Honestly I like Bernie, just not in the President role. I want him being a curmudgeonly old New York Jew grumbling in the ear of the President. Something like Secretary of Labor would be great for him.
The First Amendment Defense Act is the latest version of "religious liberty bills" that make it legal for people and businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people if it's against their "religious or moral conviction," and it's already making its way through the system. It's similar to the one Pence enacted in Indiana that tanked its economy after a $60 million boycott. These laws center on relatively benign things like bakeries not being "forced" to bake cakes for gay weddings, but they also cover things like hospitals and other healthcare providers either outright refusing to provide medical care to LGBTQ people or protect them from providing discriminatory or inaccurate healthcare. Or it protects pharmacies that refuse to fill prescriptions. Or adoption agencies from working with gay couples. Or private schools refusing to accept children of gay parents. Or old age homes refusing to take in gay people. Or hotels refusing to let gay couples stay there. Anytime there are rights given to couples - like visitation rights - those can be refused for gay couples, so while it doesn't make gay marriage illegal it would make their married status null and void when encountering any of these issues. There are a lot more services that people can deny based on not wanting to serve LGBTQ people besides wedding cakes. It protects workplace and housing discrimination where people can be refused a job/housing because they're LGBTQ or fired/evicted or harassed. The extra fun part of FADA is that they don't just mention the religious belief of marriage is only between a man and a woman, but ALSO the belief that "sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage." So, guess what, all that shit applies to: any single person male or female that's having sex, unmarried couples who are living together, single parents. Basically any time you want to seek services related to having a sex life if you're not married, you can be refused service. Birth control, emergency contraception, STD testing or treatment, sex education, healthcare for any of the other shit that can go wrong from being sexually active. Of course that also goes for women seeking abortions, having miscarriages, seeking prenatal care, having pregnancy complications, giving birth, or seeking neonatal care if they're unmarried. Landlords can refuse to give housing to unmarried couples, or kick a single mom out of the house if she has too many male visitors. Bosses can fire unmarried women for getting pregnant if they don't want to deal with maternity leave. All this isn't even for those with "religious belief" but also for those with "moral conviction." So you don't even need to be officially religiously-affiliated or otherwise show that you're a good Christian boy who attends church every Sunday or whatever. You can just say it morally offends you that gay people exist and women are being big ol' sluts having sex before marriage and you're good to go. The bill also specifically takes note that, if passed, this bill would supercede any state-level anti-discriminatory laws.
I know this is a post from a few pages back, but I did want to comment on some of the material in this. Out of the listed issues the protest was supposed to cover, one of them is actually something the government should be focusing on, and that's immigration reform. Climate change would be the second, but realistically, it's not something the government should be taking the lead on as there is WAY too much bureaucracy to get anything useful and effective completed on the front of climate change. If you think differently, look at the ACA and how it was negotiated, passed, and executed and you'll realize the federal government isn't equipped to make large sweeping changes on something as intricate as healthcare, let alone something like climate change. The rest of the items are things the government should not be involved in. The reason they are involved is because we as a population have to litigate everything in our lives we don't agree with and have "someone" fix it. We've empowered the government to step into EVERYTHING in our lives, whether they are equipped to solve the problem or not. Most of these problems we bring to the government, instead of being solved by people who would be qualified to make appropriate decisions, they are instead decided by who has the deepest pockets to buy studies, research and votes. We've been continually letting government have more and more power and giving them complete control over almost every aspect of our lives. It's gotten so bad, we are having "protests" against the idea we have someone who was elected we don't like, based on nothing of note since he's been president for exactly 2 days. You can dress up these marches as anything you'd like, but the crux of the issue is very simple, there is a portion of the population who doesn't like Donald Trump and wish he wasn't president. Nothing more, nothing less.
Wait, so you think that without the government rich people and corporations would actually have less power? I'm not sure you've thought this idea through very well.
Sure, if you have an extremely shallow understanding of politics, current events, history, Trump, protests in general, and this one in particular.
