The GOP's Despicable Demonization Of Transgender People

[Introduction:  As I watch people posting charts and citing statistics to make various cases online, I also realize that only 37+ percent of adult USians* have four year college degrees.  That means that many, if not most, only have the sketchiest grasp of how to read graphs, or even to understand basic ideas like percentages.  The same is true of a lot of words - they are not in many people's vocabulary and they have a vague or even wrong understanding of many words.  Of course that's not true of my readers :), but sometimes I feel the need to get more basic in my explanations just in case someone wants to use something I write to expand a friend or relative's understanding about a topic.]

I've been thinking about a post like this for a while.  A post somewhere this morning saying it was Transgender Awareness Week, seems to have pushed me to write this today.  Though there's probably enough reminders today and I'd be better off putting this up another time.  But, here are my thoughts on this.  I'm trying to give people as many links as possible to expand their knowledge on this topic.  

The current administration makes a habit of demonizing groups of people its base has little or no actual contact with.  They made up stories about Haitian immigrants who were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.  (A subheading of that Psychology Today story says the immigrants were 'mistakenly' accused.  There was no 'mistakenly.'  The campaign saw an inflammatory story and ran with it, intentionally adding another log into their firestorm of hatred.)  

The campaign constantly talked about immigrants who were criminals, drug dealers, murderers, and rapists.  Those who didn't know it was all flagrant falsehoods to stir them up to vote for their criminal rapist candidate, are now shocked when ICE comes after the immigrants who look after their children, grow their food, clean their cars, build their houses, and even are their relatives, their spouses. 

They also attacked non-Christians, especially Muslims, even though their presidential candidate was chummy with the Middle Eastern prince who chopped up an American journalist.  Again, there was no danger to USians from non-Christians that was greater than the danger from Christians themselves.  It was just another fictional class of villains to scare voters.  And there are campaigns against "anti-Christian bias"  which seems to mean any criticism of Christian values enacted into law to govern the behavior of non-Christians in this predominantly Christian nation.

Among the relatively unknown minorities in the US are transgender folks.  By 'unknown' I mean few people actually know someone who is transgender.  And the campaign made transgender folks a major campaign target.  This is my focus today.

Targeting transgender folks gains traction for several reasons:

1.  The idea of a clear cut dichotomy between male and female just seems so natural.  We ask whether new babies are girls or boys.  The difference between a vagina and a penis is pretty convincing.  

The idea of the world being flat makes perfect sense for someone living on what appears to be and feels like flat ground.  But from different perspectives, with greater information, it eventually becomes clear that the earth - like the round moon in the sky - is a sphere.  

And with greater context and from different perspectives, it's also clear that the dichotomy of male or female is also a gross simplification.  

Some societies have long recognized there were people who didn't fit into that either/or category.  See:

PBS - A Map of Gender Diverse Cultures

Anthropology Review - Non-Binary Gender Identities in Different Cultures

2.  Most people have little or no personal contact with a transgender person.  A PewResearch study says 42% of US population say the know someone who is transgender, with the percent higher among the youngest.  But it doesn't clarify what exactly 'know' means.  Have they spoken to the person?  About transgender issues?  Have they had them over for dinner?  We don't know.  Our schools do little or nothing to help students understand anything about trans people, and Evangelical congregations do their best to demonize them.     

• About 10% of the population are left-handed. 
• About 2 million men per year beat their partners, according to the F.B.I.  (That's not a percentage, but that's more than all the transgender people in the US. according to the study below, though others offer a higher number.)  
• Approximately 1.5 million people attempted suicide in 2023.  49,000 successfully.
• 804,926 Americans were arrested for suspected DUI in 2024, representing 11% of all arrests nationwide.  12,429 people were killed by drunk drivers.
• New data on violence against transgender people in the U.S. shows there have been at least 399 cases of fatal violence against trans people since 2013, including 27 murders in the past year alone, with no indication the trend is slowing.
• 86% of people don't fact check news on social media  and here's a related study showing people are not that good at spotting fake news, and it differs for Democrats and Republicans
• 10% of US population believe the earth is flat. Another 9% aren't sure

I was just trying to find some numbers to put the number of transgender people into context.  Raw numbers without context, without other numbers, don't mean that much to most people.  You can look up other numbers that might be more relevant.  

Bur my basic point is that transgender people are simply not a major danger to anyone compared to other things we ought to be spending time and money on.  

3.   People don't know that much about the science of gender, even people who support transgender rights.  This is hard to prove, but this study by PewResearch seems to support it:

"When asked what has influenced their views on gender identity – specifically, whether they believe a person can be a different gender than the sex they were assigned at birth – those who believe gender can be different from sex at birth and those who do not point to different factors. For the former group, the most influential factors shaping their views are what they’ve learned from science (40%) say this has influenced their views a great deal or a fair amount) and knowing someone who is transgender (38%). Some 46% of those who say gender is determined by sex at birth also point to what they’ve learned from science, but this group is far more likely than those who say a person’s gender can be different from their sex at birth to say their religious beliefs have had at least a fair amount of influence on their opinion (41% vs. 9%)."  .  

