Idiot Government Officials are Going to Learn the Hard Way About Federal Civil Rights Law

Specifically 42 U.S.C. § 1988, also know as the "Private Attorney General Statute". Basically, if you bring a civil rights case in Federal court and you win, the loser has to not only pay your damages, they have to pay your attorney's fees and costs.

So every time some low-IQ politician starts bleating about how clerks and other officials can deny people same-sex marriage licenses, those aggrieved people will have no trouble finding an attorney to take the case. And since the Supreme Court has spoken on it, we're not exactly talking Clarence Darrow-grade legal work: File a complaint, have it served, get an order and blammo! As Bobby Jindal has found out:

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Plaintiffs in each of these
consolidated cases are awarded their costs, expenses, and
reasonable attorneys' fees according to 42 U.S.C. § 1988 and any
other applicable laws.

So if the idiots in Texas want to keep on refusing to issue marriage licenses, then they can start warming up their checkbooks. And it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the courts might start holding them personally liable.

So what are they going to do, now? Pick up an axe-handle and stand in the door to the county clerk's office?

This fight is over.

Pay Attention to John Oliver

He makes more sense on the issue of transgendered people than 99% of the non-trans people who have discussed this issue.

Shorter Girl Scouts to Bigots: GFY.

Some clown gave the Girl Scouts in western Washington state a hundred grand, but then, months later, asked that none of the money be used for anything involving transgendered girls.

Two days ago, the Girl Scout Council tried crowdfunding on Indiegogo, where they explained the situation and asked for help in raising the money to return the donation. It took them a day to raise $185,000.

As of this morning, they're just shy of a quarter-mil.

Dear Texas Officials: Do Your Fucking Jobs. Or Go the Fuck Home.

The Goober-in-Chief in Texas is pledging that officials who decline to follow the law will get legal help.

Here's the thing: If your job is to issue marriage licenses, or any other damn form of license, it's not your place to insert your moral beliefs or feelings into the process. The same objection that the Jeebus Asswipes in Tejas are asserting are identical to those asserted back in the civil rights era. Only the people have changed.

If you can't comply with the law and issue the licenses and/or permits, then quit your damn job and find a job that is more in line with your moral teaching.

Oh, and as to not respecting what the Supreme Court has ruled, well, wouldn't you know that the Christian Bible has something to say about that:

All of you must obey those who rule over you. There are no authorities except the ones God has chosen. Those who now rule have been chosen by God. So whoever opposes the authorities opposes leaders whom God has appointed. Those who do that will be judged.

Damnation and the Fires of Hell await you, O Texicans who are contesting the rule of law!* Follow the law or your eternal soul will suffer the consequences!**
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* Not that it didn't before.
** Ah, who am I kidding? The Cafeteria Christians won't be swayed. But feel free to snark on them.

Explosions on the Right; Marriage Edition

Justice Kennedy the Supreme Court declared Friday that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the United States.

From what I saw at ScotusBlog, 60% of the opinion was written the dissenters. I've read hardly anything of it, but the first few sentences of Scalia's dissent reads like something that could have been written by a pro-slavery judge in the 1840s.

The GOP: Wrong Side of History(tm). Smarter heads in the party are probably eager to put this issue behind them, but don't count on the firebrands to let that happen.

It's Only There by Popular Demand; Jenner Edition

The documentary series chronicling Caitlyn Jenner’s transition from male to female will premiere at the end of July, E! announced on Wednesday.

Oh, gee. A reality show.

I suspect that whatever steps Jenner has to go through, that the fact that money isn't an obstacle makes a world of difference between her and 99% of the rest of transsexuals. She's not going to have to worry about starting a new career because transitioning destroyed the old one.*

There were transsexual women who lost their careers and went into the process knowing the risk. Many fought the law over that and lost. Jenner's probably not going to run the risk of some clown killing her and then offering a version of the "gay panic" defense.

Like most such televised fare, it will have little relationship to the process and the hardship that most other transgendered people endure.

I wish Caitlyn Jenner well, but I'm not going to watch her damn show.

(N.B.:  Keep your "Caitlyn is a man" comments to either yourself or on your own blog.  Not here.  Capisce?
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Not true in the USAF or the RAAF.

Dear Caitlyn Jenner: Your Political Party Hates You

Back when Bruce Jenner gave his interview to Diane Sawyer, he said that he was a conservative Republican.

Now that Jenner has transitioned to being Caitlyn, here's a real shocker: Her political soulmates are no more tolerant of her than they are of any other minority. In fact, they deliberately mocked her and tried to score cheap laughs about her.

In other words, Caitlyn, your political allies just shived you in the back and had a good chuckle about it.

You might want to rethink who your friends are, dear.

Ireland to Holy Mother Church: "Bugger Off!"

