I’ll decide when I need your “protection”

April 26, 2016 a world of progress, letters, progressive living, progressive media center No comments

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In Raleigh yesterday, more than 1,000 of us gathered to let the General Assembly and the governor know we do not approve of what I call Hate Bill 2, also known as the “Bathroom Bill.”

At least as many gathered behind the General Assembly Building to support it.

But a look at the two gatherings showed stark differences. The first was in the diversity of the crowds. The pro-bill folks were overwhelmingly white and mostly older. The anti-HB2 crowd was young and old, black, brown and white, gay and straight, male, female, gender-noncomforming, people of all faiths and people who have no professed religion.

We sang freedom songs, they sang Christian songs, the meanings of which they obviously didn’t understand.

Since I am a Christian, I can speak for what I believe, and I believe that Jesus, the leader whom I profess to follow, spoke not of hate and not even of tolerance; he spoke of love. He spoke of not judging others, and of standing up for “the least of these.”

The pro-HB2 crowd carried signs that claimed they want to protect women, but I don’t need or want their brand of protection. I can take care of my own protection, especially when you think you ought to “protect” me without my permission.

I am an adult. I will make my own decisions — including the decision of when and where to ask for anyone’s protection.

I have never felt threatened in a public bathroom, but I was not safe at my own grandfather’s house. Does this mean all grandfathers should be denied the chance to be alone with their granddaughters. Of course not; that would be absurd. And so is this law.

There are no incidences on record of a transgender person assaulting someone in a bathroom. In fact, most of them likely will tell you they often feel threatened. They certainly are far more likely to be harmed by cis-gender people in a public bathroom than they are to harm anyone.

They just want to go into a stall, close the door and do what they came to do.

The real problem is that the law has little to do with bathrooms; it is about a power grab, about denying local governments the ability to set their own policies, and about denying everyone the right to sue for discrimination in state courts.

We stood in Raleigh yesterday to demand repeal of the entire law, and then we sat down in the General Assembly Building to wait to be heard.

Of course, our legislative leaders had no desire to hear what we had to say, and instead of meeting with us had more than 50 of our people arrested.

We are not going away. We are not giving up. We are seeking justice for our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and we will not stop until we get it

 

 

The great over-reach and how we can fight it

February 6, 2013 a world of progress, letters, progressive living No comments

wrongRepublicans in North Carolina are convinced they will hold power forever, and that it means they should take us all back to Medieval times, where they seem to prefer to live as lords.

First the NC House voted to cut unemployment compensation and make it more difficult to qualify, ensuring more North Carolina families will lose everything when they get laid off. The top weekly compensation will be just $350 a week if this becomes law.

Then the NC Senate voted to reject the expansion of Medicaid, which would bring in nearly $15 billion from the federal government to insure more than a half-million people, including those unemployed people who are about to get royally screwed. Estimates of the number of people who will not gain access to care range as high as 650,000. The Senate also voted to reject partnering with the federal government on a health benefits marketplace, which will cost even more money.

This state ranks 38th in health outcomes (cancer deaths, heart disease, low-birthweight babies, infant mortality, etc.), and we’re about to drop even lower as federal money to reimburse hospitals and other providers gets cut (the expansion of Medicaid was designed to replace this money by covering low-income people with Medicaid).

So now, more than a half-million people in this state are at risk of dying from preventable causes. We will see more advanced cancers, more heart attacks and stroke, more serious complications from diabetes (blindness, kidney failure, limb amputations), more intractable mental illness, more life-threatening, antibiotic resistant infections … And more funerals for people who shouldn’t have died.

It will cost us dearly in both money and human lives.

Now the NC Senate has voted to fire every public servant on several critical boards and commissions to they can be replaced with like-minded ideologues who will rape the environment and offer big business everything it wants. We will see less safe workplaces, more food-borne illnesses, more corruption and much, much less protection of any kind for the people of this state.

The reason the terms on these boards are staggered is to prevent them being stacked with ideologues by corrupt politicians. But a few appointments wasn’t enough for the Teapublicans in  the Senate; they want it all. They want to run everything with no opposition from anyone.

Gov. Pat McCrory, who ran as a moderate, has a chance to veto all of this, but he hasn’t indicated whether he will. He likely will sign the raid on unemployment and he has said he doesn’t think now is the right time to expand Medicaid (When IS the right time, Governor?).

I hope he sees that this power grab is unconscionable.

We need to let our legislators know how important these issues are to us. To e-mail a legislator, it’s firstname.lastname@ncleg.net (example: tim.moffitt@ncleg.net). You can go to www.ncleg.net for more contact information Their phone numbers are listed there. To contact Gov. McCrory, visit http://www.governor.state.nc.us/contact, tweet @PatMcCroryNC, call  919-733-5811 or snail-mail:

Office of the Governor
20301 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, NC 27699-0301

Do it now and then do it every day until the issues are resolved. If these things go through, e-mail every day to let them know they’re going to be unemployed in 2014 (or in the governor’s case, 2016).