I Think My Ironymeter Just Asploded...

I know I've been gone for a long time, and I'm sorry, Internet.  Finals ate me alive - although I made out with my first straight-A semester IN MY LIFE EVAR, woot! - and I just got hired at a new job for which I am still jumping through setup hoops.  But I'm still alive, and still here, and I'm back.  On to the irony!


So.  DADT, right?  That whole bullshit "compromise", which is basically a sop to the activists in that DADT will be *technically* repealed, but the discharges won't actually stop unless and until the Pentagon says so along with the President and that goddamn "working group", and which does not include any actual nondiscrimination policy, meaning that DADT discharges, even if they ARE stopped by the current Pentagon and administration, can be started right back up again by a Republican administration/more conservative higher-ups at the Pentagon.  What we end up with, then, is a DADT that acts like the Mexico City Policy (the ban on the U.S.'s international family-planning funding going to groups that provide abortion or references for abortion services), on then off then on then off then on then off...ping-ponging its status depending purely on which letter the POTUS has after hir name.  I could write pages on this shit, and how it's not a compromise, it's a bone like the others this administration has tossed us - "Here, have an unenforceable symbolic cookie, now will you shut up and get under the bus like we told you to???" - but it's been covered plenty elsewhere.  So instead, I will share this bit of WTF going down on the House floor in debate right now:

REP. TRENT FRANKS (R-AZ), on what pushing for repeal without waiting for the study's completion tells straight soldiers: "We're going to say, 'No. We don't care what you say.  You can die for us on the battlefield, but you have no input into this process.'"

Um.  Really?  Seriously?  Because that sounds oddly familiar.  Why is that?  Oh, that's right.  BECAUSE IT'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU HOMOPHOBES HAVE BEEN SAYING TO THE LGB TROOPS WHO ARE ALREADY SERVING IN THE MILITARY, ASSHOLE!  Newsflash: there are already LGB servicemembers (T, too, but they're not covered by DADT in the same way IIRC) who are and have been actively working toward repeal, and when you and your ilk keep saying "No, no, no" or even "Well, we have to study this first", you are saying to them, "We don't care what you say.  You can die for us on the battlefield, but you have no input into this process."  


Wow.  I really think my ironymeter just broke.  I cannot believe he said that with a straight face.  I guess it's ok to say "You have no input" to those icky gays, but by god if you try to change anything without Straight Approval (tm) you are Oppressing The Heteros!!eleventy!


Rep Franks, please, do us all a favor and STFU.

Wednesday WTF: Well, At Least You're Being Honest

Wednesday WTF is back!  For my newer readers, it was a thing I used to do, every Wednesday, posting the most ridiculously WTF thing of the week as my Wednesday WTF.  I quit for awhile, but I'm reinstating the practice as of this week.  Yay!

This renewal of the Wednesday WTF comes courtesy of the burqa fight in Europe.  It's already been covered elsewhere just how fucked up this idea is, particularly as it uses an appropriation of feminist principles and language to justify racism and further oppressing the women of the already-oppressed group by targeting their specific accoutrements, thus neatly allowing anti-Muslim governments to oppress Muslim women in the name of women's liberation.  But I want to point out something very simple that apparently did not manage to make it to the notice of Jean-Francois Cope, majority leader in the French National Assembly, when he was writing and titling his op-ed.

Titling it "Tearing Away the Veil" does nothing to advance your claim that it's not about stigmatizing or oppressing Muslim women.  I don't care how cute the phrase is, you're arguing that this is not a targeted move against women who veil in the same breath that you use a title of violent imagery that summons a mental picture of someone forcibly ripping off a woman's burqa/niqab.  Message consistency FAIL.

But hey, at least you're being honest about what you're trying to do here. 

This Photo Is Important (to me).

I was blessed a few weeks ago to be in the right place at the right time to borrow my brother's camera and take a photo I've been wanting to capture for nearly eight years.  And I want to share it with you, my readers, because I think you will understand why it is so important to me.

When I was in my teens, pre-9/11, I took flute lessons.  The drive to my teacher's studio took me out on a semi-rural road near my hometown, where I would pass by the shed in the picture.  In those days, though, it was just a white shed with a big black peace symbol painted on it.  My budding-hippie-self always smiled to see it.  I thought it would be there like that forever.

And then 9/11 happened.  And then we declared war.  And then later on we declared another war, this time against Iraq.  And some time later in that school year, my senior year of high school, I drove home from my lesson, and where there had been a white shed with a black peace sign, there was a white shed, with a mostly-painted-over black peace sign covered by a freshly-painted-on American flag.  That moment, that shed, printed itself indelibly in my mind, as the perfect symbol of everything that had suddenly gone so wrong in my world.  I've always intended to go back and take a picture of it, to preserve the terrible sad contrast, of the symbol of peace abandoned and painted over in favor of the gaudy display of patriotism.  After all, you can only have one.  And we all know that a True American would rather have patriotism than peace.

Right?

Epic Quote of the Day

During the debate on Florida's abortion ultrasound bill (which, despite Dem efforts to block it from coming to a vote, got brought and voted on and passed Friday), Rep. Scott Randolph, D-Orlando, said the following:

Members, we constantly hear that this chamber is all about small government. The only thing this body has proven in the last six years is how this Legislature defines small government — six years ago this Legislature wanted government so small that it could fit down a tube into an individual woman's throat named Terri Schiavo; this decade we have shown time and again that you want government so small that it can fit under someone's bedroom door; and members, this year you are showing that you want government so small that it could fit between a woman's leg and into her uterus. It's not the small government that anyone wants.  

I have never heard it put so beautifully, so succinctly.  I want to send this man flowers.  This is what we have been saying again and again: Republicans claim to want "small government", except for when it comes to interfering in the lives of people who are making choices they disagree with.  And that's not small government at all.  That's hypocrisy.