The first male same-sex couple to marry at West Point were in a Manhattan bodega in the upscale neighborhood of SoHo on Sunday when one of them was physically attacked by a man they say threw the first punch.

"It's hard to believe that in 2015 we would have to deal with anti-gay hate crimes in soho of all places but that's what happened today," Larry Lennox-Choate III wrote on Facebook.

An unidentified man about 40-years old "screamed anti-gay obscenities" at the couple then punched Larry's husband, Daniel Lennox-Choate, in the face.

"The guy who screamed anti-gay obscenities at us in a bodega before sucker-punching Danny?," Larry, who graduated West Point in 2009, explains, "He left covered in his own blood with his tail between his legs after I handled the situation and tossed him in the street like the coward loser he is."

Congratulations, neo-Nazis, quasi-Nazis and panderers-to-Nazis: You’ve managed to catapult your obsession with “cuckolding” into semi-mainstream political discourse.

It’s no secret that those on the far right in the US can’t stop talking about “cuckolding.” Some have been using “cuck” as a handy insult for any man they don’t like; others have concocted weird paranoid fantasies about black men “cuckolding” white men and the white race, literally and symbolically. It’s a ridiculous mixture of racism and misogyny.

And until recently, it was mostly confined to the neo-Nazis and “dark enlightenment” sorts. A couple of months back, you may recall, the cuck-callers tried ineffectually to torpedo a Nickelodeon show about a high school cheerleader-turned-quarterback for supposedly “promoting anti-white (and consequently pro-black (heh)) race cucking.”

That strange crusade never caught on but the same gang of far-right cuck-callers has hit the big time with “cuckservative,” a handy if ill-defined epithet for conservatives who aren’t conservative blatantly racist enough for the anti-“cultural Marxist” crowd.
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/08/02/cuckservative-the-dumbest-neo-nazi-hashtag-since-culturalmarxism-hits-the-big-time/

It is getting frustrating to see yet another abominable Republican attack on women’s reproductive rights without any acknowledgment that it is a concerted religious effort to dominate and control American women and nothing else. It is true that it is a uniquely American unwritten cardinal sin to utter one negative word about Christian extremists imposing their “religious liberty” on Americans, but for dog’s sake the time to stand up for women and against theocratic assaults on their rights is long past. There are, allegedly, “good Christians’ in the population and they certainly outnumber the fanatical evangelical control freaks, but except for one Catholic nun, they are silent cowards.

For the record, again, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution regarding enforcing religious edicts for the sake of a religion, and yet Republicans are wasting more taxpayer time and money forcing religion down the throats of Americans with no pushback against theocracy. Republicans, the Koch brothers, and the evangelical movement claim that taking control of women, and their reproductive health, is a moral issue their god has given them unquestioned moral authority to enforce, but according to a Catholic Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B., there is nothing ‘moral’ about pro-life Republicans.

Sister Joan said, “I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

Although the Sister is spot on that so-called pro-life Republicans are only ‘pro-birth,’ she failed to elucidate what their real motivation is in opposing any form of birth control; abject male control and subjugation of women. Sister Chittister is right about one thing though, pro-life Republicans, the Koch brothers, and so-called pro-life Christians lack any sense of morality whatsoever, and worse, Americans are silent as they waste taxpayer time and money attempting to legislate religion according to a bastardized form of Christianity instead of doing the job they are paid for. As a reminder to Republicans, Congress is tasked with “The Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the general Welfare of the United States.” As an aside, when Founding Father George Washington was asked exactly whose “general welfare” taxes, duties, imposts, and excises were to provide for, he said “the people’s welfare.”

Marc Morial, the Urban League’s president, had to politely ask the people still standing there to sit so he could introduce Martin O’Malley.

Clinton was undoubtedly the candidate folks at the annual convention had wanted to see most. She got the loudest welcoming applause, the most people clamoring for a brief audience with her, and the most widespread approval by members of the Urban League, who gave her speech the morning’s only standing ovation.

This sort of response is familiar.

President Obama’s appearances at the meetings of establishment groups like the National Urban League gave these organizations an unprecedented kind of legitimacy — Obama constantly states that were it not for the organization’s work, he wouldn’t be president. He’d communicated through policy and other cues that he was deeply on their side.

Clinton is not black, nor does she have a black spouse and black children, which Obama used effectively while campaigning to reach black voters in 2008. But Clinton showed a capacity for empathy that took some at the plenary by surprise.

