Guest Post by Christian Pittman, one of the stellar Advocacy Interns at Campus Progress.
This week more than 500 Americans desperate for reform gathered in Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle to march on the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) conference at the Ritz-Carlton. This was a rally unlike those I’ve attended since the health care debacle began. In addition to sheer numbers (AP’s measly “dozens of health care activists” doesn’t even come close), it was organized to a tee. There were unions represented by their color-coordinated attire (the purple SIEU, the yellow UFCW, the green AFSCME) that marched down New Hampshire Avenue to the beat of theRhythm Workers Union. The drums weaved in and out of sync with the ever-changing chants, revealing an atmosphere more expected of a parade than a protest.
Remember when I wrote about Angelisa Young and Sinjolya Townsend's plans to marry once it was legal in the District of Columbia? Via Think Progress, the first gay and lesbian couples are officially getting married in Washington, D.C. today after picking up thier marriage licenses. Young and Townsend's wedding is in the video below.
Harvard University opened “Feminist Coming Out Day,” sponsored by The Feminist Portrait Project, on Monday night in a gallery that featured portraits of campus feminists. [Harvard Crimson]
The president of the Yale College Council is working on a plan to rent council-owned phones and laptops to students for a week at a time in the contingency that a student's device breaks. [Yale Daily News]
Pulitzer prize-winner Steve Coll discussed international journalism and the truth about Osama Bin Laden at Cornell Monday. [Cornell Daily Sun]
A mechanical engineering major at Texas A&M and his sister won an Urban Dare race, which combines the need for speed and resourcefulness as racers follow a trail and solve clues throughout cities. [The Battalion]
Nell Painter, author of the new book, “The History of White People,” discussed the myth of “whiteness” at Brown University on Monday night. [Brown Daily Herald]
Stanley Fish has done it again. The bane of my college career has a new Times column up, and he proves still capable of making eloquently nonsensical arguments for the sheer sake of contrarianism.
Fish has always seemed to pride himself on the ability deflate popular wisdom. Where there are heated emotions around a common consensus (particularly among people who may have actually heard of him, i.e. urban liberals) he has taken great delight in arguing the opposite side. Sometimes that has merits (see: his writings on the “war” between science and religion), but sometimes he does it just to do it. Today’s column on the merits of George W. Bush is a case in point.
Fish argues that W’s legacy is already being revived (just as the good professor predicted, natch). His proof? There is one billboard in Minnesota, that great bellwether state, along I-35, that great bellwether highway, with a picture of our ex-president asking “Miss Me Yet”? Also, Obama’s popularity is way down, because he hasn’t been able to keep all his campaign promises while constrained by an antimajoritarian Senate, a poisonously obstructionist political climate, the continuing fallout from a recession, and a ballooning deficit his predecessor created. Because of this completely unprecedented occurrence (that’s sarcasm, by the way, his numbers still edge out Reagan’s at this point is his presidency) people must now embrace the fact that Fish was right all along, um, I mean, that Bush wasn’t such a bad guy.
He contention that Bush-haters are “ indistinguishable in temperament from the professional Obama-haters” is simply insupportable. Fish argues that things in Iraq may be looking up. Sure, compared to the last more-than-half-decade of carnage. No one knows how things will end up in Iraq, but there can be no doubt that George W. Bush sent this country to war on a lie. He sacrificed many thousands of American lives, and countless Iraqis, for a poorly planned, poorly executed mission with no coherent end goal. And that doesn't even touch on unneeded tax cuts for the rich or his disastrously unpopular plans to privatize Social Security. Or his abandonment of low-income Americans and middle income Americans, not to mention our mission in Afghanistan, any semblance of fiscal responsibility, and our most cherished ideals. The Obama-haters don’t like countercyclical spending and a healthcare plan they cheerily proposed in 1994. It’s not quite the same thing Fish, old boy. Better luck with the next column.
In a evening conference call held last night, Mar. 8, anti-immigration group Numbers USA—best known for its brute force attacks on Congress to defeat comprehensive immigration reform in 2007—discussed a variety of tactics to thwart an upcoming march on Washington DC by immigrant rights supporters, including one proposal to call immigrant women from Mexico “the new welfare queens in America.”