Ireland has voted by a huge majority to legalise same-sex marriage, becoming the first country in the world to do so by popular vote in a move hailed as a social revolution and welcomed around the world.

Some 62% of the Irish Republic’s electorate voted in favour of gay marriage. The result means that a republic once dominated by the Catholic church ignored the instructions of its cardinals and bishops.

That's close to a 2-1 majority vote.. not even close for the Church in a country that is about 85% Catholic.

It's becoming clear that fewer and fewer people are going to stand for being lectured on morality by the protectors of pedophiles. That sentiment is probably even stronger in Ireland after the horrors of the Magdalene "schools" became public knowledge.

Not Giving a Fuck About Bruce Jenner

Because it's not anything remotely close to news. There are a lot of transgendered people out there, quietly living their lives. You may know a few, even if you didn't know their history.

Maybe in the third quarter of the last century and into the fourth quarter, it would have been a serious story. Christine Jorgensen, of course. Renee Richards. Wendy Carlos. Karen Ulane was fired from EAL for being transgendered; now there are transgendered pilots working for most American carriers.

But now? It's not news. It's not about publicly transitioning and hopefully serving as some sort of example for others. I don't buy that, not for a picosecond. Jenner is a C-/D+ grade celebrity; the one rule about being a celebrity is that there is basically no such thing as bad press.* And for two hours of prime-time exposure on a broadcast network, the lower-rent and/or fading celebrities would gladly trade a kidney, half of their livers and their second-born children.

I'm not questioning the genuineness of Jenner's transgenderism. Since he is a celebrity, the story was already likely in the supermarket tabloids. By going public,he gets to manage the story, something celebrities all want to do.

But is this really serious news? No. It's not news in the same way that it wouldn't be news if Jenner flew a single-engined airplane from New York to Paris. It's been done and by a lot of people since Slim did it 88 years ago. That wouldn't be news, now, just high-grade celebrity gossip. Which is what the 20/20 story was: Not news, just gossip.
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* Though Lindsey Lohan is pushing that envelope, hard.

Why I Don't Give a Frak About the North Carolina Pro-Hatred Amendment

First off, let's be clear on one thing: The vote on North Carolina's Amendment One, just like their earlier one, was nothing more than an exercise in hatred. Nobody has ever shown how allowing gays to marry would diminish the rights of straight people to marry. No, this is a matter of a bunch of old, bigoted (mostly white) folk using the cudgel of government to pass judgment on the private lives of other people.

But that's not the topic for today. The topic is why it doesn't matter.

Over the last sixty years or so, it has not been up to the voters of any individual state to decide who gets full rights and who does not. That battle has been fought at the Federal level and, ultimately, in the Federal courts. It was the case for the anti-miscegenation state statutes and constitutional amendments, some of which survived into the 21st Century.[1] Those laws that were in existence in 1967 were struck down by the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia.

The matter of gay marriage will go, ultimately, to the Supreme Court, which will have to decide if equal rights and equal protection under the law means what it says when applied to gay people. I imagine that one of the topics of discussion will be the lack of proof that allowing gay people to marry harms, in any way, straight people.

Of course, the self-styled originalists will proclaim that the views on rights that existed when the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment were adopted must control the debate. That is bullshit, of course, for if that were true, then the states would be free to ban any firearm that used cartridges or percussion caps, since those technologies were unknown in 1791.[2]

The efforts by the homophobes on the Right to push gays and lesbians back into the closet will fail, just as their earlier pushes to marginalize women and people of color have failed.[3] They will lose in the courts and, ultimately, they will lose in society at large.
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[1] Alabama repealed theirs in 2001.
[2] I'm rather surprised that none of the hoplophobic jurisdictions have tried to do this.
[3] Doesn't stop them from continuing to try.

Standing Up Against the Haters on the Right

I'd be bursting with pride if he were my son.

Bullying Is Just Peachy, If It is Based on Religious Beliefs

That's the way it is in Michigan. Because the Republicans want to make sure that tormenting gay kids is legal.

Gay Rights

On this day in 1969, gay people, particularly drag queens, got tired of being pushed around by the NYPD. So they pushed back.

The police have had a long and sordid history of hassling gays and drag queens. It still goes on.

I Love New York

I generally regard the New York State Legislature as pretty much a pack of drooling circus clowns who have to use political juice to get elected because they are largely incapable of earning an honest wage. So they get elected in order to make a good living from bribery.

But not this week.

Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but hushed Senate chamber. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in the Senate in supporting the measure after an intense and emotional campaign aimed at the handful of lawmakers wrestling with a decision that divided their friends, their constituents and sometimes their own homes.

Four Republican state senators bucked their party in order to pass the bill. The conservatives are already vowing retribution.

