Women Born Transsexual

Put Away the Flags

by Howard Zinn

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project in 2006.

Howard Zinn died on January 7. Please read Matthew Rothschild’s “Thank you, Howard Zinn,” for more about his legacy.

This evening we caught part of a documentary titled “Gasland”.  It is about how the process of hydraulically fracturing shale to extract natural gas, the so called “clean energy” alternative to coal is destroying our water supply and polluting our air.

The Bush Regime rolled back and suspended numerous clean air and clean water laws.  But moreover he destroyed the ability of the regulatory agencies to enforce those standards that he was not able to pervert.

All so the rich can steal even more from the working poor.  Because the profits are privatized and the damages are socialized in the form of government i.e. tax payer funded Super Fund Clean Up Sites.

Funding that is made all the more pitifully ironic by the fact that those who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum pay a higher portion of their income in taxes than do the rich.

Last week Tina and I went to see an exhibition of Ansel Adams work.  There was one of the coastal Redwood Forests.  One of the old growth ones with mighty trees hundreds of years old standing shoulder to shoulder.  Now they are gone, clear cut for the profits of the rich who bought out the original lumber companies of Northern California, gutted them out for their assets, clear cut the land and sent the lumber the Far East.  At the same time they turned the smaller trees into particles to make particle board.  People like Judy Bari fought to save those trees and were labeled as Eco-Terrorists.  When true to course the violent ones, the true terrorists were the thugs of the rich protecting the corporate interests.

In the words of Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, “If you’ve seen one Redwood, you’ve seen them all.” And they have worked very hard to insure that one old growth redwood is all you will ever see.

Last year a documentary titled “The Cove” won an Academy Award.  It documented the slaughter and torture of whales by Japan so that the rich and over privileged can indulge in the rare and exotic as well as very expensive whale sushi.  One can watch “Whale Wars” to see the true heroes.  Hint is isn’t the evil bastards who murder the beautiful and intelligent whales. The real heroes are the people of Sea Shepard. While Green Peace seems to have turned in to a giant begging operation whose main purpose is fund raising and not engaging in activity that would harm that fund raising,  Sea Shepard is the real deal.

Along with clear cutting of forests we have mountain topping where the entire top of mountains are removed to extract coal with the waste filling the valleys and once again turning the water supply to poison.  Guess who will be stuck with the bill for cleaning up the poisoned water supply?  Hint… It won’t be the ones who pocketed the billions in profits because they will hide that money in the Cayman Islands of some other tax haven so beloved by the rich who think only little people pay taxes.

If all this has not been enough to fill one with Eco-Rage, not enough to think maybe Earth First is right and we have to think about saving the planet from the rich who act like they have a spaceship and some other place to go we now have the atrocity committed by BP.  Let’s see them cover up this disaster with a new flower petal logo and a catchy reimaging of their initials into “Beyond Petroleum”.  These scum suckers have been responsible for other crimes and atrocities in the past.  True they can use the defense that others are doing or have done the same thing.  But guess what BP?  You are the target of current Eco-Rage because you just destroyed the Gulf of Mexico and all the fucking wetlands around it.

I don’t want to hear from your CEO how he wants his life back.  BP should be parted out and sold to pay for this clean up.  Every executive involved should have every penny of their wealth confiscated to pay for it.

Perhaps it is time for the people of the planet to say enough with being raped by giant corporations for the benefit of the rich.  Maybe it is time for a new Declaration of Independence from those who are destroying our planet and murdering off entire species.

Perhaps it is time to declare that among our human rights is the right to clean air, clean water and the preservation of our natural environment.

From Pink News UK

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/07/02/doctors-declare-gay-cure-therapies-harmful/

Doctors declare ‘gay cure’ therapies harmful

By Staff Writer
PinkNews.co.uk

July 02, 2010 – 11:31

The annual meeting of the British Medical Association has declared that therapies to ‘cure’ gay people of homosexuality are harmful.

The body met in Brighton yesterday and more than two-thirds of doctors present backed a call for the Royal College of Psychiatrists and other mental health standard-setting bodies to reject the treatments and ban their use in codes of practice.

Health departments should also investigate alleged cases of conversion therapy being funded by the NHS, the meeting agreed.

