More Monday Male Beauty

Millennials Need to Kill Politics as We Know It

Among the biggest losers under the Trump/Pence regime and Republican Party is the Millennial generation.  Soon to be the largest voting block generation, to date they have surrendered their own best interests by failing to vote against politicians who are their enemies when it comes to economic benefits, environmental policies, and resisting discrimination.  Had Millennials turned out in the 2016 presidential election, the foul Cheetos colored occupant of the White House would have remained a reality TV character with no ability to harm the nation at large.  A piece at CNN looks at how the Millenials could upend conventional politics and send many toxic politicians into retirement.  Here are highlights:

Millennials could be one of the biggest political forces in America today, if they wanted.

Defined by Pew as those born between 1981 to 1996, millennials make up about 22% of the US population, and at some point between November's midterms and the 2020 election, they're expected to surpass baby boomers as America's largest living generation. They're a massive voting bloc, capable of setting policy priorities and swinging elections.  They're also grossly underrepresented in American politics.

They are "highly idealistic young people," he said, and their political rise coincides with "our country's worsening polarization and political dysfunction."  Millennials are drawn into politics over issues that affect them, like student debt, the economy, the environment, and health care, said Erin Loos Cutraro founder of She Should Run, a nonpartisan group that helps women run for office.

"Millennials especially want to put their time toward something they know they can change," she said.

That millennial attitude showed up in an Instagram post Wednesday by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was photographed for Vanity Fair. In the caption for the photo, she sounded more like a social media influencer than a typical politician, writing that she felt anxious and overwhelmed by her sudden fame after winning her New York primary.

Though millennials' experience varies widely by demographics, geography, and politics, they're a generation shaped by experiences like the Great Recession, high levels of student debt, and the rise of social media.

They are the most racially diverse generation and the most likely to live in metro areas. They're more likely to be unmoored from social institutions -- the most likely to be religiously unaffiliated and the least likely to be married. They're the least trusting of others. They're the most likely to live with their parents and not be in the workforce. They've been mocked in the culture for being given participation trophies they never asked for, and many feel as if they're inheriting a mess they didn't make.

Politically, millennials are the most independent generation. They're the least likely to see big differences between the Democratic and Republican parties, and a March Pew poll found 44% of millennials identify as independent, while 35% identify as Democrats and 17% as Republican.

Millennials are "rejecting the old partisan boxes, they're rejecting the old binary choices," Olikara, of the Millennial Action Project, said.

Once derided for their hashtag "slacktivism," movements powered in large part by millennials on social media have directed political action and activism towards causes like #LoveWins, #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. It's perhaps an omen of what's to come.

Once millennials become a majority in Congress, Olikara said, "I think it's very likely that partisan identity will not be the driving force in American politics." Instead, he hopes, politics will be "more issue focused."

"We have a huge opportunity," he said.

  Let's hope they turnout in a major way next month and help flip control of Congress.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century

If one wonders where America is likely headed with a Supreme Court firmly controlled by a reactionary majority, a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic suggests that we are headed back to Court decisions like those in the 19th Century which protected the powerful, especially corporations, and set the frame work for the Jim Crow laws.  Racial minorities and the LGBT community in particular should be very fearful if the lessons of history show us anything.  Through it all, a pretense of a support for "freedom" will be maintained even as discrimination is maintained.  The Christofascists and white supremacists of Trump and the GOP's base will be thrilled since they will be allowed to victimize and discriminate against others. The rest of the GOP supporters will be complicit in the wrongs done and will need to be held accountable when the day of reckoning does finally come after incalculable harm has been done.  Here are article excerpts (take the time to read the entire article):

When the Louisiana State Militia finally arrived at the Colfax courthouse on April 15, 1873, all it could do was bury the bodies. Two days earlier, a large force of white supremacists had taken control of the courthouse from the mostly black faction protecting it. J. R. Beckwith, the U.S. attorney for New Orleans, told Congress that in the aftermath the ground was “strewn with dead negroes,” their bodies plundered by whites who had come to watch the bloodshed. The dead remained “unburied and mutilated,” Beckwith said, until federal troops arrived days later to shovel them into a mass grave.

“Not a single negro had been killed until all of them had surrendered to the whites who were fighting with them,” The New York Times reported at the time, “when over 100 of the unfortunate negroes were shot down in cold blood.”

President Ulysses S. Grant called the Colfax massacre a “butchery” that “in bloodthirstiness and barbarity is hardly surpassed by any acts of savage warfare.” . . . Many white Southerners saw it differently. Robert Hunter, the editor of The Caucasian, a Louisiana newspaper, told Congress in 1875 that some of his own staffers had participated in the massacre. “I approved it, as most of our people did,” Hunter testified. “Had not the Colfax affair ended as it did, not less than a thousand niggers would have been killed later.”

