Ben & Jerry Want You

Credit: Ben & Jerry's.

Credit: Ben & Jerry’s.

Ben & Jerry’s unveiled a new social justice campaign — and a punny ice cream flavor to go with it — alongside the NAACP at a North Carolina rally on Tuesday.

The new flavor, Empower Mint, is a peppermint base with fudge brownies and swirls. The new campaign, “Democracy is in Your Hands,” is aimed squarely at the fallout from two Supreme Court cases: Citizen’s United and the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

“We believe that these two things — the money in our political system and the attempt to disenfranchise certain segments of our voting population — are profoundly corrosive to our democratic system. And it is creating policies that are promoting deep inequities in our society,” Chris Miller, Ben & Jerry’s Social Media Activism Manager, told ThinkProgress by phone from the flavor’s premiere in North Carolina.

Full Story Here.

Religious, Er, No, Artistic Freedom!

Breanna Koski and Joanna Duka of Brush & Nib.

Breanna Koski and Joanna Duka of Brush & Nib.

“Artistic Freedom!” The new battle cry of religious people who do not want their lives or businesses tainted by anyone in that queer camp. Phoenix, Arizona has a non-discrimination law which has been working just fine. Now, a conservative law firm has found a business willing to be the poster child for an effort to knock down a law protecting LGBT people from discrimination with claims of artistic expression and “religious freedom.”

Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski own a calligraphy studio in Phoenix, Arizona called Brush & Nib Studio. They make all kinds of custom art, including wedding invitations and other items marrying couples might use. They’re also evangelical Christians who refuse to serve same-sex couples. Even though they haven’t yet been asked by such a couple, they’re partnering with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to file a legal complaint in Arizona state court attempting to overturn Phoenix’s nondiscrimination ordinance.

This pre-enforcement challenge is based on the idea that if they refused to sell the same services to same-sex couples that they already sell to opposite-sex couples, they would be penalized under the law. And the law, they argue, infringes on their right to freely express their religious beliefs.

Basically, they just don’t want to have to follow that law. Not only do they not want to have to serve marrying same-sex couples, but they also want to be able advertise their beliefs on their website so that same-sex couples don’t even bother asking for their services. Most importantly, they don’t want anybody else to have to follow it either. They’ve filed a facial complaint, asking for the entire law to be thrown out and made unenforceable.

“Joanna and Breanna must live authentic, holistic Christian lives,” the complaint reads. “They must seek to honor God in all aspects of their lives, including all aspects of their work, and must seek to serve God and their neighbors through their vocation. As a result, Joanna and Breanna cannot do anything in their business that violates their religious beliefs or dishonors God.”

The suit outlines just what the pair believes in detail:

Zack Ford has the full story here.

Artistic expression my arse. It’s outrageous for religious bigots to use this an excuse to legislate bigotry. There’s nothing stopping these people from painting “RELIGIOUS calligraphy” all over their storefront. There’s nothing stopping them from branding themselves as “Christian Brush & Nib”. Christian bookstores do this all over the place, and gosh, most of their clients are Christian. Who would have thought? Most people who aren’t bigoted assholes will choose to employ non-bigoted services. This is nothing more than a barely veiled attempt to turn over a non-discrimination law which is working well.

Oklahoma: Trans-access a State of Emergency.

The Oklahoma State Capitol. (KOKH/Keaton Fox)

The Oklahoma State Capitol. (KOKH/Keaton Fox)

Oklahoma has joined the party by declaring a state of emergency to block Obama’s directive.

Lawmakers have done so by introducing two pieces of legislation, which will be considered by May 27. First, Senate Bill 1619 would allow students to only use bathrooms based upon their gender at birth. This would render Obama’s directive powerless and also includes the following language:

“It being immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an emergency is hereby declared to exist, by reason whereof this act shall take effect and be in full force from and after its passage and approval.”

