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Gay people
are not equal in the eyes of the law, and not only because this country
does not federally recognizes our marriages, but for at least seven
other outstanding inequalities:
1. Men who
have had sex with men in the past 33 years cannot donate blood .
2. Unless ENDA passes, and until it does, LGBT individuals
have no federal protection against employment
discrimination .
3. In some states, same-sex
couples still cannot adopt children together.
4. In more
states, they are not protected against housing discrimination .
5. While
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is presently being challenged, gay men and
lesbians STILL cannot openly serve in the US military .
6. Openly gay
men are prohibited from leading Boy Scout troops and
7. Some Catholic churches will not admit openly gay
students or children of openly gay parents to their schools. While these
groups are privately run, they both have a preferred tax status in the US.
Read Ranker.com
for a further examination of these 7 inequities .
Watercooler: Fake President Maddow; Th e
new gay frontier?
Exploring gender identity in the
athletic world is tough, as we learned from runner Caster Semeneya and cyclist Kristen
Worley , but Molly Cameron of Portland, Oregon discusses her
experience as a transgender cyclist with a cavalier attitude.
“I was up at
the Mount Tabor race, signing up for women’s, and some older lady got up
in my face, shouting, ‘You’re not a f**king woman!’” said Cameron in an
interview with the Portland Mercury. “I got some sh**ty emails, I lost
some friendships. I’m not one to ram my politics down someone’s throat,
but I wanted to race my f**kin’ bike! I was just some poor punk kid who
wanted to race my bike and I was not stoked on racing with the men. I
was just gonna do my typical, ‘I’m gonna do whatever I want’ thing.”
Because of
Cameron’s case, the Oregon Bicycle Racing Association consulted
established a policy for transgender racers; cyclists have to undergo
gender-reassignment surgery in order to race under their new gender’s
category.
While Cameron does take female hormones,
she continues to race against men until she seeks out surgery.
Check out the
rest of the Portland Mercury’s profile on Cameron .
Yesterday,
California courts heard the closing arguments for the Proposition 8 trials , reminding us yet again
that same-sex couples cannot get married in that state, at least for
now.
While marriage can mean something different depending on one’s
social, religious, and political spheres, legally, marriage means one
thing. Marriage is a legal contract between two parties that determines
property, taxation, insurance, and custody agreements. When two people
are denied the right to marriage, they are denied all of these rights
that fall within the legal definition of marriage.
While MSNBC correspondent (and out
lesbian) Rachel Maddow has denied any allegations that she is
running for public office , she played the part last night when
she delivered her own version of an Oval Office Address in response to
the Gulf Coast crisis caused by BP’s oil rig explosion.
“When the
benefits of drilling accrue to a private company but the risk of that
drilling accrue to we the American people, I as fake president, stand on
the side of the American people,” said Maddow.
In
her 10-minute speech, Maddow outlined a specific plan addressing the
state of the coast and the future of the oil industry.
“I no longer
say that we must get off oil, we will get off oil…We will free ourselves
as a nation once and for all from the grip of this industry that has
lied to us as much as it has exploited us, as much as it has befouled us
with its toxic effluent. The oil age, America, is over.”
“We will not
play Russian Roulette with workers’ lives and we will not play Russian
Roulette with irreversible national environmental disaster for the sake
of some short term income.”
Her speech exemplified many
people’s disappointment with President Obama’s address on Tuesday.
Maddow explained that her address is what she wishes the president had
said, but after her speech she added, “which is why I never will run for
anything, because I say things like, ‘toxic effluent’ and I get all
weepy when I’m mad.”
Zynga, the creator of FarmVille has rolled out another web game, FrontierVille . FrontierVille is an
Oregon-Trail-meets-The-Sims sister to FarmVille.
In the game,
among other things, players create characters that can eventually form
family units. In FrontierVille, players select the gender of their
character as well as the gender of their spouse. Gay marriage is legal
in FrontierVille.
FarmVille is one of the most popular games on the internet, with over 80 million active users (for context – that is over
1 percent of the entire world population). If FrontierVille sees even
half of that popularity, a web-community the size of the population of
Argentina will be living (even if in a cyber-space simulation) in a land
with legalized gay-marriage.