Today's Mighty Oak


Alright, been a bit, but let’s see what we have today.  First up, would you like the sheet music for the THX deep note?  Here it is.

In the news that has me so excited, Idris Elba is going to start in, produce and direct Netflix’s new, live-action Hunchback of Notre Dame!  Hunchback is my favorite animated Disney movie and in my top five stage musicals so I cannot wait for this!

Overwatch has partnered with You Can Play, marking that non-profits first foray into eSports!

Alone in the Game explores what it’s like to be gay or trans in sports.

Because his is where we all said we were headed: GOP congressmen want to make it legal for people to not sell houses to queer people.  Because fuck this world.

And a reminder, they’re far from perfect, but the Democrats every now and then pull out a great win when it’s needed.  In South Carolina, a clutch filibuster helped prevent an abortion ban from being passed.

A favorite web comic of mine, Surviving The World just wrapped up, but here is his last Pride comic:

The new Smash Bros. looks amazing (although I actually don’t like the art direction on the character models):

And of course, the CDC will roll back the collection of data from queer communities, which will lead to decrease in funding and more deaths from diseases that affect us more than other communities.

I’ll be talking about the Supreme Court decision in Masterpiece Cake in a later post, but this executive order from May is also really, really dangerous.  We’re quickly moving into a world where the few rights I have are being superseded by the ability for people to use their bigoted “religious views” to discriminate against me.  And yes, even if you’re using religion, it’s still bigoted.

Alright, that’s it for now, sorry for all the depressing things, but sometimes, that’s just what the world deals you.  I’ll be back with more soon!



Alright, let’s see what we have today.  First up, Mark Hamill pays tribute to Carrie Fisher in a wonderful way.  Joe Manganiello remembers the time she glitter bombed him.

This optical illusion is blowing my mind!

USA Today did not hold any punches when writing an editorial about Drumpf.

Jessica Jones is coming back, and I”m very excited:

We have a new chapter of Harry Potter!  Kind of.  Not really

DeRay McKesson is suing FOX news after being constantly slandered, good for him.

2 Political Junkies has an amazing icon of Darlene Harris, Defender of Faith and and Small, Noncompliant creches.

Did you know Wikipedia has a list of individual dogs?  They’re all very good boys.

A great take on being gay for the holidays:

In horrifying legal news, SCOTUS has declined to hear a case about employment discrimination, leaving a split in circuit court decisions.  This will be the followup to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.

Also in bad news for us, gay people are more likely to have trouble sleeping.  But some good news, we tend to have happier relationships.

More scientific evidence about why some people are born gay, and the correlation to having older brothers.

That’s it for today, have a great one!



It’s bad.  Really bad.

After the election, I knew four couples who quickly got married, afraid that we would lose the right.  And that’s a fear that straight people don’t understand.  The few civil rights we have are new, and are still fragile.  And as it turns out, they might have been right to be so worried:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a Texas ruling that said the right to a marriage license did not entitle same-sex couples to spousal benefits under employee insurance plans.

This is certainly just the beginning, and Sue over at Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents sums it up:

Limiting same-sex marriage is the objective here – benefits, adoption, tax deductions, legal rights, etc. Restricting LGBTQ people across the board is the goal.

That decision was followed up with the arguments in Masterpiece Cake Shop which looks to use the bullshit idea of ‘religious freedom’ to hide bigotry and legal discrimination.  There are a lot of lines being drawn between this case and the racial discrimination case Piggie Park Barbecue from the sixties.

If a business is open to the public, what they sell should be available to all of the public.  The baker would be just as wrong if he declined to make a wedding cake for a black couple, citing his religious beliefs.  If you sell a product (in this case, wedding cakes), you should not be able to put restrictions as to who you will sell it to, that would take us back to the times of delis with signs saying they would not serve Irish and lunch counter sit-ins.

Although, to no one’s surprise, the white house would be all for bakeries (and other businesses) hanging up “no gays” signs.

Slate has a great article going through the myriad of reasons why this is insanity, give it a read.  It rips apart most of the arguments I’ve heard, including this quote:

Telling minorities who have suffered a history of discrimination that it’s unneighborly, unseemly, or discourteous to fight for rights that they’re being denied but you’re enjoying is shameless—ultimately just another mechanism for denying those rights in the first place. Do you actually think the minority members love always having to be the loudmouths reminding the world that they deserve the same rights as you already have? And to the extent that some activists become almost permanently wedded to the “angry activist” position, can you really blame them?

Sadly though, legal scholars (and myself, not a legal scholar) are not optimistic about the outcome, which will open a floodgate of further discrimination where literally any business could turn me away at a moment’s notice.  Not exactly a world I want to have to navigate.

We’ll find out over the summer when the ruling comes down, until then, I’ll be a ball of nerves over this hugely important case.

All my best,

Mike



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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