Make no mistake about this: The Right has lost on this issue. Gay marriage bans will fall in state after state. Eventually, a gay couple will marry in a northern state, move to a southern state, be discriminated against and then the courts will invalidate gay marriage bans nationwide.

Within a couple of decades, Republicans will be back-pedaling and trying to explain that no, they were not really bigots and homophobes when they opposed gay marriage.

Good luck with that.

Who Said School Administrators Don't Have a Sense of Humor?

Well, pretty much everybody.

PORT ORCHARD, Wash. — A 15-year-old boy has been suspended from school after wearing high heels and a dress to school as a part of a challenge laid down by his mother.
...
After [Sam] Saurs showed up at [Sedgwick Junior High School] Wednesday in the dress and heels, the school suspended him for the remainder of the year. That suspension was later reduced to three days. But Saurs won't be allowed to go to the ninth grade dance or the class party.

I might have to go watch "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" again for the scene where Jeanie Bueller kicks the shit out of Principal Rooney.

Ah, hell. That's what YouTube is for.

zOMG!!!1!! Teh Gay Pirates Are Invading Tampa!!!!!1!!!1!

At least that is what one of the politicians from the Confederate party is claiming.

Eugene Delgaudio, a Republican official in Virginia’s Loudon County, best known for claiming that gay TSA agents were getting their jollies patting down male passengers’ junk, is sending out a letter to his constituents claiming that radical homosexual pirates have invaded Tampa Bay, Florida, and are roaming the streets.

I gather the shindig started out as some family-friendly celebration of the days of plundering ships, raping, pillaging and burning villages and hanging people by the hundreds, until, that is, gay folk got involved in the party.

So how did they do it?

Organizers started by purposefully making the parade route zig-zag so no one could call it a “straight parade.”

At times, it is just too easy to mock these clowns in the Republican party.

So here's the H/T and I'll leave you with this:

GOP Generation Gap

Barbara Bush (a/k/a "not Jenna") has come out as a supporter of gay marriage.

zOMG!!1!!! They Might Get Teh Gay Cooties!!!!!1!!!!1!

I tend to think that snarking about the homophobia of the modern conservative movement is sort of like shooting a dead moose with a howitzer: It might be fun to do, but it doesn't accomplish much of anything.

The Annual Shaking of the Idiot Tree

From the introduction of the PS/2 line of PCs through the 1990s, this was the time of the year when many families set up their first home computers. Those computers came with free trial memberships to AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.

Those three were more than ISPs. They were the largest computer bulletin board services before the rise of the Internest and the Web. All were dial-up services. (AOL, in particular, sent out hundreds of millions of 3.5" floppies (and then CDs) as junk mail, attracting so many users who were clueless that they became collectively known as "Assholes On Line".)

CompuServe charged based on the speed of the connection; 300 baud was $6 per hour, 1200 and 2400 baud was $12/hr and it went up to nearly $60/hr for 9600 baud. There were several programs that allowed one to download the various forums and e-mail, work offline and then send outgoing traffic. Some of the programs cost nearly $100 and they would pay for themselves in a month. You could send e-mail to other systems, but there was an extra charge.

On CompuServe, if you set up a special interest group (a "sig", hence "AvSig"), they gave you 10% of the online fees. To say it was lucrative would be an understatement. Some of the sig owners made over seven figures.

So what would happen each year is that a flock of new users came around the various interest groups. The Shaking of the Idiot Tree began when someone signed into CompuServe and joined one of the Christian groups. The old hands would welcome them and then say something along the lines of "you know, there are a bunch of queers and such over at the XYZ Forum, why doncha go over and tell them the error of their ways?"

Of course, the gay men, lesbians and transgender folk were ready for that. Many had files with their standard answers, so when some newbie came in and began spouting about Leviticus, they got asked if they killed their disobedient children and stuff like that. Some ran off with their computer-tails between their legs, but a few stayed and became friends.

Now, of course, the proprietary networks are mainly defunct and most families already have computers.

OK, So Maybe Texas Isn't a Complete Bastion of Bigoted Assholiness

Not when stuff like this can happen:

Trans Pioneer Phyllis Frye Becomes Texas' First Trans Judge
Phyllis Randolph Frye, longtime legal advocate for the transgender community, was sworn in this morning as the state's first transgender judge. Frye was appointed by Houston Mayor Annise Parker as an Associate Municipal Judge. The city council unanimously approved her appointment, along with a couple dozen other appointments, with little fanfare and no dissent.

By two weeks, she missed being the first in the nation, as Victoria Kolakowski won an election to the bench in Alameda County, CA.

Nothing like this has happened in New York, which has its own collection of bigoted assholes, as you can see by perusing the comment thread on the Daily News article. After all, New York elected former terrorist symp Peter King as a congressman.