Quickies: 2/24/2012
By A US District Court in California rules that DOMA is unconstitutional. Edit: It looks like House Republicans may appeal the ruling, so it could possibly end up making precedent in a higher court.
Earlier this week, Blag Hag reported on an Indiana State Representative who refused to support a bill honoring the Girl Scouts because “abundant evidence proves that the agenda of Planned Parenthood includes sexualizing young girls through the Girl Scouts.” He’s since apologized, but refuses to support the bill.
As Bradley Manning’s trial for revealing information to Wikileaks continues, the defense questions whether witnesses knew that Manning was gay and possibly had Gender Identity Disorder.
In what sounds like a pretty bizarre incident, the assault case against a man who attacked a parader dressed as “Zombie Mohammad” has been dismissed. To make things even weirder, the judge in the case told the defendant that if he had “been in a Muslim country, he would be put to death.”
ugh, that article on Manning bugs me for more reasons than i can get into now, but just on a really basic level, it’s been known for quite a while now that Manning has desired to transition, but all the media and even Manning’s supporters have completely neglected that fact. also, Manning is NOT both gay and “suffering from gender identity disorder”. if Manning was assigned male, identified as a woman and was attracted to other women, she’d be both gay and trans. this happens. but by “gay” abc is attempting to say Manning is attracted to men, which conveniently erases Manning’s identity as soon as they bring it up, and doubly erases the existence of actually gay trans people. /rant
Yep.
The media has effectively erased her experiences, and created a “gay man in the military” out of a straight woman’s story.
The degree to which Manning’s supporters vehemently deny her gender in the face of ENORMOUS evidence, and the media sweeps it under the rug, and everyone acts like the concepts “hero” and “trans” are mutually exclusive, is fucking appalling.
Totally agree, Natalie. I’ve talked to scholars who study Wikileaks, and write about it – and whenever I bring up her experiences and her preferred identification I get a lot of “so what?” It seems like pople who are otherwise tuned into the Wikileaks saga just don’t hear the requests to identify her as she wishes.
My understanding is that the House of Representatives is still defending DOMA in court, in which case the ruling with the most national effect will be the one in Massachusetts (actually two cases there). I don’t know if they’ll also appeal this other decision. This is further complicated by the fact that we won the second stage of the Prop 8 trial, on very narrow grounds, but still broad enough grounds that their reasoning could be applied to DOMA as well. (In which case that could set some precedent for further cases, especially in CA)
And the whole thing is further complicated by the fact that only half of DOMA has been successfully challenged (the part about the fedral, rather than state obligations). There’s progress on a lot of fronts, but it’s difficult to tell when and how the next step will be made for a given area.
Ah, in fact they talk about that here:
http://www.metroweekly.com/poliglot/2012/02/domas-federal-definition-of-ma.html
BLAG (aka House Republicans’ lawyers) could potentially appeal?
Thanks, QuanTheory. The initial news article I found was unclear – I’ve updated the initial post.