If 40% rely on science, that means 60% do not.   And exactly what science are the 'gender is determined by sex at birth' crowd reading?  

This map is interactive online

From World Population Data where this map is interactive.  While it gives percentages for each state, it doesn't give percentage for the United States as a whole.  It does give a US total of 1,337,200 transgender people in the US but no percentage.  Further, that number is probably low because it is hard to identify transgender people - particularly those who haven't publicly identified themselves as transgender.  Using a US population figure of 347,999,881 from Worldometer, I get a total percentage of .0038 for the United States. I'll use that as a rough estimate, given the total population is more recent than the study itself.  A further complication is that the number I used is of people 18 and older.  The site says that younger people identify as transgender at a higher percent of the population than older transgender folks.  In any case, the number of transgender people is quite small.  

What do we learn from this map?

1.  Less than one percent of USians* identify as transgender.  That means for a group of 100 randomly selected people, there maybe one or no people who identify as transgender.  The Alaska number was .7% of the Alaska population.  That means out of 100 people .7 identify as transgender.  But, of course, we know, we don't have any .7 people walking around.  If we double the sample size from 100 to 200, then we'd double the number of people from .7 to 1.4.  Again, there are no .4 people walking around.  So let's go up to 300.  That would yield 2.1 people.  So, essentially 2 people for every 300 people.

 

That means most people don't know, or aren't aware they know, a transgender person.  And if they do, most of the 300 people have never had a heart to heart talk with that person to gain an understanding of what being transgender means to that person, how the person figured out they were transgender, or anything else other than the fact that the person is transgender.  

One can also learn about transgender people through other sources:  books, movies, media.  There are a number of books written about transgender people - fiction, biography, science.  

OVERCOMING IGNORANCE

Mayo Clinic:  Transgender Facts - basically a list of definitions

American Psychological Society - Understanding transgender people, gender identity and gender expression

The above two are basically sciency definitions.  The next one is similar, but adds a bit of human experience into it.

Advocates for Trans Equality - Trans 101

The ones below  offer books by trans folks themselves.  

19thNews - 21 books bringing transgender visibility to book lovers

GLAAD - Eight Books from Trans Authors to Read for Trans Awareness Week

*USians is a term some people use instead of Americans as a way of recognizing that all people who live in the Western Hemisphere - from Canada to Argentina - are Americans, not just people in the United States.  

Anchorage's Gay Pride Festival Seemed To Have Biggest Crowd Ever

 In an attempt to keep up here, I'm going to give you lots of pictures, relatively little commentary, no real order.  Sort of like someone visiting we experience it.

 

As you can see, the weather was just right.  The food lines were long,  Lots of organizations had tables and booths.  You wouldn't know we were at the beginning of regime suppression of people who don't fit the white alpha male mold.  

And there were lots of children there along with their parents.  Not being 'recruited' or 'indoctrinated' but simply seeing that there are lots of ways to be a human being and that lots of people think that is just fine.  

ICE-Free Refugee Day Celebration (And More)

RAIS (Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services) is among the groups that help folks under the umbrella of Catholic Social Services in Anchorage,  (I'd also say I've never seen a trace of proselytizing  in any of the RAIS activities.)

Yesterday, Thursday, June 26, was the first day of their summer CSA program pick up.  That's Community Supported Agriculture - a program where consumers pay farmers upfront and then pick up fresh vegetables every week.  In Alaska, that is necessarily limited to summer.  

I first learned and blogged the term CSA in March 2009 when I was a volunteer with an NGO (non-governmental organization, what we call non-profit) in Chiangmai, Thailand.  Here's that post which talks about CSAs in general and what was happening in Chiangmai specifically.  

Because it was the first day of Grow North Farm's 2025 CSA distribution there was also a celebration for World Refugee day. with music, dancing, art activities, and food from around the world. (That sentence was more or less lifted and edited from the email I got from RAIS.

For the rest of the summer, in addition to the subscribers picking up their veggies, there will be booths where other refugee farmers will be selling their crops.  Here's a blog post from 2022 showing you the variety of things for sale. It's always colorful and people are often wearing the clothing they would wear in their original countries.  There are also people selling baked goods.  The one that captured me last summer - the Egyptian Kitchen - won't be here this summer.  They are in Egypt until fall.  Lots of folks will miss their incredible home made cookies.  

Yesterday, I only saw a couple of tents where people were selling veggies and preserved food.  Most of the booths were services available in Anchorage.  The library was there - my mind's going blank - and there were a number of groups with various arts and crafts activities for kids.  

I spent more time at the Choosing Our Roots table, because it was a group I knew nothing about.  This is Adam in the photo.  He's head of the Board of Directors.  Later, the Executive Director Chami joined us.  Basically this groups helps queer youth find housing and get their feet on the ground.  They work with various groups including Alaska Housing, Alaska Children's Trust, Covenant House, and RAIS.

'Youth' means about 15 to 25.  Chami said she herself had been homeless with a baby and worked herself out of that situation and is now a social worker (I'm pretty sure that's what she said) and a licensed therapist (I'm sure she said that).  So she can counsel these youth with first hand experience of what they are going through.  

