“The right has succeeded in forcing candidates in the center and left to devote considerable time and resources simply to ensuring that their supporters will be allowed to vote. By necessity, Democratic campaigning is now at least as much about the practicalities of voting—how to register, how to request absentee ballots, how to find polling places, how to confirm the validity of an existing registration, how to help a disenfranchised ex-felon apply for reinstatement, and so on—as it is about the candidate and ideas they’re running on. Republicans believe unconditionally that higher turnout among the young, the poor, and people of color is damaging to their efforts to stay in power. They’re right, and their campaign to keep these voters away from the polls is not new—it just involves new methods. Ways to keep the poor, African Americans, Latinos, and other “undesirables” from the polls have gotten more sophisticated, more disingenuous, and harder to combat. In the short term, progressives and liberals have little hope of overturning these measures wholesale. The social and economic inequalities that make them possible are simply too entrenched. But there are a number of important steps we can take to mitigate them, while hopefully paving the way toward a broader restoration of voting rights—namely, by electing people at the state and local levels who reject policies clearly aimed at disenfranchising specific demographic groups.”
What an amazing day at the anti-Trump march! Ran into Ed Miliband, saw Jeremy Corbyn (@lilistprince got a pic I’ll get off them later) and saw the giant Trump baby! Wonderful atmosphere of people united in defiance at the racist, misogynist, orange bigot and the UK government’s appeasement of him. #fucktrump #trumpmarch #jeremycorbyn #edmiliband #resist (at Trafalgar Square)
ask me how much I care about cishet atheists ‘coming out’ to their families as non-religious
There are communities where coming out as nonreligious will get you kicked out of the house, sent to reparative therapy, beaten, ostracized, and in some parts of the world jailed. There are communities where your parents will decide you’re unsafe to have around your siblings, and judges who will rule that you shouldn’t have custody of your children.
Ironically, those are similar risks faced by LGBT+ kids. So, yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to care always about people who need my support.
ask me how I feel about people who claim to ~care always about people who need my support~ but who are totally ok with the idea of appropriating the phrase ‘coming out of the closet’ for things other than being lgbtq, which is incredibly homophobic and implies that being same-gender attracted or trans is a belief system or political stance, an idea that denies our reality and often puts us in incredible danger?
you know what? appropriation is a horrible destructive concept that directly makes it harder to fight oppression. I used to think I was just confused about it but the more I see it used the more I am convinced that, nah, it’s just terrible.
It directly serves the interests of oppressive power structures to set marginalized people at each others’ throats over who is stealing from who instead of relating to each other and thus helping each other. It feeds a simplistic understanding of privilege where no one has overlapping marginalizations or benefits from comparing aspects of their own experiences. It suggests that every kind of harm is completely independent and could never be understood in relation to other harms, which stops us from getting at the roots of harmful systems. It is evil and it is malicious and it is bullying masked as activism.
Kids who realize that they can’t live the lives their parents envision for them, and can’t tell their parents the truth without risking bodily harm, have a great deal in common with each other no matter what specific lie they are living. It is entirely a positive thing for those kids to feel solidarity with the entire vast broad community of people with similar problems. Is being trans at all the same thing as being gay? No. But is it useful to have a word that applies to both experiences? Hell yes. In this thread there were dozens of LGBT+ atheists who said that coming out as an atheist was much harder than coming out as LGBT+. There are also LGBT+ people who found it much easier. Do you know how you navigate something like that? You give everyone access to solidarity. You say “we have things in common, let’s fight for each other”.
You don’t say “how dare you have the nerve to compare /your/ experience of being kicked out of your home and disowned by your parents at the age of 14 to my experience of being kicked out of my home and disowned by my parents at the age of 14.” No one benefits from that. Literally no one.
As for the idea that it’s ~bad politics~ to suggest that being LGBT+ is a choice, guess what? Some people choose to be trans. Some people choose to be gay. Some people do think of their sexuality or their gender identity as a choice, and that is okay, because the actual fundamental point is that there isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s not okay to tell people that feeling like their identity is political or is a belief is an evil and malicious act against you.
As for me being incredible homophobic, sure, I’ll cop to that. The Incredible Homophobe, equally good at oppressing gay and bi girls and at kissing them. I should put it on a t-shirt.
“Kids who realize that they can’t live the lives their parents envision for them, and can’t tell their parents the truth without risking bodily harm, have a great deal in common with each other no matter what specific lie they are living. It is entirely a positive thing for those kids to feel solidarity with the entire vast broad community of people with similar problems.”
slam fucking dunk
Tbh, I would rather err on the side of more legal rights for emancipated minors. That obviously wouldn’t do away with all the potential for coercion, but neither does turning 18.
ETA: Besides kids who were forced into getting married way too young, I have also known a couple who did become emancipated because their home situations were just that bad. If anything, I would worry more about kids who are having about the levels of trouble supporting themselves that you might expect entering/staying in not-so-great marriages because of that. Not enough to continue treating them as legally incompetent, however.
Turning 18 really will not magically fix this set of problems, either. Unfortunately.
Hurriyet Daily News reports that Albayrak had been hired to photograph the July 5th wedding at Turgut Özal Nature Park in the eastern Turkish province of Malatya. On the day of, when he noticed that the bride-to-be didn’t look like an adult, he asked the groom her age and learned that she was only 15.
“The groom had come to my studio some two weeks ago and was alone,” Albayrak tells the Daily News. “I saw the bride for the first time at the wedding. She’s a child, and I felt her fear because she was trembling.”
Albayrak then reportedly refused to continue as the wedding photographer and attempted to stop the wedding.
