It is worth noting that Bihar is infamous for such ‘forced’ marriages, also known as ‘Pakadwa Vivah’, in which eligible grooms with secure government jobs are often kidnapped and forced to marry women related to the perpetrators. Over the past few decades, several such cases from Bihar have come to light.

X account @thenewsbasket shared the video of the man being dragged in front of students on June 6, 2025, with the claim that a government school teacher was taken away for ‘forced marriage’ at gunpoint. At the time this was written, the post had over 800,000 views. (Archive)

बेगूसराय के एक सरकारी स्कूल टीचर को बंदूक की नोक पर पकड़वा कर शादी करवाने के लिए ले जाया जा रहा pic.twitter.com/z1jmyoSGOu

— The News Basket (@thenewsbasket) June 6, 2025

X handle @BasavanIndia also shared the video, questioning the state of law and order in Bihar. (Archive)

The video was also shared by X user @iamharunkhan who claimed this was the ‘ground reality’ in Bihar and not a ‘movie plot’. (Archive)

Fact Check

A quick search using keywords related to the video and claims led us to a March 23, 2025, report published on TV9 Bharatvarsh that had the same video. According to the report, the video was recorded at the Dularpur Math Middle School in the Teghra subdivision of Begusarai and depicts the shooting of a film named ‘Pakadwah Byaah’. The video simply shows a movie scene being shot where a teacher is forcibly dragged away. However, some had raised concerns on whether the film was shot during school hours and the District Education Officer even ordered an inquiry. The principal, cited in the report, had clarified that the filming happened on a Sunday.

We also found a video of the same scene recorded from a different angle in a March 12, 2025, Instagram post uploaded by user @rajanrddfilms, a filmmaker and actor associated with the film ‘Pakadwah Byaah’. The post’s caption also makes it clear that the video is from the shooting of the film.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Rajan Rock (@rajanrddfilms)

To sum up, social media users shared a video of a movie scene being filmed in a school in Bihar with misleading claims that a teacher of a government school in Begusarai was actually kidnapped for marriage.

The post School teacher kidnapped in Bihar’s Begusarai for ‘forced marriage’? No; viral video is from a film shooting appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

The Maoist regime controlled all aspects of life in Cambodia, including who you married. She was paired up with Lep Plong, 19. Villager leaders marked the occasion with a rare extravagance – they slaughtered a pig.

(Nuon Mayouro via RFA Khmer)

Fifty years ago this week, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia, turning the country into a vast agrarian labor camp, with tragic results. A quarter of the population died in just three-and-a-half years.

Anyone deemed an enemy of the government was executed.

And when it came to relationships, the state was also in charge. The government separated families and segregated the population according to age and gender.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to wed in joyless ceremonies where the only vows were allegiance to the organization or Angkar, as the Khmer Rouge was known.

Weddings were mass production numbers, with multiple couples, all who had to pledge to produce children for Angkar.

At least in Nuon Mayourom’s case, she knew the groom, Lep Plong, who had been chosen for her. But the timing was definitely not of her choosing.

“Yes, I liked him, and he liked me. I thought he looked like a good person. But I argued with the organization because I wasn’t ready to get married. The organization said, ‘Comrade, you have to marry!’”

Nuon Mayoroum recounted to RFA the details of her wedding. In a time of mass starvation and communal living, there were benefits.

“They slaughtered a pig for us. After the marriage, we moved into a separated hut from others,” she said.

But after three days they were separated once more. Months later they successfully argued to be reunited.

Strangers picking strangers

Dr. Theresa de Langis. director for the Southeast Asian studies at the American University in Phnom Penh, has conducted extensive interviews with Khmer Rouge survivors about forced marriages.

She says while there had been arranged marriages in Cambodia previously, there were a number of very distinct differences under the Maoist regime.

“First, it was strangers picking strangers, generally unknown to each other. Second, the parents were ostracized by the Khmer Rouge. The women I interviewed told me that one of the things they worried about the most at the time was that my parents must have been angry because I had accepted the marriage proposal without their knowledge or consultation. And third, there is evidence that you cannot refuse these marriage proposals,” she said.

(RFA Khmer)

When Khieu Samphan, who was head of state under the Khmer Rouge, was sentenced by a special U.N. backed tribunal in Cambodia in December 2022, among the crimes he was convicted for was imposing forced marriages on people. Also charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, he received two life sentences, and remains in prison, aged 93.

De Langis said those who were forced into marriages had often registered their dissatisfaction at the time but were compelled to obey.

“About 70% of the people we interviewed told us that they had refused at least once, but in the end, 97% were forced into marriage because if you continued to refuse to marry, you would be taken to the organization for re-education,” de Langis said.

In Cambodia, ‘re-education’ was associated with punishment, detainment and death.

‘Until today, we were one’

It’s not known how many people were forced to marry, but researchers estimate it could be between 250,000 and 500,000.

“This happened all over the country, so it was a national policy at the time, and many, many people were victims of this crime,” de Langis said.

(Nuon Mayouro via RFA Khmer)

While Nuon Mayourom married against her will at the time, she and her husband Lep Plong survived life under the Khmer Rouge and made a life together.

They eventually moved to the United States as refugees, bringing their two children – a son, Lola Plong, born in Cambodia, and a daughter, Chenda Plong, born in Thailand.

Lep Plong died in 2010.

“To be honest, he loved me from the beginning. He saw me and loved me. When anyone wanted to propose, he would say, ‘Don’t ask, she already has a fiancé’”.

Did she love him?

“Yes, until today, we were one, one,” Nuon Mayoroum said.

Edited by Mat Pennington

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Sok Ry Sum and Ginny Stein for RFA.

The directive, dated January 24, came after a series of complaints filed by activists Indrajeet Ghorpade and Utkarsh Mishra. It also included the instructions to remove specific sections from two interviews conducted by Chaudhary, featuring Union home minister Amit Shah and his cabinet colleague Kiren Rijiju, in which they discussed the Supreme Court’s deliberations on marriage equality.

At the time of this article being written, the channels, however, have not removed or edited any of the three shows that the NBDSA found problematic.

Show 1:

This episode of ‘Black and White’ aired on April 19, 2023, had a Hindi title that could be translated to, “Black And White: A new debate on homosexuality in the highest court | Same-Sex Marriage | Supreme Court”. The episode was aired in the context of a hearing of petitions seeking legal recognition of same-sex marriage in the Supreme Court by a five-judge bench led by former Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud.

In his April 24, 2023 complaint to the NBDSA regarding the aforementioned video, activist Ghorpade alleged that the broadcaster violated the Code of Ethics and Broadcasting Standards, including neutrality, impartiality, objectivity, accuracy, privacy, and guidelines on the prevention of hate speech, potentially defamatory content, and reporting court proceedings. Two days later, on April 26, Mishra filed a similar complaint, stating that the broadcast violated fundamental principle Number 4, as well as Principles 1 and 2 of self-regulation, which mandated impartiality, objectivity, and neutrality in reporting.

The channel’s initial response was that these complaints were ‘without any basis and, therefore, deserve to be rejected’. They stated that the programme in question discussed the consequences of same-sex marriage.

What Happened on the Show?

Anchor Sudhir Chaudhary opened the episode by stating, “India is still considered a third-world country because our issues consist of electricity, water, roads, healthcare, hunger, employment, etc. Developed or first-world countries do not face these concerns; their battles are different. Our country’s concern is hunger, while in the case of first-world countries, it is depression or same-sex marriage. But today, we have prioritised this issue (same-sex marriage) without finding solutions to the problems concerning the masses. This is why, these days, a hearing regarding ‘same-sex marriage’ has been going on at the Supreme Court which is quite interesting.”

In what one might consider an act of dog-whistling against same-sex couples, he then asked viewers to imagine their son marrying a man or their daughter marrying a woman, emphasizing the shock such a situation might cause. At the 1:00 mark in the show, Sudhir Chaudhary described a same-sex marriage as a “big shock” (bada jhatka) and questioned how traditional wedding rituals in Hindu, Muslim, and Christian marriages would apply to such unions.

