Instead of voting on something meaningful that could actually end this disastrous and unsubstantiated war in Iraq, the Senate today passed a resolution condemning that clever "Patreas or Betray Us?" ad that ran last week in the New York Times.

That's right, our Senators got their knickers in a twist over an ad. In a newspaper. So twisted in fact that they felt the need to make a formal statement against that ad. That ran in a newspaper.

Of course, they did spend some time yesterday voting on a proposal by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia that would have given the troops as much time at home as they have to be deployed in the war zone. Historically, troops would get twice as much time off as they are required to be in theatre.

But the mental and physical health of our troops isn't as important as making sure that an advertisement is condemned. An advertisement that ran in a newspaper. You see, even though the Webb amendment received a majority of votes in the Senate, a procedural maneuver required it to receive a "supermajority" of 60 votes, which it did not get.

So rather than push another tactic today to try and overcome this Republican obstructionism, the Senate instead decided that its time would be better spent whining about an ad. In a newspaper.

MoveOn.org, which ran the original ad, is not taking this lying down. You can stand with MoveOn, and I encourage my faithful readers (both of you) to do so:

The U.S. Senate just told us to sit down and be quiet. They passed a resolution condemning MoveOn.org and it has one purpose: To intimidate all of us who care about ending this war. To send a message that anyone who speaks unpleasant truths about this war will pay. To make everyone--especially politicians--think twice before they accuse the administration of lying.

We can't let that happen. I just signed a statement telling Congress that they won't intimidate me, and I'm going to keep speaking out until they force an exit strategy out of this awful war. Can you join me?

Click here.

Thanks!

I wasn't expecting to be this pissed off over such a disproportionate response to an ad. In a newspaper. But here we are.

Labels: Iraq, movement-building, MoveOn, Senate

From Dr. King's remarks in acceptance of the first annual Margaret Sanger Award in April 1966:

In our struggle for equality we were confronted with the reality that many millions of people were essentially ignorant of our conditions or refused to face unpleasant truths. The hard-core bigot was merely one of our adversaries. The millions who were blind to our plight had to be compelled to face the social evil their indifference permitted to flourish.

After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action.

We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern.

This is a meaningful week for both the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Rights Movement. Today would have been Dr. King's 78th birthday had his life not been cut short by a sniper's bullet in 1968. A week from today, January 22, marks the 34th anniversary of the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision by the US Supreme Court.

Social justice movements have a tendency to put the blinders on and only see our own issues or fight for our own causes. We can all learn from Dr. King's legacy of reaching across boundaries to our natural allies.

United, we all win.

Labels: civil rights, movement-building, social justice, women's rights

Now that the sore losers at CAP have finally conceded that their hate amendment failed, opponents of the pernicious proposition can proceed with their post-mortems. The first place to start might be looking at the exit polls, which CNN has graciously posted online. Some interesting but not very surprising results in that data.

Labels: CAP, exit polls, LGBT, movement-building, Prop 107

I didn't get to attend Creating Change this year (and I'm OK with that). But I do receive the daily updates via e-mail. I'm reproducing the following summary of the closing plenary speech in its entirety. I couldn't agree more with Ms. Ross. All emphases mine:

Creating Change 2006 closed out today with a passionate plenary speech by Loretta Ross, national coordinator and co-founder of SisterSong Reproductive Health Collective, who called on activists to work together to build a human rights movement.

Ross chastised both the right and the left for moving conversations about sex off the radar screen and espoused the need to “talk about the human right to sexual pleasure,” saying, “What does this whole concept of sexual rights mean? I’m not sure we’ve had that conversation yet in this country.” Noting that the first rape crisis center formed in 1972, she said that, in a very short period of time, we’ve changed the whole world: “Now we’ve got to do it again, but bigger.”

Ross expressed concern that we are “indulging in the excesses of identity politics” and engaging in separate and parallel social justice movements.

She said, “When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement. When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. So we are building a movement or are we building cults?”

Continuing, Ross said, “While we’re fighting each other in our own Oppression Olympics, the neofascists and neoliberals are kicking our asses. They’re killing us. And only a united movement for all of our human rights will save us.”

She said when we fail to embrace a human rights framework, we ultimately cannot succeed.

Ross listed the eight categories of guaranteed human rights and pointed out how political developments such as the war in Iraq and the English-only movement directly violate them, saying that widespread ignorance of our human rights serves only those who already have power over us: “As long as [the government] can treat us as the undeserving people claiming things that aren’t ours, they can defang us our struggle.”

Ross insisted that we share one struggle despite our individual causes and said, “To the extent that you allow other people’s human rights to be violated, yours will be diminished too,” elaborating that we cannot do work against homophobia in a racist way, we cannot do antiracist work in a homophobic way, and so on.

Challenging us to “do what hasn’t been done before,” Ross urged everyone to “create change by building a new movement and calling it the human rights movement of America.”

Labels: Creating Change, human rights, LGBT, movement-building