Equal In The Eyes of SCOTUS

Opinions may be like assholes but that's no reason why you have to be an asshole about your opinion.  The most zealous on both sides of the argument don't seem to get that and that's the REAL problem.

So your religion says homosexuality is a sin. Good for you.  People still have a right to disagree with you.  You're just going to have to get over it.  So you're gay and proud.  Good for you.  People still have the right to disagree with you.  Get over it.

The issue of marriage equality and whether or not LGBT should be allowed to marry has NEVER been an issue of God verses heathen.  It's only EVER been an issue of FREEDOM versus OPPRESSION.  Whether or not the PERSONAL BELIEFS of ONE group gets to overrule the beliefs of another group.

This is America.  This country was founded on the idea of personal liberty.  Sorry,  Christians, but that liberty includes EVERYONE.  Even people who disagree with you.  Even Muslims.  Even gays.  We've fought for our freedom.  We celebrate our freedom.  Don't you DARE try to take freedom away from someone else.  It's UNAMERICAN.

So when you rant and rave and condemn the Supreme Court for legalizing gay marriage nationwide, go screw yourself.  In the land of the free, home of the brave, equality is more important than your narrow minded world view.

Gay people, now you're turn because that personal liberty includes freedom of religion.  It's one thing to change the law so that oppression ends.  We need to keep fighting for equality until everyone has it.  But it's something else to force someone who fundamentally disagrees with your lifestyle to do what you tell them and to use threats and coercion.  You're trying to break away from your oppression.  Don't become the oppressor.  It's hypocritical and isn't going to win you support. Because forcing someone to do something they don't want to do isn't going to change their minds.  Winning hearts changes minds and each generation grows more tolerant than the last.

For every hateful person that tells you no, there are dozens of more enlightened people who will say yes.  I don't care if one county clerk refuses you.  Suing them is stupid.  Go to another county clerk.  So this guy won't make you a cake.  Go somewhere else.  It's that simple.  Your marriage will still be recognized nationwide wherever it takes place and do you really trust someone who hates you not to spit in your cake?

It's ok to disagree with someone.  It's ok for someone to disagree with YOU.  It's NOT ok to force people to live by your religious doctrine or force people to abandon theirs.  Freedom is important.  Abe Lincoln said that anyone who denies freedom to someone else doesn't deserve it for themselves. He was right.

If you truly value freedom, you don't mind gay marriage.  You don't ban things like gay marriage or even abortion.  You WANT separation of church and state.  Why?  Because (and this is for you Christians out there) God tells us to get our OWN affairs in order and not worry about everyone else's.  You need to worry about your OWN soul.  Live and let live.  If you value freedom, your faith doesn't interfere with it.  You understand that some things aren't any of your damn business and you don't have the right to make personal decisions for anyone else.  Then you live your life as well as YOU can and stop trying to be the boss of others.

So the question we as a nation must ask ourselves is,  do we still believe in freedom?  If the answer is yes, then LGBT couples deserve fair treatment.  Other religions besides Christianity deserve fair treatment too.  Cuz this is America and we're all about freedom here.

This is a huge step for equality in America.  People who value equality and freedom are happy.  If you're not happy, you don't value equality and you damn sure don't value freedom.

I'll be blunt.  If you're honestly not ok with marriage equality, you may be a good Christian but you're not a patriotic American.  This country is about freedom for EVERYONE.

THAT INCLUDES LGBT.

So all you right wingers who blast liberals for destroying the American dream can piss off.  You're the ones who destroyed it because you don't even know what it is.

Wanna know what Jesus would really do about legalizing gay marriage nationwide?  Nothing.

Here's a link you may like:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gay-marriage-and-other-major-rulings-at-the-supreme-court/2015/06/25/ef75a120-1b6d-11e5-bd7f-4611a60dd8e5_story.html

Uncle Tom's Mansion

I'm so sick of people whining about institutional racism and the white man's out to get the black man and yaddah yaddah yaddah.  I'm not going to pretend racism no longer exists the way so many right wing white Tea Party nutjobs do because I'm not stupid.  I know racism is still very much alive.  Yet I'm also too intelligent to pretend that only white people are racist the way so many black people do.

Racism is not a whites only disease.  There are a great number of white people out there who aren't racist and there are a great number of black people who are.  There are also racist Latinos, racists Asians, racist Arabs....  EVERY ETHNIC GROUP ON THE PLANET HAS ITS FAIR SHARE OF RACISTS.

But society only calls out white people.  The media will crucify a white person for saying or doing anything that may be remotely considered racially offensive, but very rarely does anyone ever call out black people for doing the same thing.  And when someone does call out a black person, THEY'RE the ones who are racist.  Not the black person.

