Tag: Iowa

Two Iowa transwomen have won the right to use public women’s restrooms, while one transwoman has been denied the use of women’s facilities at the Burlington, IA YMCA.

In 2007 Iowa added gender identity to the state’s nondiscrimination policies.  In the fiscal year 2008, there were six complaints filed with the Iowa Civil Rights Commission on the basis of gender identity.  That has increased to 51 complaints in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2013.  Beth Townsend, director of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission attributes that to increased awareness about the Iowa Civil Rights Act.

The new law does require … that individuals are permitted to access (restrooms) in accordance with their gender identity, rather than their assigned sex at birth, without being harassed or questioned.

–Sara Stibitz, civil rights specialist with the Commission

I’m pretty gosh-darned frightened, America.  Frightened of what’s happenin’ to this great country of ours when a beloved fly-over state like Iowa turns its activist judges loose to pee on the holy institution of marriage.  Are patriotic Americans expected to stand idly by while gay people try to sign the same piece of paper in a church?  In a state with the first presidential caucus no less?  It’s time to draw a line in the sand!  Or dirt, in Iowa’s case.

We learned from Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas in his devastating essay (posted by Duke in its entirety at Sanctuary), that there were horrible travesties of both the law and justice itself in how the Postville, Iowa raid was executed.

As Dr. Camayd-Freixas said, speaking of his conversation with one of the immigration judges who had no choice but to rule as a rubber-stamp for the ICE:

As a citizen, I want our judges to administer justice, not a federal agency.

Yet that is exactly what happened.  A federal agency administered “justice” and the defense attorneys and judges were helpless to change anything.  As a result, an entire town was ripped apart, economic devastation ensued, and as we now see (h/t woc phd by way of symsess’ great roundups at Sanctuary), the human rights abuses continue:

Women were deeply impacted by the raids. First, female workers at Postville were part of the round up. The lost access to their children, including babies that were still nursing, without warning nor concern. For others, many of the primary or main source of income in their household was permanently removed. In many cases, the raids also labeled these women as undocumented, ensuring that they could not work. Others, afraid of being deported in a raid, did not return to their jobs. The result is that most of the women are also unemployed and unable to be employed.

For women who did not immediately hear about the raids, there was also the fear and confusion about the location of their sons and husbands. Some women went for days without knowing what had happened. As fear turned into confirmation that men were being held for deportation, women’s anxieties and stressers went up.

Hooray for us Iowans!  Our long regional nightmare is over!

President Bush visited Cedar Rapids and Iowa City today to personally vanquish the Godless floods that have caused so much damage over the last two weeks.  And John McCain visited Columbus Junction, IA, to vanquish things a few miles downstream from the President.  They shrewdly made separate trips so as to maximize the disruption to local recovery efforts.

(the President recoils in horror as he encounters an average Iowan)

Join us over at the EENR Blog for a live blog with IA-4 Democratic candidate Kevin Miskell! At 4pm pacific time Kevin Miskell will be at EENR to answer any questions you have about his run for Congress in Iowa’s 4th district. Hope to see you there!

Kevin Miskell is a fifth generation Iowa farmer from Story County, Iowa. When family farmers were facing an economic crisis under Reagan, Miskell became very involved in his community working to help save family farms. Here’s a snippet from Miskell’s website about his backround as a family farm advocate:

For the past 21 years, he has been active in grassroots politics across the state, promoting sustainable agriculture and fighting to protect the environment. During these past two decades, Kevin has worked with elected officials on both the state and national level on legislation relating to agriculture, rural economic development and renewable energy.

During the past four years, Kevin served as Vice President of Iowa Farmers Union, a grassroots organization that promotes the viability of small family farms and sustainable agriculture.

Since 2003 Kevin has worked on the staff of three presidential campaigns. In 2003, he worked for Senator Bob Graham. When Graham dropped out of the race, Kevin was hired by Senator John Edwards’ campaign to serve as his Midwestern Director of Rural Policy and Outreach and worked again in this capacity in 2008.

More below the fold….

xpost at kos

While 1500 delegates to the Michigan Democratic State Convention were approving, by acclamation, a resolution supporting legal access to cannabis as medication (On Monday, an Initiative was approved for the Statewide November Ballot), Iowa Senator Tom Harkin replied to letter from a constituent/patient with hyperbole that would make even a Republican White House Drug Czar blush.

Meawhile, the Illinois Senate’s Health Committee holds a hearing today on a State Medical Marijuana bill. Action link