Fight Fire… With Boobies!

Thanks, Huffpost, for the highlight of my day if not my whole adult life, ever!

How you like THEM apples, churchladies? Hrm... not so much apples as ... you know what, I got better places for my foot than my mouth.

When the local church down your street makes a point of protesting your gentlmen’s club all the time, take down people’s license plates, and stalk them with questions about “does your family know you come here?”, you could cower and close shop.

Or you, as a gainfully and legally employed individual can tell them to go to the same hell they think anyone but their narrowminded asses is headed for. My favorite part about this story is how sympathetic even some of the congregation is and brings the ladies cookies! Even the church further up the road thinks their brethren and sistren are outta line here.

Facebook ’em

Gotta love social networking. It’s given us such important powers and privileges that we could never imagine living without. Consider what life would be like without bathroom photos of underage women who forget to flush the toilet behind their half nude bodies, things to stick captions on and render immortal as their fed to “FFFFFFFF” guy and Pedo Bear, and every horrible person you hoped to get away from after high school now able to stalk you.

I’m cynical perhaps. But with all these astonishing blessings, Facebook just happened to find another group of people to give an “extra special” privilege to.

Being banned for having pics up of a FtM’s post-operative chest on your account.

This story is blowing up across various blogs, but as near as I can tell comes first from VUE out of Edmonton. They report on the account ban against Dominic Scaia, after he posted pics of his naked chest on his profile. Anyone who’s even glanced at social network will know this is par for the course. Except, being a transsexual man, apparently, he still has a woman’s breasts according to Facebook’s moderators. Nevermind the expensive, painful, surgery he endured to remove them, they’re still there, no matter what, in the eyes of the “ew, ew, ew” crowd.

That alone is a kick in the teeth, but I ask another question. What makes all breasts pornographic anyway? Why can’t it be like the difference between, say, potential and kinetic energy? You know, tits at rest are potentially porn, but tits covered in chocolate and having the nips pulled between someone’s teeth are at “pornographic escape velocity”.

Mississippi School Erases Lesbian Student from Yearbook

Oh Mississippi. The ACLU must be so tired of visiting you. The same state that has seen the highly publicized legal battle unfold over Constance McMillien is back in the news.

Before all the prom drama, we previously covered the story of Ceara Sturgis, an honor student at Wesson Attendance Center who had her senior photo banned from the yearbook because she rocked a tux. She fought the decision with the help of the ACLU, and now yearbooks have been printed… with no trace of Sturgis AT ALL. No photo. No name. Nothing.

Ironically, with all the news coverage more people will see the photo that high school officials tried to ban. Object lesson: Courage gets you recognized.

And what does cowardice and hatred get you? Angry calls and e-mails! Wesson Attendance Center needs to hear that they cannot go around erasing students from their yearbook.

Principal Ronald Greer can be reached here: rdgreer@copiah.k12.ms.us

Principal Oscar Hawkins can be reached here: ohawkins@copiah.k12.ms.us

The school’s phone number is (601) 643-2221 and their fax number is (601) 643-2458

Find them on the web here

Oh Mississippi, when are you going to learn…

Spill your guts

“Woodhull Freedom Foundation wants your personal essays about how you experience (or don’t experience) sexual freedom in America. Essays should be approximately 500-1000 words, and should be engaging and well-written. Selected essays will be published on our website or our blogsites, and you will always receive credit for your work. Please include the name you’d like it published under and a brief (one to two sentence) bio.”

 

Submissions should be sent to kbartlett @ woodhullfoundation . org.

Get Moving

Movement feels good. This is what I try to remind myself of all the time when my lazy habits try to convince me that exercise isn’t worth the effort. Or to take the elevator up that one floor to my classes instead of the stairs. Or to coo sexily at someone so they’ll get me that white russian over there.

Fine, so that last one is a different kind of exercise, worthy in its own right. But the point here is, movement may seem difficult or trying, but it’s also often rewarding in its own right. Process over product.

