Category Archives: glbt

Voting My Green Conscience

glbt, greenparty, politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

DNC treatment of Sanders at issue in emails leaked to Wikilinks (CNN) DNC emails: Wasserman Schultz furiously pressured MSNBC after it criticized her “unfair” treatment of Sanders (salon.com) The Green Party Responds to Dan Savage, Says He’s “Dead Wrong” (Portland Mercury) In the days following the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting that left fifty dead last month, one of the more poignant figures to emerge as some of us tried to make sense of the tragedy (while others just tried triangulating different minority groups so they…

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Refusing to Break, Refusing to Hate

glbt, politics, rhetoric, transgender Leave a comment

Divide and Conquer? Trump Fails to Split Gays, Muslims After Orlando Terror (yamazaj.com) I’ve gotten in the habit of drafting these blogs on Friday nights, while one of my favourite public radio shows is playing, and then revising what I wrote over the weekend before posting it on Monday. A couple of Fridays ago I drafted a long blog about a bombing at a Target restroom in Illinois that had just happened a couple of days earlier. Writing about that was kind of risky, because at the…

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Deliberately Blocking Solutions

glbt, politics, rhetoric, transgender Leave a comment

Ohio Lawmaker Says He’s Looking Into The Need For A Bill To Ban Gender Neutral Bathrooms (wvxu.org) Online petition to boycott Target over bathroom policy tops 900,000 signatures (Cleveland Plain Dealer) If compromise was ever a virtue in American politics, there’s no denying that it’s taken a beating over the past few years, especially among right-wingers. A lot of factors played a part in the galvanization of the Tea Party movement, but many people point to the role of right-wing media, both new and old,…

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This Year’s Monster

glbt, politics, rhetoric, transgender Leave a comment

North Carolina governor signs controversial transgender bill (CNN.com) Young children have a tendency to use slurs and other disparaging words without really knowing what they mean. Often times when you hear a child say X slur, you can ask that child “What does X mean?” and quickly find out that they have no idea. The only thing they know for sure is that X is an other, and of course that means X is deserving of scorn and ridicule. I was no different when I…

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21st Century Erasure

glbt, politics, rhetoric, teaching, transgender Leave a comment

Legislators unhappy with [University of Tennessee]’s gender neutral pronoun push (knoxblogs.com) Duke freshmen object to Alison Bechdel’s  ‘pornographic’ graphic memoir, ‘Fun Home’ (latimes.com) About three years ago, right after starting a new teaching position, I was faced with a crisis of conscience. As a composition instructor my focus is on teaching the arts of rhetoric and argument, but I  have to handle some grammar in there as well, and I was having an increasingly difficult time dealing with the fact that I was being expected…

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