The law would allow parents to sue school districts who don’t comply, based upon a request for a religious accommodation. Then legislators introduce Senate Concurrent Resolution 43, which actually calls for articles of impeachment against President Obama over the bathroom directive. One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. John Bennett, explains the rationale:

“This directive to schools is not only unlawful, but the breadth of overreach in this instance by the Obama Administration is shocking. We are working on legislation that would protect our citizens by not requiring our kids and women to share a facility with anyone who ‘identifies’ as a gender that they were not born. We are going to do everything we can to protect our women and children.”

Via Uproxx, Ktul, and Raw Story.

This comes after Oklahoma’s stunning disregard for, well, everything, by passing a bill making performing an abortion a felony. I think this graphic should be up everywhere Oklahoma is being discussed:

oklahoma-sign

Via Politicususa.

Cool Stuff Friday

Punk Portraits in Pink, by Scott Scheidly, are simply fabulous. Many of them made me laugh in delight. I’m only going to include two here, be sure to go see the rest.

While most people find PINK funny, “I have been told to kill myself because of the Spock piece (you know how Trekkies are), the Russians said that there are people coming to get me for my Putin pieces, and one lady lost her mind in a gallery over the Pope John Paul piece.

Whhhyyyyyy? I *love* Emo Spock. Nimoy would have loved Emo Spock, it would have made him laugh. I’d buy it in a second if it weren’t sold. And Care Bear Putin? Adorable. Reagan keeps making me laugh. Only time he’s ever done that.

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Reagan Hates Me

Emo Spock

Emo Spock

Via Creators Project.

Toshiba 1400 FL Typewriter, 1940

Toshiba 1400 FL Typewriter, 1940

Today every tweet is archived, every Facebook selfie stashed and cached, every arts/tech/culture blog mirrored, and the idea of the permanence of data is taken for granted. But things like physical objects aren’t permanent. They break down, melt, or are tossed in the trash, and could potentially disappear from public consciousness forever, leaving behind but a foggy memory. Thngs, a digital database for the preservation of physical objects, wants to change that. Billing itself as “A place for everything,” this new system allows users to interact with objects old and new, whether they be a bust of Emperor Vitellius from the 1800s, or the Spice Girls-branded Polaroid Spice Cam from 1997.

Thngs co-founder Dima Dewinn comes from a background in social design and architecture, but quickly became interested in the preservation of physical items. Calling in from Moscow, Dewinn explains, “We were learning for a long time about the philosophy of the preservation of an entity. About all the things that we are surrounding ourselves with. All the things that we adore, we don’t know much about them because there’s no such thing as a Wikipedia of things.” So Dewinn set out “to make a tool that would preserve and structurize data of the material world. And we wanted to make it sexy.”

It’s an interestin’ place, have a look around. You can add to it, too.

73 Republicans Agree

Rep. Bill Flores

Rep. Bill Flores

Seventy-three House Republicans are reportedly challenging the Obama administration’s authority to issue schools guidance on the restroom use of their trans student population.

Texas state representative Bill Flores, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, is urging “members to sign on to a letter, pushing the Departments of Education and Justice to detail how, and on what authority, they plan to enforce the new guidelines,” as The Daily Signal, a conservative news site run by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, reports.

“Americans are incensed by President Obama’s blatant executive overreach,” Flores told the conservative website. “Now they are threatening school funding over an issue that should rightfully be left to the states. Their actions are politically motivated and Congress has every responsibility to challenge them.”

[…]

North Carolina state representative Mark Walker, who authored the letter, believes that the Obama directive poses a danger to schools. Walker told The Daily Caller, a conservative website, that the decision of trans bathroom access should be up to individual administrators to make, not the federal government or youth. He said it allows students to make up the rules “from one week to the next.”

“If a 17 year-old young man wants to go shower with the girls on the soccer team,” Walker argued, “he’s allowed to do that because of his will or his gender fluidity for the week [he] can tell the teacher ‘this [is] what I’m feeling, this is where I’m at’ and she has no recourse to step in.”

Fuck me, but these idiots are beyond tiresome. They are utterly ignoring gender dysphoria and transgender people in favour of this nebulous ‘gender flu[idity]’ that people are going to mysteriously come down with whenever.

Walker’s fear, however, is unfounded. In the more than 200 localities across the United States that have passed nondiscrimination laws providing equal access in public accommodations, there’s never been a reported case of a cisgender person — student or otherwise — pretending to be trans to gain access to the opposite-sex facilities.

