UPDATE: 6:20 pm EDT: The Innocence Project reports that the US Supreme Court has issued a stay that prevents the execution of Hank Skinner.
Hank Skinner
Texas plans to kill death row prisoner Hank Skinner by lethal injection today. Even though DNA from the crime scene has never been tested, and even though Skinner has insisted for more than sixteen years that he is innocent, Texas plans today to have its inexorable revenge against Skinner for a triple homicide. Stopping the execution now so that DNA testing can be conducted depends on long shots: Texas Governor Rick Perry and last minute appeals to the Supreme Court.
Lt. Dan Choi, a nationally known LGBT activist and Iraq War veteran who the military is attempting to discharge because of its Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, led a group of protesters to the White House today, where he and Capt. Jim Pietrangelo let themselves be handcuffed to the wrought iron fence in an act of peaceful civil disobedience. They were subsequently arrested and are now being held in jail pending court tomorrow.
United States Park Police spokesman Sgt. David Schlosser told The Advocate that both men were taken to Park Police’s Anacostia station, where they were charged with failure to obey a lawful order. Choi and Pietrangelo will be held overnight and are scheduled to appear in D.C. Superior Court on Friday.
“You’ve been told that the White House has a plan,” Choi told rally attendees. “But we learned this week that the president is still not fully committed. … Following this rally, I will be leading [the protest] to the White House to say ‘enough talk.’ … I am still standing, I am still fighting, I am still speaking out, and I am still gay.”
Lt Choi and Capt Pietrangelo, handcuffed to the fence at the White House on March 18, 2010, while the crowd chants “Equality….. NOW ! ”
Despite the Democrats holding the majority in the House and Senate since 2006, and the White House since January 2009, during campaigns which Democratic candidates called for the repeal of DADT, nothing has changed much in that soldiers who are outed in terms of their sexuality can still be discharged against their will for nothing but being attracted to the same gender irregardless of performance and duty. This in spite of the issue of inequality being used for fundraising purposes, people seeking justice have been told “not now, it’s too controversial while we’re doing something else first” repeatedly. While the President finally mentioned the topic in this year’s state of the Union address, he intends to put language about it into a fiscal appropriations bill for next year.
In the fiscal years since the policy was first introduced in 1993, the military has discharged over 13,000 troops from the military under DADT.[23][51][52] The number of discharges per year under DADT dropped sharply after the September 11 attacks and has remained relatively low since. Discharges exceeded 600 every year until 2009. Statistics on the number of persons discharged per year follow:
2007 — 627 discharged
2008 — 619 discharged
2009 — so far 428 discharged so far
Rick Sanchez of CNN does a good job covering this in this video. Lt. Choi and Capt. Pietrangelo chained themselves to the White House fence today, then were arrested, in an act of peaceful civil disobedience to protest the lack of action on the ENDA Non Discrimination Act, and for ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military. Choi is an Iraq veteran.
The protest at the White House was followed by sit ins at House Speaker Pelosi’s offices in San Francisco and in Washington, DC later that afternoon by LGBTQ activists with “Get Equal.” http://www.getequal.org/getenda/ Per their website, 4 people have been arrested at Speaker Pelosi’s Washington DC office. The ones arrested in San Francisco have been cited and released. twitter for Get Equal http://twitter.com/getequal
The group appears to be convinced that the administration and Congress are not moving forward with gay-rights legislation, despite Obama’s call in the State of the Union for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and assurances that ENDA is being explored. This week, however, The Advocate published an article in which Barney Frank claimed that the administration wanted to push the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” into next year.
According to GetEqual’s statement: “ENDA legislation has been stuck in the House Committee on Education and Labor since last year. Contrary to what has been told to many LGBTQ allies in Congress, The Hill reported in December that Pelosi assured Democrats she would not bring any controversial bills to the floor for a vote this year.”
But activists say that politics should take a back seat to human rights and basic safety. “A recent study on discrimination found that 97 percent of transgender people who responded had experienced some level of harassment and 26 percent had been fired simply for being transgender,” said David McElhatton, who is described in the statement as a transgender activist who participated in the San Francisco action today. “We thought we had an ally in Nancy Pelosi, but she has taken our equality for granted. We are not going to let up on her until she takes action to ensure that we are all protected in the workplace.”
Human rights are civil rights. We can’t be invading country after country on the rationalization of some sort of mission to “democracize” them with western values when we continue to discriminate here at home on the basis of religious and gender identity. These people who are willing to defend and even die for us, only wish to continue to serve their country honorably.
I’ll be mercifully brief. I just listened to a program on KPFA which is an interview with Michelle Alexander speaking of her new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Basically, her contention that the 5 fold increase in incarceration in this country is thew way the elites have managed to use prisons as a means of social control as industries have moved away from population centers and left in its wake unsustainable ghettos. Which were invaded, starting under Reagan, by federally subsidized efforts to incarcerate a high proportion of African-American men through the spectacularly disproportionate application of drug laws against the poor and, largely, ignoring the white middle-class. SWAT Teams were sent in and funded to roust people out of their beds, seize and confiscate their property and deprive them of their civil rights.
(This started out as a reply comment in a recommended diary over at GOS by Bill in Portland, Maine, to somebody who said the Veto 1 sure looked like Prop 8, and it sort of took on a life of its own as I started putting in the links.)
The PR on “Yes on People’s Veto # 1” in Maine- It’s being run by Schubert Flint, http://www.schubertpa.com/who_… the exact same Sacramento- based Republican PR firm that ran the Prop 8 campaign here in CA last year, to drag Republicans across the finish line, with laundered tax free donation money.