It doesn't matter what black people do wrong anymore.  It's always the white man's fault.  Blacks are forced to commit crimes because of institutional racism.  Black poverty is the white man's fault even though millions of white people are in the same poverty.  It isn't the lack of education and skills that keep black kids from having a successful career, it's the white man denying them the right to work.  Even though schools have been desegregated for decades.  Even though large portions of blacks have college degrees and successful careers.  It isn't black people's faults that predominantly black neighborhoods have such high crime rates or that black teens are so disrespectful they refuse to wear pants correctly or that so many blacks have so little consideration for their neighbors that they play loud music at all hours of the day. THEY can't help it.  The white man MAKES them behave that way.

Bullshit.  You  CHOOSE what kind of person you are and if you CHOOSE to act like trash, you ARE trash.  The white man isn't making the black man do anything the black man doesn't want to do.  All the anti discrimination laws on the books, affirmative action.  What have black people done with them?  Why don't black people want to be more active in politics or in the community?  Why don't black people want to be cops?  How can you expect your circumstances to change if you don't do anything to change them?

We never want to call black people out on their own bad behavior.  We never want to suggest that maybe things would change if more black people would just stop blaming their problems on their being black and started CORRECTING the things that cause those problems.

We feel so guilty of our past, we've lost all sense of fairness.

But we have come a long way since the 1960s and we've certainly come a long way from the days of slavery.  This continued blame everything on white people nonsense makes it sound like nothing's changed at all.  Even though white people marched during the Civil Rights movement and in Ferguson and Baltimore.  Even though whites are demanding the Confederate flag no longer be flown because even whites recognize that something racially offensive has no place in our society anymore.  To keep attacking whites isn't fair.

A handful of bad seeds can't speak for an entire people, but vilifying an entire people over a handful of bad seeds will make those people not like you very much and so racism will never die.

Stop demanding the equality you have no intention of giving to others.  That makes you a hypocrite.

The only way to end racism is for one side to be the better person and stop recognizing race as anything other than an ancillary issue.  Most white people are trying to do that and I commend them for it.  It's not ignoring the problem of racism.  It's acknowledging that giving racists attention only encourages them.  It's recognizing that someone's race isn't an issue anymore and we don't have to let it be.

The only people still hung up on race are the people using race as an excuse to either hate or to explain their own inaction.

It's time to move on if we're ever going to heal.

Does affirmative action promote racism?

I can get where they were coming from when they created affirmative action.  It was designed to force white business owners to hire black employees and colleges to accept black students at a time when it wasn't their intention to do so.  I get that in a segregated world that had just legalized civil rights, affirmative action was something we HAD to do in order to enforce the new anti discrimination laws and give black people the chance to finally get a leg up in the world.  And it did a lot of good.

But at some point,  probably in the 90s, affirmative action stopped being the thing that fought discrimination against black people and started being that thing that discriminated against white people.

This is where the trolls come out to tell me how racist I am for saying anything bad about black people, but I'm not.  I'm being honest about the modern concept of affirmative action and being critical of any system that's based on race doesn't make you racist.  It's not racist to condemn racism even when that racism benefits black people.

See, what affirmative action REALLY does is forces businesses and colleges to base their hiring and admissions on RACE rather than qualifications.  It forces them to meet a quota and, in doing that, forces them to NOT accept someone who may be more qualified for the job or have better grades and have worked harder for that scholarship BASED ON THEIR RACE.

So what is affirmative action except racism against non black people?  And does affirmative action really just keep racism alive?

Now black folks are not going to like this.  They're going to say I'm racist for thinking such a thing because blacks have had such a rough time and face racism every day and need things like affirmative action to protect themselves against the big bad white people who want to oppress them.

But how does that genius Asian kid feel who got overlooked for his place at his school of choice because the school needed more black students on campus?  How does the black girl feel when she didn't get her dream job because they needed someone more Hispanic for the position?

Affirmative action doesn't just affect whites and blacks.  It isn't just racist against whites even though whites are admittedly the intended target and reason affirmative action exists.  Affirmative action is a double edge sword that can help and hurt anyone of any color.

Except white people, actually.  There is no quota of white people to meet.  In fact, white people are specifically left out of the quota which is racist in itself, but hey.

The point is that affirmative action keeps racism alive by forcing race to be the deciding factor.  That shouldn't be an issue anymore.  A person's merits and abilities should mean more than their skin color.

We don't live in that world yet and I get why we need to pressure employers and colleges to be more diverse.  But in forcing that diversity against everyone's will, we may actually only be making the problem worse.

It's a vicious truth, isn't it?

The Coming Storm

If and when the apocalypse happens, kiss your ass goodbye.  Guns aren't going to save you.  Secret underground bunkers with years of food storage won't save you.  It will only prolong the inevitable.  You're going to die.

