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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > General Talk > The Assault on LGBTQ Rights
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Re: The Assault on LGBTQ Rights  [message #78338 is a reply to message #78300] Tue, 03 May 2022 14:53 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Bensiamin is currently offline  Bensiamin

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Presumabley pretty much everyone had heard about the leak yesterday of the draft Supreme Court ruling which will overturn Roe v. Wade, and was printed by Politico. 

In a way it comes as no surprise, and as this forum string has been pointing out, overturing abortion rights is of a piece in the culture wars, and its only the beginning. It's time to start assessing the consequences and implications. The New York Times had this image in their main article today on the SCOTUS ruling.


https://forum.iomfats.org/?t=getfile&id=5326&private=0

Remember, when Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey Barrett were confirmed they all said Roe v. Wade was established law! Historian Heather Cox Richardson characterizes where we are as follows:

And so here we are. A minority, placed in control of the U.S. Supreme Court by a president who received a minority of the popular vote and then, when he lost reelection, tried to overturn our democracy, is explicitly taking away a constitutional right that has been protected for fifty years. Its attack on federal protection of civil rights applies not just to abortion, but to all the protections put in place since World War II: the right to use birth control, marry whomever you wish, live in desegregated spaces, and so on.
The draft opinion says the state legislatures are the true heart of our democracy and that they alone should determine abortion laws in the states. 


Yes, this may be happening in the US, but authoritarian birds fly together. Today's Republicans have taken a lot of material from Putin and Orban's play book, and they cross polinate each other. La Pen got over 42% of the vote in France recently. This is the new reality: authoritarians take away people's rights. It's as simple as that, and gives all the more import to the maxim that elections have consequences!

[Updated on: Tue, 03 May 2022 23:32]




Bensiamin
Re: The Assault on LGBTQ Rights  [message #78339 is a reply to message #78338] Tue, 03 May 2022 23:34 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Bensiamin is currently offline  Bensiamin

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And it should be noted that the implications are becoming apparent. Here are three from today's The Atlantic Magazine newsletter:

•             The conservatives aren't just ending Roe--they're delighting in it. The leaked draft is the work of emboldened justices who have no desire to end Roe in a gentle manner, the law professor Mary Ziegler argues: "The conservative majority is not going to sit around and wait; nothing about this seems particularly hard for these justices. No soul-searching was required."

•             Roe's supporters must stand up. "My mother and all the women who fought alongside her gave my generation Roe v. Wade," our contributing writer Molly Jong-Fast explains. "They gave us the bodily autonomy we should have already had ... It was an essential gift, and an irreversible one. Or so we thought."

•             This ruling will have tremendous implications. Our staff writer Adam Serwer asks, if the Court is willing to strip away a right that has been enshrined for a half century, what will the justices do next? "There is no freedom from state coercion that conservatives cannot strip away if conservatives find that freedom personally distasteful," he writes. "The rights of heterosexual married couples to obtain contraception, or of LGBTQ people to be free from discrimination, are obvious targets."




Bensiamin
Re: The Assault on LGBTQ Rights  [message #78361 is a reply to message #78339] Thu, 07 July 2022 07:38 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Pedro

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"Bensiamin wrote on Tue, 03 May 2022 23:34"
And it should be noted that the implications are becoming apparent. Here are three from today's The Atlantic Magazine newsletter:

•             The conservatives aren't just ending Roe--they're delighting in it....
•             ...
•             This ruling will have tremendous implications. Our staff writer Adam Serwer asks, if the Court is willing to strip away a right that has been enshrined for a half century, what will the justices do next? "There is no freedom from state coercion that conservatives cannot strip away if conservatives find that freedom personally distasteful," he writes. "The rights of heterosexual married couples to obtain contraception, or of LGBTQ people to be free from discrimination, are obvious targets."




-- what's next? Contrary to my expectations, not the 'easy' pick of LGBTQ, but another, far more reaching, case, Moore vs Harper -a voting rights case that also potentially overturns 100+years of precedent. As I understand it, overturn would effectively allow state legistlatures to gerrymander and restrict voting so as to ensure a de facto one party state.
On a Youtube channel I visit from time to time, one of the comments in a discussion on this case (and the current state of the great American Experiment )was:
"As crappy as Putin is doing in Ukraine I would guess he tunes into Fox News and gets a huge pick me up. The downfall of Western Democracy with out firing a single round. Awesome."
From this side of the pond looks about on the mark.

[Updated on: Thu, 07 July 2022 07:40]




Pedro
Re: The Assault on LGBTQ Rights  [message #78369 is a reply to message #78361] Tue, 12 July 2022 14:48 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Bensiamin is currently offline  Bensiamin

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The impacts since the leal of Justice Alito's draft and then the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade haven't needed any commentary. The news media and commentary have provided adequate coverage. What is slowly becoming apparent, however, is where the real threats lie and how they are starting to appear. Of note, an article in today's New York times with this telling observation:

The same state-level dynamic on abortion may destabilize protections the court has extended to certain other rights not enumerated in the Constitution, including those related to same-sex marriage and even contraception. On this point, both Justices Alito and Kavanaugh offered unconvincing reassurances, while Justice Clarence Thomas concurred separately to invite challenges to precedents based on "substantive due process" rights not found in the text of the Constitution.

Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples enjoy a constitutional right to marry, 35 states still have statutes or state constitutional amendments (or both) on the books that ban such marriages. In the wake of Dobbs, it's likely that one or more states will reactivate a same-sex marriage ban or decline to issue a license to a same-sex couple. Litigation will ensue, culminating in a Supreme Court clash forcing the hard-right majority either to embrace Justice Thomas's blunt forecast that Dobbs foreshadows a reversal of Obergefell or somehow split hairs over different varieties of unenumerated rights. The same approach could jumpstart state attempts to revive criminal bans on contraception and consensual gay sex.



That's a huge number: 35 out of 50 states in the USA still have these laws on the books! The rights of Americans to privacy and personal decision-making that are enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment never looked so good... nor have even been at such risk. All like-minded Americans need to be working to stop this nightmare that has been unleashed.

You can read the whole NY Times article here.



Bensiamin
Re: The Assault on LGBTQ Rights  [message #78370 is a reply to message #78369] Fri, 22 July 2022 14:47 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Bensiamin is currently offline  Bensiamin

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Now that the Supreme Court ruling has done away with Roe and turned outlawing abortion over to the states, some of the pundits in the US are finally getting real about how it came to pass. This is particularly relevant as members of that same court have said that the right to contraception, consensual relaitons and same-sex marriage should also be reconsidered.

Here's what Linda Greenhouse said in the New York times today:

It was not constitutional analysis but religious doctrine that drove the opposition to Roe. And it was the court's unacknowledged embrace of religious doctrine that has turned American women into desperate refugees fleeing their home states in pursuit of reproductive health care that less than a month ago was theirs by right.

We all know the focus of religious bias and bigotry, and so should take notice.  You can read the entire article here





Bensiamin
Re: The Assault on LGBTQ Rights  [message #78412 is a reply to message #76756] Wed, 23 November 2022 16:34 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Bensiamin is currently offline  Bensiamin

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I ended my last post about the consequences of the overturning of Roe on LGBTQ rights by saying, "We all know the focus of religious bias and bigotry, and so should take notice."

Sadly and tragically, that notice has been brought into focus once again by the shooting in an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, CO, USA. There is a painful irony in the locale because Colorado Springs is the home of Focus on the Family, James Dobson's rabid anti-LGBTQ organization. It's also painfully ironic that the shooter was taken down and subdued by a grandfather who is an US Army vet who was in the club with his family to watch his daughter perform a drag act, and the boyfriend of his other daughter was shot and killed! All of that is compounded by the fact that the shooter is the grandson of a rabid Christian white nationalist Republican legislator from California, which speaks voumes about the kind of intolerant religious environment the shooter almost certainly grew up in!

