Mourn the Dead. Fight Like Hell for the Living.

On Sunday I watched Young Royals season 2 episodes 3 & 4. It is the story of Prince Wilhelm of Sweden who has fallen in love with Simon, a commoner. After I watched episodes 1 & 2 I wrote that one aspect of this season’s story is vengeance for a betrayal at the end of last season. Now it looks like the possibility of reverse vengeance. By that I mean person A betrayed person B and B has been making A’s life miserable. That’s being done through indirect means – psychological games. Now A has been given incentive to target B again. Which makes me wonder if the queen understands the situation. A good (as in not boring) romance story puts the lovers through challenges. And there are definitely challenges. Beyond that I don’t want to spoil the story. I finished the book The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Daré. The story is told by Adunni, a 14 year old girl in Nigeria. Her mother assured her she would go to school, which she adores. A louding voice is one that can speak for itself, that others will listen to. She knows a voice can be louding through education. But Mama died and Papa needs money. So he sold her to be the third wife of Morufu whose first two wives have given him only daughters. When something happens to the pregnant second wife Adunni has good reason to believe she will be blamed, so flees. Mr. Kola gives her a ride into Lagos to work for Big Madam – fortunately not that kind of Madam. Adunni is to clean the house, though her salary is paid to Mr. Kola, who disappears. Big Madam is cruel. Big Daddy is lecherous. The previous girl left under mysterious circumstances. She does have a friend in Kofi, the chef. And the house has a library, where she continues her education. She eventually meets Ms. Tia from down the street and is drawn to Ms. Tia’s kindness. Through her Adunni learns of a scholarship at a boarding school given to young domestic workers like herself. Tia helps her apply. Through it all Adunni shows how strong she is. She maintains her kindness for others and her drive for becoming someone important while struggling to understand injustice. I had thought the novel would be about the importance of education, how Adunni got what she needed and where that took her in life. But there is only a hint of that at the end. However, in the author interview at the end of the book she says the story is about the plight of many young Nigerian housemaids, how they are lured into what becomes slavery without chains and how badly they are treated. Adunni tells the story in a style of English of one who knows many of the words, but not how they fit together, as if English is a second language or she learned it in a community that freely mixed English words with the local language. Even so she can express complex thoughts, to the point I wondered if the author forgot to keep the dialect going. Here is an example from page 7:

My head been stoning my mind with many questions since this morning, questions that are not having answers. What is it meaning, to be the wife of a man with two wifes and four childrens? What is making Morofu to want another wife on top the already two? And Papa, why is he wanting to sell me to a old man with no any thinking of how I am feeling? Why didn’t he keep the promise he make to Mama before she dead?

This book is a good one. I downloaded Michigan COVID data. I get the data from here. The program I wrote to draw a chart of the data says Tuesday, the day this data was last updated, is three days short of a thousand days of data. Michigan’s data goes back to March 1, 2020. A thousand days from then will be tomorrow, November 25, 2022. The peaks in the number of new cases per day for the last few weeks are 1537, 1615, 1250, and 1080. I like this trend! But the pandemic isn’t over yet. The deaths per day for the last week is in the single digits. That’s also great news, though I wonder if data collection is up to date. Another mass shooting. Another mass shooting in an LGBTQ club, this one is Club Q in Colorado Springs. A mass shooting in what is supposed to be an LGBTQ safe space. Five LGBTQ people and allies dead just a few minutes before the start of Transgender Day of Remembrance. I think two of the dead were trans. There were also 25 injured. Lauren Sue of Daily Kos has details. She also collected a litany of anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric that has been coming from Republicans and from the far right. She also lists the 37 Republican Senators who voted against the Respect for Marriage Act working its way through Congress. Gabe Ortiz of Kos lists and describes the five people who died in this shooting. They are Daniel Aston – transgender, Kelly Loving – I think transgender, Ashley Paugh – not a member of the LGBTQ community and just enjoying a good time, Derrick Rump, and Raymond Green Vance – also not LGBTQ and there for a birthday party. The community is pleased that when Police Chief Adrian Vasquez read off the names he also included pronoun preferences. David Neiwert of Kos explained the prominent role stochastic terrorism played in the case. We don’t know much about the motives of this particular shooter, but ...

What we do know, however, is that this horrific act of domestic terrorism occurred in a cultural environment in which the LGBTQ community has been under siege by an American far-right apparatus wielding eliminationist rhetoric: Demonizing and dehumanizing them (particularly transgender people and drag queens) as pedophilic “groomers,” attacking specific events that are targeted by far-right social-media influencers, and setting them up for a range of levels of violence, including the extreme and lethal kinds. This is exactly how stochastic terrorism works.

