On October 12, 2017, the day after National Coming Out Day, I received an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) informing me that President Donald Trump was scheduled to appear at the Value Voters Summit, a venue that combines virulently anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim “values.” Like I have almost every day since last November’s… Read more →
Tag: human-rights
HIV in Brazil: Health and Human Rights in a Global Context
The fight over the future of the ACA here in the U.S. has made me think about universal healthcare, disease, and rights in a global context. The fierce debate over the idea of healthcare as a “right” versus a “privilege” on Capitol Hill seems almost antiquated when compared with other countries. When a friend of… Read more →
Pink Triangle Legacies: Holocaust Memory and International Gay Rights Activism
In the twenty-first century, it’s hard to imagine a social movement without hashtags. Social media has influenced issues ranging from local elections to global geopolitics (just ask anyone involved in the Arab Spring), and hashtags have become forms of communication and customizable symbols representing specific movements. But what about social protests in a pre-Internet age?… Read more →
Love and Rage
On November 2, 1992, members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) carried a dead body through the streets of Manhattan. The deceased was Mark Fisher, a gay man and AIDS activist who had died from complications of the disease he spent his last years fighting. His was the first political funeral staged… Read more →
Love, Death, and Human Rights: A View from Rio de Janeiro
My partner Clayton was murdered while riding his motorcycle home from work on April 28, 2015. He was followed by three men on two motorcycles who opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon and shot him nearly 20 times in the back. Clayton was a police officer in the favela of Manguinhos, an urban slum in… Read more →
Fallen Women Forgiven: Enda Kenny and the Magdalene Laundries
By Helen McBride
Prompted by the UN Committee against Torture in 2011 to set up an inquiry, the Irish government has released a report on State collusion with the Catholic Church in the treatment of girls and women in the work houses known as the Magdalene Laundries. These Laundries were run by four Roman Catholic orders of nuns.
The laundries were institutions started by the Catholic Church in 1922, in which thousands of vulnerable women were incarcerated. While in reality those sent to the laundries were products of poverty, homelessness, and dysfunctional families, the myth of the “bad girl” and “fallen woman” sent to the laundries to reform has persisted. Those that were sent to these institutions spent months or years in hard labour, with no access to education, little respect and in many cases lived in constant fear. Work included doing laundry for hotels, hospitals and prisons.
Justice Delayed, No Longer Denied
By Mary Griggs
One little known aspect of the policy against “homosexuality” for the US military was that service members who were discharged for being gay or lesbian, had their separation pay cut in half. The policy, which was not part of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” statute was, therefore, not changed with the law was repealed. Laura Schauer Ives, managing attorney for the ACLU of New Mexico, rightly called this a “double dose of discrimination.” The ACLU The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of New Mexico had filed a class action lawsuit against the policy.