And there it is: intolerance... and hate. The most candid and painful assessment of the event and its cause is in this op-ed by Brian Broome that appeared in the Washington Post:

After the shooting at the LGBTQ Club Q in Colorado Springs, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), gun rights advocate and representative for her state's 3rd Congressional District, tweeted the following: "The news out of Colorado Springs is absolutely awful. This morning the victims & their families are in my prayers. This lawless violence needs to end and end quickly."

In her tweet, Boebert left out the "news" that a lone gunman entered an LGBTQ space and began shooting, killing five and injuring at least 25. I'm betting Boebert did not mention these specifics because that would ruin her brand: the gun-toting, queer-hating, God-loving, outlaw whose job it is to own the liberals. If she had tweeted the specifics of the night and its tragic outcome, it might cause some of her followers to see LGBTQ people as human beings. And she can't have that.

I don't go to clubs and bars anymore. But when I was younger, queer spaces were a lifeline. They weren't just bars; they were shelters where I could escape all the judgment of the world. All the Christians who seemed to delight in telling me that I was hell-bound. All the pressure to be a "real man." All the pretending to be someone I wasn't, just to fit into a social order that I didn't understand. They were, in short, places where I felt free.

Everyone should have such a place. For heterosexual people, that place is the whole wide world. For heterosexual people, that place includes public parks and restaurants and any street they care to walk down, hand in hand. But LGBTQ people must find - or more accurately - create those spaces. And because of the shooting at Club Q, there is, for now, one fewer place for the queer community of Colorado Springs to go.
You know who will get the blame for Colorado Springs, right? Each time these things happen, the right-wing go-to is to blame "mental illness." That's what some thought drove Robert Bowers to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh to kill 11 human beings. That's what others believed made Dylann Roof stroll into a Black church in Charleston, S.C., to murder nine human beings. And, sooner or later, conservatives will say it was "mental illness" that drove this newest killer of the marginalized to commit the latest atrocity.

But are we ever going to ask why so many supposedly mentally ill people seem to carry right-wing talking points along with their AR-15s?

It's right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares. And here's the bonus for the instigators: The bottomless list of homophobes and transphobes on the right don't need to throw the rock and then hide their hands. Instead, they use someone else's hands entirely. After ginning up hatred for a particular community through fear, lies and conspiracies, all they have to do is sit back and wait for someone to do their work for them.

Boebert's tweet about Colorado Springs on Sunday strikes a different note from the tweet she issued in August stating, "A 'kid-friendly' drag show in Texas was guarded by masked ANTIFA guards armed with AR-15's. Remember, they only want YOUR guns. They want to use theirs to protect their depravity."

So, the old "thoughts and prayers" line from Boebert on Sunday means little or nothing. And my guess is that she knows that. Boebert will continue, along with other conservatives, to spew the hate that gets the people they don't like hurt and killed.
Already, queer people feel less safe in the United States now. I guarantee that those spaces where we feel at home in the world, the bars, the coffee shops, the clubs, will be emptier this weekend. The writer bell hooks once described queerness as "being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live." Hostility to that experience was on full display in Colorado, but it originates with people who have large platforms and loud microphones.

Nothing in politics is as effective as fear. And conservatives such as Boebert know exactly how to weaponize it. The conservative mind is more concerned that a drag queen is entering a classroom to read a story to children than a gunman is entering a classroom to shoot them. And I will never understand that.

[Updated on: Wed, 23 November 2022 16:39]




Bensiamin
Re: The Assault on LGBTQ Rights  [message #78492 is a reply to message #76756] Wed, 22 March 2023 17:58 Go to previous message
Bensiamin is currently offline  Bensiamin

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The religious assault continues.

Being in the US, it's easy to get distracted by the American culture wars, but the religous led assault on LGBTQ rights is international and continues apace. 

The latest example? Uganda.

https://forum.iomfats.org/?t=getfile&id=5335&private=0

Over the last few years, led by literalist and conservative American Protestants and very conservative Anglicans, lawmakers in Uganda have been swept up in an anti-gay fervor.

You can read the entire New York Times article here.

[Updated on: Wed, 22 March 2023 18:00]




Bensiamin
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