Look, son

Recently Donald Trump made a play for the gay vote, "So you tell me: Who is better for the gay community and who is better for women than Donald Trump?"

To help you answer that question (in case the answer isn't blindly obvious) note later that same evening Trump was photographed with Robert Jeffries, pastor of First Baptist Church, who is notoriously anti-gay and has lamented that people aren't noticing how gays are persecuting Christians (that whole thing about demanding cakes for their weddings). And it was Trump who thinks states should decide whether they allow marriage equality.

I saw a long post in which various LGBT people responded to the Donald. Alas, I didn't keep it nor can I find it. Most of the replies were short videos rather than written text.



Here's a beautiful 3 minute film titled Golden. It made the rounds of LGBT film festivals. The maker decided to post it online after last Sunday's attack.



A lot of the press about Hillary seems to be "a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person," as Henry Louis Gates wrote. Michael Arnovitz provides an example:

To conservatives she is a radical left-wing insurgent who has on multiple occasions been compared to Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Kremlin's long-time Chief of Ideology. To many progressives (you know who you are), she is a Republican fox in Democratic sheep's clothing, a shill for Wall Street who doesn't give a damn about the working class. The fact that these views could not possibly apply to the same person does not seem to give either side pause. Hillary haters on the right and the left seem perfectly happy to maintain their mutually incompatible delusions about why she is awful.

Melissa McEwen of Shakesville has a two-tweet summary of the way lots of people think about this election. Those two tweets include her response.



Saleem Haddad neatly sums up why last Sunday's attack is not part of a war with Islam.



It appears that in California primaries all the R and D candidates are lumped into one big pool. The two top vote-getters, no matter which party they are from, go on to the general election. This fall the two candidates for the seat being vacated by retiring Senator Barbara Boxer are both Democrats and both women of color. They're current Attorney General Kamala Harris (who performed the ceremony for the first same-sex wedding in Calif. last summer) and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who might be the first Latina in the Senate.

Yes, this system can backfire. Consider a case where a seat has two GOP candidates and four Dem candidates. There may be more Dem voters but if their candidates split the vote they could all fall short of the GOPs.



The cast of Kinky Boots (which won Best Musical in 2013) created a response to the North Carolina Bathroom Law – a fun little song and dance. The lyrics include, "I'm me! I don't need ID to tell who am I and where I oughta pee!"



The Black Youth Project has a report on the nine most segregated metropolitan areas. The divide used to be mostly about race. Now it is about income, though there is still a strong racial component to income segregation. The ratings are based on the percentage of population living in segregated areas. The data includes black and white poverty rates and unemployment rates.

Second from the top is Detroit-Warren-Dearborn with 51.9% living in segregated areas. Yes, Detroit is predominantly black and Dearborn is predominantly white (though with a large Arab community). I wonder if the data includes only those cities or includes all of Detroit's suburbs.

At the top of the list is Cleveland-Elyria with 55.1% living in segregated areas.



On the day before the Calif. primary, Hillary Clinton said:

And I do think it will make a big difference for a father or a mother to be able to look at their daughter, just like they can look at their son, and say, 'You can be anything you want to be in this country, including President of the United States.'

That prompted a comment from phoquess, responding to Clinton saying men bring their daughters to meet her. phoquess wrote:

I want to hear about men bringing their daughters, yes, but I also want to hear about men bringing their sons and saying, "Look, son, the future President of the United States. Look, son, we are about to make history. Look, son—the highest authority in the country will be a woman and she'll do a hell of a job at it, and that's going to make things better for EVERYONE."