This was a very colorful (in the literal sense of that word) event and a photographer's buffet.  Except it wasn't.  Many of the people, for cultural reasons, do not want to be photographed.  

And as the title hints, two different people I mentioned this event to responded, "So ICE will be there?"

So no, I don't want to give ICE any assistance in identifying potential targets.  

I took only a few pictures.  Of course I should have taken pictures of the vegetables, but I wasn't thinking.  We got, as our CSA email listed:  

• Radish
• Spinach
• Sorrel
• Bok Choi
• Either Chamsur or Arugula

Don't know what Chamsur is?  Well, the RAIS email tells us not only what it is, but also how to use it.

"Chamsur is the Nepalese word for Garden Cress - a green which is popular in mountainous regions of Nepal and Afghanistan. Nepalese farmers brought seeds to Fresh International Gardens to experiment with growing Chamsur in Alaska - it proved to be well suited to Anchorage and has grown at the farm every year since! 

Include garden cress in any soup, salad, or sandwich for a tangy flavor. The taste is very similar to that of arugula, so it works great in any wraps, sandwiches, or salads! Add this Green Salad with Garden Cress to your list of tasty summer salads! Or use both your spinach and chamsur in this Chamsur Palungo recipe."

Don't know what to do with sorrel?  Another hint from the email:

"Sorrel is another tangy green, bright and lemony and makes a lovely Ukrainian Sorrel Soup - perfect for a rainy summer day."

I did take a few pictures and I've smudged out the faces of kids and people who might not want ICE to know they were there.  

And if ICE was there, they were unmasked and unarmed and just chilling with everyone else.  Here are a couple of pictures.  

I'm trying folks.  I've got pieces of about five posts that haven't been posted.  So many other things are luring me from the blog.  

I'm trying to decide if I really want to duplicate last summer's 1000 miles (1600+ kilometers) of biking.  I'm at 740k so far.  (That's slightly ahead of last summer.  But there were bike-able days in March this year, and last year I was biking hard the second half of the summer.)

I'm doing Duolingo Turkish everyday.  Sometimes I feel like it's hopeless because it's focused on everything but my speaking.  And while I'm gathering vocabulary and a loose understanding of the grammar (and all the fascinating but maddening suffixes which change tense, change who is acting, indicate coming and going, and many other conditions), I don't think I can actually use it to make oral conversation.  Speaking uses other muscles and parts of the brain than reading, writing, and even listening.  But Turkey is the last place on my list of places I promised myself I'd go to another time.  I passed it up while I was a student in Germany and decided more time in Greece for then, and Istanbul later.  Later is going to be never if I don't do it soon.  

And now I'm taking letters every Monday afternoon to my two Senators and my member of Congress.  I'm trying to find different ways to try to break through to them.  But I do believe that numbers matter to legislators, so I encourage others in Anchorage to join the group.  Just go to their offices (510 L Street for the Senators, 6th and 7th floors, and half a block away (1016 W Sixth Ave Suite #406) between 4pm and 5pm on Mondays.  There's no formal gathering, just people coming and going.  And if you miss a week or two, not a problem.  But I am getting to know the staff.  Begich has a second office in Fairbanks.  And Murkowski and Sullivan offices in Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, Matsu, Soldotna.  So you folks can also make weekly drop-offs.  

Biking gives me a chance to see what's new and changing in Anchorage, so I have pics on some of those things to put up.  I did post about the closing of Lake Otis at 42nd.  Lake Otis is back working, but work on 42nd continues.

There's somebody working on an ordinance to change local Anchorage elections to ranked choice voting (the State has that, though Republicans are trying again to do away with it) and I'm trying to get more info on who is doing this and how it's going.  I know an Assembly committee had it on their agenda this week.  This would be a great improvement.  

Frustration with Democratic establishment and their problems with the bright young, articulate, members of their party, culminating, most recently, with the Islamaphobic responses to Mamdani's apparent primary win in New York.  For example. Christopher Bouzy, the creator of Twitter alternative Spoutible, writes, "Democratic Leadership Told Rep. Jasmine Crockett She's Too Black and Too Loud."

Gardening and regularly visiting the Alaska Botanical Garden as part of one of my bike routes.  

Don't despair.  Find beauty every day.  Get outside and move your body.  (The biking and gardening) Find good folks to be around.  Find ways to resist.  

There are organizations offering lists of ways to fight back daily.  Taking action is the best antidote for hopelessness.  Here are two that send me regular (not daily) emails with list of ways I can resist:

Peoples Action Institute  

The Digital Drumbeat

"It's been two months since I blogged. Considering that I am . . ."

From Ursula LeGuin's No Time To Spare:

"It's been two months since I blogged.  Considering that I am on the eve of my eighty-fifth birthday, and that anyone over seven-five who isn't continuously and conspicuously active is able to be considered dead, I thought I should make some signs of life.  Wave from the grave, as it were.  Hello, out there!  How are things in the Land of Youth?  Here in the Land of Age they are rather weird."

While for me, it's only been four days, and I still have daylight between now and 85, I am over 75 and don't want to be considered dead yet.  

