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citizenkane
A New Kind of American Children's Literature
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Canada has our back
Some would rather switch than fight...
By Bob Fertik
Created 2004-11-04 10:29
Here's one way to get prescription drugs from Canada.
As a side benefit, we'd even get full health coverage for
everyone. We might even be able to leave our doors
unlocked, as we saw in Bowling for Columbine.
http://www.democrats.com/node/136
Protesters V. Soldiers
Protesters v. Soldiers
Twenty months the ST. Patrick's Day Four will collectively spend in prison for throwing their blood on the walls of a military recruitment center in upstate New York days before the invasion of Iraq. On January 27, Teresa Grady became the last of the group to receive her sentence- four months in a federal prison- for damaging government property and entering a military station for an unlawful purpose.
Zero months in jail Army chief warrant officer Lewis Welshofer Jr. will spend after a military jury convicted him of negligent homocide in the death of detainee Abed Hamed Mowhoush. During interrogation Welshofer forced the former Iraqi general head-first into a sleeping bag, tied him tightly with electrical cord, and sat on his chest. On January 23, a court-martial board ordered Welshofer to spend 60 days restricted to his home, church, and office.
(Source: Democracy Now!, January 26, 2006)
Iraqi War: Psychological Stress
From the New York Times:
"An American soldier who beat, raped, and sodomized a Nigerian woman in the northern Italian town of Vicenza in 2004 was given a lighter sentence because the court ruled that his tour of duty in Iraq had made him less sensitive to the suffering of others." The court document said," The prolonged psychological stress to which the accused was subjected and the lowered importance he ended up giving to the life and well being of those around him can only have influenced the committing of crimes."
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Equality and Respect for All People
I am an advocate for equality and respect for all people. Cultural and religious beliefs in the United States continue to maintain and perpetuate individual acceptance or rejection of certain minority groups. Accommodation, acculturation, equality, respect, and toleration have almost disappeared from the American vocabulary in our government. Instead, we hear of maladjustment, assimilation, inequality, disrespect, and intolerance for individuals who live outside the traditionally historic American paradigm.
As a gay American, I should be entitled to the same equality and respect that other Americans demand, and expect from me. Such equality includes, but is not limited to, marriage. Selective equality and respect by the government, in particular when it comes to submitting personal income tax returns, is hypocritical to say the least. It is, perhaps, the only time when I am NOT considered a second-class citizen. Selective equality and respect by the government assuring me that I have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but only insofar as I fit within the traditional historic American paradigm is intolerable and blatantly discriminatory!
Imagine if you will what our nation would have become without the abolition of slavery, without the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and without the securing of the right to vote for African-Americans and for women. Religious ideology has been the driving force behind most social discrimination that has plagued, and continues to plague our great nation. Although we have revisited and revised our religious notions pertaining to African-Americans as chattel, and women- wives and daughters- as submissive property of men- their husbands and fathers, we, as a nation, are still victims shackled in religious ideology that continues to define and shape our politics, and our lives, with reference to civil rights and equality for gays and lesbians.
We preach that there is a separation of church and state in our nation. However, if one looks closely at federal and state laws pertaining to marriage (except in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), one will clearly see that it is entrenched in religious ideology defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Where is the separation of church and state? Religious ideology should not be the determining factor that denies or ensures civil rights and equality for citizens of the United States of America.
We will receive our civil rights and equality that we have been denied. We will remember our struggle as other minority groups have remembered theirs, and America will be a better nation because of it. It is only a matter of time.
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