And how’s this for a movement? Not in Our Town is about using sophisticated social media to link up people who, you know, give a damn about their communities and reinforcing their identity as loving, accepting people, by targeting the sites of hate crimes and the demonstrations of hate groups, exposing them, and countering with nonviolent demonstrations of pretty much what they’ve always been doing: loving each other.

I just wanna make them all cupcakes or something. Even my flying monkeys can smell the "nurture" pheromones I must now reek of just seeing this.

No, this doesn’t mean public orgies. Perhaps that comes later. But don’t be disappointed; singing songs, holding hands, laughing and just “being there” is intimidating enough for hate groups. Earlier, we covered an example of non-violent responses to the Westboro Baptist Church’s hate, and it looks like this kind of thing is shaping into an actual, coherent, resistance movement.

Don’t believe this kind of thing is frightening to hate mongers? Think about every time someone says “that’s gay” or similar things. In my experience, it’s almost always directed at someone trying to connect to someone else on an authentic level, at something designed to foster personal growth or learning. They say it about homework assignments, attack some kind of fictional “thought police” of “political correctness” because civility is just too much a burden for them, they say it about men who admit to having a feeling once in a while that isn’t just rage, they say it to each other with that curious look in their eye, both shaming and also desperate for approval.

And they wouldn’t say it if they weren’t fucking afraid. So fearsome is this kind of thing, in fact, that even people who say they support things like gay rights, or getting an education, or having an honest conversation with people they say they love, these people too may resist it.

If you think about your high school or workplace or drinking buddies, then sit them along side this report from Towleroad about how the students of Gunn High resisted the fear and hate mongering of the WBC on their own campus, how do you think your “communities” measure up? Are they strong enough to resist when the kooks come knocking? Do you even know what kind of strength it takes?

There is nothing more frightening than a person who knows who they are and loves every part. Get moving!

Silver Linings (and updates!)

I found it! I found it! I found the elusive chimera, that rare creature thought to be mythological by so many for so long!

I found good news! Bless your heart, Andy Towle!

Take THAT, Pope Benedict Arnold

Some years ago I converted to Catholicism. I may have mentioned I’m a serious masochist before. But I’ll admit it; there are parts of the faith I suck at. Believing in hell for example. Never could pull that off. I’m more in line with what Company of Thieves says about such things. “We are all our own devil… and we make this world a hell.”

But one of the reasons I hopped on board and started participating as a lector in my church is the wonderful, loving, wise priest who listened to me and understood my need to confess. As a long time Vincentian monk, he was part of the really old school movement for social justice in the church, now being denied and shit on by the likes of Glenn Beck. When I say old school, I mean several centuries old, though he was also a huge proponent of Romero’s liberation theology.

True, I was politely asked to leave by the new priest after that wise man passed on. He was fine with me coming back to the church after transition, but not during. Couldn’t afford to alienate people. Make them uncomfortable. Services no longer required. I didn’t give up the faith though. Just the church.

And this is the church we’re probably used to hearing about nowadays. The church that kicks people out, decides who’s Christian and who isn’t, often while protecting pedophile priests. These things are both entirely real and, as my students might say, “some ol’ bulllllllshit”.

But by heaven, it is NOT all of us. When the Denver archdiocese removed a young girl from their school, not for being gay mind you, but for her PARENTS being a lesbian couple, Christians stood up. And they’re still standing up. They’re telling their own leadership that this is not Christlike. That this is not acceptable.

And I’ll be damned (likely for many reasons) if there isn’t more evidence of good people in community reaching out to do good things. As an update to previous posts on Mississippi and Utah respectively, we get examples of honesty and love being rewarded and hypocrisy being exposed.

Constance McMillen and ALL her peers will get their prom, due to a couple big donors, even as the facebook page created to support her and her girlfriend has garnered 250,000 followers.

And those fine upstanding gents in Utah who spend their days thinking up new and creative ways of strangling civil liberties? The pharisees out west are “shocked” and “stunned” by one of their own confessing to a skinny-dipping excursion some years ago with a minor.

I need to add a couple things here for balance. I know as a blogger I don’t really have a responsibility to be fair in the way journalists might. It’s just my own ethics that beg for at least lip service.