For years and years I blogged pretty much daily.  And when I'm engaged in an important story (say Redistricting) blogging does take front and center in my life still.  But I've also given myself permission to take days off.  But don't want to have too many blank pages here.

So here's a list of other distractions:

1.  Technical - Getting photos from my phone to my laptop stopped working

I thought I'd conquered this, but the AirDrop stopped working again and the original fix didn't stick. Photos are an important part of this blog (at least for me).  Monday, when we went for a hike, I took along my bigger Canon so I could use the memory card to get the pictures onto my MacBook.  After two photos the battery stopped working.  

So I reverted back to the phone.  I'd find a way.  I figured I could upload the pictures to Blogspot (the blog site I'm using) on my phone. Easy Peasy.  But I couldn't.  I googled.  Here's what I found on google support::  (Google bought Blogspot long ago as well as other independent apps I've used for the blog)

"If your photo is on your phone, it is probably in Apple Photos. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no direct upload from Photos to Blogger. You must therefore export the image to your phone as a jpg. Then you can upload it into Blogger using the "from device" option in the Blogger post editor.

I do not know how to export the image to your phone as a jpg. But once you copy it into Blogger, you can delete the jpg file."

Or on Apple discussions

"iPhoto pictures no longer upload to Blogger with Mojave 10.14.6 update installed"

I've been thinking I might need to get a more current iPhone and even upgrade my laptop (it's about nine years old and the letters on six keys are no longer readable), but I have pulled out my old Canon Powershot and I'll use that until then.  It has a memory card I can insert into my laptop.  But as I think about it, I'm sure the newer laptops no longer have a spot to insert a memory card.  

2.  Other things - Reading online

Twitter and Spoutible - Despite everything, Twitter still alerts me to important items of (I hate to use this term because it's so overused) 'breaking' news, particularly Anchorage and Alaska related things.  Mainly because I've been careful to pick who I follow, I don't get a lot of garbage tweets. But as Twitter goes X-tinct,  Spoutible is getting more 'useful' Spouters (useful here meaning people who put up things I want to hear about) but I'm still getting too many "Hope you all are doing great this morning!" Spouts.  There's nothing wrong with them, but that's not why I'm on Spoutible.  

Spoutible also got its Android app up and then a couple of weeks later the IOS app was ready.  I downloaded it, but I couldn't type in the login info.  My keyboard didn't work.  Their announcements had said that the iPhone 7 still had some problems, so I deleted it.  When I downloaded it again a few days ago, I could log in.  But the keyboard doesn't work when I try to reply or to Spout.  

I've put Twitter and Spoutible under Reading.  I spend way too much time on these apps.  They were supposed to give me tips for blog posts (and they do) as well as back up information I can use to support my arguments on the blog.  But they are also addictive.  It's like fishing or slot machines, you're always hoping the next one will be good, and enough are, that you keep casting or putting more money in, when you should just walk away.  

3.  Other things - Reading books

I've got the following three books that I'm actively working on:

Boy, I didn't realize how relatively poor the images are on the Canon Powershot compared to my phone.  Demon Copperhead is for my September book club meeting (but I thought it was for August so I started it because it's long). No Time to Spare is the August book.  It's essays Le Guin wrote late in life (as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests) and so far it's focusing on being old.  She's not sugar-coating things.  Blowback is by Miles Taylor, a Republican who worked as a high level Homeland Security appointee in the Trump administration and is using the book to warn people about how crazy Trump is and the kinds of things to be expected in a second Trump administration.  Because Trump wanted to do them (and in some cases did) during his presidency.  But this time, Taylor warns, Trump and the conservative interests that back him, are better organized to make them happen.  Basically like establishing a Fascist regime supporting the wealthy and making life harder for everyone else, particularly those who aren't white, Christian, heterosexual men.  

As I figure out ways I can contribute to protecting democracy in the 2024 election, books like this give me facts to convince non-voters why they need to vote. Non-voters are the key.  But I'm not giving up on Trumpers either though that's time spent doing more work for smaller gains.  

But while people say the hard core Trump supporters are a cult, immune to reason and reality, I know that people leave cults all the time.  Cult-Escape is just one of many websites (not necessarily the best) for people thinking about getting out.  I also know that the Trump cult is reinforced by trolls who spew out misinformation at high volume, whether they do it on their own, for money, or with the support of foreign governments.  They exaggerate the number of people who support the Trump world of lies.  

There are several other books, newspapers that tempt me away from the blog (all in the guise of keeping me informed and giving me material for the blog.)

3.  Other things - local events

I listened in on the Alaska Board of Education hearings on a policy to ban transgender girls from girls sports. (You can find the written testimony here, here, here, here, and here.) While I have lots to say, the anti-ban crowd made many good arguments I don't have to duplicate.  

But what no one mentioned (while I listened in anyway) was the fact that the Board began the meeting with a Christian prayer that ended with "in Jesus' name."  

Here's a government board, holding a public hearing on a policy that is being heavily pushed by Christian Nationalists (and other Christians who would legitimately reject the Nationalist part) and beginning with a Christian prayer, that excludes those who are agnostic or atheists, and members of religions that do not worship Jesus Christ.  I can only think of two reasons for this:

1. To show their power to add their religion into their governmental function - that they can get away with this
2. Because they are so sheltered from the non-Christian world that they don't realize how offensive this is to people who don't see the world the way they do.  

