The Republic of T.

You’ve probably already seen this, but it’s something as many people as possible should see. So, I’m doing what I can.

I’ll just add one thing. These are the people who have kept George W. Bush’s approval rating in the double digits, if only just barely, for the last few years. These are the people the McCain-Palin ticket is going out of their way not just to court, but to rouse them in a way they have not been roused before.

What will happen if they win? What will happen if they lose? Which is worse?

At least he didn’t say “That boy,” but he was just one word off. I heard it, and I saw it. I saw it first, actually, during the first debate when McCain refused to look Obama in the eye.

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Want to blame someone for the financial mess we’re in? Well, join the club and get in line. Folks on the right are hell bent on blaming blacks. And if that doesn’t work, they can always blame gays for our economic downturn. (Okay, okay! I confess already. it’s all my fault. I’m not sure how I did it, and I don’t know what I did with the $1 trillion that’s likely to be the total we’re in the hole.)

Christian fundamentalists are suggesting gays and lesbians are to blame for Wall Street’s woes, a frequently made charge in the wake of national calamities.

In a September 25th blog post titled ‘The Nation Will Right Itself If It Fixes Sex’, Christian Civil League of Maine Executive Director Michael Heath writes that the financial crisis facing Wall Street is a symptom of America’s sinful sexual culture, including the acceptance of gay unions.

“Our crisis is a symptom, not the cause,” writes Michael Heath. “I am not saying I know whether this financial crisis is God’s judgment or not. It is not for me to know that definitively.”

Heath goes on to list policy changes that would make God “crack a smile,” including: End abortion rights and defund non-profit groups supporting it, amend state constitutions to ban gay marriage and eliminate domestic partnerships and civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, and end discrimination against private religious schools and homeschools.

A related post by Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian at the National Review’s website pushes a similar theme, this time focusing on Friday’s failure of WaMu.

Krikorian suggests the big bank failed because it was too accommodating to minorities, including gays, African-Americans and Hispanics.

In his September 26th post titled ‘Cause and Effect?’, Krikorian writes, “I really thought this was a joke, but it’s not. WaMu’s final press release, before it sank beneath the waves.”

I’ve heard some people suggest — in response to the above — that if Jesus did have something to say about this mess, he’d probably take a swipe at the “moneychangers” again, and repeat the parable about the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle. Jesus would run the moneychangers out of the temple, and denounce the worship of wealth, right?

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Part One: Yours, Mine…

One of the things I hoped for when Michelle Obama spoke at the Democratic convention, was that she would introduce people to the America that she came from, and that was the setting of her story. One of the biggest shames in the campaign — aside from the fact that political realities required this intelligent, accomplished woman to effectively bite her tongue for the last couple of months — is the lack of any honest discussion about the reality that we don’t all live in the same America. It’s one reality that both progressives and conservatives must grapple with between now and November, and beyond

Delivered on a night that carried the theme “One America,” her speech should serve as a reminder that if we are to be America, we have to first acknowledge that what we have are three America’s: yours, mine, and ours.

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It’s funny, what memories come back to you, just from reading a news story. I finally read, this morning about Cullen Jones and his Olympic win.

Bronx-born swimmer Cullen Jones didn’t just help power the U.S. relay swim team to Olympic gold - he just may have shattered the stereotype that blacks can’t swim.

Although Jones isn’t the first African-American swimmer to make the Olympic squad (he’s the third), or the first to win a gold medal (he’s the second), he figured in one of the most exciting races in sports history.

And that thriller will be replayed on Olympic highlight reels for generations to come. “I hope this exposure from the race today, a kid can see this and say, ‘Wow, a black swimmer - and he’s got a gold medal,’ ” Jones, 24, said. “The stigma that black people don’t swim ended today.”

…Jones was 5 years old and living in Irvington, N.J., when his parents took him to a Pennsylvania water park to cool off. His mother, Debra, didn’t want him to go down a slide in an inner tube because he couldn’t swim.