At 2:12, the air of homophobia and stereotyping in the bulletin hit an unprecedented high (or low) when the screen displayed an image of a person half dressed as a man and the half as a woman (image below). With a smirk on his face, Chaudhary quipped, “In this image, you would be able to see both your son-in-law and daughter-in-law”.

Chaudhary also made the point that even after homosexuality was decriminalized, some privileged upper-class individuals from big cities would begin ask why homosexual marriages should not be allowed. It is noteworthy that in October 2023, the Supreme Court had ruled against legalising same-sex marriages and left it to the Parliament to decide on the issue.

The complainant highlighted how the usage of such imagery as the one cited above was not only distasteful but also “promotes false notions and stigma against the LGBTQIA+ community.”

During the hearing, the broadcaster defended the use if the image stating, “One may disagree with the manner of projecting it, which some may consider unpalatable; however, the same does not violate the code of conduct. The picture cannot be construed to be in bad taste, as it is merely a manner of projecting people’s views on both sides and cannot be regarded as violative of good taste and decency.”

It was also stated in the complaint that the channel played videos featuring LGBTQIA+ individuals and couples throughout the episode without their informed consent. Besides, according to the complainant, statements like “imagine your son marrying a man or your daughter marrying a woman” were intended to instill fear among viewers. In addition to that, the anchor echoed the “false and malicious idea” that this was an “urban elite” issue, the complaint noted.

It is important to note that even today, many in Indian society continue to stigmatize the LGBTQIA+ community, making it difficult for non-heterosexual individuals to openly express their sexual orientation. This challenge is even greater in rural areas, where orthodox and conservative beliefs remain more deeply ingrained than in urban spaces. Many individuals who have come out with their sexuality have been made to undergo malicious and traumatising experiences such as conversion therapy in order to “fix them”, even after Section 377 was removed. On the other hand, queer individuals hailing from urban India have the privilege of better access to resources such as support groups and a relatively better financial situation, which makes it somewhat more feasible for them to come out and speak on such matters.

The NBDSA in its decision observed that Aaj Tak’s broadcast on same-sex marriage violated the dignity of the LGBTQIA+ community by failing to maintain neutrality, impartiality, and adherence to guidelines on the prevention of hate speech. It noted that the anchor’s remarks were inappropriate and did not include perspectives from LGBTQIA+ individuals. Further, the NBDSA directed Aaj Tak to remove the video from all platforms within seven days from the date of the order.

Show 2:

In his second complaint, the activists flagged a section of an interview conducted by Chaudhary with Union minister Kiren Rijiju. According to the complaint, the anchor falsely attributed statements to the CJI in the LGBTQIA+ marriage equality case and misrepresented the Supreme Court’s stance. Chaudhary also inaccurately claimed that the solicitor general’s arguments were being disregarded and made defamatory remarks implying the CJI was acting like a dictator.

The complaint said that the broadcast violated the code of ethics & broadcasting standards concerning impartiality, objectivity, and neutrality, as well as guidelines on defamatory content and court reporting. Additionally, it breached the Contempt of Court Act, 1971.

At the 30:21 mark of the above interview, Chaudhary stated, “The government has said that this is an elitist matter and CJI disagreed with that and said ‘here only what I say goes’ (Sarkar ne bola ye toh elitist vichaar dhara hain, aur unhone (CJI) ne kahan ki nahi aisa nahi hain aur yahan wahin hoga jo main chahunga)“. The complaint says that the CJI never made such a comment. The channel said in its response that the host only pointed out that the Chief Justice had stated that the government could not decide what would be heard in court and remarked that the Chief Justice himself would determine this.

At the 33:03 mark, the anchor said that it seemed like the solicitor general’s arguments were not being given importance at the court and that the Supreme Court appears as if they had already decided their judgement in favour of the petitioners (Solicitor General ki Supreme Court mein chal nahi rhi hain, aur Supreme Court aisa lag rha hain ki mann bana chuka hain ki wo chahta hain aisa ho). Further, at the 34:53 mark of the video, Rijiju talks about how, in a democracy, it is the citizens of the state who decide, as sovereignty lies with them. Chaudhary then says, ‘So, to make it simpler for the larger public to understand, you are saying — and have said in the past as well — that ‘Hindustan kisi ke baap ka nahi hai, desh ke logon ka hai, aur kuch log ise chalane ki koshish kar rahe hain‘ (Hindustan does not belong to anyone’s father; it belongs to the people of the country, and some people are trying to control it).”

NBDSA has directed the channel to remove the aforementioned parts from the interview video and asked the anchor to show more maturity in future while conducting such programmes.

Show 3:

Ghorpade’s third complaint flagged certain parts of another interview conducted by Sudhir Chaudhary featuring Union home minister Amit Shah at India Today’s Karnataka Roundtable 2023.

At the 39:43 mark in the interview, while posing a question to Shah, Chaudhary said, “It seems that the Supreme Court bench is bringing in a new logic to justify why this should happen in our country. What is your take on this matter as the home minister of the country”? The complaint says that the anchor’s statement was inaccurate, as the Supreme Court bench had not made any official comments or declared that same-sex marriage should be legalized. In response, the channel argued that the statement in question needed to be understood in context and that the complaint lacked objectivity, as it directly targeted the host and his interviewing style, which is inherently subjective.

NBDSA ordered the anchor to maintain maturity in future broadcasts. Additionally, India Today was directed to edit and remove the problematic portions of the broadcast within seven days of the order.

The post NBDSA slams Sudhir Chaudhary, asks Aaj Tak to remove show on same-sex marriage appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

In 2016, things became even more dire when her family was saddled with repayment of a loan to a local bank.

So when a neighbor approached her that year with the opportunity to make a higher salary in China, Sok Suosdey - who asked to use a pseudonym for this report to protect her privacy - leapt at the chance.

After making the necessary preparations, she departed to the bustling city of Shanghai, excited with the prospect of becoming financially independent in China and helping her family get free from debt back home.

But around a month after her arrival, the woman who had promised her a job told her she would have to marry a deaf Chinese man and if she refused, she would be on the hook for the costs associated with her relocation to China - a sum far beyond her ability to pay.

Sok Suosdey agreed, but said that after her marriage, she was reduced to “a slave” in her husband’s home.

She was made to take a job to earn money for the family, but her mother-in-law also forced her to do household chores whenever she had a break, and subjected her to relentless physical and mental abuse, she said.

“Every day, my mother-in-law chased me to work from 10 am-11 pm, sometimes until 2 am,” she told RFA Khmer. “I only slept three hours a night, and I worked very hard. When I was at home, I also worked as a seamstress, sometimes as a laborer, or putting springs into children’s water guns.”

Sok Suosdey said that if she needed new clothes, she was made to buy them with her own money.

Her mother-in-law also refused to let her communicate with Cambodian friends she made or with family members back home, as “she was afraid I would run away from home.”

“My Chinese mother-in-law insulted me and made me hurtful and fed up,” she said.

Things were no different after having a child with her husband.

“The most painful thing was that after I gave birth to a son, my mother-in-law kept me away from him and didn’t let him know who I was,” she said. “She wouldn’t let me take care of him and would even call the police when I tried to take him to school.”

Trafficking to China

According to a report by the human rights group Adhoc, in the first nine months of 2024, at least 29 Cambodian women were trafficked to China. Of the trafficked women, 28 were forced to marry Chinese men.

According to the same source, in 2023, 28 Cambodian women were rescued from human trafficking in China.

The NGO said that some of the women who married Chinese men were beaten, abused and forced to work as slaves by their husbands and families. In addition to physically and mentally abusing the women, some families also forced them into sex work, leaving them traumatized, it said.

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‘He told me that if I ran away he would report me to the Chinese police’

Sok Suosdey told RFA that, because she could no longer endure the abuse, she saved enough money to buy a mobile phone and started to seek help via social media.

She started a group on Facebook for Cambodians in China and spent time searching for people she knew lived close to her parents back home. It was through these sources that she was able to contact her mother and get authorities at the Cambodian Consulate to intervene on her behalf.