(A PEW Trust study copyrighted in 2021 found that 37% of Alaskans identify as in religions other than Christianity or no religion. That's more than 1/3.  Under 

"Frequency of participation in prayer, scripture study or religious education groups among adults in Alaska"

fully 69% responded "seldom or never.")

If the Board is so out of touch with people who are not devout Christians that they can open this public meeting with a Christian prayer, imagine how out of touch they are with transgender youth!  This is not a representative body of Alaskans making this decision.  Even the Alaska legislature rejected this and the Governor has now asked a body that he's (mostly) personally appointed to do what the people's elected representatives wouldn't do.  

OK, so that by itself is a synopsis of a blog post I've been thinking about.  

There was also Juneteenth and Gay Pride which I didn't post about because I couldn't easily get my photos up.  

4.  Other things - biking and the garden

I took my bike in for a service yesterday.  There's a regular clank sound every time my right pedal is forward. It's been about four years and I've ridden it a lot (for an old man anyway) each summer. As of yesterday I've biked 762 km (473 miles) since April.  Last year my goal was 1000km which I passed and I'm well on my way to doing the same this summer.  I put it down here only because it takes up about five or six hours a week.  But mentally the biking is good for my blogging.  

Reviewing this before posting I realize I left out the gardening part.  I'll just say my favorite gardening book is No Work Garden.  Much of the hill in our backyard is natural - birch, alder, high bush cranberry and other local fauna.  We've focused on perennials which come back on their own. And the front lawn, much to the chagrin of our neighbors (though they've come to accept it over the years) is clover right now along with rock garden perennials along the sidewalk.  Gardening enthusiasm is highest in the spring when the snow is gone and things start poking out of the earth.  I have put in hours of weeding and thinning, and I do just enjoy wandering the yard to see all the daily surprises.  

5.  Other things - Netflix

We're currently juggling The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, Suits, Friday Night Lights, and random other movies or short series that some variety.  After watching several seasons of Suits I've concluded we would all be much better off if we had script writers to help us with our day-to-day interactions.  

Netflix takes a toll in my blog writing time.  

6.  Other things - Tutoring English

One of the more delightful activities this spring and summer has been tutoring a Ukrainian refugee in Ketchikan in English.  His English is good enough to communicate what he needs to say, but we're adding vocabulary, pronunciation (both sounds and sentence rhythms), grammar, and cultural nuances.  We were paired by Catholic Social Services' Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service (RAIS) and it's a great match, pedagogically and personally.  We tend to have a good time even though I work him hard.  Planning lessons and actually doing the lessons take up four to eight hours a week, depending on if we meet once or twice a week.  Twice a week is the norm.  

There are other things as well - the general maintenance people have to do in their lives, paying bills, getting things cleaned and repaired, getting and preparing food (fortunately, my wife has done the lion's share of this in recent years in part because she's not that excited about my cooking), and I'm sure you can add to the list.  

But I'm committed to writing here on important topics.  But I must say, that the local political and legal events I spent so much time on in previous years are being better covered by others now.  Twitter has been a big addition there as well as more local reporters covering events.  That just wasn't the case back in 2006 when I started blogging.  And it took me a while to jump from more mundane blogging to more public affairs blogging.  

Have a good weekend.  We're having more sun and warmth than we did earlier this summer.  But compared to much of the world, the weather has been very comfortable and the air quality good.  

The Point Is Not Just To Take Back Rights, But To Do It So Fast And Furiously That We Can't Keep Up With The Outrages - 303 Creative

 In a couple of days the Supreme Court threw out Affirmative Action for colleges and universities (and surely employment and other areas will be challenged soon); blocked Biden's waiving of $10-20,000 in student loans (ignoring the word 'waive' in the law that gave him the right to do that); and allowed a would be (but not actual) wedding website designer to refuse to take gay couples as clients.  

I suspect they intentionally timed the one case hailed by supporters of democracy - the voting rights case - earlier so that these three would all be together and there'd be less time to analyze them and protest.  

For the most part, lots of pundits are using these cases to get hits and likes.  Some are even worth reading.  But I want to just think out loud here about the 303 Creative case - the wedding website case.  

I posted in the past about the baker and about the photographer who didn't want to make a wedding cake for, or take photos of gay weddings.  Some of those same issues arise. 

Here I want to just lay out ideas as I try to understand this case and how it affects one's religious beliefs and what other collateral damage it might lead to. 

And I'm also setting aside the allegations that have come up after the decision that this whole scenarios was made up.  Or the arguments that the courts don't rule unless some harm has been done, but they skipped that standard in this case.  

As I said, I'm just thinking out loud here.  (And maybe even venting a bit as we reach a point similar to the post civil war court that used states' rights as an excuse to ignore the massive civil rights violations perpetrated against former slaves.)