Jones should have listened to his mother. When the inner tube flipped over, he panicked instead of letting go and then passed out.

It took CPR to bring him back to life. The next week, his mother sent him for swimming lessons at a YMCA in nearby Newark and then the John F. Kennedy Aquatic Center, which is also in Newark. Jones took to the water immediately, but wasn’t a standout at first, his coaches said. “At first he was an average swimmer and he progressed,” said Elliott Bradley. “The more he progressed, the better he got at it. I never thought he would go this far. I’m very proud of him.”

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One of the things that surprised me after starting the LGBT Hate Crimes Project is the amount of email I get. Much of it is from people who knew, or were related to the victim. Sometimes I’ve heard from family members who didn’t know the outcome of their loved one’s cases. Sometimes it’s from people who want to let me know about cases that they think should be on the site.

In the latter case, I usually take them and research them, unless they’ve been covered in depth elsewhere. If, for example, they’re already covered in depth on Wikipedia I may decide not to duplicate efforts. I started this project on Wikipedia, by the way, but stopped posting entries on Wikipedia when it became clear that their notability guidelines would cause many of the cases I was writing about to get deleted, because one editor or another didn’t think they were noteworthy enough. In one case, one person asked me “What makes this different from any other crime story?”

I thought I’d scream, but it got worse.

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I don’t remember how old I was the first time it happened. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old. We were in Philadelphia — my mother, my younger sister, and I — visiting my great grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. For my sister and me, it was our first time traveling that far from home, and our first time in a city like Philadelphia. Everything amazed us, from the size of the buildings, downtown to the narrow little houses on my great great-grandfather’s street, with no yards to speak of and no space between them; so different from our suburban home back in Augusta, GA.

Even going shopping was different. Instead of driving to the store, my mom pushed her grandfather’s folding cart a few blocks to a store a few blocks away, and we followed her. The store was a wonder unto itself; on the outside a rowhouse like the one my great grandfather lived in, but on the inside there were long, narrow shelves holding food, toys, and other items we’d never seen before.

Our mother had told us time and time again not to touch anything whenever we went shopping, but we couldn’t help it this time. We picked up toys and candy and other items, exclaiming to each other to “come look at this.” Until it happened.

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I guess I have to admit that I have been drawn in by the Washington Post’s series on the 2001 disappearance/death of Chandra Levy. I’ve been reading each installment as they are published. It’s likeI can’t help it. Before Natalie Holloway, before Elizabeth Smart, before Kristin Smart, before Laci Peterson, before Laurie Hacking, before the Runaway Bride, there was — at least here in D.C. (I don’t know how the story played elsewhere)— there was Chandra Levy.

It’s long since turned into a syndrome. It has several names, and one rather of them popular. I have my own name from it, taken from a scene in Scary Movie.

White Woman in Trouble!

A pretty high school student, knowing the killer is close to breaking through her bedroom door, calls 911 on her PC. Her eyes wide and her heart pounding, she types in her message: “White woman in trouble!” In an instant, her suburban driveway is crowded with cruisers, sirens shrieking and lights flashing, and her wouldabeen slayer is beating a hasty retreat.

And Eugene Robinson has the best working definition.

Someday historians will look back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21st century and identify the era’s major themes: Religious fundamentalism. Terrorism. War in Iraq. Economic dislocation. Bioengineering. Information technology. Nuclear proliferation. Globalization. The rise of superpower China.

And, of course, Damsels in Distress.

But of course the damsels have much in common besides being female. You probably have some idea of where I’m headed here.

A damsel must be white. This requirement is nonnegotiable. It helps if her frame is of dimensions that breathless cable television reporters can credibly describe as “petite,” and it also helps if she’s the kind of woman who wouldn’t really mind being called “petite,” a woman with a good deal of princess in her personality. She must be attractive — also nonnegotiable. Her economic status should be middle class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime (see: Lynch).

Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage. The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment. Since the Holloway story broke we’ve had more news reports from Aruba this past week, I’d wager, than in the preceding 10 years.

The damsel— the “White Woman in Trouble” — thanks to the Post, is back.

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Not sure if this is going to be a series or not, but sometimes I wonder why — when someone says something with so much obviously wrong with it — no one seems to ask the obvious question. For example, Bill O’Reilly:

On Saturday, former Vice President Al Gore made a surprise appearance at the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, TX. In his speech, Gore praised the gathering of progressives, saying that they are part of an effort to “reclaim the integrity of American democracy.”

While the attendees of Netroots Nation received Gore with enthusiasm, his appearance has caused Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly to declare that Gore has “gone off the deep end.”

On his radio show today, O’Reilly claimed that Gore was now associating himself with the most “hateful group in the country.” “And I’m including the Nazis and the Klan in here,” said O’Reilly.” He then claimed that attending Netroots Nation was “the same as if he stepped into the Klan gathering.”

I haven’t seen anyone asking the obvious question: How exactly does Bill O’Reilly know what a Klan gathering looks like, let alone what it’s like to step into one?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Anyone who thinks the injustices of the past remain in the past is living in a “post-racial” fool’s paradise. There are black folks in this country who are just now getting justice for decades of discrimination. Like the black neighborhood in Ohio that was denied public water for decades, for no other reason than racial discrimination.

Residents of a mostly black neighborhood in rural Ohio were awarded nearly $11 million Thursday by a federal jury that found local authorities denied them public water service for decades out of racial discrimination.

Each of the 67 plaintiffs was awarded $15,000 to $300,000, depending on how long they had lived in the Coal Run neighborhood, about 5 miles east of Zanesville in Muskingum County in east-central Ohio.

The money covers both monetary losses and the residents’ pain and suffering between 1956, when water lines were first laid in the area, and 2003, when Coal Run got public water.

The lawsuit was filed in 2003 after the Ohio Civil Rights Commission concluded the residents were victims of discrimination. The city, county and East Muskingum Water Authority all denied it and noted that many residents in the lightly populated county don’t have public water.

Coal Run residents either paid to have wells dug, hauled water for cisterns or collected rain water so they could drink, cook and bathe.

From 1956 to 2003? You know, then, that means that several people, over long periods of time — well after the age of Jim Crow had officially passed — knew this was going on, and were either alright with it or didn’t see fit to put a stop to it.

From 1956 to 2003.

[Pic via -ReRod- @ Flickr.]

Well, that didn’t take long. Just this morning I asked:

I’m just wondering if it’s too far-fetched to suggest that we’re probably not too far from the day when someone — a gay couple who gets married, or the person who officiates — does get arrested and locked up. What happens then?

I guess I have my answer.

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I really should learn to let stuff like this go, but…

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I did a double-take when I read this on CNN. It’s been a while since I read Fire in a Canebreak, an account of the last mass lynching in the United States, which took place in my home state in 1946. Apparently, there’s new evidence in the case.

State and federal investigators said Tuesday that they spent the past two days gathering evidence in the last documented mass lynching in the United States: a grisly slaying of four people that has remained unsolved for more than six decades.

In a written statement, the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said they collected several items on a property in rural Walton County, Georgia, that were taken in for further investigation.

On July 25, 1946, two black sharecropper couples were shot hundreds of times and the unborn baby of one of the women cut out with a knife at the Moore’s Ford Bridge. One of the men had been accused of stabbing a white man 11 days earlier and was bailed out of jail by a former Ku Klux Klan member and known bootlegger who drove him, his wife, her brother and his wife to the bridge.

The FBI statement said investigators were following up on information recently received in the case, one of several the agency has revived in an effort to close decades-old cases from the civil rights era and before.

“The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn’t ignore with respect to this case,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.

Of course, there are people who’d rather they did ignore it.

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