In a photo taken from a newsletter for the Concil of Conservative Citizens,’ a designated "hate group"according to watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center, Beck speaks at the group’s national conference in 1997. (Click here to view the newsletter)
The call, which was held at 9 p.m EST, was organized by Numbers USA, and included approximately 45 participants from across the country, many of them representing archconservative“Tea Party” affiliates. In a 30 minute time span, Chad MacDonald, the moderator of the discussion and a worker with Numbers USA, walked callers though ways they could create the perception that there was a grassroots opposition to immigration reform, according to notes taken during the phone call. The actions, organized to pressure Congress to stall on immigration reform, are meant to coincide with the “March For America,” a pro-immigration reform march organized for Mar. 21.
During the discussion, listened to by Campus Progress, activists not only talked about how they should paint Mexican women in the United States as “the new welfare queens,” but they also recommended tactics like referring to immigrant children as “dependents,” rather than “babies,” because “babies” is an "emotional" word. All of this was discussed in the presence of MacDonald and Roy Beck, executive director for Numbers USA, who has his own turbulent past with reported connections to white nationalist groups.
According to notes taken on the phone call:
CALLER 1: I would like to speak out on something. I feel the new welfare queen in America today is women coming from Mexico with a bunch of babies. So I feel they're all coming over here and having all these babies, they are the new welfare queen in America....
New people in America today with a lot of babies, 'cause they coming from Mexico having a bunch of babies. And our tax dollars is taking care of them babies, 'cause the mothers are illegal. So to me, we need to speak out about letting them know they're the new welfare queens in America.
CALLER 2: That was well said brother!
MACDONALD: We will make a note of that. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
CALLER 3: One piece of information would be, they aren't babies, they're dependents. Don't use babies. It's emotional to them. They have dependents. We have babies.
Along with circulating distortions that immigrants somehow use and drain welfare programs—an allegation that has no actual factual basis—Numbers USA and its affiliates are also planning to flood Congressional offices with phone calls and faxes during the pro-immigration march—all with talking points that have been meticulously prepared by Numbers USA—much like the group did in 2007. “I think jobs is the number one way to do it,” said Beck, who noted that growing unemployment during the recession can be fastened to the immigration debate.
“It's not about reality, it's all about perception,” Beck said on the call. “What happened in 2007 is that we as a movement created the perception of on Capitol Hill that most American's did not want amnesty, they did not want comprehensive immigration reform, and that there was an intensity to the people who didn't want it that could really cause political damage for the careers for the members of Congress. That's what moves Congress.”
MacDonald added during the discussion, “We are a single issue organization about reducing both legal and illegal immigration. We have an immense amount of resources. We have an incredible coalition and we can answer and frame a question for any ostensible person to reduce overall immigration.”
I'm from North Carolina, where my Uncle and cousin are never expected at Thanksgiving because they go hunting. My other cousin has a gun collection, including an AK-47. The cousin with the gun collection had been nagging me to go to the shooting range with him and I had bailed out several times. Guns scare me. They just make it too easy to kill someone.
I finally got the courage and went shooting. It was strangely liberating, but strangely out-of-body. I shot two hand guns, one rifle and the AK-47. I shot at a bullseye target 50 feet away against a wall of dirt. For my cousin, it's a sport. He does not carry a concealed weapon. He keeps the guns tightly locked away from his two children. There is a seriousness around the guns that made me comfortable.
A new movement that very much scares the heck out of me, the right to carry an unconcealed weapon, is brewing. The movement is seperate from the NRA and grassroots-based.
I was curious to find out why exactly people want to carry guns in the open. Yes yes, it's a Constitutional Right, but beyond that, what is the necessity in today's society?
On OpenCarry.org, a grassroots website devoted to media coverage and legality of the issue, the most I got of their mission was this:
“Anthropologist Charles Springwood sums it up nicely when he commented that open carriers are trying to 'naturalize the presence of guns, which means that guns become ordinary, omnipresent, and expected. Over time, the gun becomes a symbol of ordinary personhood.'
OpenCarry.org believes that 'a right unexercised, is a right lost,; and increasingly gun owners are agreeing - it's time gun carry comes out of the closet in America!”
Do they feel like police do not do enough? That they need to be walking around their suburban neighborhoods like cowboys in 1850s Colorado? I do not want guns to become a part of everyday life. For sport (as long as it doesn't involve animals), O.K., but not for going to grab a cup of coffee or getting on a bus.
Guns equal hurt. Let's say I'm walking down my urban neighborhood street at night and someone approaches me and tries to mug me. Instead of pulling out my pepper spray and letting go, I pull out my gun and let go. No thank you. I imagine this scenerio playing out in bars, in road rage, in domestic disputes. People are just too unpredictable to have guns strapped to them.