Research published last year found that a sixth of registered British therapist and psychiatrists have attempted to “cure” patients of homosexuality.

Tom Dolphin, the proposer of the motion and the vice-chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, said: “Sexuality is such a fundamental part of who a person is that attempts to change it just result in significant confusion, depression and even suicide.

“You can’t just wish away same-sex attraction no matter how inconvenient it might be.”

But Cardiff consultant neurophysiologist Gareth Payne said there was no “gold standard” evidence that conversion therapy did not work and was harmful.

He added that it was important to respect the wishes of patients who asked for the therapy.

Earlier this year, gay journalist Patrick Strudwick published an expose of ‘ex-gay’ therapists and began a campaign group to persuade medical bodies to condemn the treatments.

He went undercover for the article, telling two therapists he was struggling to cope with attraction to men and wanted to be straight.

One therapist, named only as Linda, tried to convince him he must have been sexually abused as a child by a member of his family.

The other, who PinkNews.co.uk later revealed was homophobic former Northern Ireland MP Iris Robinson’s advisor, tried to make Mr Strudwick sexually aroused during his therapy.

Mr Strudwick told the Independent that the BMA’s declaration was a “watershed moment in the struggle for gay equality”.

From Alternet:

http://www.alternet.org/rights/147382/leaving_granny_behind%3A_do_obama%27s_debt_commissioners_want_to_impoverish_older_women/?page=2

By Martha Burk, Other Words
July 2, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147382/

President Obama’s Fiscal Commission–a group of lawmakers, former officials, and other experts charged with developing a bipartisan plan to stabilize our soaring national debt–is primarily holding closed-door hearings. The commission’s co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently became an instant YouTube star with his rant against seniors as he exited one of the panel’s sessions. That put Social Security defenders on high alert about what’s going on in these meetings.

Simpson, who is nearly 80, has maintained that the founders of the program never expected anyone to actually live to 65 and collect. “People just died,” he has said. “Social Security was never [for] retirement.”

The program has always been an easy target for deficit hawks and budget cutters because it’s so big–the government’s largest expenditure, just ahead of the Pentagon. But setting up a target isn’t as easy as actually hitting it. George W. Bush found that out when he proposed privatizing the system so we could all invest in the likes of Enron, Lehman Brothers, General Motors, and Goldman Sachs. Thanks to a massive campaign by progressive interest groups, that proposal was shot down. But like Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street, the nightmare of cutting Social Security never dies –it just returns in a new form every few years.

Tea partiers, egged on by Sarah Palin, were fond of claiming during the health-care debate last summer that government “death panels” were going to off our grannies, even though it was an outright lie. Now that we have a much more serious and credible threat to the well-being of our elderly poor population (the majority of whom are female) in possible cuts to Social Security, Palin and company are strangely silent.

Not so the progressive groups that want to preserve the program. Ashley Carson, Executive Director of the Older Women’s League (http://www.owl-national.org) and member of the Social Security Works coalition, points out that those same grannies the tea party has apparently forgotten about are the ones who will suffer the most if the program is cut.

Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, agrees. “Raising the retirement age and other ways of cutting benefits would all have a devastating effect on older women, many of whom live alone and depend mainly or entirely on Social Security,” she says.

The numbers bear this out. Women depend on Social Security more than men, and without it, close to 60 percent of elderly women would live in poverty. One reason is that women are far less likely than men to have a company-provided pension, and when they do get one it’s most often based on a lifetime of lower earnings. So much for Simpson’s “greedy geezers.” Even younger women would suffer if the program is cut, since they are the majority of caretakers when a spouse dies and leaves young children, who draw Social Security until they’re 18.

Simpson may have embarrassed some of less flamboyant members of the Fiscal Commission with his outburst, but it remains to be seen whether in their hearts they believe he’s right. And whether granny is really in the crosshairs this time.

Martha Burk is the money editor for Ms, and author of Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in the Workplace and What Can Be Done About It.

Statement of NOW President Terry O’Neill

July 2, 2010

Today the National Organization for Women opens its 2010 National NOW Conference at a critical time for women’s rights. Hundreds of feminist leaders and activists have gathered in Boston, Mass., to share information, ideas and strategies for addressing the huge challenges before us.

