Tag: rights

Basic Human Rights

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same. […] Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.

It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay. No matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we are, we are all equally entitled to our human rights and dignity.

It is, however, a mortal certainty that a) Obama is no different than Bush –and– b) that the 2012 election will have no impact whatever on the policy of the country. A pox on both their houses, and all that. May as well not vote, or just vote for whomever makes me chuckle on the day and just learn to live with the GOP-tapped nominee as a result. Nothing will change anyway.

Well, let’s just check in on what the GOP candidates are thinking re: the gays and their “rights”:

Governor GoodHair:

there is a troubling trend here beyond the national security nonsense inherent in this silly idea. This is just the most recent example of an administration at war with people of faith in this country. Investing tax dollars promoting a lifestyle many Americas of faith find so deeply objectionable is wrong.

President Obama has again mistaken America’s tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles. I will not make that mistake.

Meh, he has no chance anyway. What about perennial frontrunner Rick Santorum?

Obviously the administration is promoting their particular agenda in this country, and now they feel its their obligation to promote those values not just in the military, not just in our society, but now around the world with taxpayer dollars.

He said he’s for traditional marriage, and now he’s promoting gay lifestyles and gay rights, and he’s fighting against traditional marriage within the courts, and I think he needs to be honest.

I said “Meh;” show me somebody up front. How about Newt, on the horror of gay marriage:

I believe that marriage is between a man and woman. It has been for all of recorded history and I think this is a temporary aberration that will dissipate. I think that it is just fundamentally goes against everything we know.

Reminiscent of Cain’s “wash it off” approach.

And, of course, Mittmentum holds the same basic view on most days:

The story on same-sex marriage is that I have the same position on that, that I had from the very beginning. I’m in favor of traditional marriage, I oppose same-sex marriage. At the same time, I don’t believe in discriminating in employment or opportunity for gay individuals. So I favor gay rights, I do not favor same-sex marriage. That has been my position all along.

Elections have consequences. There are major differences between the governing approach of the two major parties. You’re getting one or the other come 2012. Vote. Vote in primaries, especially. Show up to town halls. Occupy things. Yell and scream if you feel the need. But vote. Every time. It will make a difference. Maybe not a difference that’s immediately and tangibly Your Own Personal Heaven, but even the little ones add up. Just like this.

“Exigent Circumstances” Are All Circumstances

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sole defender of your Fourth Amendment rights:

How “secure” do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?

Lawyers, Guns, and Money is particularly trenchant in response:

it’s the latest example of the drift of the exigency exception away from actual emergencies and toward the mere convenience of the police. If the police have time to obtain a warrant and there isn’t an actual emergency, they should be required to obtain one.

Yep. Why is this (seemingly) so difficult to a) understand –and– b) get the general public agitated about? Today it’s suspected drug dealers and suspected terrorists whose rights are summarily discarded in the name of “exigency.” Next it will be suspected whatevers. Some time after that, you’ll have no recourse whatsoever to stop the police from randomly entering your house and ransacking it for evidence of crime, any crime, at any moment they care to do so. Exigency!

When literally everything is an extension of the War on Drugs/Terror/bogeyman-of-the-day, then everything is easy to deem simply too exigent to bother getting a warrant. Indefinite detention without charge, assassination of US citizens (without trial), a gulag off the coast and a chain of secret prisons beyond that gulag, and now further, near-unanimous defenestration of our most basic rights.

Seriously, is any of this, even a hint of it, worth whatever public policy victory we think we’re getting out of it, even using the most optimistic possible reading of (in this case) the War on Drugs? I don’t see how anyone could think so.

Like Alcoholism and Some Other Things

David Gregory: “In a debate last month, you expressed your support for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell [and] you alluded to ‘lifestyle choices.’ Do you believe being gay [is a] choice?”
Ken Buck (R candidate for Senate, CO): “I do.”
Gregory: “Based on what?”
Ken Buck (R): “I guess you can choose who your partner is.”
Gregory: “You don’t think it’s something that’s determined at birth?”
Ken Buck (R): “I think that birth has an influence over it, like alcoholism and some other things, but I think that basically you have a choice.”

My sweet untouched Miranda

It occurs to me that people like Joementum, the Commonwealth’s own Code Brown, and apparently all of those in the media that slavishly cover them simply don’t understand what the Miranda warning even is.

Here’s what it’s not: conferring you any new rights

Here’s what it is: warning you of the rights you hold, by dint of being a living citizen of these United States and of which you may or may not choose to avail yourself (specifically, this boils down to the right to sit there mute unless and until you’ve spoken to counsel). Beginning to see why they so frequently put that word “warning” in there after the word Miranda?

How is it that these same folks that recite and (incorrectly) parse the Second Amendment ad nauseum (but inevitably, and notably verbatim) don’t understand the most basic concepts regarding what I would deem the single most fundamental right governing our interactions with our pre- and post-W.Bush-administration government?
Ironically, though, does it surprise anyone that gun ownership also happens to be the one Constitutional right that suspected terrorists get to keep under the GOP’s dream setup. Honestly, we should probably make it even easier for the suspected terrorist to buy guns; I’d assume this policy is best achieved through a wide-ranging program of blanket tax cuts.

So, once again for the truly slow and Brian Williams: Mirandizing someone simply ensures that they are fully aware of rights that are operative for all citizens no matter what; it doesn’t confer said rights, and neither do those rights magically begin only subsequent to their being invoked by rote recitation. Just like on all the cop shows!

For what it’s worth, if [A. Joseph Stack] had somehow survived, he should’ve been read his Miranda rights and tried in a civilian court. He should not have been tortured. These people are small and we – and our traditions and values – are big. They lose when we remember that, and they win when we forget it. Yesterday, they lost. An act of terrorism was committed, but we were not terrorized.

Ezra Klein on the Austin IRS domestic terrorist attack. Amen, brother.