'I am gay. And so, those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long,' Ashburn told radio host Inga Banks on her show on the KERN station in Bakersfield.
The announcement follows days of intense scrutiny of Ashburn's personal life after he was arrested just after 2 a.m. on March 3. A Sacramento television station reported that Ashburn was at a popular gay dance club that night and several people have said they have seen the senator at gay bars in the city.
His sexual orientation is at issue because Ashburn has one of the staunchest records of voting against bills that would expand rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Californians.”
The intersection of personal and public life can be hard for professionals attempting to find a balance with their sexual identity. There is a fear that one will not be hired if you're open, will you able to keep your job, will your coworkers treat you the same, will you be able to move up in an organization the same as if you were straight.
There is a huge element of courage to come out in public life. My hope is that one day, it will not be assumed that everyone you work with is straight. It will not matter. But for public officials, the rules are different. He voted to disinfranchise gay people who were couragous enough to come out.
His actions prove that it is still not an equal playing field for the LGBTQ community. He had to keep it a secret to succed, espeically with the conservatives in his state.
There is a saying in the LGBTQ community: when one person comes out, one vote is changed. You change the opinion of those who love you toward that of acceptance. Unfortunately, I don't think that will be the case in this situation.
Avatar was nominated for nine Academy Awards last night, winning three (Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects). It is the highest grossing film of all time, beating out director James Cameron’s previous record of $1.8 billion for Titanic by $700 million. It’s the most successful environmental film ever. Yeah, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” may be the most obvious choice, for its impact on the climate change movement. It also won the Academy Award for Best Feature length documentary. But millions and millions of people worldwide have seen “Avatar,” and very few can argue with its central themes. At last night’s ceremony, Kathy Bates said the movie was about “peace, harmony and conservation.” Cameron goals were far more reaching than that. At a benefit for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in LA, Cameron said that his movie had a powerful emotional message that a film like “An Inconvenient Truth” could not.
“Avatar is not here to teach or preach, its to create an emotional reaction,” he says. “Avatar asks us all to be warriors for the earth.”
During the event (full video here), Cameron made it clear that the movie was meant to inspire viewers to action. The movie combines feelings of moral outrage and hope to inspire the audience to have greater awareness of the world they live in, he says.
In what is no doubt a response to immigrant rights groups’ plans to hold a march in Washington D.C. on March 21 to push for immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship for millions of people, the radical Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC)—which refers to the United States as a “dictatorship” because “America elected Representatives who have no influence over or knowledge of” their restrictionist “immigration policy”—has declared a three-pronged approach to stop progress on reform legislation, and they’re working with Tea Party protesters to help them.
As ALIPAC announced today, the approach includes “thousands of calls directed at the US Senate Republicans” to oppose any reform legislation that might be proposed in the Senate—which means they’re calling to oppose a bill that doesn’t even exist yet. The second step is to “elevate this issue in the Congressional campaigns, says the group. And last, but not least, ALIPAC “plans to announce countermeasures on Wednesday by unveiling the plans for Tea Party Against [sic] Amnesty events to be held across the nation on April 15 in response to the March 21 protests.”
In reality, the tactics aren’t really that different from 2007, when immigration reform was debated, and defeated. Many people, organized by archconservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh, flooded Congressional offices with faxes and phone calls to oppose the legislation, which was even supported by George W. Bush and business groups.
CampusProgress is proud to present The Plaza, a daily blog that brings news from Spanish-language media outlets to an English-speaking audience.
(Flickr/jcolman)
A great look at some of the local organizing that’s being done to prepare for the “March For America,” being held in Washington on March 21 to push for immigration reform.
The next step to support immigration reform will be taken to the streets in Washington, where Dallas-Fort Worth activists plan to gather for a national march on March 21.
The “March for America,” has been called for by various student, religious and community organizations in order to urge lawmakers to debate a immigration reform proposal before they are occupied with their reelection campaigns.
Activists in Chicago, where Rep. Luis Gutierrez [D-Ill.], author of the reform proposal that was presented before the House of Representatives on Dec. 15, lives, say they counting on 200 buses to transport at least 10,000 people to the rally at the capital.
Five buses in Dallas are reserved for the same purpose, said José Luis Flores, a representative with the Texas Mexican-American Coalition for Immigration Reform, one of the organizers with the “March For America.”
