Category Archives: glbt

#freekate

Kaitlyn Hunt Refuses Plea Deal: Gay Teen Charged Over Underage Relationship Will Appear In Court (Huffington Post) ACLU of Florida Statement on Prosecution of 18-Year-Old Kaitlyn Hunt (aclufl.org) Several years ago, when I was still playing dance games at arcades and going to tournaments and such, I got to know someone who was a registered sex offender here in Ohio. When he was nineteen years old he had a consensual relationship with a woman who was seventeen; the age of consent here in Ohio is…

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Stall-ing Transgender Progress

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…

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The Nexus of Politics and Grammar

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…

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Married to Hatred

Democrats look to back gay marriage at convention (Reuters) In the wake of the whole controversy over Chick-Fil-A President Dan Cathy coming out forcefully against same-sex marriage, I got treated to one of my Facebook friends trying to argue the issue with a Chick-Fil-A supporter who repeatedly asserted that homosexuality is morally equivalent to murder. It reminded me of my recent observations on the difficulties in trying to have real conversations with people on issues like reforming drug laws and legalizing prostitution, as did the…

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The Lady Gaga Principle

Traveling in the circles I do, I’ve certainly heard more than my fair share about Lady Gaga. From what little I’d heard of her first album I was sure that I wouldn’t care for her music much; that’s not to say I thought it was bad, just that it didn’t really sound like my sort of thing. Last year, when she released Born This Way and Amazon was selling the MP3 version for 99 cents, I decided to go ahead and buy it, if nothing else…

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