The county where no one's gay. The 2010 Census of Franklin County Mississippi shows
no same sex couples. (pdf). CNN videographer Brandon Ancil and human rights columnist John D. Sutter tried to determine if the census was wrong, and see if they could find gay men and women willing to speak about "what keeps them hidden."
Video
posted by zarq
on Mar 30, 2013 -
54 comments
Civil Rights is a slam poem performed at last year's
Brave New Voices festival. There's a transcript
here, though it's worth noting that the page gets the poem's title wrong.
Written and performed by Shanita Jackson and Dakota Oder, it becomes even more impressive when you realize that both women are still teenagers...and from the looks of it,
Jackson was only fourteen at the time.
posted by MeghanC
on Mar 7, 2013 -
5 comments
Makers: Women Who Make America is a sweeping 3-hour documentary of the movement for women's equality in the last half of the twentieth century. Airing this month on US public television, it's accompanied by an
online archive of videos of interviews with individual women in leadership across a variety of fields. Leaders and activists, celebrities and pioneers, and everyday women retell the story of their awakening, organizing, and world-changing efforts.
posted by Miko
on Feb 28, 2013 -
5 comments
"Better known as the “Jane Roe” in the landmark Supreme Court case
Roe v. Wade,
Norma McCorvey has led a conflicted life. Forty years ago, she was at the center of the court decision that famously legalized abortion. Today, she is a zealous anti-abortion
advocate." Why did McCorvey turn against the cause she once championed? Tracing the life of an
Accidental Activist.
Via
posted by zarq
on Jan 24, 2013 -
39 comments
The Geography of Abortion Access -
Forty years ago Tuesday, the Supreme Court ushered in legal abortion for American women when it decided in Roe v. Wade. Today, states—particularly in the South and Midwest—are eroding that right by legislating hundreds of provisions intended to impede access with burdensome obstacles. To understand more fully the complex state of access to abortion services in America, The Daily Beast identified and confirmed the location of the country’s remaining 724 clinics and calculated the distance from every part of the country to its closest clinic. (
more)
posted by Artw
on Jan 24, 2013 -
26 comments
In on attempted murder . . . According to evidence cited by Diane McWhorter in today's NYT:
Bull Connor, eased out but still active, organized a police assassination plot against Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. The conspiracy failed, but it was known to the Birmingham News beforehand. (The News was & is owned by the Newhouse family -- Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, etc). According to McWhorter, the paper also funded and collaborated in police spying on civil rights activists.
McWhorter won a Pulitzer for Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. Her point in today's piece is to recall how wide and deep the Jim Crow violence machine operated.
Good And Evil In Birmingham
posted by LonnieK
on Jan 21, 2013 -
11 comments
Jennie Linn McCormack "isn’t the only woman in recent years to be prosecuted for ending her own pregnancy. But her case could change the trajectory of abortion law in the United States":
The Rise of DIY Abortions.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jan 3, 2013 -
66 comments
A woman wanting a mans-style hair-cut was
denied one by a Toronto barber because his religion forbids him from touching a woman he is not related to. The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario is expected to hear the issue if
mediation fails, as a
competing rights issue where there is a conflict between two individuals exercising their rights. The
OBA (warning, cheesy music autoplay) defends some Barbershops as a men's-only space tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, while others point to womens-only spaces like
spas that are allowed to continue to operate while discriminating against men.
posted by saucysault
on Nov 15, 2012 -
239 comments
Surveillance Camera Man (SL Vimeo) is a man who acts like a surveillance camera. However, he is not ceiling-mounted like most surveillance cameras. He takes video of people in public and private places. Most people have a problem with him, creating conflict. One person actually likes him.
posted by ignignokt
on Oct 29, 2012 -
68 comments
"Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual, and most of my friends are Jewish homosexuals, and some of my best friends are black homosexuals, and I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends." - Merle Miller.