One of those buses will transport students from Texas and Oklahoma who will demonstrate in favor of another legislative proposal that would legalize high school and university students, said Ramiro Luna, a coordinator for DreamAct.com, a site that promotes the proposal.
“It’s very important that students join the movement for comprehensive immigration reform. They are very involved with technology, they have a profound knowledge of politics in the United States and they have a good command of English. These are valuable tools for dealing with Congressional lawmakers,” said Luna, alum of Texas Tech.
He adds that Gutierrez’s office agrees with political analysts that March is the key month in order to keep the possibility for immigration reform in 2010 alive.
“The more time that passes, the harder it’s going to be this year. When Congressional lawmakers have already begun to focus on reelection, they don’t want to tackle controversial issues,” said Luna. The next Congressional elections are in November.
Flores, for his part, said that it was important to keep up the pressure, with many or few possibilities. “We don’t have any other way. This is being done for all of the people who work to get up each morning, not knowing if they will have work, if they will be able to return home, or if they will see their family again,” he said.
Luna said that many students will go to the rally and stay in Washington, with at least one more day to meet with members of Congress to lobby in favor of reform. If they can’t make it to the capital, Luna is asking the young people to mark the major number of the Capitol building to talk with their Senator or Representative about immigration reform.
If gay and lesbian soldiers are allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, the entire US military will be “taken over by gay militants!”
Dan Choi, an Arabic-fluent Army officer who had served in Iraq, ricks losing his career because he is gay. (Flickr/Paul Schreiber)
Or at least, that’s according to a recent memo from the Traditional Values Coalition, which was discovered and posted by LGBT-friendly zine The Advocate in a blog post on Friday. In the letter, authored by the right-wing group’s executive director, Andrea Lafferty, readers are warned of the possibility that there will be “rampant violence in the military if macho men must share shower facilities, bunk beds in a submarine or fox holes with sex-crazed gay males.”
The group is livid over the possibility that the military’s "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" (DADT) policy could be repealed. Under DADT, countless military personnel risk getting kicked out of the armed services if they are ever discovered to be gay. Perhaps the most stunning case in recent memory was the story of Dan Choi, an Arabic-fluent Army officer who had served in Iraq. Currently, Choi is likely to be discharged from the military because he came out as a gay man in 2009. It’s also been reported that 59 Arabic linguists—by far some of the military’s most sought after personnel for Middle East operations—have been discharged for being gay in the last five years.
But the military readiness of the United States is of little concern to the Traditional Values Coalition, which asks “How will men in a Marine platoon react to the knowledge that one of them is a gay who sexually lusts after other men?” Calling Congressional discussions about legislation to repel DADT “a dog and pony show for the gay agenda,” Lafferty writes “the bill is misnamed the ‘Military Readiness Enhancement Act’ – but it should be called the ‘Legalization of Sodomy on the Battlefield and Barracks Act’ because that’s really what it is.”
But it probably shouldn’t be surprising that the Traditional Values Coalition has taken such a zealous stance on DADT, obsessing over “sodomy” and supposed ideas of “macho men.” This was, after all, the same organization that called laws against violent gay bashing an attempt “punish individuals who stray from the current politically correct orthodoxy.”
The amount of applicants to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is up 5 percent this year, a fact that administrators attribute to greater awareness of environmental issues. [Yale Daily News]
Graduate design students at Harvard are working to design a genocide museum in Armenia’s capital to commemorate post-World War I killings. [Harvard Crimson]
Sophomores at George Washington University have formed their own Quidditch league. [GW Hatchet]
Law students at the University of Minnesota took part in a musical spin-off of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” last weekend, satirizing their law school experience. [Minnesota Daily]
At Northwestern Thursday night, students discussed China, Google, and Censorship at an event entitled, “Is China Part of Google Earth?” [Daily Northwestern]
The headline, “Being a porn star ain't what it used to be” pulled me in.
I hadn't thought of the affects of the Age of the Internet on the porn industry. And, on top of it, empathize with its decline.
After reading a story in the Brisbane Times, I started drawing parallels with the decline of print journalism and the porn industry. And actually started feeling for porn stars.
The article describes the plight of porn star Monica Mayhem, from her introduction, the high life, to now, where sales are down, due to what she attributes as the Internet.
Mayhem says, "And these little girls are coming in doing way hardcore things for $300 and ruining it for everyone.[What they] don't realise is that's never going to happen like [Jameson] again - that she was all marketing - and the industry is never going to be like it was."