This is just another job for people like this, altho they won’t put it up on their Schubert Flint website under the “past successes” category.
There is still LOTS of out of state money going east towards Maine- as I have said in several other comments, it’s just not going to be obvious unless one knows where to look.
There was a time, in the 1990s, when “boy bands” walked tall in the musical world. New stars with names like “BoyzIIMen” and “Backstreet Boys” and “*NSYNC” were everywhere to be seen, and positioned prominently within this firmament of stars was an Irish band, “Boyzone”.
One of the five members of Boyzone’s most famous lineup, Stephen Gately, died over the weekend in Mallorca, aged 33, much to the dismay of the group’s fans and friends.
Because Gately came out at the height of his career, and at considerable risk to his (and the group’s) “brand” prospects, the LBGT community is experiencing considerable dismay over the loss as well.
Today’s story, however, isn’t about any of that.
Instead, we’ll consider what’s likely to happen to Gately’s estate.
The point of the exercise? With this being one of the most prominent deaths of a gay celebrity to occur since civil commitment came to pass, and with Mr. Gately being legally committed to husband Andrew Cowles at the time of his death, it seems like a good time to examine how the law responds to these situations in the UK-and how it could work in the United States.
Wow. So this is what can happen if you’re a woman, you get assaulted, and you call the police for help. The police come and arrest you, then hold you down while male cops forcibly strip search you, and someone videotapes the whole process.
From Cleveland Ohio.
Cops in this country are absolutely out of control. They’ll taser anyone, mothers in front of their kids, grandmothers, they don’t care, a cop with a taser is a fucking menace to society.
And now male officers forcibly strip searching women? This is in direct violation of the Sheriff Department’s own official policy on strip searches.
Videotaping this was fuel on the fire of this woman’s humiliation, but at the same time, it’s the only evidence we have as to what really happened. According to the news report, the police are holding back other video, not providing it to the woman’s lawyers.
Recently a good friend here on teh toobz was banned from public discourse in a private setting, a limitation of his personal freedom of speech in a private place. Though he was offered reinstatement, he refused it on principle. He stood by his perinciple. He defended his freedom.
Personally, I think the whole situation sucks.
But MUCH BIGGER than that was the Police State RIOT SQUADS brutal response to PROPERTY DAMAGE in Pittsburgh, PA this weekend, when protestors without Government permission to exercisize.
This is my point.
If you have to ASK PERMISSION to use your rights, you never really had that right in the first place.
So, the Dog very rarely posts on the same issue in the same week, but this is a kind of breaking and important news, so please forgive the old hound as he breaks his own rules. As you may know, the great State of Maine has passed marriage equality for its gay citizens. This is a very, very big deal as it is the first State to do so without litigation as the basis of the action by the legislature. Mainers, being the good small d democrats they are also have what is known as a citizens veto provision. If you live in Maine and can get the signatures, you can get a vote to override action by the legislature. This is what is happening now in Maine. The Anti’s (the theocratic forces who don’t think all citizens should have equal rights to marry) have gotten the signatures and are trying to override the legislature.
Update: You People Rock! We have already raised the 10,000 required to get the matching 10,000 from our anonymous donor. He is so impressed that he has agreed to match everything up to 20,000 raised by midnight EST Friday. We are already at 16,098 right now, so we only have to raise 3,902 in the next 11 hours!
So, if you have not donated, here is you very last chance to make you money count twice as much towards full civil rights for all citizens!
The Dog is at the Netroots Nation and it is fabulous! For those playing our home game this week the Dog is going to try to post as many posts about being here as possible! This post is about the first panel of the day. It was titled Prop 8 and beyond. Marriage Equality for all 50 States.
I think it’s time, once again, to talk about police abuse, the violation of citizens’ rights by police officers, and their being held to a different, lower standard of conduct than other citizens. I think that’s the core of the Henry Louis Gates arrest. And I think the commentaries that focus on the illegal arrest of Dr. Gates just as examples of racism and/or classism to the exclusion of the societal role of out-of-control police are missing the boat. Of course, the poor, people of color, immigrants, the disenfranchised, the powerless are the usual objects of police abuse. But the primary, ugly problem that needs to be confronted is that the police are unrestrained and repeatedly commit illegal acts with impunity.
This old post from April, 2006 makes my point far better than yet another re-hashing of the illegal arrest of Dr. Gates in his own home by Cambridge Police. And it even goes a long way toward explaining why the offending officer has been invited to a beer at the White House rather than a deposition in a federal civil rights case in which he is the named defendant.
Pride Month has come and gone, Gentle Reader, with no comment from this desk.
It’s not that I’m in some way insensitive to the subject; instead it’s more of a desire, once again, to stay off the beaten path.
And in that spirit, I do indeed have a story of Gay History…but it’s not from the Summer of ’69…instead, this story was already well underway before the Summer of ’29.
So put on something très chic and let’s head on over to Harlem…at the time of the Renaissance…because it’s time to meet Gladys Bentley.
Last week I posted a diary about LGBT legislation before Congress, suggesting that all was not doom and gloom in the fight for LGBT rights. Now there’s more good news coming down the pipeline: on Friday the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posted on its website the words that activists have been waiting years to see:
Title: Medical Examination of Aliens: Removal of HIV Infection as a Communicable Disease of Public Health Significance
With this we move one significant step closer to getting rid of one of the worst and most discriminatory bits of immigration law currently on the books: the HIV travel ban.