On July 16, 2024 - seven years after being trafficked to China - Sok Suosdey finally returned home to her family in Cambodia.

Now 35, things have not been easy for Sok Suosdey back home, according to Sun Maly, the head of Adhoc’s Women’s Unit. She is the sole breadwinner of a household with an elderly mother, a father who was blinded during Cambodia’s civil war, and a younger brother with a mental disorder.

But despite the challenges, Sok Suosdey is thankful for her rescue and overjoyed to be reunited with her loved ones, she said.

Assisting victims

When victims of human trafficking return to Cambodia, they receive assistance from the Ministry of Social Affairs' Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation agency, which provides them with mental health treatment and rehabilitation.

However, the assistance is only temporary, and many victims face a long road to recovery.

Once a victim is released from the Ministry of Social Affairs, humanitarian groups such as Adhoc step in to provide additional help.

Adhoc’s Sun Maly said that her NGO now provides victims with sewing machines to help them achieve financial stability by starting their own business following their rescue.

“My case manager has helped to find skilled trainers who can help women victims in tailoring,” she said. “Most villages have tailors, but as they age out, a victim with the ability to sew can replace them by setting up their own garment business.”

Some victims told RFA that the Cambodian government needs to do more to pressure Chinese authorities to investigate claims of trafficking inside China.

Chou Bun Eng, the permanent deputy chair of the Ministry of Interior’s Anti-Trafficking Committee, told RFA that she has met with Chinese authorities in the past to highlight the need to investigate such claims.

However, she said that her Chinese counterparts regularly deny that there are any cases of Cambodian women being trafficked and forced into marriage in China - only consensual marriages. Domestic violence they classify as a “family dispute,” she said.

“I’m not saying that all cases involve trafficking - some Cambodian women pay money to be smuggled into China,” she acknowledged.

“But in general, most Cambodian women who go to China already have relatives in China who promise to help them find a husband with a good family. So, if they sign a marriage certificate and then domestic violence occurs, the authorities say it is a family dispute.”

The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report ranked Cambodia as a “tier 3″ nation - the worst possible ranking - in 2023 and 2024.

In July, the State Department released a report which found that the Cambodian government did not meet international standards in its efforts to eradicate human trafficking, largely due to corruption amongst senior government officials.

Translated by Sum Sok Ry. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Khmer.

Oh, yeah, that Messiah, Mister Rapist, Grifter, Dirtier than Dirt Kushner-Guided, Roy Cohen-Trained TRUMP: “My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’”

Read the Time Magazine article written  by his nephew.

Here, reality check for democrats and republicans:

Some legit writing here from me to be published in “legit” media around my area:

When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful

“I’d like to have enough resources, money, to take a trip somewhere. I don’t want to be homeless if housing finds out I have extra money in my bank account.”

Seems like a wish for anyone supposedly in the land of the free – not to be homeless. Variations on this goal were broached at the Oct. 23-24 self-advocacy meeting at the Best Western at Agate Beach.

More than forty people attended the planning and visioning session to carve out some future collective goal to make change a community of people living in the developmental disability and neurodiverse world. One of the main organizers of this self-advocacy event is Julie Chick, Sammy’s Place Director, a nonprofit out of Nehalem.

I attended the event wearing several hats – an educator, an activist, journalist and assisting working with clients in the neurodiverse “world” with Essential Services. Right out of the blocks I asked Chick to synthesize what she got out of the two-day meeting.

What did you find valuable in the event?

“The person-to-person connections and relationships again can be taken for granted by those that easily access their community, and can be difficult if you have no wheels or knowledge of public transportation. Relationships of all types are the bedrock of humanity, yet some of the people in our DD system had not had much opportunity to get out and make friends. These folks have been meeting though this self-advocacy work, Arc of Lincoln’s Day Services Activities, and Beach Buddies, and their circle is growing with some coming in from other counties.”

The critical mass around self-advocacy is fighting for basic rights, like lifting up the maximum allowable savings and checking account balance above the draconian $2000 law.

With such a limit on money given to or earned by people living in subsidized housing, and those receiving disability payments from the government, and other services, like personal assistants, the fear losing those hard-fought safety nets is palatable.

Connecting with others along the coast, in the seven counties situated along the Pacific, the participants were passionate and determined to come away with tools to advocate for themselves not only politically, but through better transportation services, more opportunities to make money on the side with arts and crafts creations, and better ways to make personal connections, even romantic ones.

“I want to meet people who respect me for who I am and so I can follow my dreams,” stated advocate Frank Perdue. “I don’t understand why ‘normal’ people don’t want to go out on dates with people like us. We need better opportunities to meet people who think like us.”

For anyone interested in the complexities of life as a man or woman living in the neurodiverse world, a recent Hulu documentary might be their entry point. “Patrice” follows New Jersey school crossing guard Patrice Jetter. The kids love her, and she loves them.

She is also an amazing artist, entertainer and performer. She is romantically involved with Garry, who lives with cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. The story is about a commitment ceremony – between Patrice and Garry – since they were told their marriage quest would jeopardize their individual monthly social security stipends and their subsidized housing.

The documentary utilizes vérité footage of Patrice and Garry’s daily life, both together and apart. Their lives are at a rather challenging level just accomplishing daily routines like preparing a meal. Patrice walks with a cane and leg braces, whereas Garry uses a wheelchair and needs help into bed.

They both have their separate apartments, 20 minutes apart via bus. Also part of the movie is the handicapped-equipped van Patrice owns which breaks down for good in the documentary. Much of Patrice’s story focuses on raising funds (and awareness) around a vehicle they need – for Patrice to get to work as a school crossing guard and for Garry to live a more mobile life with his significant other. Collecting aluminum cans just won’t cut the $55,000 price tag, and alas, a Go Fund Me drive gets Patrice to that goal and the new vehicle.

Many of my current and past clients will relate well with this documentary, from the Special Olympics participation, to the end-of-the-month dilemma of $28 left for food or incidentals. The shared values and the care each of the main protagonists display should melt any cold heart, but the reality is that both democrats and republicans have stalled on a marriage equity bill allowing a legal union AND continuation of both spouses’ Social Security/Medicaid support.

Garry and Patrice had terrible upbringings and experiences  during their formative years, and Patrice’s reads read like a horror story of abuse, bullying, assaults and rape. The oppression from the government agencies is just another knife in the heart. We learn that Patrice’s mother was from a family of abusers, and that Patrice’s stepfather abused her mother.

Patrice is on her own as her siblings are dead, as well as her mother. But by the end of the movie, with the Go Fund Me videos, it is clear that she has a plethora of friends and tribal family.

Compelling is Patrice’s real life friend, Elizabeth Dicker, who happens to be the Accessibility Specialist at Rutgers Center for Adult Autism Services. Elizabeth summarizes how Garry and Patrice’s situation is not just cruel, but also illogical:

“If two people are having Medicaid benefits, and then those two people get married and then they just don’t lose their benefits, how is the government making or losing any money?”

Situating the real policy issues now, after billions ($15.5 billion) were spent on the 2024 elections, we learn from advocates like Julie Chick and Frank Perdue that the limitations on Supplemental Security Income are badly out of date.

Organizations like Oregon Self Advocacy Coalition (OSAC) work hard to engage communities in advocating for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

I spoke at length with Gabrielle Guedon, director of OSAC. She was really interested in the power of the press to bring OSAC members’ struggles to the general public. She is also inviting people to read the GO! Bulletin on how to get involved in advocacy about policies.

She lives by this credo by Malala Youseif: —

And, on the OSAC webpage we see she’s just like anyone you might know:

“I build miniature doll houses and make pillow cases. I love camping. I’m a carb-o-holic! I like rock-n-roll and I would love to visit Australia.”

Fred C. Trump III is the author of

All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.

