I was originally writing something up on the conservative response to Lt. Dan Choi’s arrest when I wrote this sentence: “If conservatives want us to stop equating their homophobia to the racism that the civil rights movement experienced, they should stop using the same talking points.” I decided to write the following instead of a typical conservatives-freak-out-at-liberal-activism post.
Let us play a game. I am going to give you a quote about the bigotry of the armed forces. I will redact all names, dates, and any words along the lines of “homosexual”, “gay”, “sexual orientation”, “black”, “negro”, “race.” You try to guess what kind of bigot these perfectly rational arguments came from, homophobic or racist! Sounds fun, right?
Yesterday, Lt Dan Choi and a fellow veteran had themselves handcuffed to the White House fence to peacefully protest the Obama administration’s empty words and lack of action on ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” This disgraceful policy allows over 600 military servicemembers per year to be tossed out of the military merely for sexual orientation. They were arrested and held overnight in jail, incommunicado.
Protesters also staged sit ins at Speaker Pelosi’s offices in San Francisco and Washington DC.
A spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi’s office said, this morning, that “they didn’t have the votes” to do anything this year.
Robin McGehee of Fresno, CA, of GetEqual, who was at the arraignment in Washington, DC, is reporting that Lt Dan Choi and Capt Jim Pietrangelo, have been arraigned before the judge this afternoon, and have pled Not Guilty. They have now been released from federal custody and will go to trial April 26. http://twitter.com/speechadvice
“We will not admit guilt in our fight for equality”
“We may have been caged up physically, but many are caged up in their heart.”
– Lt. Dan Choi March 19, 2010
Americablog also had witnesses there yesterday and disputes another version of events being put out by another LGTB group.
Lt. Dan Choi and Capt. Jim Pietrangelo should be released from jail today. They were arrested yesterday after handcuffing themselves to the fence in front of the White House to protest Obama’s inaction on repealing DADT. The President plays a key role in that legislation, but despite a vow to do it in the State of the Union, the White House isn’t moving. It was the first time I’ve seen civil disobedience up close. And, it was intense. To think it’s come to this with the Obama administration. But, it has. This week, Barney Frank made it abundantly clear that the White House really needed to speak out on its desire to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell this year. That was Monday. No word from the White House, which says everything. There is no plan, despite the promises. It seems that everyone in DC knows that, but not everyone will admit it.
There is a plan, Joe. They’re going to ignore you until you make yourself heard, which requires many different ways. Just like with ending the mid east war expansions, getting everybody into a real health care system and not just a junk insurance plan, or forcing the banks to stop stealing people’s life savings, or making the government do something about carbon emissions besides more Nukes, or preserving a woman’s right to chose to bear children.
So don’t let somebody tell you it’s better to use your time to make phone calls on behalf of OFA instead of reading, writing, talking, blogging, protesting, photographing, communicating, and badgering incumbents and candidates.
We’ve (anybody who needs equality, and that is all of us, rich, poor, all colors, all genders, all faiths) got a plan, too.
Accountability.
_______
updated to add link to my diary yesterday, and the americablog link
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.
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.
:: ::
Chris Britt, Comics.com, see reader comments in the State Journal-Register
Crossposted at Daily Kos. If you choose to recommend it there, the Rec Button may have been pushed to the bottom after the last diary comment made.
THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.
:: ::
Chris Britt, see reader comments in the State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL)
Jacob Heilbrunn has a new essay up at the Huffington Post titled “Please, Cut Obama Some Slack.” It is Exhibit A in hero mythology of the President, as well as a prime example of chastising anyone — even progressives — who would dare criticize any of Obama’s policies.
A year ago, Barack Obama was a hero for Democrats. Now he’s becoming a villain. Have the Democrats lost their minds?
The tenebrous story is recounted by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, who notes that some liberals are even starting to join forces with the tea party to decry Obama over the confirmation of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The decriers are also upset about Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, the administration’s readiness to make concessions on health care, its failure to shutter Guantanamo, along with a host of other grievances.
Apparently, because some liberals have chosen not to regard President Obama as a “hero” and have begun to seriously question some of the policies of the Obama Administration, that qualifies Heilbrunn to assert that those same liberals have “lost their minds.” Heilbrunn doesn’t identify in his article who those allegedly insane Democrats are — though for the record, Dana Milbank does, naming liberal voices such as Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, MoveOn.org, John Conyers, and Alan Grayson as the progressives who are supposedly “joining forces with the tea party,” to use Heilbrunn’s language.
This post is written in response to a very well-crafted argument against the resumption of military conscription. What I will say is that I have engaged in hypothetical discussions at times about what the resumption of a draft would produce in reality, versus what goals and reforms we might assume would transpire as a result. I’m not entirely sure that I agree that those who advocate the return of conscription are making specious or at best hypocritical arguments. Though I am opposed to war in all forms, one cannot disagree that war shapes so much of our consciousness and influences who we are as both Americans and humans to a degree that we are sometimes unaware of its complete impact. War and warfare is that pervasive and it is that enmeshed in who we are as a people that merely criticizing it from the outside may not simply be sufficient.
In another online forum, I suggested that perhaps if women were included in the draft that their presence might successfully overturn gender-based inequalities and begin to reform Patriarchal excesses. A previous generation of Feminists believed that the way to be recognized as the equals of men was to de facto refine the idea of masculinity by building it into its own image and idealized notion. Feminists of today have taken special care to embrace their femininity and sex while simultaneously redefining both in an effort to also reshape repressive ideas of masculinity and manhood. Gender as a social construct has become especially problematic to many, since transgender and intersex rights have turned conventional gender norms and gender arguments completely upside down. If applied to current draft regulations, it could easily raise a huge to-do.
