This is a great video sharing SGI Nichiren Buddhism as well as one young man's personal transformation.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
JUDGE RULES FOR GAY RIGHTS ADVOCATES IN SPOUSAL HEALTH CARE SUIT
State employees in California can sue for discrimination over the government's exclusion of their same-sex spouses from long term health benefits, a federal judge has ruled.
In a ruling issued on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken of Oakland said the couples can proceed with a lawsuit they filed in April against the U.S. Treasury Department and the California Public Employees' Retirement System, known as CalPERS. Wilken said that two federal laws used to deny the same-sex spouses the right to buy long-term care insurance "do not bear a rational relationship to a legitimate government interest."
The two laws are the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriage, and a section of the Internal Revenue Code that prohibits same-sex spouses from receiving favorable tax treatment for insurance plans. Wilken did not explicitly strike down the DOMA law, but said it could not be used as a basis for dismissing the lawsuit. She turned down a bid by the U.S. Justice Department for dismissal and said the case can go to trial.
They add: "The three couples in the CalPERS lawsuit - Michael Dragovich and Michael Gaitley, Elizabeth Litteral and Patricia Fitzsimmons, and Carolyn Light and Cheryl Light - were married during a five-month window in 2008 when same-sex marriage was legal in California."
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
LEGISLATION INTRODUCED TO INVALIDATE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE IN IOWA
They are really just that scared of homos. We must be very powerful. Supernatural powers:
They are really just that scared of homos. We must be very powerful. Supernatural powers:
Marriage equality is being challenged in the Iowa legislature, the Iowa Independent reports:
A constitutional amendment that would mandate that marriage between one man and one woman is the only legal union that is valid or recognized in the state was introduced Wednesday in the Iowa House, marking the beginning of what promises to be one of the most contentious debates of the 2011 legislative session.
Fifty-six of the GOP’s 60-member majority signed on as co-sponsors to House Joint Resolution 6. Four Republican lawmakers — Peter Cownie, Steven Lukan, Scott Raecker and David Tjepkes — and all 40 Democrats refused to sign on as co-sponsors. The legislation goes beyond just banning same-sex marriage. It would also ban civil unions, domestic partnerships and any other legal recognition of same-sex couples.
The amendment would invalidate the Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous 2009 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage.
Democrats still have a majority in the Senate, however, and State Senator Mike Gronstal has vowed to block any attempts to bring up an anti-gay amendment.
Be Who You Are - Transgender Book
From Sarah Hoffman - go to this blogpost for a chance to win a free copy.
Be Who You Are is a new book out for transgender kids, written by Jennifer Carr and illustrated by Ben Rumback. Carr was kind enough to send me a copy of the book to give away to one of my readers.
The book tells the story of Nick, a child with a boy’s body who feels like a girl inside. His teachers do not understand—but his parents love him just the way he is. Be Who You Are models what it looks like for a transgender child to have a family who is 100% behind him, who seeks out the care required for children so different from their peers to feel wholly themselves. It’s the story of the self-respect that comes when your parents say, “Be who you are…We love you any way you feel.”
Every family of a transgender child should have this book. (Buy your copy here.) I would like to see Be Who You Are on every school bookshelf, in every public library, in every doctor’s waiting room—all the trusted places kids and parents go—so that children like Nick know that they are not alone. This book will introduce the gender-normative world to the idea that there are trans kids out there, and that there are parents who accept and love them. And it shows trans kids that they are okay, that they are loved, and that they are not alone.
In the end, Nick decides that she wants to be called Hope. Carr says, “When her parents called her Hope, she felt right for the very first time.”
Bomb Found On MLK Day Parade Route, Says FBI
The discovery before Monday's parade for the slain civil rights leader raised the possibility of a racial motive in a region that has been home to the white supremacist Aryan Nations.
"The confluence of the holiday, the march and the device is inescapable," said Frank Harrill, special agent in charge of the Spokane FBI office. "But we are not at the point where we can draw any particular motive."
He called the planting of the bomb an act of domestic terrorism that was clearly designed to advance a political or social agenda.
The suspicious backpack was spotted by three city employees about an hour before the parade was to start, Harrill said. They looked inside, saw wires and immediately alerted law enforcement.
The parade route was changed to avoid the device. A bomb disposal unit disabled it without incident, he said.
Harrill declined to release details of the device, other than to call it a functional bomb that could have caused multiple casualties.
"The potential for injury and death were clearly present," Harrill said.
The FBI received no warnings in advance and did not have a suspect, Harrill said. No one has claimed credit for planting the bomb.
The agency decided to appeal to the public for information and offered the $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
"Subject should be considered armed and dangerous," the agency said in its announcement.
The agency released photos of the backpack and two shirts found inside.
Another explosive device was found March 23 beside the Thomas S. Foley U.S. Courthouse in downtown Spokane. No arrests have been made in that investigation, Harrill said, and agents didn't know if the two incidents were related.
The Spokane region and adjacent northern Idaho have had numerous incidents of anti-government and white supremacist activity during the past three decades.
The most visible was by Aryan Nations, whose leader Richard Butler gathered racists and anti-Semites at his compound for two decades. Butler was bankrupted and lost the compound in a civil lawsuit in 2000 and died in 2004.