In January 2020, just before COVID hit, Lisa, myself, and a team of advocates met with Chris Neeley, who headed the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, a much-needed federal advisory committee that promotes policies and initiatives that support independent and lifelong inclusion. We discussed the need for all medical schools to include courses that focus on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We emphasized how crucial it was for hospitals and other acute-care facilities to help patients transition from pediatric to adult services. We emphasized the importance of collecting sufficient data to explain medically complex disorders. This was not about more government spending. It was about smarter investing and greater efficiency.

We spent the next few months making calls and talking with officials and gathering our own recommendations, giving special attention to the critical need for housing support for people with disabilities. We were back in Washington in May.

By this time, COVID was raging. We were all masked up and COVID tested on the way into the White House Cabinet Room. Once we got inside, we sat down with Alex Azar, the administration’s secretary of health and human services, and Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health, both of whom served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The promising agency motto stated: HHS: Enhancing the Health and Well-Being of All Americans.

Sharp, direct, and to the point, Azar exhibited my kind of efficiency with no time to waste. His first question was, “OK, why are you here?”

I made a brief introduction. Our group included a leading doctor and several highly qualified advocates. What followed was a great discussion. Something clicked with Giroir—an idea for a program everyone could agree on that would cut through the bureaucracy and control costs and also yield better and more efficient medical outcomes.

Excellent. We were making progress.

“Really appreciate your coming in,” Azar finally said, more warmly than he had sounded at the start. “I know we’re going to see the President.”

The meeting I had assumed would be a quick handshake hello with Donald had turned into a 45-minute discussion in the Oval Office with all of us—Azar, Giroir, the advocates, and me. I never expected to be there so long. Donald seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members, who were constantly in and out of the hospital and living with complex arrays of challenges.

Donald was still Donald, of course. He bounced from subject to subject—disability to the stock market and back to disability. But promisingly, Donald seemed genuinely curious regarding the depth of medical needs across the U.S. and the individual challenges these families faced. He told the secretary and the assistant secretary to stay in touch with our group and to be supportive.

After I left the office, I was standing with the others near the side entrance to the West Wing when Donald’s assistant caught up with me. “Your uncle would like to see you,” she said.

Azar was still in the Oval Office when I walked back in. “Hey, pal,” Donald said. “How’s everything going?”

“Good,” I said. “I appreciate your meeting with us.”

“Sure, happy to do it.”

He sounded interested and even concerned. I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members. But I was wrong.

“Those people … ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

I truly did not know what to say. He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives. For Donald, I think it really was about the expenses, even though we were there to talk about efficiencies, smarter investments, and human dignity.

I turned and walked away.

And, yes, this is an equal deformity essay, so, drum roll, Harris did what?

And, yes, bullying at school is a effing big thing, leading to depression, and, yep, suicide. But another clown just didn’t/doesn’t get it.

The Human Costs Of Kamala Harris’ War On Truancy

[Cheree Peoples outside of the apartment where she lives when her 17-year-old daughter, Shayla Rucker, is at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Peoples was arrested six years ago for Shayla’s repeated truancy despite ample evidence given to the Orange County school showing Shayla suffers from sickle cell anemia, which leaves her in constant pain and requires frequent hospitalization.]

On the morning of April 18, 2013, in the Los Angeles suburb of Buena Park, a throng of photographers positioned themselves on a street curb and watched as two police officers entered a squat townhouse. Minutes later, their cameras began clicking. The officers had re-emerged with a weary-looking woman in pajamas and handcuffs, and the photographers were jostling to capture her every step.

“You would swear I had killed somebody,” the woman, Cheree Peoples, said in a recent interview.

In fact, Peoples had been arrested for her daughter’s spotty school attendance record under a truancy law that then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris had personally championed in the state legislature. The law, enacted in January 2011, made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in kindergarten through eighth grade to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. Peoples’ 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days so far that school year.

[Cheree Peoples outside of the apartment where she lives when her 17-year-old daughter, Shayla, is at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Peoples was arrested six years ago for Shayla’s repeated truancy despite ample evidence given to the Orange County school showing Shayla suffers from sickle cell anemia, which leaves her in constant pain and requires frequent hospitalization. (Credit: Tara Pixley for HuffPost) ABOVE: Buena Park police officers Luis Garcia (left) and James Woo escort Peoples, 33, to their patrol car on April 18, 2013. She was handcuffed and under arrest.]

Yet the penalties she once championed for truancy and the way she originally thought about the issue are foundational to how California handles truancy today. Peoples’ arrest wasn’t a freak occurrence ― it was the inevitable outcome of Harris’ campaign to fuse the problem of truancy with the apparatus of law enforcement. And Peoples is far from an outlier. There are still hundreds of families across California entering the criminal justice system under the aegis of Harris’ law.

“I think it was a good thing that she shined a light on [truancy],” Jeff Adachi, who served as San Francisco’s chief public defender from January 2003 until his death on Feb. 22, told HuffPost in February. “There is a correlation between children who fail at school and what happens later in life. [But] the idea of locking parents up, or citing them with a crime because they’re not taking their children to school — it doesn’t address the root of the problem.”

“What it ended up being, practically, is families and kids having to come to court to be told to utilize certain services in order to come to school. Which, from where I sit, is very much the job of the school district and not the job of the criminal court.” – a public defender

And then this criminal, Trump?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

With the two houses of the Thai legislature having now adopted legislation that provides equal marriage rights to LGBTQ people, the bill will become law within 120 days after the king signs it and it is published in the Royal Gazette.

The legislation is expected to unlock previously denied legal rights for Thai same-sex and non-traditional couples, such as adoption or the ability to make health care decisions for their partners’ behalf, human rights activists said. 

A majority of senators attending the session voted in favor of its passage. About 100 of the 250-member Senate were not present for the vote. Out of 152 voters, 130 approved, four disapproved and 18 abstained, said Gov. Singsuk Singprai, the first vice president of the Senate, who chaired Tuesday’s session.

The scene outside Government House in Bangkok was filled with rainbow colors of the Pride flag as gay people and others gathered to celebrate this landmark moment for Thailand’s LGBTQ community.     

“As an LGBTQ person who is in love and wants to marry another woman, we have long hoped that we would have equal rights and dignity, just like the heterosexual couples who can marry and start families,” Ann “Waaddao” Chumaporn, an LGBTQ organizer and community spokesperson, said during Tuesday’s Senate deliberations on the Marriage Equality Bill.   

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Together three decades, Thai same-sex couple hopes for legal recognition

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The bill proposes replacing terms such as “husband” and “wife” with “spouse” in Section 1448 of Thailand’s Civil and Commercial Code. 

“We hope that changes in Thailand will ignite a spark for other countries in Asia. Although this law is not 100% perfect, from an international human rights organization’s perspective, it makes Thai law more aligned with international standards,” Mookdapa Yangyuenpradorn, a Southeast Asian human rights associate at Fortify Rights, told BenarNews, an affiliate of Radio Free Asia.

If and when the bill becomes law, Thailand would join Taiwan and Nepal as the only countries in Asia to recognize the rights of same-sex couples to wed.

Isa Gharti, a public policy researcher at Chiang Mai University, said the vote demonstrates progress in accepting sexual diversity.

“This shows the societal advancement in Thailand in terms of accepting sexual diversity and safeguarding the rights of the LGBTQ community to equality both legally and in human dignity. This is a positive sign that will make Thai society more open, although there are still some voices of opposition,” Isa said.

“Going forward, Thailand must also address deeply entrenched gender discrimination and biases in education, employment, and public health,” Isa said. “It’s essential to educate the public to foster understanding and reduce stigmatization of sexual diversity.”

‘Beautiful and powerful’

In Thailand, a Buddhist-majority politically conservative country, legislation around same-sex marriage has been more than two decades in the making. 

An earlier marriage equality bill, introduced by opposition lawmakers from the progressive Move Forward Party, reached its second reading in November 2022, but didn’t move beyond that because of a series of legislative delays. It died when Parliament dissolved in March 2023 ahead of the general election two months later. 

This year, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the current bill, with 400 of 415 lawmakers present endorsing it at its final reading in March.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who is a backer of marriage equality, has said his government was working toward Bangkok hosting World Pride 2028.