PROBLEMS FOR THE COURTS

1.  How do you distinguish a true religious belief from an excuse to discriminate?  How did Lorrie Smith pick gay weddings to block?  Is it really a deep religious belief?  Or is it dislike/hate of gays that is being masked by religion?  When the Constitution was written, I think 'religion' was more concrete.  Today there are thousands of different Christian denominations?  Where do they all come from and what prohibitions can various ones have that the Supreme Court will eventually say allows them to discriminate against some target?

Homosexuality is not mentioned in the ten commandments, but Lorrie couldn't possibly make a website for a gay couple.  Would she refuse a wedding website for a couple that have been living together unmarried for five years?  And maybe have some kids?  What about businesspeople who cheat their customers and their employees?  Would she refuse making a site for them?  

If Lorrie belongs to a church that is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which does not allow women to be pastors, how would she react to a client who was a woman pastor and wanted a website?  Would she refuse?  Based on her being a woman?

Many Christian denominations believe women should stay at home and raise babies.  Could someone from one of them refuse to make a website for, say, a woman lawyer?  

2.  When you look at all the things that a religion professes, how do you determine which ones are critical in that religion and which ones are not central requirements or prohibitions?  How does the Court decide which belief of any religion is an important enough one to allow the holder of that belief to discriminate against protected classes? 

If a congregation believes whites are superior and other ethnicities are inferior, can they then discriminate against people of color?  Last week I would have said the answer is a loud NO, but today I have no idea how the Supreme Court majority would rule.  

The Bible lists hundreds of rules.  Rules that Orthodox Jews follow, including a number of dietary restrictions.  Eating shellfish or pork, for example, are called out as abominations.  Why are those rules ignored?  Should the Courts look at whether someone practices all the rules or just identifies a few that trouble them enough to discriminate?  

3.  How do the justices weigh one right against another?  Is being denied service from a business because of one's sexual orientation - even when laws clearly protect against this - a lesser right than someone's professed religious convictions?  What happens in a small community where there aren't many choices of businesses?  Does the gay couple have to simply move so they can find vendors who will serve them?  Doesn't sound very American.  But perhaps MAGA's remember when whites - particularly in the South - were, legally, superior, and that's the world they want to return to.  

4.  How do you separate your own personal beliefs when they agree with one side or the other?  At what point does recusal become mandatory?  In this court, for the conservative majority, it seems recusal isn't necessary because they are all above human bias that could cloud their view.  At least in their own minds.  Note the expensive trips and vacation that various judges never reported and say would not affect their legal decisions?  

ALTERNATIVES FOR THE WEB PAGE DESIGNER

This was not a case where anyone tried to resolve the issue.  This was a case put together to invalidate Colorado's law that make discrimination against LGBTQ folks illegal.  And as mentioned above, the issues argued - that a gay man requested a wedding website - apparently didn't even happen.  There are other ways that Lorrie Smith, the designer, could have handled this (assuming she had such a request.)

1.  She could make it clear on her website that she adhered to a religion that only sanctioned male/female marriage and that she wanted to help such couples celebrate their weddings.  She's not, then refusing gay couples, but she's making it clear that's not her interest.  People don't enroll their kids in religious affiliated schools unless they are comfortable with their kids getting that school's religious instruction.  Gay couples would not ask such a website designer to design their wedding websites for several reasons:  

    1.  They don't trust such a person to make them the website they want

    2.  They don't want to financially support a business that doesn't approve of their wedding.

The only time a gay couple might ask for her services would be to create a legal basis for challenging her legal right to deny them. (What Lorrie Smith was doing to challenge the Colorado anti-discrimination law.)  If she doesn't deny them, there's no problem.  If they push, she can offer them one of her basic templates.  If they don't like them, they can go elsewhere.  Just as a bride, who  doesn't like a wedding dress in one store, can go to another.  

2.  She can politely decline and give them the names of three other web designers who specialize in gay weddings, or at least, who do gay weddings.  Unless she is so opposed to gay weddings that she won't help them in any way.  That would probably be proof that the 1st Amendment angle Lorrie Smith's case used, was just an excuse to discriminate.

3.  More radically, and much less likely, she could meet with the couple and learn about them as people, what being gay means to them, and why they want to get married.  

Well, I guess I had less to say about this than I thought.  Basically, this seems to show that this was not so much about  protecting 1st Amendment Rights as it was about sending a case to the Supreme Court that could create the first wedge to break down anti-discrimination laws protecting the rights of LGBTQ folks.  

I realize for some that might be a giant leap, so let me explain.  Normal business folks try to work out things with customers when they ask for services the business doesn't offer.  I gave examples of how this could have been done.  But none of that seemed to have happened.  And it now appears that there never was a request by a gay couple. (Though I'm not sure how the Colorado attorneys failed to contact the alleged client.)  Rather this was a case designed by group that has been fighting against LGBTQ rights for years now.  It was created to be a test case and they believed, correctly, that the current Supreme Court would look favorably on their argument.  

Random Shots San Francisco

 

Prickly pear foot.

Went to the Castro to buy a friend a rainbow flag.

Someone chalked a memorial to their grandfather on the garage door.

One architectural feature I began to notice I've finally got a name for - quoins.  Lots of the San Francisco buildings have them.  They seem to be both structural and decorative.  In the picture they are the lighter color pieces on the corners.  