No, I'm simply saying we've ceded most of our decision making to government and we are now upset because we have barely any input into the things that affect our everyday lives. Then, we continue to go to the very system put in place to try and regulate things we don't agree with and get upset when we are ignored.
Can you show me one or two speakers who specifically didn't mention directly or allude to the fact they were there in opposition to Trump? How many of the signs brought by protesters weren't in some way either anti-Trump or anti-Trump appointments?
Given how much I hate this Regressive Left, and given even more how I fucking hate these violent rioting assholes, this is definetly the tastiest thing I've read this year. I don't know who wrote it, but it cracked me the fuck up: Don't know if it's real or fake, I loved it. Regardless that I'm a liberal, fuck these faggots. Go to jail, go DIRECTLY to jail and stay the hell off my brand that you keep embarrassing on a minute-by-minute basis.
Yeah, thinking that the protests were about Trump wasn't the part of your post that was silly. They were, by and large, about Trump. But they weren't about "not liking" Trump, "nothing more, nothing less." That's the shallow part. They were about all of the things that could fill in the blank with "not liking Trump because _____." The "based on nothing of note" was also the shallow part. Not only has he been telling us what he's going to do for months now, but steps toward doing a lot of those things have already been taken since Congress' session started. As I've already said, it's better to protest to stop something from happening then to wait until they already have. Same goes for calling your congresspeople. You tell them which way you want them to vote beforehand, not wait until after they've voted and call them to yell. A lot of the criticisms have displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of protest and its role in our country.
Assuming this is about what I think this is about, you know the black bloc are anarchists and not liberals, right?
I'm going to have to strongly disagree based simply on this point. If Hillary had won, this march wouldn't have been even a 1/100th in size, which is why I can say, at it's root, it's simply about not liking Trump.
I agree with you, only if "not liking Trump" is because of his stance on things like women's rights, LGBT rights, etc. You can't say that they're marching just because of his shitty hair or personality... it's because of what they've said. Trump and Pence have both been very vocal about their general plans around those issues, and it has pissed women and LGBT people right the fuck off. I totally understand why. And I empathize with them. I'm not affected directly by it so it's not as big a deal to me, but that doesn't mean I'm OK with it. (For whatever that's worth, as a Canadian). It's also very interesting to note that the previous LGBT policy White House web page was taken down, and has not been changed or put back up. Others, like energy policies, etc., have been, but there's been no mention at all about LGBT. From a social aspect, Trump and Pence are a step back to the bible-thumping stone age, and I believe they are going to waste time and energy trying to reverse some forward progress that has been made in those areas. I think a lot of the people at the march were there expressing their anger that such backwards-thinking people have been elected into such powerful positions.
If the new Whitehouse page on energy is any indication, LGBT folks might be better off not having a replacement page.
Or it's so bad they're still trying to find an intern willing to make the page that's been requested.
And I can sympathize with that line of thinking and can completely agree it's a big source of conflict with a large swath of the population. HOWEVER, my original point still stands. LGBT "rights" aren't something the president or congress should be involved in. At the very most, it should be a Supreme Court issue in specific cases where laws were broken or existing laws need to be challenged. This is what happened with gay marriage. It wasn't something decided in congress or by the president, it was decided by the branch of government in charge of making this decision. In the case of abortion, it was not legalized by congress or the president, it was legalized in the manner it should have been, through court decisions and finally after appeal, brought up to the Supreme Court and finalized. There is an established path to affect change in our country, but instead of going through the sometimes arduous task of moving something through the various court systems and allowing logic based arguments to rule, we've decided the easier way is to work around them by allowing congress or a president the power to bypass the entire system and put in place their own ideas with little recourse. This goes all ways, both parties, throughout our federal and state level governments.
I may have misunderstood you initially... because I am 100% in agreement with that statement. To me, the fact that they are is more than a valid reason to go out and march against them within the first 2 days of being sworn in.