“We have fought a long time because we believe in all equal rights,” Srettha wrote on his X account after the vote.

“Today is our day. We celebrate to ‘diverse’ love, not ‘different’ [love]. Love is beautiful and powerful.’

The movement for legal recognition of same-sex marriage began during the Thaksin Shinawatra government in 2001. At the time, the Ministry of Interior proposed amendments to the marriage law, but dropped them because of public opposition. A military coup forced Thaksin from the prime minister’s office in 2006.

In 2012, the government of Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, introduced the Civil Partnership Bill for consideration. While this bill did not grant full marriage rights to same-sex couples, its progress was halted by another military coup in 2014 that drove her from the same office.

The Move Forward Party proposed the Marriage Equality Bill in the lower House in 2022. Simultaneously, the administration of then-Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha submitted the Civil Partnership Bill for consideration. 

While the two bills shared similarities, the Civil Partnership Bill would have established a “life partnership” status for same-sex couples, granting them fewer legal rights than “marriage.” The House term ended before either bill could be passed.

After Tuesday’s Senate vote, Plaifah Kyoka Shodladd, an 18-year-old who identifies as non-binary, took the floor and thanked everyone who supported the legislation, calling it a “force of hope” that will help Thailand become more accepting of diversity, the Associated Press reported.

“Today, love trumps prejudice,” Plaifah said.

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Nontarat Phaicharoen and Harry Pearl for BenarNews.

The bill sailed through the lower house receiving 400 votes in favor and 10 against, according to deputy speaker Pichet Chuamuangphan.

The landmark legislation still requires approval from the conservative-leaning Senate and endorsement from the king before it becomes law – a process that would see Thailand join only Taiwan and Nepal in Asia in recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to wed.

“This law ensures that the rights of ordinary men and women are not diminished in any way. Your legal rights remain unchanged in all respects,” Danuporn Punnakan, chair of the special Committee reviewing the bill, told Parliament before the final reading.

“Simultaneously, this law will protect a group of people, whether they are called LGBT, transgender men, transgender women, or anything else.” 

Thailand boasts one of the most vibrant LGBTQ+ communities in Asia, and public surveys show that the bill enjoys overwhelming support.

However, discrimination against gay and lesbian individuals persists in the country, particularly in employment and health care, advocates say.

Same-sex couples were previously unable to adopt children, make emergency health care decisions for their partners, or access spousal benefits, including tax deductions and government pensions.

A key aspect of the bill is to allow “two individuals (of any gender)” to marry, amending current wording of the Civil and Commercial Code that specifies marriage as between a man and a woman. The change will allow spouses of all genders to manage assets and legally adopt children.

“A public opinion survey showed that 96.6% of the population agrees with this bill. The benefits of the act affirm the government's intention and policy to respect and promote human rights by amending unjust laws to ensure that everyone has the right to equally and fairly establish family relationships,” said Deputy Prime Minister Somsak Thepsutin while presenting the bill for consideration.

Speaking before the vote, Pakodchakon Wongsupha, a 67-year-old woman with a transgender partner, said the amendments would provide social security and legal recognition. 

“If something went wrong that resulted in death, I wouldn't have the legal right to file any complaint like other legalized couples. It makes me hurt when I think about it. Every couple in this world, regardless of gender, should have the right to receive welfare benefits or legal recognition like anyone else,” Pakodchakon told BenarNews. 

Thailand’s road to approving same-sex marriage legislation has been years in the making. 

An earlier draft marriage equality bill, introduced by opposition lawmakers from the progressive Move Forward Party, reached its second reading in November 2022, but didn’t move beyond that because of a series of legislative delays after which the Parliament was dissolved in March ahead of the May general election. 

Mookdapa Yangyuenpradorn, a Southeast Asian human rights associate at Fortify Rights, said she hoped that Thailand's law could inspire other countries in Southeast Asia.

“While this law may not be 100% perfect, from the perspective of an international human rights organization, it makes Thailand’s legislation more aligned with international standards,” Mookdapa told BenarNews.

Wilawan Watcharasakwet and Ruj Chuenban in Bangkok contributed to this report.

BenarNews is and RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nontarat Phaicharoen for BenarNews.

The Marriage Equality Bill, which saw multiple versions proposed by the ruling and opposition parties as well as through a public petition, received resounding support in the House of Representatives. As many as 369 MPs voted in favor of it versus 10 who voted against the proposed legislation.

“The benefits of this [bill] affirm the government’s commitment to human rights,” Deputy Prime Minister Somsak Thepsuthin said while presenting the government’s version of the bill to Parliament. “We are working to ensure everyone has equal access to family life, free from unfair discrimination.”

“This law should not be seen as belonging to any particular party. It should be a collective effort for the benefit of all Thai society,” he said.

Different versions of the bill proposed by the ruling and opposition parties had only minor differences and had agreement on key issues.

The core feature common to all versions of the bill is the alteration of the marriage definition from a union between “male and female” to “two individuals (of any gender).” 

This change grants “spouses” access to a host of legal rights that were previously exclusive to heterosexual couples.

If approved by the king, the Thai government will publish the bill in the Royal Gazette before it becomes law – a process that would make Thailand the first country in Southeast Asia and only the third in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage.

There is no timeline for completing the process.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin previously announced that the Cabinet had approved a draft amendment to the code regulating civil unions in Thailand.

“This law will enable same-sex couples to engage and marry under the Civil and Commercial Code, granting them rights and responsibilities equal to heterosexual married couples,” he told reporters.

Tunyawaj Kamolwongwat, a member of the LGBTQ community and an MP from the main opposition Move Forward Party, addressed Parliament to share a personal perspective.

“I was born a transgender. Whether I laugh or cry, my transgender identity always remains with me,” Tunyawaj said. “Transgender individuals have a place in society, have rights and dignity, and deserve to live life as they wish, including within a family setting.”

Public support

The bill enjoys overwhelming support in Thailand, with a survey during formal public consultation showing nearly 97% in favor. 

Thailand boasts one of the most vibrant LGBTQ communities in Asia, a region where only Taiwan and Nepal previously recognized the rights of same-sex couples to marry.

Annually, thousands of Thais participate in Pride Month celebrations and tourism authorities actively promote the country’s welcoming environment for LGBTQ travelers.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center, an American think-tank, revealed that 60% of Thai adults support the legalization of same-sex marriage. This places Thailand behind only Japan (68%) and Vietnam (65%) in terms of support for such a measure in Asia.

However, discrimination against gay and lesbian individuals persists in Thailand, particularly in employment and health care, advocates say.

Same-sex couples were previously unable to adopt children, make emergency health care decisions for their partners, or access spousal benefits, including tax deductions and government pensions.

If enacted, the law is expected to address many of these issues, said Matcha Phorn-in, a rights activist and executive director of the Sangsan Anakot Yawachon Development Project, an advocacy group led by LGBTQ feminists.

“Looking at the current societal atmosphere, there’s hardly any concern. The principles of all drafts show no hidden discrimination,” she said. 

“However, once the law passes, our next step is genuine participation. The law must not lead to people of diverse sexual orientations becoming second-class citizens through its enforcement.”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nontharat Phaicharoen for BenarNews.

The Marriage Equality Bill, which saw multiple versions proposed by the ruling and opposition parties as well as through a public petition, received resounding support in the House of Representatives. As many as 369 MPs voted in favor of it versus 10 who voted against the proposed legislation.

“The benefits of this [bill] affirm the government’s commitment to human rights,” Deputy Prime Minister Somsak Thepsuthin said while presenting the government’s version of the bill to Parliament. “We are working to ensure everyone has equal access to family life, free from unfair discrimination.”

“This law should not be seen as belonging to any particular party. It should be a collective effort for the benefit of all Thai society,” he said.

Different versions of the bill proposed by the ruling and opposition parties had only minor differences and had agreement on key issues.

The core feature common to all versions of the bill is the alteration of the marriage definition from a union between “male and female” to “two individuals (of any gender).” 

This change grants “spouses” access to a host of legal rights that were previously exclusive to heterosexual couples.

