Today's Mighty Oak


Alright, let’s see what we have today. First up, as part of the 50th anniversary celebration, the entirety of Stonewall has been 3D scanned, preserving the record of it.

I’ve been running a lot recently while listening to audio books, and before this news broke (even though the biography was published last year), I had started the biography of Mr. Rogers (as read by Lavar Burton, so just amazing all around), but he basically came out as bisexual!

The third season of Santa Clarita Diet is about to drop:

Young activists received a letter of apology from the governor of Utah. A great story, and hopefully it leads to a great outcome!

It’s higher than I thought, but still lower than it should be: the CDC reports that 35 percent of at-risk gay and bi men are on PrEP.

This is amazing: A woman recited (as much as she could in her three minutes) the Patton Oswalt filibuster from Parks and Rec! She even got to say “please allow me to finish.” These are civic engagement goals.

Speaking of civic engagement, one of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination, Pete Buttigieg, has impressed me so much, he makes me want to register with the party instead of being an Independent. I don’t have the link handy, but his interview on the Today show, talking about reclaiming faith for the left, was inspirational.

The massacre in New Zealand is of course, horrific. The outpouring of love, and hakas, has been emotional to say the least. It gives me hope (and makes me sad we can’t do it here), that tighter gun restrictions really can be done so quickly.

Also in super sad news, a survivor of Parkland has taken her own life.

In amazing karma, an anti-vaxxer in Italy…got chicken pox. Which is much worse if you’re an adult.

And finally, in funny news from the EU, France’s EU minister has named her cat Brexit: it cries to leave, but then never does.



Alright, let’s see what I have going on today.  First up, before the Windsor and Perry rulings by SCOTUS, the Voting Rights Act was gutted.  Justice Ginsberg summed it up well:

A 4,000 year old Egyptian statue started rotating in its case in a British museum.  Creepy.

Also in the news, was Wendy Davis, who, with the help of other Democrats and the citizens of Texas, filibustered an anti-choice bill in Texas.  And while I think that so many of the “three strikes” used to stop her filibuster were Republicans stretching the rules, they still (generally) played by the rules, except for not voting on the third and then trying to change the congressional record to show they voted before midnight.  But my favorite moment of the night was the fifteen minutes of the citizens screaming nonstop to stop the bill.  Check out Slog’s coverage here.

A great ad via Norway (it’s okay if you only speak English):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBiW5WGtcTI  

The ad campaign from Italy for their alzheimer’s foundation, brilliant and moving

And what is being called the best coupon in history.  If I wasn’t lactose-intolerant, I would agree.

A few more follow-ups from the DOMA and Prop 8 cases.  YouTube put together their #ProudToLove campaign:

Dan Savage hits it out of the park with a few articles.  First up, “I Can Die Now,” which gets to the heart of why the Windsor case was so important, and what people take for granted.

Conservative Christians and their “cheeseburger” moment, and no, it doesn’t include cat memes.

And while they didn’t lose a single thing, we can celebrate what we’ve won, including a man, thirty minutes after the rulings came out that was saved from being deported:

At 10:30 a.m. EDT this morning in a New York Immigration Court, attorneys from our law firm (Masliah Soloway) requested and were granted a continuance in removal (deportation) proceedings for a Colombian gay man married to an American citizen for whom we had filed a marriage-based green card petition last year. A copy of the 77-page Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor was delivered to the court by our summer intern, Gabe, who ran five blocks and made it in time for the decision to be submitted to the Immigration Judge and to serve a copy on the Immigration & Customs Enforcement Assistant Chief Counsel. DOMA is DEAD and it had its first impact on a binational couple within 30 minutes of the Supreme Court ruling.

The horrific nature of Justice Scalia and his son, who doesn’t think homosexuals even exist.

And of course, if you haven’t heard yet, Brian Sims, who was trying to speak on the Pa. House floor about the rulings, was silenced by the representative from Cranberry.  He’s garnered national attention for “speaking against God’s will” as the bigot from Cranberry said.  He keeps pushing for a non-discrimination ordinance and marriage equality, we’ll see how far he can get.

Garfunkle and Oates are back with “The Loophole.”  Sadly, this is a real thing, and they are of course, pointing out the absurdity of it.  Not at all safe for work, or for easily offended eyes.  But wroth it if you get to the end to see the list of other rules they ignore:

That’s it for today, but I’ll be back soon with more.  Have a great one!

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