These hurdles include a rash of state restrictions on women’s legal right to abortion — laws that threaten women’s health, violate their bodily integrity and relegate them to second-class status. With the mid-term elections just four months away, this conference offers NOW an opportunity to motivate its grassroots to get out the vote for candidates who promise to champion women’s rights. Sending the Tea Party and faux feminist candidates packing is high on our supporters’ to-do list for November, and we aim to help them with that mission.

This year’s conference carries the optimistic theme of “Loving Our Bodies, Changing the World.” In this spirit, a number of sessions will address a wide range of women’s health issues, the still-pressing need for single-payer health insurance, recovering from domestic violence, the media’s negative impact on women’s body image, and much more.

What else does NOW have on the agenda? A number of incredible speakers, including local favorites, such as: Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Boston Mayor Tom Menino, State Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz, Wellesley College President Kim Bottomly, and Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea Cabral. We will hear from a host of progressive leaders, policy experts, medical professionals and media figures, like Democacy Now! Host Amy Goodman and celebrated author Susan Douglas. We will honor the founders of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, creators of the groundbreaking book Our Bodies, Ourselves, with our first-ever Victoria J. Mastrobuono Women’s Health Award. And, in addition to health, our impressive line-up of speakers will tackle the topics of the state of the feminist movement, women of color and empowerment, expanding abortion access, and electoral politics. With this exciting program, there’s sure to be a moving message and an inspiring individual for everyone.

In fact, this year’s festivities even include a wedding ceremony and reception. What could be more fitting, with Massachusetts one of the few states to acknowledge the constitutional right of same-sex marriage, than for longtime partners and NOW activists Shirley and Joan to tie the knot right at the national conference?

That’s what makes NOW’s annual assembly a unique event. Women’s rights supporters come from across the country looking for camaraderie, solidarity and inspiration. And NOW delivers it — in as many methods and flavors as possible. After all the feminist fireworks are done, our participants will return home fired up and prepared to press forward on the long and often bumpy road toward women’s full equality.

Why does it seem like every single right wing homophobe preaching hatred of queers turns out to secretly be homosexual?

Years ago there was a documentary film by Arthur Dong (Licensed to Kill) that focused on men who murdered gay people in acts of homophobic outrage.  The world would have been a better place if they had committed suicide instead because the most common feature of these hate murder preps was that they were gay themselves.

I look at so many of those Bible thumpers preaching anti-LGBT/T and I wonder how come they look like tea room queens and truck stop marys.

The answer is because many of them are.

So many are hiding their being on the down low by ranting and raving about how gays and lesbians are bring about the end of the world as we know it that virulent homophobia is turning into a dead certain read that the spewer of it himself a homosexual.

Yesterday during the Supreme Court nominee  hearings for Elaina Kagen, we were subjected that questionable peddler of Fascist Family Values Tony Perkins spewing his bigoted bullshit.  Now there’s a voice of “authority” for you.  It should be noted for the record that he left his sheets at home.

Transcript of his bullshit from: Good As You

Chairman Leahy, Ranking Member Sessions, and members of the Committee,

Thank you for the invitation to testify.

As one who has spent a number of years in uniform, as a Marine and a police officer, my remarks will focus primarily on Ms Kagan’s treatment of military recruiters at Harvard Law School.

As has been pointed out while Dean of the law school she defied the requirements of a federal law, known as the Solomon Amendment. Her violation of this federal law was motivated by her vehement opposition to the military’s prohibition against open homosexuality.

This protracted incident, combined with the just made public report of her re- writing of the medical findings of ACOG on partial birth abortion as advisor in the Clinton White House, raises doubts as to whether she possesses the requisite judicial temperament and impartial nature required of a Supreme Court justice.

On the former topic, when Ms. Kagan did comply with the law she wrote to the campus making clear just how grudging her cooperation with the military was in light of the military’s “repugnant” policy.1 She declared, “I abhor the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy,” and she added that the policy was “a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order.”

“A moral injustice of the first order?” Of all the moral injustices throughout history that man has inflicted on man, she equates them to a military policy enacted by Congress?