In 1970, two years after Stonewall,
Joseph Epstein wrote a cover story for Harper’s Magazine,
Homo/hetero: The struggle for sexual identity, that came to chilling conclusions: "I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth." His incendiary language prompted author/journalist/writer Merle Miller to come out of the closet in the New York Times Magazine, with an angry and poignant plea for dignity, understanding and respect: "What It Means to Be a Homosexual." 40 years later,
that essay helped inspire the launch of the "It Gets Better" campaign. Via [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 17, 2012 -
62 comments
Civil Rights CAPTCHA is unique in its approach at separating humans from bots, namely by using human emotion. This enables a simpler and more effective way of keeping sites spam free as well as taking a stand for human rights.
posted by mahershalal
on Oct 7, 2012 -
107 comments
"Shut Up and Dance’s 1991 hardcore LP ‘Dance Before the Police Come’ was released at a time when the UK authorities were struggling to contain the massive explosion of raves. Thousands of people each weekend were playing a cat and mouse game with the police to party in fields and warehouses, and if the state was often outwitted by meeting points in motorway service stations and convoys of cars, it tried to keep the lid on the phenomenon by staging high profile raids."
Dance before the police come: a social history, covering UK (and US) raves, queer activism, morality police (both figurative and literal) and racial discrimination.
[more inside]
posted by Len
on Jul 9, 2012 -
14 comments
In 1971, "decades before any state had seriously considered legalizing gay marriage, long before anyone had thought of creating—never mind repealing—a policy called “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” before Reagan, before AIDS, before the American Psychiatric Association determined that homosexuality was not a mental illness, and before half the people currently living in America were even born, a man named John Singer stepped into the King County marriage license office in Seattle."
Meet Faygele ben Miriam, the radical activist who pioneered the fight for same-sex marriage in Washington State, 41 years ago. Via.
posted by zarq
on Jun 7, 2012 -
16 comments
Joyce Banda, who was
recently sworn in as Malawi's first ever female president has
announced plans to repeal her country's laws against homosexuality in her first state of nation address. She said:
"Some laws which were duly passed by the august house... will be repealed as a matter of urgency... these include the provisions regarding indecent practices and unnatural acts."
More than two-thirds of African countries have laws criminalising homosexual acts with imprisionment, abuse and even murder being served as punishment to generally widespread public support. This, coupled with Malawi hosting the African summit in July makes Banda's move all the more laudable.
posted by jamiemch
on May 21, 2012 -
25 comments
The Washington State Senate has approved SB 6239, a bill granting marriage equality, in a 28-21 vote. It now moves on to the House, where its passage is all but assured, then to the desk of Governor Gregoire, who
started the process earlier this year and has promised to sign it.
But,
then what? As in 2009, when citizens voted 53-47 in favor of
Referendum 71 to reject overturning the legislature's domestic partnership bill, the bill will likely be subject to a citizen referendum, rendering it temporarily inactive until approved by popular vote. A recent poll found that
55% of voters would approve that measure. If that holds true, same-sex marriages could begin in Washington State starting December 7th, 2012.
posted by 0xFCAF
on Feb 2, 2012 -
70 comments
On the same day that NJ governor Chris Christie
announced that he has nominated an openly gay African-American Republican mayor to the state’s highest court, Washington state's legislature has
announced that they have the votes to pass the same sex-marriage bill that the governor has already promised to sign. Washington will be the seventh state to have same sex marriages.
[more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Jan 23, 2012 -
70 comments
On the
6th of December 2011, as has been traditional for the past 9 decades since Finland's Independence, the President, Tarja Halonen and her spouse, Dr Pentti Arajarvi
host what is known as the
Linnan juhlat or Castle Ball, an
extremely popular televised reception for the notables of the nation. Along with the usual dignitaries, the President is also permitted to select invitees based on merit - entertainers, athletes, individuals - whom she feels have been in the news in the past year.
This year Peter and Teija Vesterbacka also were invited due to Peter Vesterbacka's work as the CMO of Rovio. Teija Vesterbacka wore a red dress for the evening that had design concepts from one of the birds in the mobile game Angry Birds.
Highlighted
in the Finnish news by the very select group of photographers permitted entry to this exclusive event, it was when the photograph of this dress went viral among global MSM that
the angry birds began to fly.
posted by infini
on Dec 8, 2011 -
29 comments