If approved by the king, the Thai government will publish the bill in the Royal Gazette before it becomes law – a process that would make Thailand the first country in Southeast Asia and only the third in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage.

There is no timeline for completing the process.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin previously announced that the Cabinet had approved a draft amendment to the code regulating civil unions in Thailand.

“This law will enable same-sex couples to engage and marry under the Civil and Commercial Code, granting them rights and responsibilities equal to heterosexual married couples,” he told reporters.

Tunyawaj Kamolwongwat, a member of the LGBTQ community and an MP from the main opposition Move Forward Party, addressed Parliament to share a personal perspective.

“I was born a transgender. Whether I laugh or cry, my transgender identity always remains with me,” Tunyawaj said. “Transgender individuals have a place in society, have rights and dignity, and deserve to live life as they wish, including within a family setting.”

Public support

The bill enjoys overwhelming support in Thailand, with a survey during formal public consultation showing nearly 97% in favor. 

Thailand boasts one of the most vibrant LGBTQ communities in Asia, a region where only Taiwan and Nepal previously recognized the rights of same-sex couples to marry.

Annually, thousands of Thais participate in Pride Month celebrations and tourism authorities actively promote the country’s welcoming environment for LGBTQ travelers.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center, an American think-tank, revealed that 60% of Thai adults support the legalization of same-sex marriage. This places Thailand behind only Japan (68%) and Vietnam (65%) in terms of support for such a measure in Asia.

However, discrimination against gay and lesbian individuals persists in Thailand, particularly in employment and health care, advocates say.

Same-sex couples were previously unable to adopt children, make emergency health care decisions for their partners, or access spousal benefits, including tax deductions and government pensions.

If enacted, the law is expected to address many of these issues, said Matcha Phorn-in, a rights activist and executive director of the Sangsan Anakot Yawachon Development Project, an advocacy group led by LGBTQ feminists.

“Looking at the current societal atmosphere, there’s hardly any concern. The principles of all drafts show no hidden discrimination,” she said. 

“However, once the law passes, our next step is genuine participation. The law must not lead to people of diverse sexual orientations becoming second-class citizens through its enforcement.”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nontharat Phaicharoen for BenarNews.

The Washington Post (11/22/23) insists that young people’s political “mismatch means that someone will need to compromise”—and it’s not hard to figure out who that “someone” is supposed to be.

The Washington Post editorial board (11/22/23) has its knickers in a twist over marriage. “If Attitudes Don’t Shift, a Political Dating Mismatch Will Threaten Marriage,” it recently warned. The Post lamented the increase in political polarization because it portends “the collapse of American marriage.”

You see, the Post has identified a “growing ideological divide” between single young men and women, with far more women identifying as liberal—a gap that’s “particularly pronounced among Gen Z white people,” the Post board takes care to point out.

When you add this to a 2021 survey of college students that found “71% of Democrats would not date someone with opposing views,” the Post says, you find yourself with a “mismatch [that] means that someone will need to compromise.” And since it’s the Democrats who say they won’t date Republicans, that would mean the young liberal women are the ones who need to do the compromising.

Oh sure, they could just decide not to marry—but then they’ll be even unhappier than those in politically mixed couples, the Post warns, hyperlinking to the Institute for Family Studies as its source for that statement.

In fact, the right-wing Institute for Family Studies lurks throughout the editorial, along with its senior fellow Brad Wilcox, who was involved in discredited anti-same-sex marriage research that was influential in that political battle a decade ago. Together, the Post references or links to them three separate times in its editorial. (The IFS argument about marriage happiness is flawed too, by the way.)

Ginning up a story

When you look at the Post‘s chart (11/22/23), every time either of the darker lines crosses its lighter counterpart, that’s young men and women switching places as the gender with more conservatives or liberals in it—a frequent phenomenon that disproves the thesis of the editorial it accompanies.

Looking at the chart in the article, you see the political identification numbers the Post is so worried about bounce around a great deal. If you look at the data from the 2021 survey of political identification instead of 2022, you find that young men and women were much more closely aligned that year—with a 5-point gender gap in identifying as either liberal or conservative, as opposed to a 9-point gap the following year.

The editorial notes that “since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016,” the percentage of young women identifying as liberal “has shot up,” while “young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.” But two years ago—after Trump had been out of office for a year—young men were much readier to identify as liberal than they were in either 2016 or 2022. The real lesson seems to be not that there are “Trump-era divisions between single men and women,” but that young people’s political beliefs—at least as expressed to pollsters—tend to fluctuate quite a bit.

In fact, the editorial’s assumption that liberal women are going to have trouble matching up with conservative men doesn’t hold up to a quick glance at the chart. In five of the last 11 times the survey has been taken—going back to 2002—the percentage of young liberal men either matched or exceeded the number of young liberal women, and young conservative women outnumbered or equaled their male counterparts the same number of times. So unless the Post has a crystal ball that tells them that 2022 marked the start of a new era, it’s ginning up a story out of nothing.

‘Culture of seeking sameness’

The Post (11/10/23) urged universities to keep silent about issues like “institutional and structural racism” and reproductive freedom—as if such things had no bearing on the ability of students to take part in education.

But the number-fudging has a purpose: to chastise people—primarily young, female liberals—for being so political and uncompromising. The Post writes:

Unfortunately, Americans have not equipped themselves to discuss, debate and reason across these divides. Americans have increasingly sorted themselves according to ideological orientation.

“Americans” are a diverse lot, though. The reason that “Americans” can’t “reason across these divides” is because one side of the divide has firmly committed itself to a different reality that permits no reasoning, even criminalizing the expression of ideas it disagrees with. The board makes clear, though, that those are not the Americans it’s most worried about:

They are working, living and socializing with people who think the same things they do. Particularly on college campuses, a culture of seeking sameness has set up young Americans for disappointment.

This is the academic version of corporate media’s perennial “move to the right” advice. (Tellingly, the hyperlink goes to another Post editorial—11/10/23—advising universities to shut up about issues like “institutional and structural racism” and reproductive freedom.) Yet it’s “particularly on college campuses”—and not, say, evangelical churches or the military—where young people have a “culture of seeking sameness,” and need to open themselves to other, more right-wing ideas:

They expect people to share their own convictions and commitments. But people’s insight and understanding about the world often come from considering alternative perspectives that may at first seem odd or offensive.

What’s “odd or offensive” to a young liberal woman surely includes things like the “outright misogyny” the Post acknowledges is popular among some “boys and young men.” Yet instead of centering its solutions on things like combating such misogyny in our culture, the Post would rather ask women to suck it up and kindly consider those perspectives.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

The post WaPo Tells Women: If You Want Marriage, Compromise With Misogyny  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Her latest report documents more than 27,000 instances of grave violations against children caught up in war, including use in conflict, killing and maiming, and rape and sexual violence. 

It also reveals a worrisome rise in attacks against schools, with nearly half carried out by government forces.

Ms. Gamba recently spoke to UN News’s Felipe De Carvalho about the main drivers of child recruitment and the unique challenges that conflict poses to children and education systems. 

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Felipe De Carvalho.

Her latest report documents more than 27,000 instances of grave violations against children caught up in war, including use in conflict, killing and maiming, and rape and sexual violence. 

The report also reveals a worrisome rise in attacks against schools, with nearly half carried out by government forces.

Ms. Gamba spoke to UN News’s Felipe De Carvalho about the main drivers of child recruitment and the unique challenges that conflict poses to children and education systems. 

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Felipe De Carvalho.

The final appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the government has a constitutional duty to provide a legal framework for same-sex relationships to be recognized, setting a two-year timeline for officials to deliver.

But it ruled against Sham's argument that the exclusion of same-sex couples from the institution of marriage was a violation of the right to equality under the Hong Kong Bill of Rights and Basic Law; and that lack of recognition of foreign same-sex marriage violated the right to equality.

Sham, who is among 47 opposition activists and former lawmakers currently on trial for "subversion" under a national security law for taking part in a democratic primary, filed his judicial review back in 2018, but lost the case both in the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal at the High Court.

