This goes back to the whole “I can’t go there without a sidearm” kind of thing I was talking about before, where you assume people who don’t live in your neighborhood aren’t real. They don’t, say, get up and go to work or come home and sit on their porch reading or listening to the game. They don’t love their children or drive through the hamburger place or check books out of the library or get their hair cut or drink coffee. They think violence is normal and gang affiliation is awesome and everybody be slingin’ tonight. Their ways are strange to us all. I mean, God Almighty:

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on a challenge to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The conservative justices lobbed hostile and for the most part uninformed questions at defenders of the historic legislation. It’s obvious that those judges couldn’t give a fig about the dignity of man or the destiny of democracy.

s we’ve seen with the war on women (womb-controlling legislative efforts around the country, rape apologists, and media blowhards like Rush Limbaugh), the desperate gay-bashing by professional anti-LGBTs even as losses mount as civil equality advances — the Right’s efforts are nearly bunker-mentality, and the neo-Confederacy has leaned heavily on misogyny and racism (and guns) as its teddy bear, a security blanket. They are in full emotional meltdown, and that is when these movements are probably the most toxic — and dangerous.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. – Martin Luther King Jr. Admittedly it’s a little early, but this is my favorite story of the year so [...]

A travel agency called Al and Chuck Travel chartered a cruise on a Carnival ship with special performances by some of the popular drag queen stars of the Reality TV program Ru-Paul’s Drag Race. Six days before departure, ticket holders received a letter from Carnival Vice-President Vicky Rey informing them that passengers would not be permitted to dress in drag.

I am almost at a loss for words to express the level of contempt I have for the National Organization for Marriage and its most high-profile purveyors of hate and intolerance, Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher. Always couching their arguments as protecting “traditional marriage” and the family when crowing on the media, NOM most recently tried to work its magic working behind closed doors trying to drive a wedge between the black (and Latino) community and LGBTs in order to kill pro-marriage equality ballot initiatives.

Failing miserably at the voting booth in November, Brian Brown sees fertile ground in countries where existing as a gay human being is against the law and/or where culturally, the concept of someone violently beating, maiming or killing someone based on real or perceived sexual orientation is common place.

Doug Saunders is a journalist of the rare kind these days. He actually researches, explores, investigates and only then reports on the major trends of our global community. His earlier book, Arrival City, explored “the final shift of human populations from agricultural life to cities… —from Maryland to Shenzhen, from the favelas of Rio to the shanty towns of Mumbai, from Los Angeles to Nairobi. “ His new book The Myth of the Muslim Tide addresses the fearful response of so many Americans and Europeans to one key constituency of that shift, Muslim immigrants.

What the whole controversy seems to show is that in our depleted democracy wherein the only “vote” that matters (literally, if vote-suppressing Republicans have their way…), is measured in dollars, the right has taken caveat emptor into previously unattained heights: they no longer have to even call shit Shinola. It sells either way.

So as Pam Spaulding noted, some members of a Baptist church came to the pastor and said, we heard you’re marrying some black folks in here and we’re not okay with that.

And you thought it was a just a problem that churches feel that “all God’s children” applies to LGBTs? Yes, it’s the 21st century and on Sundays around the U.S., Christian worship still occurs most of the time in racially self-segregated environments. This story goes to show you that in some predominantly white churches, even if they open their doors to minorities (and let them put their hard-earned money in the offering basket), those people of color — heterosexual couples — can still be denied the very spiritual services others can count on without batting an eye (or apparently any guilt about the discrimination by the congregants).