In December, a man in Hayden, Idaho, built a snowman on his front lawn shaped like a member of the Ku Klux Klan holding a noose. The man knocked the pointy-headed snowman down after getting a visit from sheriff's deputies.
Amen...
I would like to ask that anyone with video editing skills please edit out the speech and leave behind the chorus and string it together.
BREAKING NEWS: MLK Approves of War.....
Pentagon Official: King Would Support Iraq, Afghan Wars (VIDEO)
Read More: Afghanistan, Defense Department, Department Of Defense, Iraq, Jeh Johnson, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther King War, Mlk, MLK Day, Mlk War,Pentagon, Video, World News
WASHINGTON -- Although the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is best remembered by the American public for fighting against racial discrimination, he was also an outspoken opponent of war and violence, most notably of the war in Vietnam. A top Obama administration official at the Department of Defense, however, argued Thursday that if King were alive, he would understand and perhaps even support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At a Pentagon commemoration of King's accomplishments, DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson suggested that today's wars are in line with the reverend's teachings.
"I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack," Johnson said. "Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness -- the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968."
In April 1967, King spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War in a landmark speech at Riverside Church in New York City, criticizing the large amounts of money the United States was spending on fighting rather than taking care of its citizens domestically:
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. [...]This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Salon's Justin Elliott wrote that while it's impossible to know what King would think of today's wars, this speech "strongly suggests that he would be an opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, for that matter, the secret wars in Yemen and Pakistan."
WATCH:
We've all thought about it at one time...
Since President Obama's election I have routinely thought about the possibility that his life is in true jeopardy. This article gives some of the reasons.
We are faced with an opportunity to transform the violent rhetoric and true interpersonal violence at a variety of levels. What it will take is each one of becoming engaged. It will take each one of us being willing to face truths about our own identity and self. It will take a true human revolution.
Dingell: Current Political Climate Is Similar To When JFK Was Assassinated
WASHINGTON -- While pundits debate whether the tone in Washington will change in the aftermath of the tragic shooting in Arizona, the dean of the U.S. House of Representatives predicts that the respite in vitriol will be short lived.
Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), who has served in the House since 1955, is the chamber's longest continuously serving member. In an interview with The Huffington Post on Tuesday, he compared the current political climate to that of the early 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
"They sort of go in peaks and valleys," Dingell said. "If you'll remember that just before Kennedy was shot, they were using the same kind of rhetoric, and two weeks before, they attacked Lyndon Johnson when he visited Dallas. A little later, Kennedy was shot, and all of a sudden, they said, 'My, this is terrible, we can't do this sort of thing again.' It's as if we're seeing the same type of temporary reform occurring here today."
"One always hopes that these things will be of lasting character," he added, "but there's every reason to assume, given the behavior of these people on the other side, this will be of temporary duration, and we will be hearing the same thing."
In his book Before the Storm, which analyzes the influence of former Arizona senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, historian Rick Perlstein wrote about the climate surrounding Kennedy's trip to Dallas:
Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, was spooked. He had received a letter on November 19 from a Dallas woman: "Don't let the President come down here. I'm worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him." Salinger answered the letter personally: "I appreciate your concern for the president, but it would be a sad day for this country if there were any city in the United States he could not visit without fear of violence. I am confident the people of Dallas will greet him warmly." [...]Extremists were distributing in the street a "WANTED FOR TREASON" handbill produced by General Walker's Dallas business partner, with face-forward and profile "mug shots" of the President. The Dallas Morning News editorialized: "If the speech is about boating you will be among the warmest of admirers. If it is about Cuber [sic], civil rights, taxes, or Vietnam, there will sure as shootin' be some who heave to and let go with a broadside of grapeshot in the presidential rigging." [...]
The newspaper hit the streets as H.L. Hunt, whose son had helped bankroll the ad, took to the radio in full-throated bray to predict that Kennedy's next move after passing the civil rights bill would be revoking the right to bear arms. "In dictatorships," he said, "no firearms are permitted, because they would then have the weapons with which to rise up against their oppressors."
Dingell said that since he has been in office, the number of death threats he has received have jumped significantly and now occasionally involve his wife.
"There's less goodwill, more bad will, more nastiness, more threats," he said. "The occurrence of threats in election time in my own case has gone up, and while I certainly expect threats to me, I find it a matter of deep resentment on my part that the death threats are now being heard by my wife."
Dingell has been outspoken in his condemnation of right-wing rhetoric in the days following the shooting in Tucson that targeted Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). In a Jan. 12 speech on the House floor, he said, "Over the years, I have witnessed horrendous events -- the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. I have seen firsthand the anger brought on by landmark, life changing legislation. The rage during the civil rights debates was unlike anything I had seen, until now. ... What is different today is not the anger and apprehension felt by some in this country, but the inciting speech, dare I say encouragement, given by well-established folks in the seemingly mainstream political parties."
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NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS 01/18/11 07:00 PM
SPOKANE, Wash. — The FBI offered a reward Tuesday for information about a potentially lethal bomb found in a backpack along the downtown route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.