I was about to start recording audio for a new .musecast last night when the first tweets about George Zimmerman being found not guilty in the death of Trayvon Martin hit my timeline. It was in the wake of my first real interest in politics — the 2 Live Crew obscenity trials — that I witnessed the nationwide riots in 1992 after the first criminal trial of the police officers who beat Rodney King resulted in acquittals. I was too young to really appreciate the…
Arizona bill seeks to tie bathroom use to birth gender, restricting transgender rights (Vancouver Sun) A lot of talk is made of recent GLBT progress — witness the rapid growth in support for marriage equality in just the past few years here in America — but more often than not these measures of progress only affect transgender people tangentially, if at all. Certainly there have been causes for celebration in the past few years, such as President Obama adding protections for gender identity for federal…
In addition to discussing linguistic relativity with my classes this week, we’re also going to go over the problematic issue of singular/plural pronoun agreement, in particular the sticky issue of indefinite pronouns. If you’ve ever gotten red ink on your writing for saying “Everyone is entitled to their opinion” then you’ve had to deal with this, and it’s one of the longest-lingering grammar-based arguments I’m aware of. I grew up when the appropriateness of using male pronouns as defaults (“everyone is entitled to his own…
Michael J. Nelson: “BronyCon 2012 drew a crowd of 4000 chubby little pervs.” (twitter.com) When I first started writing here about getting into Dance Dance Revolution in late 2003, I got a lot of negative e-mails. Most of them were along the lines of, “You can’t go play video games where kids are present because you’re one of them queers and everyone will be right to assume that you’re just going there to try to ‘pick up’ or kidnap kids for whatever perverted things people like…
Judge overturns Calif. gay marriage ban (AP via Yahoo! News) It is one of the most (in)famous videos of its era. Freshly installed as the governor of Alabama, George Wallace stands before a cheering crowd during his inaugural address to the state and declares, in a booming voice, that in Alabama there will be “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” It’s hard to call it the most galling video of the time, in the face of white police officers turning fire hoses on young African-Americans,…