Smart people saying smart things (1.28)

Smart people saying smart things (1.28) January 28, 2015

Panti Bliss, “All the Little Things”

Many people object to the word “homophobia” itself. They object to the “phobia” part. “I’m not afraid of you,” they say. But I’m not saying that homophobes cower in fear every time they pass a Cher album. But they are afraid. They are afraid of what the world will look like when it treats [LGBT] people with the same respect as everybody else. They are afraid that they won’t fit in this brave new world of equality.

Rachel L. Martin, “The Brave and Tragic Trail of Reverend Turner”

But although he had been raised to believe in segregation, Turner was bothered by the inequality desegregation had exposed. “There are a few things I see about the total situation now that I didn’t realize in the first place,” he wrote the governor in September, saying that he was particularly worried about “some longstanding inequities as regarding the education of colored children.”

ClintonUSA

Scott Hancock and Alexandra Milano, “The Real Rebels of the Civil War”

Confederate soldiers, regardless of their bravery during battle or their commitment to comrades, were fighting for a government that sought to maintain the ancient institution of slavery. They were preservationists. Accommodationists. Conformists. Anything but genuine rebels. The real rebels were the hundreds of thousands of black men and women who, in what was arguably the most successful slave uprising in world history, did more than simply resist slavery: they actively, militantly, violently, killed it.

Anne Mellinger-Birdsong, “I Am Tired of Politicians Using My Grief for Their Gain”

They are being false and duplicitous. They are pretending to care about babies, when they don’t. They are pretending to care about babies with disabilities, when they cut funding for programs to help them. They are pretending to want to prevent abortions, when they prohibit the very thing that will help reduce the need for them. They are pretending to care about women’s health and safety, while at the same time promoting ideas and laws that will lead to deaths, infections, sterility, and untold agony. They are pretending to care about women, when they are really trying to control us, shame us, and punish us for not following the politicians’ religious precepts.

We women who have had abortions are intelligent capable human beings. Whether we are young or not, poor or not, married or not, we are all able to make independent, thoughtful decisions. Trust women.

Mark Danner, “Our New Politics of Torture”

The CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, lifesaving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. …

From the beginning the CIA had claimed that these techniques were absolutely essential to saving the lives of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. Those claims have been made by many people and it is another revelation of the report that we see CIA people, notably the lawyers, raising these claims before the program even existed. The lawyers seemed to be thinking, “This is the only way we’re going to get away with this.” There is a quote in the report that people would look more kindly on torture — that is the word used — if it was used to stop imminent attacks. This was the so-called “necessity defense,” which, as the CIA lawyers put it, could be invoked to protect from prosecution “US officials who tortured to obtain information that saved many lives.” This idea was there right from the inception of the program.


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