Seventy-two men were ultimately indicted for their role in the Colfax massacre, charged under the Enforcement Acts of 1870, which were passed to help the federal government suppress the Ku Klux Klan. But their convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the federal government lacked the authority to charge the perpetrators. . . . And it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, argued the Grant-appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, because the Fourteenth Amendment’s powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state. “The only obligation resting upon the United States is to see that the States do not deny the right,” Waite wrote.

This decision, in United States v. Cruikshank, the legal historian Lawrence Goldstone argues, provided a guide for the campaign of racist terrorism that would suppress the black vote and enshrine a white man’s government for generations.

Grant was enraged that “insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers … and the so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice.” . . . By the end, racial segregation would be the law of the land, black Americans would be almost entirely disenfranchised, and black workers would be relegated to a twisted simulacrum of the slave system that existed before the Civil War.

The justices . . . carefully framed their arguments in terms of limited government and individual liberty, writing opinion after opinion that allowed the white South to create an oppressive society in which black Americans had almost no rights at all. Their commitment to freedom in the abstract, and only in the abstract, allowed a brutal despotism to take root in Southern soil.

The Conservative majority on the Supreme Court today is similarly blinded by a commitment to liberty in theory that ignores the reality of how Americans’ lives are actually lived. Like the Supreme Court of that era, the conservatives on the Court today are opposed to discrimination in principle, and indifferent to it in practice.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s June 2018 ruling to uphold President Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting a list of majority-Muslim countries, despite the voluminous evidence that it had been conceived in animus, showed that the muddled doctrines of the post-Reconstruction period retain a stubborn appeal.

In doing so, he [Roberts] embraced the logic of decades of jurisprudence from his predecessors on the high court, whose rulings ensured that the Constitution would not interfere with the emergence of Jim Crow in the American South. The nation’s founding document is no match for a dedicated majority of justices committed to circumventing its guarantees.

Not since the end of Reconstruction has the U.S. government been so firmly committed to a single, coherent program uniting a politics of ethnonationalism with unfettered corporate power. As with Redemption, as the end of Reconstruction is known, the consequences could last for generations.

The lesson of the post-Reconstruction Supreme Court is that a determined Court majority can prove stubbornly resistant to short-term swings of political fortune. Even if Democrats win the next election cycle, and the one after that, an enduring conservative majority on the Supreme Court will have the power to shatter any hard-won liberal legislative victory on the anvil of judicial review. It will be able to reverse decades-old precedents that secure fundamental rights. It will further entrench the rules of a society in which justice skews toward the wealthy, and the lives of those without means can be destroyed by a chance encounter with law enforcement. It will do all these things and more in the name of a purely theoretical freedom, which most Americans will never be able to afford to experience.

The Supreme Court’s moments of majesty, such as Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregated schools; and Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws; and even Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage, are few and far between. For most of its existence, the high court has been committed less to upholding the rule of law or the Constitution than to preserving its own legitimacy, unwilling to shield the powerless from the mob unless convinced that it has the political cover to do so. Like many things in America, the ideal rarely resembles the execution.

The Colfax massacre is most often remembered as the single worst act of violence during Reconstruction, but it also set a template for the high court’s approach to the bloody restoration of white rule in the South. The men who carried out the massacre had popular support among Southern whites—according to the historian Ted Tunnell, “nearly half the white males” in New Orleans alone belonged to terrorist groups such as the White League, which was willing to use violence to secure political gains or prevent black Americans from voting. With Cruikshank, the justices sent the message that if white Southerners wished to overthrow their state government at gunpoint, the Supreme Court would bar efforts to prosecute them.

The Supreme Court’s growing hostility to federal efforts to protect black rights would come to its logical conclusion in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation in public transportation. Justice Henry Billings Brown, a Rutherford B. Hayes appointee, wrote that “if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Separate was not inherently unequal, he insisted. . . . As the historian Ibram X. Kendi has written, “Brown relied on racist ideas to support a policy that was clearly discriminatory in intent. It was his job to obscure those intentions.”

In 1898, in Williams v. Mississippi, the William McKinley–appointed Justice Joseph McKenna would write for a unanimous Court that literacy tests and grandfather clauses, two cornerstones of Jim Crow–era disenfranchisement, were constitutional because they also affected some whites. That the devices were consciously used to bar black voters from the polls was of no significance—the Court would avert its eyes and plug its ears.