Mr. Chairman, the purpose of our military is to fight and win this country’s wars. War is the most difficult human activity, bar none. It requires organized groups of men and women to act with strategic and tactical lethality while its members are simultaneously being wounded and killed.

In war, the normal ways of living are completely sacrificed in the harsh, punishing environment of combat. Even in peacetime settings and in units not engaged in combat, great sacrifices are required. Military life, by its nature, must be characterized by a regular lack of privacy and repeated situations of forced intimacy.

As military experts have testified and this Congress has affirmed, in such an environment it is not “a moral injustice of the first order” to minimize the sexual exposure that such conditions forces on soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. It is the only sensible and effective way to run a military organization.

It should be noted that the current law on homosexuality in the military has been repeatedly challenged—and upheld—by the federal courts. And the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Solomon Amendment.

Some have defended Ms. Kagan’s actions regarding the military, claiming they do not demonstrate that she is “anti-military.” There is truth in that, only in that she does not oppose the military simply because they are the military. However, she clearly does oppose the military because they have not yet bowed to the demands of the sexual counter-culture. Her record would suggest that it is not that Ms. Kagan does not want the military to defend our nation against terrorism; it’s just that she wants to use the military to advance radical social policies more.

This becomes very clear when one examines the amicus brief that Ms Kagan signed on to in the Solomon case. This brief began with a sweeping declaration that is startling in its implications. “We are deeply committed to a fundamental moral principle: ‘A society that discriminates based on sexual orientation – or that tolerates discrimination by its members-is not a just society’.”

Note that Kagan and the professors condemn not only a society that “discriminates,” but a society “that tolerates discrimination by its members.” I abhor discrimination based on race and other immutable characteristics, but the implications of this are chilling for the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion. It should alarm those who live in the 45 states that define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and to the tens of millions of Americans who affirm biblical moral teaching.

Her own statements make obvious that Elena Kagan would strike down any marital statute – including the federal Defense of Marriage Act – which defines marriage as being between one man and one woman.

At question is not whether Ms Kagan is a good person or even skilled in the law. What is in question is her ability to be an impartial jurist. Her record makes clear she is an impassioned activist that only sees laws and in some cases science as mere obstacles to overcome in pursuit of a far left agenda.

We do not need a justice on the Supreme Court who sees it as her life mission to write the homosexual version of Roe v. Wade by striking down one-man, one- woman marriage across America. These positions and the temperament accompanying them make her unfit to sit as an associate justice on the Supreme Court. I urge the Senate to reject her nomination.

But the real window of insight into the thinking processes of this Fascist Family Values Fanatic can be found over in the comments section of Joe My God”s Blog piece on the same subject.

From the Family Research Council”s own literature:

‘Untrammeled homosexuality can take over and destroy a social system. If… all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get – and that is what homosexuality seems to be – then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men and women on women, if all you are looking for is orgasm …. It’s pure sexuality. It’s almost like pure heroin. It’s such a rush. . . . Marital sex tends toward the boring end. Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does.’” [Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, Chaos, Law, and God: The Religious Meanings of Homosexuality, 2008]

So many of the Christo-Fascist arguments regarding LGBT/T folks having equal rights seem centered upon the idea that if LGBT/T people had equality and were not forced to deal with hatred and bigotry every day then everyone would want to be part of our rainbow flag waving alphabet soup.

Same-sex  sexual relationships are hotter than straight ones so we have to punish people who engage in same-sex sexual relationships isn’t a very compelling argument unless you are a repressed homosexual making it to yourself.

The argument of: “God doesn’t want people to do this…”  Leaving aside the questionable existence of an invisible all powerful sky daddy whose management style seems strictly hands off.  Well that argument parses out to “I pray every night that I won’t give in and get caught soliciting a vice cop in a major airport.”

Even more hypocritical are the ones who get caught and continue to deny.

Instead of treating these neo-Nazis sex lives as though they are “private matter” I think we should not only out all of them but perhaps even run sting operations on a bunch of them of the sort that are regularly run on the left.

Because in the end homophobia is the darken closet the last refuge of all those right wing gay closet cases.

Homophobia is soooooo gay!!!!