[…]

This statement is strikingly similar to an earlier dispatch from Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia, issued by their states’ attorneys general. “The so-called ‘significant guidance’ issued by the Obama Administration raises more questions than it answers, just as it creates concerns among anyone who believes sex is a biological fact and not a personal preference,” Texas state representative Ken Paxton argued in a May 17 statement.

Oh, gender is a biological fact, it just resides in the brain, not the genitals. It would certainly be nice if these people would exercise their brains a bit. This is starting to sound suspiciously like the creationism vs evolution fight. Might be nice if they remembered they lost that one. At any rate, these are bloody guidelines, it isn’t law, it isn’t an order, it isn’t enforceable.

Full Story Here.

Photographic Delusions

IMG1625

IMG1624

Vik Muniz is an innovative artist who creates imagery within a nexus of diverse media. Working with a dizzying array of unconventional materials—including sugar, tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, and junk—Muniz painstakingly builds tableaux before recording them with his camera. From a distance, the subject of each resulting photograph is discernible; up close, the work reveals a complex and surprising matrix through which it was assembled. That revelatory moment when one thing transforms into another is of deep interest to the artist.

Muniz’s work often quotes iconic images from popular culture and art history, drawing on our sense of collective memory while defying easy classification and mischievously engaging a viewer’s process of perception. His more recent work incorporates electron microscopes and manipulates microorganisms to explore issues of scale and to unveil both the familiar and the strange in spaces that are typically inaccessible to the human eye.

This major mid-career retrospective canvasses more than twenty-five years of Muniz’s work to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, reminding us of the power of art to surprise, delight, and transform our perceptions of the world.

The exhibit will be showing through August 21st, 2016. If you’re in Atlanta, take a look.

Vik Muniz was also the driving force of the documentary Lixo Extraordinário (Waste Land), 2010. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

The Church Is Stealing Our Church!

Priest with crucifix (Shutterstock www.shutterstock.com)

Priest with crucifix (Shutterstock www.shutterstock.com)

For the past 12 years, the church of St Frances Xavier Cabrini in Scituate, near Boston, has not been empty for a single moment.

Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, a group of parishioners has maintained a vigil inside the building to prevent its sale by the archdiocese of Boston, to help pay the Catholic church’s enormous bills relating to its long and sordid history of child sexual abuse .

Children have slept in the sacristy, meals have been eaten beneath the stained glass windows, planning meetings have been held in the pews, prayers said and candles lit.

But not for much longer. After the supreme court this week declined to hear an appeal against an earlier court ruling, the parishioners must now vacate the premises, and will hold a final farewell service on 29 May.

[…]

That does not seem likely. “This church is being stolen from us, there’s no denying that. The archdiocese sees the value of property over the value of people,” said Rogers.

Well, the church certainly didn’t value all those who were abused throughout its history on this planet, so I’m not sure why there’s any surprise about this.

Full Story Here.

100 Year Old Anti-War Graffiti to Be Saved

The cells of Richmond Castle, which have over 5,000 drawings on them, will now be preserved by English Heritage. Credit: English Heritage


The cells of Richmond Castle, which have over 5,000 drawings on them, will now be preserved by English Heritage.
Credit: English Heritage

Richmond Castle has been standing since shortly after William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066.

Throughout its long history, the fortress in North Yorkshire has held a lot of prisoners. Surprisingly, it was still being used for this purpose as recently as 100 years ago, during World War I.

Conscientious objectors — people who refused to take part in the war on moral or religious grounds — were held in the castle’s tiny cells.

And while they were there, they scratched messages of protest and pictures into its walls. A kind of World War I graffiti.

Since then, the castle walls have been crumbling away, threatening to erase those historical marks.

But now the structure is going to be saved, thanks to a grant of half a million dollars just approved to preserve the site.

[…]

The identities of many of the graffiti artists remain unknown, but according to Leyland, some of the drawings were made by a group who came to be known as the “Richmond Sixteen.”

Imprisoned in the castle for refusing to take part in the war effort, the group was then forcibly sent to France to carry out non-combat roles on the front.