His lawyer, Karon Monaghan KC, had argued at the hearing in June that it is unconstitutional for the Hong Kong government to eliminate the possibility of same-sex marriage, and that it is unconstitutional not to offer an alternative legal union for same-sex couples.

She said such discriminatory treatment would likely also engender discrimination against same-sex couples in other areas, including inheritance rights and access to housing, and sent the wrong message to the public.

Same-sex relationships share all the characteristics of intimacy, love, long-term commitment and mutual support with heterosexual marriages, Monaghan said. 

She argued that the government's rejection of same-sex marriage, and its failure to provide alternatives like civil unions, amounts to discrimination against same-sex couples, sending the "insulting" message that homosexual relationships are inferior to heterosexual ones.

‘Important victory’

Sham, who married his husband in New York in 2013, but who has been denied permission to marry him in Hong Kong, called on the court to rule that the government's approach is unconstitutional.

An earlier court ruling in 2020 described his bid for equality of recognition as "too ambitious."

Hong Kong Marriage Equality welcomed the ruling, saying the verdict was an "important victory" for same-sex couples.

"This verdict won't cause harm to anyone, and also marks Hong Kong society's progress towards equality in love, and a more harmonious society," it said. "This is a big step."

It called on the government to actively communicate with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and questioning community in developing the framework.

Amnesty International described Tuesday's ruling as "a moment of hope" for LGBTQ+ people in Hong Kong.

"Jimmy Sham’s partial victory in court is the reward for his tireless campaigning for equality, and it sends a clear message to the Hong Kong government that its laws on same-sex marriage are in urgent need of reform," Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Piya Muqit, said in a statement.

“Today can be the start of a more equal society in Hong Kong, but there is still a long road ahead," Muqit said. "It is now crucial that the government does not delay in implementing this ruling as a first step towards ensuring full equality for [LGBTQ+] people."

“Jimmy Sham’s marriage is legitimate and should be recognized as such," Muqit said, calling for a comprehensive review of all of Hong Kong's laws, policies and practices that discriminate based on sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status.

Sham is the former convenor of Civil Human Rights Front, which once organized mass protest marches on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule and on New Year's Day and which once led a march of 2 million during the 2019 protest movement.

The front was among several prominent civil rights groups to disband following the imposition of the national security law on July 1, 2020.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ng Ting Hong for RFA Cantonese.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Eileen Sosin.

Ren Zeping, an economist with a large number of followers on Weibo, said the move would serve to shift people's thinking after decades of family planning policies that encouraged late marriage and child-bearing in a bid to curb population growth.

"Lowering the legal age for marriage would be to return power to the people, to give them back their right to choose," Ren wrote in a post to his Weibo account, suggesting that the minimum age for women be lowered from 20 to 18. The minimum age for men is 22.

"People should be able to choose independently. There’s no need to force them to marry at 18,” he wrote, addressing online comments that feared the authorities would start pushing people to marry earlier if the legal age was lowered.

Widespread rights abuses around forced abortion, forced sterilization and the often violent enforcement of birth quotas that was widely reported during the "one-child policy" between 1980 and 2015 has left many concerned that similarly oppressive measures could be used to “encourage” more births now that the population is shrinking.

That policy was an attempt to slow the country’s population growth and manage economic development, although in 2021 the government said couples could have up to three children.

Fewer marriages

Marriage rates have been falling rapidly in China over the past decade, with approximately 7.64 million marriages registered in 2021 compared with 8.14 million marriages in the previous year.

An aging population, a gender imbalance following decades of selective abortion, the high cost of raising a family and changing notions of what marriage should be are all driving the trend, according to Ren, who called for subsidies to help house and support young families, more relaxed rules on adoption and for single women to be allowed to have children.

Last year, China's population fell for the first time in over 60 years, with 9.56 million babies born compared with 10.41 million deaths, according to data published by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

It was the first decline since 1961, the final year of the famine brought on by failing economic policies during Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” the campaign to transform China from a mostly agrarian society into an industrial one that ended in disaster.

‘Definitely not a good idea’

Former high school teacher Guo Jian said allowing even younger teenagers to marry would be a mistake because they aren’t mature enough.

"It's definitely not a good idea," Guo said. "Kids these days may be quite precocious in some respects, but they come very late to shouldering responsibility."

"An 18-year-old is still a child – even 23 or 24 isn't a very good age [to marry], because people still want to have fun," Guo said. 

Guo said his sister's family were happy with a single child, because they don't want to lower their standard of living any further.

"For me, it's a financial issue, because I already have two boys, and that means pressure in China because you have to pay for them to buy a home and to get married," Guo said. "I would need to be in a much better financial situation to have another kid."

Current affairs commentator Fang Yuan said Ren appeared to be viewing population issues as primarily economic, rather than driven by real-life stories.

"It's pretty blatantly regarding people as tools for running the country," Fang said. "It's about farming humans for their labor and the concept of added value." Ren ignores a series of problems that would crop up if women were allowed to marry under age 18, he said.

Link to political suppression?

A number of provinces and cities have followed up with falling birth rates since last year's population figures were published, with the southwestern megacity of Chongqing reporting fewer than 200,000 new births last year for a population of 31 million, and many other cities and provinces reporting drops of around 10% in their birth rates.

Health rights activist Lu Jun, who now lives in New York, said he believes people's unwillingness to have children is linked to political and social changes under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

"Xi Jinping broke with the system of presidential term limits ... and there has been [widespread] suppression of public speech, freedom of association and public interest lawyers," Lu said. "The political ideas of an entire generation are being suppressed ... which has left people with a very strong sense of insecurity."

"There have been cases where local government officials have used the children of people who try to stand up for their rights in local communities to put pressure on them," he said. Radio Free Asia has reported on several cases of the children of activists being denied access to schooling in recent years.

"People don't have enough trust [in the future] to have kids, because it's hard to imagine there will be a bright future for them in [China]," Lu said.

Running away

Lu said many younger middle-class Chinese are leaving the country in a bid to give their families a better life overseas, which has also had an impact on birth rates.

"It's become quite common for Chinese people to ‘run’ in recent years, particularly as the zero-COVID policy and lockdowns made life unbearable for them," he said. "A lot of people are voting with their feet and for a brighter future for their kids."

Economic commentator Jin Shan said there is little hope of economic prosperity either in today's China.

"Economic development, internal reform, and opening up to the outside world have become a thing of the past," Jin said. "There has been far more attention paid to the consolidation of state power in recent years."

"After three years of intensive pandemic restrictions, it can be said that the economy is on the brink of collapse," Jin said. "The developments of the past 10 years, especially the last three years, have dealt a fatal blow to China's middle class."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei and Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Chrissy Stroop.

Human rights advocates cheered Tuesday's signing by U.S. President Joe Biden of the Respect for Marriage Act, landmark legislation to codify limited protections for same-sex and interracial marriages passed in response to right-wing attacks on civil rights.

"If there is one message that breaks through from today, it's that this law—and the love it defends—strikes a blow against hate in all its forms."

The new law—which passed the Senate on November 30th and the House of Representatives last Thursday—requires states to recognize marriage licenses issued anywhere in the United States. It does not confirm nationwide same-sex marriage rights as established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges. Nor does it prohibit states from banning same-sex marriage if Obergefell is struck down, as Justice Clarence Thomas suggested it should be in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the June decision that voided half a century of national abortion rights.

Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House, Biden took aim at the "callous, cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need."

"Racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia—they're all connected," the president asserted. "But the antidote to hate is love. This law and the love it defends strike a blow against hate in all its forms."

Vice President Kamala Harris noted that "as attorney general of California, I had the honor of giving the order to allow same-sex marriages to take place across the state in 2013. Now, we continue our progress with the Respect for Marriage Act becoming law."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hailed the new law as "a landmark victory in the fight for full equality enshrining the foundational right to marry the person you love into the law of the land."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), wearing the same purple tie he wore to his lesbian daughter's wedding, said that "thanks to the millions out there who spent years pushing for change, and thanks to the dogged work of my colleagues, my grandchild will get to live in a world that respects and honors their mothers' marriage."

