Zorra
Zorra's JournalThe questions were silly.
Justice Kennedy is too smart to buy into that "milennial" argument. Just because a tenet that is unjust and unconstitutional is a long standing tradition does not mean it should be law. If that were the case, it would be reasonable to argue that women should still be the personal possessions of their husbands, like they were in the US until the middle of the 19th century, because that was just the way it had been for thousands of years.
The State has no reasonable compelling interest in denying the right of same sex couples to marry. If they use long standing tradition as a reason for ruling against same sex marriage, they will be deliberately and deceitfully suppressing justice because they don't have the courage to uphold the constitution for fear of backlash from a minority of the population that grows smaller by the day.
The fact that there are already currently 390,000 legal same sex marriages in the US, which have posed no impediment to the interests of the State, clearly illustrates that the State has no compelling interest whatsoever in denying same sex couples the right to freely marry at will.
It is not Secretary Clinton's credibility on social issues that many Democrats
and left independents are concerned about. It's pretty much a given for everyone, at least everyone here at DU, that she is unabashedly socially progressive. She's awesome on social issues, this is undeniable, and infinitely commendable. This is a huge positive among the reasons to support her candidacy.
It's not rocket science, and this is not any kind of conundrum whatsoever for any reasonably perceptive person who has the ability to breathe and think logically at the same time.
What some Democrats, and the majority of left independents, are concerned about is that, if elected, she may govern as a total global free market capitalist 1% puppet.
The democratic left wants a government that is fully committed to promoting the best interests and best quality of life for all human beings, and not a government that is fully committed to promoting the aggressive profit and privatization agenda of wealthy private interests.
If Secretary Clinton begins to sincerely and accurately publicly address populist economic issues exactly the way that Senator Sanders has been doing, she is likely to gain more trust and support from more Democrats and left leaning independents who wish to support a candidate committed to addressing all the social, economic, and environmental issues critical to a healthy environment and a genuinely healthy functioning representative democracy.
Some of us genuinely detest the fact that wealthy oligarchs and wealthy private interests have so much control over our government. Oligarchs who very obviously use their wealth to subvert our democratic ability to govern ourselves. Many of us believe that this critical problem, as well as all issues of social inequality and injustice, should be a primary concern of any Democratic presidential candidate who desires our support.
This is not an unreasonable expectation of any Democratic presidential candidate, or Democratic president, and any Democrat who believes that this is an unreasonable expectation may want to consider that oligarchy is exactly what the republican party is fully committed to preserving.
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. "
-Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Message from the President of the United States..."
That's not a brawl! It's a sincere, heartfelt outpouring of christofascist religious faith and love!
It's a good old fashioned christofascist revival meeting, and they just got too much of the spirit, that's all. The police were violating their religious freedoms!!111!!
Just imagine what they would do to LGBT if they could express similar love and faith of their religion without going to jail for it.
Intent, and the percentage of sex slaves per capita, is the issue here.
Dubai freely and openly caters to men from all over the world who want to use and/or abuse women, and many don't care or don't know if the women they are using and/or abusing are slaves or not.
This was not Amsterdam's red-light district or the Reeperbahn in Hamburg or a bar on Shanghai's Bund. This was in the city centre of Dubai, the Gulf emirate where western women get a month in prison for a peck on the cheek; the Islamic city on Muhammad's peninsula where the muezzin's call rings out five times a day drawing believers to prayer; where public consumption of alcohol prompts immediate arrest; where adultery is an imprisonable offence; and where mall shoppers are advised against "overt displays of affection", such as kissing.
Ayman Najafi and Charlotte Adams, the couple recently banged up in Al Awir desert prison for a brief public snog, must have been very unlucky indeed, because in reality Dubai is a heaving maelstrom of sexual activity that would make the hair stand up on even the most worldly westerner's head. It is known by some residents as "Sodom-sur-Mer".
Beach life, cafe society, glamorous lifestyles, fast cars and deep tans are all things associated with "romance" in the fog-chilled minds of Europeans and North Americans. And there is a fair amount of legitimate "romance" in Dubai. Western girls fall for handsome, flash Lebanese men; male visitors go for the dusky charms of women from virtually anywhere. Office and beach affairs are common.
But most of the "romance" in Dubai is paid-for sex, accepted by expatriates as the norm, and to which a blind eye is turned – at the very least – by the authorities. The bar where "Jenny" approached me was top-of-the-range, where expensively dressed and coiffured girls can demand top dollar from wealthy businessmen or tourists.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/16/dubai-sex-tourism-prostitution
Three quarters of Dubai's population is male. You can be damn sure that every prostitute in Dubai's oppressive Islamic patriarchal monarchy is owned, or tightly controlled by a man or group of men, even the male prostitutes.
On edit: I forgot to mention the children forced into prostitution to service the pedophiles who come to Dubai for diverse and easy pickins.
Fuck Dubai.
Most of the MRA and or RW religious types don't seem to be capable of empathy
or thinking logically. A deadly combination.
The belief that women are not equal to men is locked into the human cultural consciousness as "just the way things are, and have always been".
This is why women are by far the most discriminated against group forever and always, and for us, changing hearts and minds is a long, frustrating process. It's very rare that I have been able to convince a sexist that any of their dearly held beliefs are skewed and unreasonable. It's been a slow and difficult process, even among liberal/progressive women and men.
So we really need to get massive legislation passed that combats all forms of sexism, misogyny, and inequality.
The overall numbers of minority group members have been growing exponentially for years, and will continue to grow. I suggest that right now, we begin our campaign to unify all the minorities in the US in order to create a massive Democratic voting bloc that will crush this RW machine that prevents us all from becoming genuinely equal.
Make it perfectly clear to all that the white straight conservative male is the clear and present deadly enemy of all of us.
Create a general social and political consciousness that will help all minority members understand that by unifying we can eliminate the white straight male conservative threat to our equality and secure existence forever.
The notion that "my cause is your cause, I support you, you support me, and we will all get what what we need", needs to be spoken and manifested in every way possible to create this unification that will end the white male conservative threat and control over our lives en masse.
Women, LGBT, ancestral African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, conscious progressive white men, Asians, the disabled, etc, banding together with a single focused and determined immutable will and purpose:
To stop the power of the white conservative straight men forever by voting them out of office in great numbers. Their time is up. White conservative straight men are a malicious numerical minority who have managed to maintain an inordinate amount of political and social power and control over us for eons, despite their minority in numbers
We will not be able to significantly change the general social consciousness of our culture until we remove the white straight conservative males from power. Only after we do this will we be able to control the national dialogue and progress until we attain informational critical mass and evolve a general cultural consciousness where genuine equality and justice for everyone becomes the cultural norm. We must tear down the unconscious barriers that prevent us from being understood as being equal from the general cultural consciousness.
Only then will it be possible for women to be truly equal in the eyes of most everyone.
We can, and we will, stop them if we all unite against their twisted tyranny, and stop them from having any control of our lives forever.
No More, Ever.
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