The argument soon turned physical when the groom attacked him as he was attempting to leave, Albayrak says. The photographer ended up breaking the client’s nose in the fight, according to local reports.
Albayrak confirmed the reports in a Facebook post, which has been met with widespread approval, attracting thousands of Likes and hundreds of overwhelmingly positive comments.
“I wish this had never happened, but it did,” Albayrak writes. “And if you were to ask me if I’d do the same thing again, I’d say ‘yes.’ Child brides are [victims] of child abuse and no power on earth can make me photograph a child in a wedding gown.”
The legal minimum age for marriage in Turkey is 18-years-old for both sexes, and child marriage is punishable by imprisonment for men who marry underage girls. Despite being outlawed, however, child marriage is still prevalent in the country and remains a controversial political issue.
btw – let’s remind ourselves, americans, that unlike turkey, in the US the legal minimum age for marriage is only 18 in two states. in alabama, you can be married as young as fourteen years old if you have “parental permission”. in california, you can get married under 18 if you go to counseling, have a parent with you when you apply for the marriage license, and appear before a judge. in some states, there isn’t even a specific minimum age for marriage.
the minimum marriage age for girls in new hampshire is 13 years old.
child marriage is not an “over there” problem, it happens right here, legally. any one of us might find ourselves called upon to break somebody’s nose if we encounter something like this occurring. we also have a responsibility to support groups and laws trying to end child marriage in this country.
Virginia previously allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with “parental consent” (with no process in place to ensure it’s not actually “parental coercion”) and allowed younger children to wed with such “consent” if they were pregnant or had a child. (X)
Now, the only exception is 16-17 year old court emancipated minors, hopefully making the parental coercion factor far less relevant.
New Jersey and Delaware have also apparently passed new legislation changing the marriage age to 18 with no exceptions, just last month (June 2018). Presmably giving the 48 states figure.
Millennials and Gen Z: Trump shows signs of being a genocidal dictator, we shouldn’t vote for him
Baby boomers: OOOOO Is your Safe Space being violated by his comments snowflake??? How AWFUL IT must be to have a REAL man for president instead of OoOoBamA
Trump, after being voted into office: *leaves the UN human rights council, puts hundreds of young children into prison camps and tent cities, takes away valuable items like rosaries similar to the removal of rings during the Holocaust, puts babies and toddlers into foster homes/orphanages, literally treats ACTUAL CHILDREN like prisoners for wanting a better life elsewhere*
Baby boomers: oh….oh no….
Millennials and Gen Z: *stare into the camera like they’re on the office*
Please stop making posts like these please. They don’t make any sense. All they do is make you feel better and hope that if only you wait a little longer, the baby boomers will die and The Young and the Woke will inherit the earth. Senior citizens weren’t the ones down in Charleston playing with those tiki torches or reading Breitbart every day.
Thirty-seven percent of people aged 18-29 voted for that nut. That’s not a number you should be comfortable with.
Elderly people are a vulnerable group. I know that some of you have convinced yourselves that anyone over the age of 45 is a Koch brother, but that’s not the case. The people of color, disabled, queer, and impoverished people who we are allegedly so concerned with were not all born 25 years ago and the ones who aren’t had to deal with even worse circumstances than we do. That includes far fewer legal protections.
The biggest advocate for voting I knew when I was a kid was an eighty year old lady who handed pamphlets out on the bus and took the time to teach me about war crimes.
The grannies and the grandfathers are so important and we need to care for them.
“I have great love for countries in Europe. Don’t forget, essentially I’m a product of the European Union, between Scotland and Germany. Right? My father Germany, my mother Scotland.
I think what has happened to Europe is a shame. Allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame. I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was and I don’t mean that in a positive way. So I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.”
THIS IS WHITE NATIONALISM
What this is is a trap, and you’re falling for it. Every time he makes a statement like this, it’s usually a trial balloon: a remark made to gauge a reaction to it. By making this sort of reaction, you’re giving him exactly what he wants. Every time we react to this sort of thing, his support only grows. We’ve got to start blocking him out and denying him publicity!
explain the mechanism for how calling a racist racist increases his support.
You can’t deny the fucking president publicity lmao
“blocking him out and denying him publicly” what does this fucking mean???
I think there’s a misunderstanding about what a “trial balloon” is. It’s not something he’s saying to stir up publicity. It’s something he’s saying to see how much he can get away with. So actually, not responding would be “giving him exactly what he wants.” Because that would be signalling to him that “yeah, okay, we’ve reached the point where this sort of thing is acceptable, let’s push a little further now.”
“I have great love for countries in Europe. Don’t forget, essentially I’m a product of the European Union, between Scotland and Germany. Right? My father Germany, my mother Scotland.
I think what has happened to Europe is a shame. Allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame. I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was and I don’t mean that in a positive way. So I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.”
THIS IS WHITE NATIONALISM
What this is is a trap, and you’re falling for it. Every time he makes a statement like this, it’s usually a trial balloon: a remark made to gauge a reaction to it. By making this sort of reaction, you’re giving him exactly what he wants. Every time we react to this sort of thing, his support only grows. We’ve got to start blocking him out and denying him publicity!
explain the mechanism for how calling a racist racist increases his support.
You can’t deny the fucking president publicity lmao
Donald Trump: “ahhhh Tumblr blog ‘Justsomeantifas’ called me a white nationalist! I can feel my power level rising! Feed me more observations of exactly what I am!”
Some fuck: “Ah, Orange”
Super Saiyan Trump: “More!”
Melania: “disgusting?”
God mode Trump: “Yes!!!!”
An almighty centrist: “Worthy of respect given your office”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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