When they continued to resist, they were sentenced to death by firing squad. But “in a dramatic scene, their sentences were reduced to 10 years of hard labor,” said Leyland.

“But they were willing to go all the way and face the ultimate deterrent. They would rather be killed than kill.”

Bert Brocklesby, one of the so-called Richmond Sixteen, drew this delicate sketch of his fiancée, Annie Wainwright. Credit: English Heritage

Bert Brocklesby, one of the so-called Richmond Sixteen, drew this delicate sketch of his fiancée, Annie Wainwright. Credit: English Heritage

Full Story Here.

La Raza says no to NC.

Janet Murguia. Via Facebook.

Janet Murguia. Via Facebook.

National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, announced it has moved its 2016 Northeast/Southeast Affiliate Leadership Convening, scheduled for October, from Raleigh, N.C., to Miami, in protest of the state’s anti-LGBT law, House Bill 2.

[…]

In a statement, La Raza president and CEO Janet Murguía said, “Hispanics know what it is like to be singled out and stripped of our humanity because of who we are or what we look like. And with the wave of anti-immigrant state laws in recent years, the Latino community is all too familiar with legislation that purports to ‘protect’ but, in fact, legalizes discrimination.”

She called HB 2 “a solution in search of a nonexistent problem; it is unnecessary, offensive and violates not only our rights, but our values as Americans. By taking this action, we extend our support to the efforts of so many in North Carolina and the LGBT, civil rights and business communities to repeal this egregious law.”

Full Story Here.

sarah_2

Cardinal Robert Sarah, keynote speaker at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. on May 17, 2016. (CNSNews/Hollingsworth)

On the other side, Cardinal Robert Sarah was having a fine time mocking LGBT peoples everywhere, at a National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.

“In your nation, God is being eroded, eclipsed, liquidated,” Cardinal Robert Sarah, who was appointed as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments by Pope Francis in 2014…Cardinal Sarah condemned same-sex marriage, transgender bathroom laws, and attacks on the family as “demonic”.

“All manner of immorality is not only accepted and tolerated today in advanced societies, it is even promoted as a social good,” the African cardinal said. “The result is hostility to Christians and increasingly, religious persecution.”

“This is not an ideological war between competing ideas,” Sarah told the D.C. gathering. “This is about defending ourselves, children and future generations from the demonic idolatry that says children do not need mothers and fathers. It denies human nature and wants to cut off an entire generation from God.”

There is a great deal more here.

No Mocking Christ’s Crucifixion!

Boylesports’ ad was likely to cause serious offence, said the ASA. Photograph: ASA

Boylesports’ ad was likely to cause serious offence, said the ASA. Photograph: ASA

A gambling ad featuring a hand nailed to a piece of wood that ran over Easter has been banned for mocking the crucifixion of Jesus and the Christian religion.

Gambling company Boylesports emailed a promotion to punters that showed a hand nailed to a piece of wood against a desert scene with the strapline “nailed on bonus”.

Its text read: “In memory of the dearly departed JC, we are offering you a sacrilecious [sic] bonus this Easter weekend … So don’t just sit there gorging your own body weight in chocolate, that’s disrespectful. Get on Boylesports Gaming and get your nailed on bonus.”

[…]

One recipient of the email lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority that the ad was offensive and mocked the Christian religion.

Boylesports tried to play the link with Jesus Christ down, saying that there was no religious symbolism in the ad and that crucifixion per se was a “common practice” in Christ’s time.

The ASA rejected Boylesports’ argument, saying the ad was clearly not a reference to a “generic” crucifixion, but directly to that of Jesus Christ.

I think Boylesports’s argument should have been given more credence, because an awful lot of people were executed by crucifixion, but of course, they don’t matter. They never do. Boylesports did rather shoot themselves in the foot by mentioning JC though. Christian sites are jumping all over this, absolutely gleeful that the ASA has defended Christians and Christianity. All the stories have made it clear that it’s a no-no to mock Christ’s crucifixion, but I guess it’s perfectly okay to mock all those others who were actually crucified.

Full Story Here.