Why?  Because when the world falls apart, when you need those guns and secret bunkers, it'll be too late to save yourself.

If the world dies, life on it dies too.  It's not that complicated.

War kills the planet.  Pollution kills the planet.  I don't care if you believe in climate change,  if you don't understand the need to have a clean environment, you're a murderer.  I don't care how threatened you feel, if you think violence is your only option, you're a murderer.  And you're not a little murderer.  You're committing genocide.  You're killing our entire species the more you continue.

So go ahead and frack the earth to death.  Bomb it to death.  Cut down the trees and kill all the bees.  If that's the kind of species we are, we deserve extinction.

But if you want to live, if you want your children to live, you care about the earth.  You don't want to frack it to death or bomb it or cut down all the trees.  It doesn't matter if you're allergic.  You don't want to kill the bees.  You want to protect the environment regardless of whether or not you think climate change is real.

The only way to survive the apocalypse is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Save the world, save yourself.

Do you believe we're on the way to extinction?  Here's a link to read:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/earth-is-entering-sixth-extinction-phase-with-many-species--including-our-own--labelled-the-walking-dead-10333608.html

Mckinney: the next Ferguson?

Is McKinney, Texas destined to be the next Ferguson?

So... some kids decided to sneak into someone's pool they didn't have permission to be in and have a loud party.  Someone called the cops.  All hell broke loose.  That's all we know right now, but that isn't stopping people who weren't even there from weighing in.

The peanut gallery has already started the race bashing.  See, the cops were white and some of the kids breaking the law were black.  So naturally the whole thing was racially motivated.  White folks being mean to black folks again.  But there's more to the story.  The comentators are just too racist to acknowledge it.

Yes.  The cops were too aggressive.  They manhandled these teenagers.  It was, in hindsight, an over reaction on their part and needs to be addressed.  I'm not going to defend the police.

But I'm not going to defend those hoodlum teens either.  They broke the law and when the police arrived to enforce the law, they were disrespectful and antagonizing.  They refused to disperse when told to and that's what led to an escalation in the situation.  Just because the brief part of the video going around social media shows a SINGLE incident, doesn't mean that's the whole story.  These kids are being held blameless but they aren't really, are they?

The neighborhood where this happened is an upscale, gated neighborhood.  Yes, predominantly white, but that's irrelevant in this case.   The pool in question is strictly for the residents in that neighborhood.  Most of the teens throwing the party were not residents of that neighborhood.  They didn't legally have a right to be there.  You can't have a free for all party even on semi public property without permission from someone.  Probably need a city permit.  But the teens behind this party didn't respect the law enough to bother with either.  It's not youthful indescretion.  There's too many resources for this sort of thing (Google, for example) and had they asked their parents, this could have all been avoided.

It's a party so there's loud music.  Most likely inappropriate music and even less appropriate behavior.  Been to any parties lately?  There's been several reports of inappropriate behavior but the media ignores that even reports made by BLACK witnesses because making this all about race is giving the people what they want. Neighbors took offense at their peace being violated and kind of had a right to do so.

Could a few of the complaints have been racially motivated?  How the hell should I know? I wasn't there and you probably weren't either, but it's a rich, predominately white neighborhood in a very Republican state so I wouldn't fault you for making that assumption.  I wouldn't say you were right either.  If the teens felt that threatened by the white neighbors, why didn't THEY call the cops or just leave?  Because they weren't supposed to be there.  It's almost as though they wanted a confrontation.

Were the cops wrong for breaking up the party?  No.  Because the teens had no right to be there.  End of.  It isn't segregation.  It's a matter of the pool being strictly for the people who pay the HOA fees to maintain the pool.  If black families live in that neighborhood and pay for the pool, I'm positive they'd have a legal right to use it. These teens didn't.  They certainly shouldn't have resisted the police when they were told to leave.  These teens are not innocent of wrong doing and no one wants to publicly acknowledge that.  Too scared people will think they're racist.

Was this just a political statement and the cops were baited into responding for the cameras?  Things that make you go huh.

But if the teens were innocent, why weren't their parents there and why didn't they get permission to use the pool?  Bad parenting may not excuse police brutality,  but it creates the situations that make confrontations with police possible.

Police brutality affects people of all colors.  Cops beat up white people all the time, but the media ignores that because it's only newsworthy when blacks are victims.  We only care when it involves black people.  Everyone knows only whites are racist, right?

And that kind of thinking is why racism will never die.

But no matter what new information comes out, people have already made up their minds based on what they WANT to believe regardless of the truth.

Watch the video for yourself.  Try to be objective.  Here's more info:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/07/us/mckinney-texas-pool-video-police/