Neiwert then discussed who this shooter is. He then discussed previous events and talking heads that have been spewing rhetoric sounding like calls to terrorism. Ortiz reported that Richard Fierro was at Club Q with his wife, daughter, and daughter’s boyfriend. When the shooting started Fierro’s military training kicked in. He raced across the room, pulled the gunman to the floor, jumped on him, and beat him with his own weapon. An unnamed drag performer also beat him with their high heels. His daughter’s boyfriend was Raymond Green Vance, who died in the shooting. Leah McElrath tweeted an image created by NoBonzo that could be printed and used for coloring therapy. It shows people lighting candles around the words “Mourn the Dead. Fight Like Hell for the Living.” Mike Luckovich tweeted a cartoon. On the left is the rally outside the Capitol that turned into an attack. The caption says, “Lies about the election caused this.” On the right side is an image of Club Q wrapped in crime scene tape. The captions says, “Lies about LGBTQ caused this.” Kevin Necessary tweeted a cartoon showing an elephant wearing a MAGA hat offering a gun to a young boy. The elephant says in part, “Lash out at those who are different than you. ... And if ya feel threatened, well, that’s why ya got this baby.” The caption says, “The Groomer.” Just a few days of that shooting was another. This one had six dead in Chesapeake, Virginia. M Adryael Tong tweeted a thread starting by saying that back in the 2000s the Human Rights Campaign removed gender identity from the Employment Non Discrimination Act to help get it passed.

There was a conscious decision that was made in the aughts to focus on gay and lesbian acceptance especially for wealthy, white gender-conforming people. Incrementalism, people said. I said back then it was BS and I said back then we’d pay for it. And lo and behold.

And we’re paying for it in far right people who can’t or won’t tell the difference between a drag queen and a trans woman. We have to support the whole community. I had mentioned above that 37 Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act. From an article posted last week – before that procedural vote – Joan McCarter of Kos describes the bill and what it does. It is on the Senate agenda, and will likely be passed (though I haven’t heard that it has). It is on the agenda because Justice Clarence Thomas has invited cases that would overturn the 2013 decision that found the Defense of Marriage Act to be unconstitutional. So the big thing the RFMA will do is repeal DOMA. However, RFMA does not protect the Supreme Court ruling that grants same-sex marriage. Congress can’t – the high court has an anti-commandeering doctrine that says the federal government can’t force states to pass state laws. What Congress can do is withhold funding from states that don’t pass their own laws. Marriage is a state issue, as we saw in the early 2010s as one state after another approved same-sex marriage. While the Supreme Court can declare a state law violates the federal constitution, Congress does not have the same power. So if the Supremes reverse themselves Congress can’t fill in the gaps (and all that makes me wonder about a federal law that mandates the right to an abortion in all states or bans abortion in all states). What RFMA can do is regulate marriage across state boundaries. And it does – if a couple gets married in one state and then lives in another the state where they live must honor the marriage and honor the children of the marriage. RFMA also repeats what is happening now, that a religious denomination cannot be forced to conduct a same-sex wedding. That clause allows the Mormon church to support it. McElrath, who has started using Mastodon to establish a presence in case Twitter goes down, tweeted (or whatever the Mastodon equivalent is) to add a bit to McCarter’s explanation:

Alert: There’s a bipartisan bill being considered by the Senate that’s being promoted as “codifying same-sex marriage” rights. Except it doesn’t. The “Respect for Marriage” Act merely guarantees federal recognition of same-sex marriages recognized at the state level. If SCOTUS overturns Obergefell (which is likely), many states will revert to pre-existing laws prohibiting same-sex marriages or pass new ones.

Michel Martin of NPR talked to Kate Sosin, the LGBTQ+ reporter for The 19th, a nonprofit news outlet that focuses on gender policy and politics. They talked about the recent election results in a time of so much anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric. Some of Sosin’s points: Yes, there are a lot of anti-trans bills. Those having to do with gender-affirming care reject what doctors and scientists say about treating gender dysphoria and replace it with what Republican lawmakers say. Less than 5% of voters said gender-affirming care or trans kids in sports was a motivating issue in why they voted. For the vast majority of people this isn’t an issue. It’s only an issue for the Republican base. This year state legislatures introduced 344 anti-LGBTQ bills. 25 passed. Also, there were 1,065 LGBTQ candidates on the ballot and 340 of them were elected. Also, 1 in 5 hate crimes are motivated by anti-LGBTQ bias. Alisa Chang of NPR talked to two trans people elected to state legislatures in 2022. They are James Roesener of New Hampshire and Zooey Zephyr of Montana. Zephyr ran because she was alarmed with several anti-LGBTGQ bills in the Montana Legislature in 2021. She testified against one of them and saw others pass by one vote. Friends left the state, even though they lived in a caring community. That prompted her to run. She added:

And in Montana, when the Department of Public Health and Human Services proposed a new rule about banning updating your birth certificate if you're trans, they held a public hearing, and one person came out to support that anti-trans piece of legislation and 100 came out in opposition to it. And that's across Montana. And if it's true here, I know it's true across the country as well.

Roesener has volunteered at a clinic that provides gender-affirming care and abortion care. Things became personal when laws threatened to lock up friends for providing health care.