Mayhem is talking about Jenna Jameson, perhaps the biggest household porn star name. I imagine the girls going into porn look at Jameson in the same way I look at Walter Cronkite, Margaret Fuller and Nellie Bly. The golden age of journalism is gone. Now, it's all about the Internet. I will probably never work for a print newspaper as a reporter. Most of what I write goes on the Internet. I have to print off copies to send to my grandmother.
Mayhem had a negative perspective on the internet, as I think many older journalists do. She is right that younger people will do more. I'm lucky I came into the working world when I did. I never knew the time when Washington Post reporters made $100,000. I hear the tales and can't believe it. My reality is that I'm just glad to be getting a check for my writing. I will work long hours and pay my time and hope that the internet becomes lucrative.
Porn and journalism are different. I'm selling what's in my mind and my ability to get into the minds of others. Porn stars sell their bodies. But the similarities of the impact of the Internet are striking and both industries can learn from the other.
Help save the environment and get free music — says a new promotion starting today from three very different organizations: Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, HeadCount and the NRDC Action Fund. A music festival, a voter-registration non-profit, and an environmental organization are teaming up to encourage music-lovers to take political action on the energy bill. The free music includes 17 different live performances from Bonnaroo music festival, including artists Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, Jack Johnson. Participants are encouraged to send an original or pre-packaged e-mail to their senator, the president or their local newspaper. For the contribution, a participant can download the 17-tracks. You can also skip the letter writing, and just download the music. But that's lame.
"This generation has an opportunity to be remembered as one that confronted environmental challenges and took responsibility for the future,” said Jack Johnson, in a press release from the promoters.
The pre-organized letter includes statements about the coming legislation confronting climate change and investing in the clean energy economy.
“There are no excuses when it comes to our planet’s future. This Congress, and this generation, will be judged by the action we take or fail to take,” says the letter.
Earlier this week, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) released a study which questioned 665 magazines about their online presence. The report is quite comprehensive covering everything from profitability to fact-checking, and the resultant data is fascinating. It will certainly give more fuel, as if more were needed, to the raging debates over journalism’s future. (One particularly interesting finding shows little correlation between accessibility and profitability—those websites that hide their content behind a paywall, don’t make any more money, on average, than their freebe competitors.)
But the study’s most disturbing revelation relates to the copy-writing habits of web magazines: namely, they don’t seem to have any. (Or should I say, we don’t seem to have any.)
48 percent of magazine websites copy-edit their content “less rigorously than print content”. 11 percent don’t copy-edit their online content at all. This doesn’t include the blogs that are attached to these sites. If blogs were included, those numbers would probably be even worse (that is certainly how CP works, plenty of editing on articles, not as much on blog posts). Your favorite magazine is probably included in this damning figure. Sites with 50,000 or more readers are less likely to copy-edit rigorously, as are more profitable outlets.
The New York Times has a neat summary here, including extensive quotes from the man behind it all. “There isn’t yet a generally accepted set of norms for this new medium,” said Victor Navasky, chairman of CJR chairman and publisher emeritus of The Nation. “There’s chaos out there.”
As a grammatically-challenged, yet strangely frequent, contributor to online magazines I issue this plea to all those editors and publishers out there: start copyediting rigorously! Readers deserve it and writers, specifically this writer, need it.
By now, almost everyone has heard of the Credit CARD Act of 2009. This bill, which just went into effect, finally created some basic consumer protections for credit card borrowers. While these companies are doing their best to find new and creative ways to stick it to their customers, the bill stopped some of the worst abuses, and made sure that credit card companies could no longer treat college students, whom they courted aggressively, differently from the rest of the population.
There is a provision in the bill that many people have not heard about, however, and it could be a real help to student journalists, student government, and anyone else who is trying to make sure that colleges, credit card companies, and alumni associations are not taking advantage of students. This provision, championed by Pennsylvania Rep. Patrick Murphy, requires schools to disclose agreements that they have with credit card companies allowing them to market to students. It also allows any individual to request this information.
My fascination with dinosaurs comes from a childhood fascination with where we come from —what existed before people, coupled with the science-fiction sense that we have about dinosaurs. Monsters, aliens and ghosts may exist, however, there is no real evidence toward their existence. But dinosaurs, they did exist. And the more I find out about them and why they became extinct, the more the narrative of what came before me evolves.
Scientists released a consensus Thursday saying that dinosaurs most likely became extinct due to a six-mile wide meteor that hit the Earth while traveling at 45,000 mph. They looked at hundreds of land and sea-floor clay layers to examine microscopic fossils and chemistry dating back to the event.