Truth is, if we believe people can change, that they can learn from mistakes, then I think any ethical adult would have to admit that there’s going to be more to this Utah story than the scandal. We need to listen to the grown woman’s story and his. We need to extend what we’re so often not given ourselves: the chance for forgiveness and healing. It seems like the world could use a lot more of that in general.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean we need to extend them legislative authority while a legitimate question about their ethics remains unanswered. I have no illusions of being voted in as Texas governor as a sex worker. Maybe Illinois governor, but not the Lone Star.

For now though, I’m just gonna bask in the fact that there’s still a great big chunk of hope out there, growing in the hearts of loving people, that we can all take a bite of. I’ve even given the flying monkeys the day off.

Odd combination of sexuality and spirituality

Being a spiritual person does not mean that you cannot be a sexual person,  but this combination….well, it’s just a little odd. And to proclaim it on a sign, well that just defies good taste and seems somewhat declasse.

Football Player Tim Tebow on What Should Happen in Your Womb

Article excerpt from AlterNet.org By Tana Ganeva

“How stupid would you feel if you aborted the next Tim Tebow, leaving the world with only tens of thousands of other football players?

That’s the nightmare scenario presented in a Focus on the Family ad set to air during the Super Ball. The completely irreplacable Tebow (who’s also left his mark on the world by promoting abstinence till marriage) will appear in the ad with his mom, who ignored the advice of doctors to have an abortion after contracting amebic dysentery, and wants to tell you all about that wise decision. (Several organizations are launching letter-writing campaigns to get CBS execs to change their minds about running the ad.)

Strangely, CBS has rejected issue advertising in the past. In 2004, the network refused to run ads by both PETA and MoveOn.org. The MoveOn ad made the wildly controversial point that Bush had increased the national deficit; PETA’s involved scantily clad women.

Also too edgy for CBS: the notion that Jesus espoused universal. In 2004 the United Church of Christ submitted an ad showing a bouncer blocking a gay couple from entering a Church, with the tagline: Jesus Didn’t Turn People away. Neither do we.

The network rejected the Church’s ad because it “touches on and/or takes a position on one side of a current controversial issue of public importance.”

Read the rest of the article at AlterNet.org.

Did you fill out the Sexual Freedom Survey?

If not, YOU BETTER, or SiP will hunt you down and take away your sexy license.

Take the survey now!!!!

Let’s start the New Year off in a proactive way, by adding your voice to the Sexual Freedom Report!

This questionnaire will be the foundation for the first report on the State of Sexual Freedom in America today.  If you already responded to the questionnaire, and many of you have, thank you!  If not, we would really value your opinions!

As I shared with you in the first email, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation plans to publish regular reports on the sexual freedom movement, designed to help identify the social changes taking place, or that must take place for progress to be made, on the diverse issues on which we work. We are particularly interested in recognizing opportunities for already-established sexual freedom issue groups to work together.

We would like to know what you think are the most pressing sexual freedom issues this country is facing and so we are asking for a bit of your time and a lot of your knowledge and expertise.

We will treat your responses as confidential, unless you specifically give us permission to share your comments.  To protect the confidentiality of our participants, we will download the responses each day and they will be taken completely offline.  With that assurance, we are also asking that you provide your contact information on the survey.

I do hope that you’ll take some time right now to respond to the questionnaire.  What you think really does matter to us and to this project.

Please click here or at the link below to begin the survey.

Thanks for your time and your participation!

Ricci Levy, Executive Director

PS:  Please make sure to give us an email address in the questionnaire so that we can email you a copy of the completed report immediately prior to its public release.

Yet another naked anti-fur protest

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Yet another naked fur protest“, posted with vodpod

 

For the record, I love pouring buckets of blood on shivering naked girls as much as anyone else does. But these naked anti-fur protests are getting played out. Yes, it gets you some press, but it’s been done for years and so far the gain for animal welfare has been slim to nil. Read more

Can’t we all just go back to getting naked for fun and/or money?