“The Court increasingly used the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporations from state regulation rather than the civil rights of persons.” In case after case, “the U.S. Supreme Court had come to embrace the logic of corporations,” Painter wrote in Standing at Armageddon, her history of the Gilded Age. “These decisions outlawed virtually any attempt by states to limit maximum hours of work, of unions to strike, and of the federal government to curb or regulate monopolies or to curb the accumulation of vast fortunes.” . . . The redistribution of civil rights from American citizens to American corporations helped create the greatest disparities in wealth in the nation’s history, until the present day.

“The Supreme Court contributed to the inequality of the Gilded Age by reinforcing and encouraging racial segregation. By refusing to read the Fourteenth Amendment broadly for minorities, they allowed a system of racial apartheid to go up in the South,” Winkler said. “On the other side, the corporate rulings enhanced inequality by entrenching the power of industrialists, financiers, and wealthy elites at the expense of immigrants and the working class."

Chief Justice Roberts upheld the [Trump muslim] ban, writing that it was “facially neutral” and that “the text says nothing about religion.” His decision echoed the logic of the Supreme Court’s rulings in Redemption-era cases such as Cruikshank and Williams: that as long as the legal language itself did not explicitly mention the group being discriminated against, intent and effect were irrelevant. The implications are larger than one religion: As with the Redemption Court, which gave the Redeemers a blueprint for creating a segregated society through laws that “do not on their face discriminate between the races,” Roberts and the conservative majority have indicated that Trump’s bigotries can be made policy as long as they appear “facially neutral.”

With Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, there is no discriminatory voting restriction the justices will be unable to sanction, no immigration law born in animus they will be unable to approve, no expansion of corporate power they will be unable to accept, no grant of presidential immunity they will be unable to uphold, no financial or environmental regulation they will be unable to strike down, no religious objection to an anti-discrimination law they will be unable to recognize, no worker protection they will be unable to repeal, no limitation on abortion they will be unable to allow, and no abuse of power by law enforcement they will feel compelled to restrict. 

There is hope for the Democratic Party in its base. The black and brown workers intimately acquainted with the two-faced nature of American liberty, the rebellious teachers whose surprise strikes brought red-state politicians to heel, the young leftists whose cold-eyed understanding of power mirrors that of their Republican opponents, and the feminists who flooded the streets after Trump’s inauguration forced the nation to reckon with the ascension of predatory men to the highest levels of culture, clergy, and state. But they will have to contend with a party establishment that is so divorced from the lives of those the Trump administration has put in peril that it cannot comprehend what will be required to defeat Trumpism. Democracy is a fight, and the Democratic Party’s leadership has yet to show that it can even wrap its hands.

Be very, very afraid.  America could be poised to revisit some of its ugliest history.

More Sunday Male Beauty

CCV Racing - An Escape from Politics

Waiting for wind and the start.

Sometimes I feel I suffer from an overload of politics and stress in general.  Other than surfing, which I sadly have not done regularly in several years after having a 70 month period of never missing a month surfing, I find sailing a great stress reliever.  I pursue this endeavor through racing at the Hampton Yacht Club where I have been a member since 2012. Today, I raced in the CCV Fall Racing series on a boat owned by a friend with whom I have raced before on a number of occasions. We took second (2nd) place overall and had a wonderful time.  As with surfing, once a race is underway, all else fades away and your focus becomes, the boat, the wind, and the competition.  The camaraderie is also wonderful and the connection with nature is unique (something power boating cannot offer in my view).   Above and below are photos from today which started off slow until the wind picked up but turned into a great day.

The Laser 28 that I crewed on today (and a number of other times).

Some of the 18+ boats competing today.

A view of Hampton Yacht Club - the husband and I were the first publicly recognized gay couple members.

One of our competitors motoring to the start.

White Women Need to Stop Betraying Themselves

Women putting white privilege ahead of equality and decency.

I often ridicule white redneck types - think Southwest Virginia or West Virginia voters - who time and time again voted for Republicans who do nothing for them and, in fact, enact policies that do them significant financial harm.  How do Republicans get away with this?  By playing the race card as they have ever since Richard Nixon devised the so-called Southern strategy.  But it is not just rednecks that fall for the ploy.  Leading the charge of self-harm are and bible thumping, broad assed women, typically evangelicals who place their whiteness above all else. In doing so, they perpetually condemn themselves and their daughters and granddaughters to an inferior place in society.   (Gay Republicans maddeningly do the same thing, in my view) With two daughters and three granddaughters, it enrages me.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon and urges white women to stop the self-betrayal.  Here are excerpts:

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.

They’re more sympathetic to Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who actually shooed away a crowd of women and told them to “grow up.” Or Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whose response to a woman telling him she was raped was: “I’m sorry. Call the cops.”

These are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped. The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday. But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades. White women have broken for Democratic presidential candidates only twice: in the 1964 and 1996 elections, according to an analysis by Jane Junn, a political scientist at the University of Southern California. . . . . The gender gap in politics is really a color line.