I first started to notice them (first you see something, but don't consciously register them and then you do) on a bright blue house I put up in a previous post.  I don't usually post the same picture twice, but I think it's appropriate here.  

On this house, because of the starkly contrasting colors, they really stand out.  And while some go around the corners, others seem mainly decorative.  

Look closely for the hummingbird.

Waiting for the bus.

Cymbidium seem to do alright in San Francisco.  From Orchidweb:

"While these orchids can be cultured successfully indoors, Cymbidium benefit tremendously from growing outdoors between May to early October. In late summer and early fall, night temperatures that fall below 58°F (15°F) initiate the development of flower spikes. Keep in mind, these are not frost-tolerant plants, and should not be exposed to temperatures below 35°F (2°C)"

Other Avenues is a worker owned coop grocery in San Francisco with a small woke book section.  

I ended up buying two bars of soap which caused TSA to pull my roller bag aside and look for the suspicious blocks.  

I'm pretty sure this is an aeonium arboreum.  These plants are very popular in San Francisco.  

People Who Want To Be Themselves VS People Who Are Hiding As "Normal"

This was not at all on my agenda for today.  But then I saw  this Guardian article:

". . . Kids like Seph bring into sharp focus what it means to be male, female or something else. There is still widespread belief that minors with gender dysphoria – the clinical term for the distress caused by a mismatch between a person’s sense of their gender and their birth-assigned sex – should not be encouraged to transition. At least eight states have proposed bills that would criminalize doctors who prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to trans adolescents.

On one side of the debate are people who think Seph’s gender dysphoria will fade by adulthood. On the other are the vast majority of mental health professionals who study gender dysphoria insisting that affirming a child in whatever way they express their gender is beneficial to their mental health. . . ."

Here's my proposal on this topic, a different way to think about those opposing transgender rights.  Well, it's not really that different from what lots of people have already said.  

On the one side we have transgender human beings.  People whose physical signs of gender are either ambiguous or are in conflict with their mental sense of themselves.  (And probably a number of other variations of a theme.)  Their desire to dress, walk, adorn themselves, and the activities they want to participate in, with the people they want to be with, all that and more, doesn't match society's norms of how they should do those things.  

On the other side we have 'normal' people who find transgender human beings wanting to be themselves, a horrible, terrible thing.  Why?  The constitution says nothing about how people should dress and act.  It does say people have the right to pursue happiness.  Why interfere with another's pursuit of happiness?

We do have limits on pursuit of happiness - mainly when those pursuits do harm to other people.  But what harm do transgender folks living their lives honestly do to others?

I'd offer two interrelated reasons:

1.  It violates their world view.  People may like to change their cars or their clothing, but they don't want to change their fundamental views of the world.  Changing cars still confirms driving.  Changing clothes still confirms wearing clothes.  But changing genders violates people's fundamental binary belief system - male/female, good/bad, black/white, true/false.  A bright student of mine who was also raised Fundamentalist, told the class that he opposed homosexuality because it was wrong in the eyes of his church.  When challenged by other classmates, he finally said:  "The word of God is infallible.  It's a whole package.  If it's wrong about homosexuals, then the whole package falls apart."  

If transgender people are allowed to be themselves openly and society is more accepting of them, then their own world view is challenged.  Worse, their children get to see challenges to that world view.  

2.  It violates their personal view. 

 Let me tell you about another student.  He looked good, dressed well, spoke well.  But his papers didn't work.  I don't remember exactly what was wrong, just that I marked them up a lot, pointing our lack of supporting details and that what he was saying didn't sound authentic.  Things like that.  

He made an appointment to see me.  He told me he'd had a difficult childhood - again, I don't remember the details.  But he said he carefully watched the 'successful' people and remade himself in their likeness - the way he dressed, the way he walked, the way he talked.  Everything.  Until he passed for 'normal' and 'successful.'  My comments on his paper were, he said, pulling all that apart, exposing the boy he was running away from.  And after talking to his therapist, he was dropping the class.  He wasn't ready to face that or to have someone else (me) see that.  I told him I was sorry, but that I trusted his and his therapist's judgment.  

I think there are a lot of people living like that in the world.  They are disguised as 'successful' people - that is people who look and act like society's norms would have us look and act.  We have so many people hidden behind facades.  

For some of them, maybe many, people who defy society's norms because they are too oppressive are threatening.  They threaten their world view and they challenge their personal view.  That was true of gay people.  It was true of women who wanted to be more than a housewife.  Of African-Americans who wanted to be treated the same way white people are treated.  

Some closeted gays have been outed for being more anti-guy than the norm.  People have said they did this to hide their own internal struggles with their sexuality.  

But people can be hiding from lots of sources poor self-images - abusive childhoods where they were never good enough for their parents.  Or they grew up in poverty whose tendrils still pull down their self image. Or they weren't thin enough, tall enough, pretty enough, smart enough, articulate enough, or 'enough' in any of the countless ways our society tells us we have to be.  