Dinosaurs are for non-believers, like creationism is for Christians. I want to know where the world started and how it started. What were the first events and how did those events came to pass? Dinosaurs fulfill a larger need to make sense of the world and how I fit into it. I just hope I'm not blasted off the planet by a six-mile wide meteor.
CampusProgress is proud to present The Plaza, a daily blog that brings news from Spanish-language media outlets to an English-speaking audience.
(Flickr/OZinOH)
While immigrant rights groups are already planning a march on March 21 to push for immigration reform legislation, there are now signs that the White House is feeling some pressure, as this brief (and fully-translated) article explains.
While concrete progress on immigration reform has not come from Congress, the perception regarding the level of pressure being exerted by the White House appears to be changing.
After numerous criticisms relating to the lackluster push immigration reform, mother of them after the State of the Union address, pro-immigrant groups seems to be modifying their message.
In this sense, the hopes now seem to be with what President Barack Obama can do to push legislation on Capitol Hill. In fact, on Monday, the president held an informative session with his domestic policy council, where movement on the issue of reform was analyzed.
The council is part of the White House’s internal machinery and has regular meetings with Obama on various issues that are prevalent on the domestic agenda. Its principal job is to “coordinate the process and supervise the execution of domestic policy, offering advice to President Obama while representing the priorities of the President before Congress.”
Although the White House declined to comment on the meeting, immigration related sources told ImpreMedia that Obama had said that he “really wants to move the legislation, and then asked for the most effective way to do so in the current political context.
The Administration won’t confirm such a comment, and would only note that “the President’s commitment to fixing our broken immigration system continues to be unshakeable, and he maintains hope for bipartisan leadership on the legislation. The President believes that we should resolve the situation of the 12 million undocumented people who are here,” said Luis Miranda, spokesperson for the Administration.
Now there exists an impression that Obama has increased the urgency in this area and is looking for “alternatives to impact the negotiation process at the Capitol,” according to a source closely tied to the issue.
The Washington Post is reporting that Virginia Attorney-General Ken Cuccinelli isn't satisfied with standard homophobic positions like opposing marriage equality or LGBT parenting rights—he wants to make life difficult for LGBT college students too:
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II has asked the state's public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, arguing in a letter sent to each school Thursday that their boards of visitors have no legal authority to adopt such statements.
In the letter, Cuccinelli (R) wrote that only the General Assembly can extend legal protections to gay state employees -- a move the legislature has repeatedly declined to take, including as recently as this week.
"It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including 'sexual orientation,' 'gender identity,' 'gender expression,' or like classification as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy absent specific authorization from the General Assembly," he wrote.
To be sure, I am no expert on Virginia state law, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what legal grounds Cuccinelli could possibly have for this position. Is there really a law on the books that says (to paraphrase), "colleges and universities funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia may not determine which suspect classes they can and cannot discriminate against?"
I'm guessing not—and I'm interested to note that this article doesn't mention any evidence Cuccinelli might have for his position. This leads me to believe that Cuccinelli's stance isn't rooted in any understanding of Virginia law at all, but rather in the pure irrationality of homophobia. Repealing anti-discrimination policies reads to me like an active desire to discriminate, and my sense is that Virginians (whatever their stance on LGBT rights) wouldn't be too fond of the notion that their Attorney-General actively desires to discriminate against them.
Today, students across the country are taking action as part of the National Day of Action to Defend Education. You can read more about it and find local actions here, read Campus Progress’s statement here, and take action here.
The latest updates
Protestors in Sacramento being beaten, tased, gassed by police as they try tomarch forward. -via @ CaliforniaAggie on Twitter
500 High School students and supporters in Baltimore, as part of the Algebra Project, marched to a youth detention center in order to draw attention to the “school-to-prison” pipeline. They’re insisting that money for the youth detention center be diverted to education. -via SocialistWorker.org
Hundreds at UCLA convene in the Chancellor’s office to present their demands to Gene Block: lower fees and less layoffs. -via Huffington Post
200 students at UMass-Amherst had the same strategy as UCLA. Disrupting the chancellor is a popular tactic today.
18 students arrested at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee after rallying with 250 others to deliver signatures to the chancellor. Police are accused of using excessive force. Video here and here.
400-500 UW students in Seattle marching in the streets demanding to see UW President Mark Emmert. -via @JayBeeStarkey on Twitter
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