Trayvon Martin: Mourning in America

I haven't posted about the killing of Trayvon because so much has already been said and I can't seem to write anything coherent myself. Every time I think about it, I'm overcome with rage and grief. But, Charlie Pierce captures my emotions in a fine rant. Don't want to excerpt a lot of it, because it needs to be read in full, but these few sentences resonate with me.

Well I certainly don't feel calm and measured, and it's not because my kids "could have been Trayvon." No, they could not have. My kids are white. ....nobody would have looked askance at them, let alone blown them away with a handgun.

I am sick to death of people who celebrate "the family" making excuses about why other people's children are expendable. I am sick to death of politicians who are more concerned about protecting zygotes than about the teenagers on whom they seek to balance their budgets and advance their careers. ...I am sick to death about how we can argue about anything simply to argue about it, and then move along to the next argument, as though anything at all has been settled.

Never mind the obvious inherent racism, I despair for the human race when I read the vicious reaction coming from Zimmerman's apologists. I feel like we're witnessing the final breakdown of civil society. And so much of the reaction feels like a simple transference of anger by people who just can't stand that a black man is our president. You know the ones I mean. They can prove they're not racists. Shee-it, they have black friends. It's just those other shiftless niggers they can't stand.

I've seen dozens of images in the last few days as people try to express their response to this travesty. This is one that moved me the most because it rings so very true.

This is the reality for this child simply because his skin is dark. No child should have to grow up with the certain knowledge this, in fact, could easily happen to him. [Original photo]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

New York stands up for equal marriage rights

I've been offline, so just finding this out. Blow me over with the wind off a butterfly's wings. My tweetstream had me convinced this wasn't going to happen, but hot damn. New York passes equal marriage rights:

Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Assembly. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.

This isn't an issue I follow all that closely so I didn't know this:

New York joins Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia as the only places in the U.S. where same-sex couples can get legally married.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that not all of those states followed the same path. New York joins Vermont as the only states in the nation that approved marriage equality because they wanted to — the others approved measures under court order. In other words, policymakers in New York, just as in Vermont, legalized same-sex marriage because they thought it was the right thing to do, not because a judge told them they had to.

Final vote was 33 to 29, which I guess doesn't sound that big but I expected it to be closer than that. Good for the GOPers who bravely crossed the line into sanity.

I have only one quibble. I wish people would stop calling it gay marriage rights. Even same-sex, which is more accuratedly descriptive, makes it sounds like something extraordinary that must be ceded to this community when in fact, marriage is a basic human right for everyone. Thinking equal marriage rights is the best framing.

That aside -- Yeah! Congrats to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen.