: While this post contains no graphic descriptions or images of violence, it does contain discussion of: child sexual assault, abuse and death; suicide; hostility to consent, bodily autonomy and agency; homophobia; sex- and gender-based discrimination.]
Just a reminder: in the intro to Part 1, I noted that while Dr. Coyne communicates some very useful and interesting things in this lecture (and elsewhere) that readers may find worthwhile, he is exasperatingly prone to poo flinging, and I fully respect the decision of anyone who decides to pay him no attention whatsoever on this basis alone. As I said, FWIW I do not allow Coyne’s poo flinging in the remaining portions of the transcript to go unrebutted.
1 – WHY DO CONSERVATIVE MEN WANT TO URINATE WITH TRANSGENDER WOMEN IN PUBLIC RESTROOMS? (All caps in original meme.)
2 – DOES THIS BIRD EAT SQUIRRELS? (All caps because IMPORTANT BIRB.)
I have some theories about the first, but no idea about the second.