"According to the latest annual statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, nearly $16.7 billion was spent on cosmetic procedures in the U.S. in 2020. (From Baylor College of Medicine)"

A July 2019 Business Insider article reports 

"The beauty industry is growing faster than ever before. Today it's valued at an estimated $532 billion and counting," 

Another 2019 Business Insider article  says:

"The U.S. weight loss market is now worth a record $72 billion, but the number of dieters has fallen, due to the growth of the size acceptance and body positivity movement."

We could add the money spent at gyms and in therapy and any other kinds of businesses that make money off of people's poor self-image, businesses aimed at making people 'normal.'  

That's not to say there aren't legitimate reasons any of these activities.  But a certain percentage of people who pursue these things would just be better off in a society more tolerant of differences.

And for those who can't make themselves look successful, there's alcohol and drugs to dull or even to escape reality for a while.  

REMI reports that people in the US spent $253.8 Billion on alcohol in 2018. But it's important to remember that about one-third of adults don't drink at all, and many drink relatively little..  Others very moderately.  I'm having trouble finding numbers that divide total expenditures on alcohol among different types of drinkers.  But there is:

"In 2019, 25.8 percent of people ages 18 and older (29.7 percent of men in this age group and 22.2 percent of women in this age group4) reported that they engaged in binge drinking in the past month,4 and 6.3 percent (8.3 percent of men in this age group and 4.5 percent of women in this age group5) reported that they engaged in heavy alcohol use in the past month.5"

And then there's the amount paid for illegal drugs - about $146 billion in 2016.

Basically, there are lots of signs that Americans are not happy.  I would suggest that many, if not most, are living lives, in Thoreau's words, of quiet desperation*.  Seeking to survive not just the physical world, but the social and political world.  

I'd suggest that those most desperate to 'fit' are those who are most inclined to attack those who are true to themselves.  Honest, open people threaten them.  They also make them conscious of the fake lives they are living.  I can't prove this, but I throw it out as something to consider and study.  

We should all be striving for a society where all people have not only 'the right' to pursue happiness, but the actual opportunity to do so.  

And, of course, there are the scavengers of the GOP who are always looking for fears to exploit in the next election.  

After I did the first draft, we went to the Bainbridge Art Museum and I saw these two words juxtaposed in one of the exhibits and it seemed meant for this post.  

*Iddo Landau takes exception to the broadness of Thoreau's comment, but does acknowledge, too, a number of points I make in this post.

At What Point Is A Politician Liable For Deaths Because Of His Actions Or Inactions?

Retired pilot Dave Bronson took office as Anchorage's new mayor on Thursday, July 1.  That was at a time when Alaska's COVID situation was relatively low.  So low that the State Health and Human Services Department only posted new numbers Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  So my starting date on this chart is Friday, July 2, 2021.  My ending date is Thursday, September 23.  Yes, they went back to reporting the numbers five days a week.  There was a Friday report too.  One of the worst ever.  They added 41 deaths and the new resident case total was 1729.  The highest ever.  But that report included a lot of backlogged numbers.  Most of the deaths probably happened during Bronson's tenure, but the new cases inflated that one day total. I decided the Thursday report was damning enough.  

These numbers are for the whole state of Alaska, and the Mayor of Anchorage is only in charge of Anchorage, But Anchorage is by far the largest city in the state with almost half the population, and people from nearby the Matsu borough and the Kenai Peninsula work and shop in Anchorage.  Plus it's the transportation hub of the state.  Many people outside of Anchorage have to fly through Anchorage on the way to other places.  It's also the medical center of Alaska, the place where people from more rural areas, with smaller hospitals or just clinics, come for more serious health needs.  So what the Mayor of Anchorage does regarding COVID affects more than just Anchorage.   

Our mayor came into office  having at various times denied COVID was a serious problem.  He thinks people's individual liberties are violated by mask mandates and vaccine mandates. And that the health restrictions harm business more than the virus.  He recently said he didn't know what more he could do.  

The alarming change in the COVID numbers is the result of his willful ignorance.  His stubborn clinging to bullshit information.  (Sorry, misinformation is much too tepid a term for the organized and profitable propaganda that is aimed at Trump supporters.)

My sense is that Bronson is the kind of man who rarely if ever acknowledges he's wrong.  Maybe on something minor like flipping a coin.  But he's been adamantly certain about LGBTQ issues for many years.  It's hard for a man like him to do the right thing after investing so much of himself to following the wrong path.  And because he's mayor, his actions and or lack of actions, impact tens of thousands of people. 

 One hundred and forty-four people have died since he took over Anchorage.  

• Let's drop half of them as not Anchorage related.  
• Let's skip the first month in office (there were only 12 deaths reported between July 2 and August 2). That leaves us 132 deaths. 
• Let's cut out 50% of deaths since August 2,  since Anchorage only has half of Alaska's population.  That leaves us 66 deaths.  
• Let's just arbitrarily say that 10% (and this is really low) of those could have been avoided had Bronson taken rigorous action against the spread of COVID in Anchorage.  

That would be six people who would probably be alive, but for  Bronson's inaction.  Probably a lot more.  He may be passionate about the life of every single fertilized human egg that is created, but actual birthed human beings seem much less important to him.   And we're not even talking about all the people who have been very ill.  Or the businesses that are suffering because people are cautious about going out in public because the of huge surge in COVID cases.