“Over the years, I’ve gotten the chance to work with you, learn from you,” she said, addressing the organization. “I’ve pored over your State of Black America reports, I’ve spoken at your conferences, but most importantly, I’ve seen how you change people’s lives.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/darrensands/hillary-clinton-at-national-urban-league#.qc2b0j8XXa

In Griffin’s frankly ludicrous, ignorant, and downright offensive opinion, “When black women attack ‘white feminism,’ they are forgetting who made it possible for them to have rights -- as women. And, they are racist.”

Oh, Lord. Where the fuck do I even begin?

Well, maybe I should start with something that clearly (and bafflingly) needs repeating: PEOPLE. OF. COLOUR. CANNOT. BE. RACIST. TOWARDS. WHITE. PEOPLE. White people are the beneficiaries of racism. The concept of separating human beings into racial categories with differing characteristics was created by white people to justify their exploitation, enslavement, murder, rape, and colonization of people of colour worldwide.

This isn’t opinion. This isn’t some “social justice bullshit.” This is the sober truth of Earth. Deal with it. We’ll never be able to heal from this reality if people can’t come to grips with this most basic truth.

Griffin tried tweeting the bloody dictionary definition of racism when Black feminists began to take her to task, like that was her “I know what I’m talking about” trump card. Try again please!

My fingers are cramping from having to write about this simple stuff over and over again. My brain hurts because I don’t understand how white women can continue to be so wilfully ignorant. We live in the golden age of information! You can discover pretty much anything at the touch of a screen! There is no excuse.

Read more: http://www.forharriet.com/2015/07/thanks-for-nothing-black-women-dont-owe.html#ixzz3h0Dt9Jfz
Follow us: @ForHarriet on Twitter | forharriet on Facebook

Police in Lafayette, Louisiana are evidently struggling to understand why the outspokenly misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic John Russell “Rusty” Houser murdered two women and wounded 9 other moviegoers at a showing of “Trainwreck,” a film written by and starring Amy Schumer, a feminist comedian with a Jewish father, who jokes frankly about sex.

Col. Michael D. Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, wondered aloud about Houser’s motives at a press conference:

Why did he come here? Why did he do that? … We may not find a motive.

It seems to me that Houser’s likely motive is staring them in the face.

Because it turns out that Houser was pretty well-known, at least to regular viewers of one local TV talk show in Columbus, GA, as an angry right-wing fanatic who hated women. As one former host of the show recalled,

He was anti-abortion. … Rusty had an issue with feminine rights. He was opposed to women having a say in anything.

Houser evidently appeared on the live show dozens of times as a “gadfly” whose appearances “would generate calls.”

Stenberg, though young, is not wrong in her claims. For the mainstream media to pretend as though her concerns were being expressed this way for the first time is misleading and reductive. Stenberg has been consistent in her critique of appropriation of “Black culture” and the exclusion of Black women from Eurocentric beauty standards. If anything, Stenberg has summarized precisely the exclusionary actions of white supremacy that Serena Williams herself experiences daily – a phenomenon Dr. Moya Bailey calls “misogynoir.”

No, this isn’t a new issue. I recently covered this subject at length in reference to the Rachel Dolezal media debacle. The mainstream media’s obsession with Dolezal was fueled by both a hatred for Black women and an insatiable desire to present white women as inherently pure and idyllic.

Even more importantly, I have thoroughly explained how white women have long invested in the demonization of Black women and families. By making themselves the point of reference for womanhood, they have contributed to a framework which excludes Black women’s bodies, marking them as “other.” This double standard is so pervasive that it has been internalized and projected onto little Black girls. Therefore, these two recent events involving Williams and Stenberg should not surprise anyone who has been paying at least a little bit of attention.

As it stands, modern beauty standards rely on almost unattainable ideals but still rest upon the exploitation and appropriation of Black women’s bodies. But why?

The answer is simple: Just as whiteness is defined by the existence of blackness, white women’s beauty can’t exist without Black women’s (purported) lack thereof. This isn’t to say that Black women’s beauty is reliant on the White Gaze. Rather, I am noting that many white people, at least partially, define themselves by their deviation from Black people.

Read more: http://www.forharriet.com/2015/07/where-does-black-womans-body-belong.html#ixzz3gj6LiYM5
Follow us: @ForHarriet on Twitter | forharriet on Facebook

For the 10 transgender women who have been murdered in the U.S. this year, not even death can bring an end to disrespect.