That’s because white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re placed on a pedestal to be “cherished and revered,” as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has said about women, but all the while denied basic rights.

This elevated position over women of color comes at a cost, though. . . . . white women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies.

[A] woman who steps out of line may be ridiculed by [Trump] the president himself. President Trump mocked Dr. Blasey in front of a cheering crowd on Tuesday evening. Betray the patriarchy and your whiteness won’t save you.

The pedestal is a superior, if precarious, place. For white women, it’s apparently better than being “stronger together,” with the 94 percent of black women and 86 percent of Latinas who voted for Hillary Clinton.

Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their whiteness.

This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”

I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.

But apparently that doesn’t include Ms. Murkowski anymore. Maybe it’s because she comes from a state with the nation’s highest rate of sexual violence, with a sexual assault rate three times the national average, where prosecutors just let a man evade jail time after he kidnapped a native Alaskan woman and strangled her unconscious, then masturbated over her body. Maybe.

Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.

The question for white women in November is: Which one of these two women are you?

I know where my daughters fall on this question.  They will vote against maintaining white privilege.  I also know where some "friends" votes will fall: they will vote to maintain their white privilege even when it means trowing decency, morality and the "Christian values" they pretend to honor.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

More Saturday Male Beauty

Philadelphia Archbishop: LGBT People Don't Exist

With all of its problems and its legitimacy among educated portions of the world plummeting, one would think that the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church would focus on putting its own foul and morally bankrupt house in order.  Yet, instead, these same leaders who turned a blind eye to abuse and helped in massive cover ups to protect their own power and status continue to wage a war against LGBT individuals and basically modernity itself.  A case in point is Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput who railed against even using the term "LGBT" and claimed that LGBT individuals do not exist and parroting the Christofascist lie that sexual orientation is a choice.  A piece in The Advocate looks at this batshitery.  Here are excerpts (Note that this raging homophobe was selected by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to be its representative):

Philadelphia Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput, one of the more anti-LGBTQ voices in American Catholicism, says the church should avoid using term “LGBTQ” in official documents — and he blames liberal beliefs about sexuality for the church’s abuse crisis.

“There is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are; as if these designations described discrete communities of differing but equal integrity within the real ecclesial community . . .

Chaput objected to the fact that the working document for the synod said, “Some LGBT youths, through various contributions that were received by the General Secretariat of the Synod, wish to ‘benefit from greater closeness’ and experience greater care by the Church.”

“‘LGBTQ’ and similar language should not be used in church documents, because using it suggests that these are real, autonomous groups, and the church simply doesn’t categorize people that way,” he said.

Chaput said young people are being shaped “by a culture that is both deeply appealing and essentially atheist.” He went on to blame contemporary culture for the church’s sexual abuse crisis.  “The clergy sexual abuse crisis is precisely a result of the self-indulgence and confusion introduced into the church in my lifetime, even among those tasked with teaching and leading,” he said. “And minors — our young people — have paid the price for it.” His admonition to avoid using “LGBTQ” and similar language came after that, so it wasn’t clear if he was specifically blaming gay people for the crisis or sexual liberalism in general.

Chaput was chosen by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to represent the group at the synod. He is a member of the synod’s permanent council as well.

Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBTQ equality within the church, denounced Chaput’s message. It “is a perfect example of how some church leaders have been so blinded by ideological homophobia and transphobia that they cannot perceive plain human facts accurately,” he wrote in an online essay published Friday. “His comments reflect the dangerous avoidance mentality that is the cause of the clergy sexual abuse scandal and so many of the ills which plague the Catholic Church today.”

“There are LGBTQ Catholics and transgender Catholics and heterosexual Catholics, just as there are Italian Catholics, elderly Catholics, disabled Catholics, Latin American Catholics, traditionalist Catholics, poor Catholics, educated Catholics, and so many other distinct groups within our big tent church,” DeBernardo wrote. It appears that Chaput “is trying to make LGBTQ people invisible in the church by pretending that they don’t exist,” he continued.

Chaput, who has a long history of anti-LGBTQ stances, was named archbishop of Philadelphia in 2011, having previously led the archdiocese of Denver. In Colorado, he supported the decision by a Catholic school in Boulder not to reenroll a lesbian couple’s child, and he used his regular column in Denver’s Catholic newspaper to celebrate the defeat of legislation that would have established civil unions for same-sex couples in the state. He further called same-sex marriage “the issue of our time.”

In 2016, with same-sex marriage legalized nationwide by the Supreme Court the previous year, he announced that people in “irregular” relationships, including same-sex ones, must refrain from sex if they are to receive communion or participate in certain other church activities.

Chaput is guaranteeing that more young Catholics will rightfully walk away from the Church.