The truth of the matter is that if a draft were resumed today, only men would be drafted. My argument, which again was set forth purely as food for thought, was that if women wished for full equality with men then they ought to seriously consider lobbying to be included as part of the process. My rationale for this was that women have for far too long been seen purely as keepers of the hearth and home and that their presumed status solely as nurturing figures and caregivers is restrictive and based on assumption, rather than reality. Another huge can of worms that goes along with this is that if Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell were ever to be revoked and if LGBTs were allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, the draft laws as written would apply to gay men, but not to lesbians. One gets in thornier territory than that when the question of trans men, trans women, and intersex individuals enters the picture. When we are only now beginning to confront the fact that what constitutes “male” and what constitutes “female” is far more fluid than any of us could have ever before believed, then we see what happens when the gender binary falls unforgivably short.
I seek not to seem ignorant or unaware of draft board realities. My own father did not serve in Vietnam because of his high draft number. By sheer luck, the highest number called for his group was 125 and, since the system focused on date of birth to determine draft status, his announced number 215 worked out in his favor. Still, Dad was labeled 1-A (available for military service) and taking no chances he continued to pursue a college degree and served for a time as a state trooper, since both of these options made it unlikely that he would be forced to serve in combat. I do recognize that if those times were our own, then as now, those unable to afford college or so poor that they could not use the privilege of middle class or upper class affluence to their benefit, advantages that most of us take for granted—they would be the first to go. My grandfather used his business connections with the people at the local county draft board to ensure that his sons did not go to Southeast Asia. In business, in politics, and in all of capitalism, ultimately it comes down to precisely who you know.
Assuming the draft was (God forbid) ever resumed, perhaps a brand new group of underprivileged souls would be sent off to fight and die. It’s not as though gay men live and are born only in affluent cities, states, or regions. Nor is homosexuality a phenomenon relegated purely to Whites. Perhaps the recent transitioned trans man, fresh from top surgery finds zirself for the first time as a prime target to be forced to fight for a country that still hasn’t quite acknowledged the unique struggles of transgenders. One would hope that if this situation were ever to come to pass that it would not force trans men to be disinclined to undergo the process of claiming a gender of which they were not assigned at birth while desperately seeking to feel authentic to who they are inside. One would also hope that resentment would not build within the gay community due to the unfortunate fact that gay men could be sent off to die but gay women could not.
One now understands why Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, for all its flaws, is still in force. But I do understand my history, as well, and I know that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment raised the uniform voting age in this country from 21 to 18. A compelling argument raised by young Vietnam War Protesters, which stated that young men who were being drafted and sent to die in the jungles were without the right to vote in or vote out the legislators who were in charge of making that awful decision—this push led to resolute action. Quite unlike the legislative logjam we are now facing today in other reform measures, the process of enactment and ratification was not a particularly contentious one and it didn’t take long for the amendment to take effect. When I consider today how many eighteen to twenty year olds only vote when the name Obama is on the ballot, it really makes me sad. Yet, at least that right exists, and at least combined effort towards good produced satisfactory results. We might learn from that when it comes down to pushing our own unique ends and aims. If we are going to increase the scope and span of conscription, an act so unfair and so completely unjustified as to border on complete evil, perhaps we might be forced to learn some lessons and to confront the hypocrisies that don’t merely influence some, but influence all.
Welcome to the 18th installment of “Considered Forthwith.”
This weekly series looks at the various committees in the House and the Senate. Committees are the workshops of our democracy. This is where bills are considered, revised, and occasionally advance for consideration by the House and Senate. Most committees also have the authority to exercise oversight of related executive branch agencies.
This week, I will look at the House Armed Services Committee and Senate Armed Forces Committees. Obviously, these members are the ones to contact to advance the bill that would repeal the “Don’t ask/don’t tell policy.” These are also the committees that need a proverbial kick in the pants to advance legislation that would close Gitmo. More information below.
Push harder, YELL LOUDER, whatever it takes, Harry Reid. I think many of us in the Democratic party would agree. Now is the time, Harry, now. One or two rogue sell out Senators can not be a monkey wrench in the works, not on health care or EFCA or anything else that this Congress needs to do. That is why we elected you people, for action, not excuses.
PODESTA: And I think that – I suppose I have a little bit of sympathy for Sen. Reid, in the sense that I look around at his caucus and understand how hard his job is. But I don’t think you can settle for a statement like that. I think you have to call out the fact that we’re demanding serious change, and indeed, it is the job of the leadership to round up votes, to push legislation through, to try to get the kind of bold initiatives that the President is talking about passed, and to his desk, and signed. […]
And that, I think, is what we should expect, that’s what we should demand, and that’s what we should put pressure on the members of their caucus to push back on their leadership. You just cannot settle for “What am I supposed to do? I’ve got one outlier who won’t vote for cloture.” We’ve got to both put pressure on the members who are not supporting a progressive agenda, but we’ve also have to put pressure on the leadership to come up with a strategy to find the votes to kind of get these things and move them forward. And we just can’t settle for less than that.
The “statement like that” pointed out by Podesta refers to Reid’s recent statement that Democrats can’t “bulldoze anybody” because we all know that if the GOP had the White House, a filibuster proof Senate and a huge House majority they would never in a million years do that to us, right?
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.
Today the Obama administration will attempt to make amends to the GLBT community by granting Federal Benefits to the partners of Federal Employees who are involved in same sex relationships. This, as far as it goes, is a good thing. The problem is it is a case of too little, too late. The mounting fervor in the GLBT community over what is, rightly, perceived as a lack of priority on this communities issues has been a bit of a wake up call for the Obama Administration. The problem is they are just rolling over and hitting the snooze button, instead of waking up.