On Tuesday morning, India Clarke, a 25-year-old black transgender woman and cosmetology student, was found lying on the ground near basketball courts at a community center in Tampa, Florida. Homicide detectives confirmed that she had been beaten to death.


But when local TV station Bay News 9 reported on the murder, they didn’t call her India.

They introduced her as “Samuel Elija Clarke, also known as India,” and only then used her chosen name. And instead of referring to India using female pronouns, they published a clunky piece of copy that fastidiously and obviously avoids the use of pronouns altogether: “violence to the upper body” and not “violence to her upper body,” for example.

It’s a pattern that has been tragically repeated too many times in 2015: A transgender woman, most often a transgender woman of color, is found murdered but the media still fails to respect her identity.

Aham and I got engaged on my birthday. He took me to dinner, suggested a “quick nightcap” at our neighbourhood bar, and then, surprise! Everyone was there – our friends, our families, the kids, four random people who were just trying to get a damn drink on a Sunday night without being accidental set dressing in somebody else’s raucous public proposal (sorry, dudes). I was so happy. He took my hand and led me to the back; there was a paper banner that said my name (the bartender made it – we go there a lot); there was a live string duet. I was confused. Why was there a sombre cello at my birthday party? Why was my boyfriend doing his Intense Face? Wait, it’s almost 10pm on a school night and we’re at a bar – why ARE the kids here? Then it all happened at once: the knee, the ring, the speech, the question, the tears. All the hits. It was a full-blown grand gesture.

Months later, I asked him why he did it that way – such a big spectacle, such an event, not precisely our style – and I expected something cliched but sweet, like, “I wanted to make sure our community was a part of our marriage,” or, “I wanted everyone to know how much I love you.” Instead, his response cracked me up: “One time when you were drunk you told me, ‘If you ever propose to me, don’t do it in the bullshit way that dudes usually treat fat girls. Like it’s a secret, or you’re just trying to keep me from leaving you. Thin girls get public proposals, like those dudes are winning a fucking prize. Fat chicks deserve that, too.’” I probably would have finessed it a bit if I’d been sober, but way to lean in, bossy, drunk past-Lindy!

It’s not that I’d ever particularly yearned for a grand gesture – the relationship I cherish lives in our tiny private moments (and, as I’d later discover at my bridal shower, I’m surprisingly uncomfortable being the object of public sincerity) – but the older I get and the longer I live in a fat body, the harder it is to depoliticise even simple acts. A public proposal to a publicly valued body might be personally significant, but culturally it shifts nothing. A public proposal to a publicly reviled body is a political statement.

I’ve dated men who relished me in private but refused to be seen with me on the street, or who told me, explicitly, that we had no serious future because they were afraid their friends would laugh at them. I’ve been eagerly approached by men who clearly saw me as nothing but an arousingly taboo body type, which I find equally demoralising (other fat people don’t mind, I know – that’s cool, too). I just wanted to be a person, and, if I was lucky, to fall in love with a person – neither in spite of my body nor because of it. Once I finally did, I wanted to crystallise that, make it solid, and broadcast it where younger versions of myself could find it.

I’ve been an actress since age 13. You might be familiar with me from the TV show Neighbours, or from my current role on the CW’s Reign. But after a recent run-in with a crooked magazine editor, you might be familiar with me instead as an attention-seeking, hysterical lady human who endlessly cheapens feminism by having the lunatic opinions that our bodies are beautiful and worth celebrating—and also, simultaneously, believing that my body is my own.

Earlier this year, I launched a website called Herself.com. Herself is a safe space for women of varying backgrounds, body types and belief systems to amplify their concerns, wishes, dreams, complaints and woes—a platform dedicated to expanding the scope of visible female experience and of visible female bodies. The courageous, luminescent women you will find there are nude, shot by female photographers. In showing us their bodies on mutually-agreed-upon terms, they have given all of us an immense gift; as they appear there, they are both impossibly vulnerable and utterly indestructible. Even, I, myself, appear on the website too, completely naked. (Burn her!)

Given these facts, it may or may not surprise you to hear that, when an Australian magazine called The Good Weekend asked me to appear in lingerie to accompany a piece on me, I declined.

It wasn’t the nature of the shoot that bothered me, but the pairing of the shoot with the story I was hoping to tell, which was specifically that women, and only women, are in charge of their bodies, their image and their sexuality. This commodification of my body had nothing to do with me. My input and my consent had never been sought. Simply, my body was going to be used as a prop to sell a magazine. And I, as the human occupying this prop, was not a part of the conversation.