The White House was lit in the colors of the rainbow for the signing ceremony. There were performances from musicians Sam Smith and Cyndi Lauper, who sang her 1986 Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit "True Colors."

"For once, our families, mine and a lot of my friends—and people you know, sometimes your neighbors—we can rest easy tonight, because our families are validated," Lauper said before the signing.

Matthew Haynes, co-owner of Club Q, the Colorado Springs nightclub where a mass shooter killed five people and wounded 19 others last month, was also on hand.

"We must stop the violence like we just saw in Colorado Springs," Biden asserted.

A video recalled how Biden, then vice president, came out in support of same-sex marriage equality before his boss, then-President Barack Obama, a decade ago. Biden joked that he "got in trouble" for that, but three days later an "evolving" Obama publicly endorsed gay marriage.

Democratic politicians and advocates applauded the signing, with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), who is gay, tweeting that "today is a HISTORIC day for the LGBTQ community. The Respect for Marriage Act is the law of the land."

"When I presided over the Respect for Marriage Act, I had a simple message for the far right: 'Your hate will never have the final word on our love,'" he added.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), who is lesbian, tweeted: "It was great to be at the White House to celebrate the Respect for Marriage Act being signed into law by @POTUS ! I'm happy that the hard work and long hours of bipartisan negotiation have finally paid off for the millions of loving same-sex & interracial couples across America."

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose daughter is transgender, wrote on Twitter that "I was honored to watch as @POTUS honored the fundamental right of Americans to marry the person they love. It means people like my child will have the same rights as everyone else."

Janson Wu, executive director of the advocacy group GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), said in a statement that "this is a joyful day. Millions of couples and their children across the country now have the assurance that their families will continue to be respected by our state and federal governments because President Biden has signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law."

"The effort to pass the Respect for Marriage Act spanned decades and involved the work of so many. The law's passage this year demonstrates the strong and growing support for equality among Americans of all political parties and from all walks of life," Wu added.

Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, said that "55 years after Loving v. Virginia," the Supreme Court case legalizing interracial marriage, "and seven years after Obergefell v. Hodges, we can celebrate that marriage equality is now the law of the land."

"We thank President Biden and members of Congress who voted for this historic bill for ensuring that love wins," Saunders added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Lori Long was diagnosed in childhood with a rare disease that requires extensive medical treatments, supports, and services. She receives Social Security, earned for her by her now deceased parents. Medicare and Medicaid provide her health insurance. 

Given the millions of beneficiaries and recipients who are affected by the marriage penalties, it is highly inefficient to require them to assert their religious claims individually to obtain relief.

In 2015, she met Mark Contreras. They fell in love, became engaged, and began to plan their wedding—only to discover that marriage would be a death sentence for Ms. Long.  

Ms. Long's doctors have told her that losing the medical treatments, supports, and services which she receives from Medicare and Medicaid would be life-threatening. (Those same comprehensive treatments, supports, and services are generally not provided by private health insurance and are prohibitively expensive without insurance.)  

The Social Security Act requires that, if Ms. Long and Mr. Contreras marry, her Social Security and Medicare benefits terminate the month before the date of their marriage. (The only exception is if Ms. Long were to marry another Social Security beneficiary, which Mr. Contreras is not. Nor would the benefits be reinstated if Mr. Contreras died or if they divorced.)

As heartbreaking as their inability to marry is, it is also against the law. It violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act ("RFRA"), which prohibits any application of federal law that substantially burdens religious freedom.  

Unquestionably, the termination of benefits upon marriage is an overwhelming burden on Ms. Long, who has been a devout, practicing Christian throughout her life and believes marriage is a holy sacrament. She and her fiancé want to have children, but having children out of wedlock  conflicts with their religious beliefs. They attend services where married couples are asked to stand and are blessed—and they are unable to receive that blessing. Moreover, as a Sunday school teacher, a Vacation Bible School teacher, and a leader in the youth ministry, she believes that she should model proper behavior to her students—including marriage.

The only exception RFRA allows is if the government has a compelling interest and, even then, the government loses unless there is no other less burdensome way to achieve its goal. There is no compelling reason to force Ms. Long—or anyone else—to choose between their religious beliefs and the benefits for which they otherwise qualify.

RFRA forbids the burden on Ms. Long's religious freedom by the potential termination of her Social Security benefits, just as the Supreme Court held that the withholding of unemployment benefits was an unconstitutional burden on Adell Sherbert's religious freedom. (The Religious Freedom Restoration Act explicitly restores the religious freedom test set forth in Ms. Sherbert's decision. The test had been undermined by subsequent decisions.)  

In Ms. Sherbert's case, South Carolina's Employment Security Commission had denied her claim for unemployment benefits, because Ms. Sherbert, a Seventh-Day Adventist, had refused all positions that required her to work on Saturdays, her Sabbath. The agency had ruled that her desire to observe her Sabbath was not a good enough reason to refuse work that had been offered to her. 

The South Carolina statute forced Ms. Sherbert to choose between attending Sabbath services and temporary cash benefits; the Social Security Act is forcing Ms. Long to choose between the lifetime, daily sacrament of marriage and the potential loss of her life. Tellingly, those burdens are much greater than the burden the Trump Administration found sufficient under RFRA to exempt religious organizations from having to complete a form to escape a requirement of providing contraceptive coverage as part of employer-provided health insurance.

Unless contraception is against an employer's religious beliefs, employers are required to include that coverage in the health insurance they provide. If contraception is against an employer's religion, all the Obama administration required was that the employer simply file a form stating that fact. The filing automatically freed employers from the obligation and cost of providing contraceptives. To not penalize the employees, though, the written filing caused the insurance company providing the health insurance to still provide the coverage but absorb the cost itself.  

The Trump administration, relying on RFRA, reversed the requirement that employers file the form, on the grounds that the mere filing might make some employers feel complicit. To be clear, no religious organization had to provide its employees with insurance that covered contraception.  All a religious organization would have had to do is file a claim one time. 

If filing paperwork to avoid a legal obligation is an undue burden on religious liberty, and being pressured by financial need to work on one's Sabbath is an undue burden, the loss of life-sustaining benefits as a result of Ms. Long's religiously-motivated decision to marry is without question an undue burden on her religious liberty within the meaning of RFRA. 

Accordingly, Ms. Long, who is represented by the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), has just filed a written request asking the Social Security Administration to comply with RFRA and allow her to marry without losing her benefits. SSA should immediately grant this relief—and the Biden administration should do much more. 

The provision in the law that would cause Ms. Long to lose her benefits if she married is only one of a number of anti-marriage provisions in the programs that SSA administers. Supplemental Security Income (SSI), also administered by SSA, pays two married recipients 25 percent less than two other recipients identical in all respects except that they simply live together as roommates. The married couple's allowable assets are also 25 percent lower. Moreover, SSI recipients can lose life-sustaining Medicaid benefits, along with SSI benefits, if they marry people with even extremely modest income or savings. That is because those resources are automatically attributed to the recipients themselves.

Importantly and heartbreakingly, these rules affect not only the religious freedom of those who receive the benefits, but their chosen partners, their families, and their broader communities. These laws mean that Mr. Contreras, who is not receiving a penny in benefits, is nonetheless prevented from sharing the commitment of marriage with the woman he loves. 

At the very least, the Biden administration should publicize that it is removing the marriage penalties of those Social Security beneficiaries and SSI recipients who attest that they are not marrying, despite their religious convictions, because they would lose benefits. 

But the Administration should go further. Given the millions of beneficiaries and recipients who are affected by the marriage penalties, it is highly inefficient to require them to assert their religious claims individually to obtain relief. Instead, the administration should start treating all those affected as they now treat unmarried individuals.

The Biden administration should immediately announce that adults with disabilities can marry and continue to receive the Social Security benefits their parents have earned for them. It should immediately announce that two SSI recipients who are married will be paid the same level of benefits as unmarried recipients are paid. It should immediately announce that two SSI recipients who are married will have the same higher assets limits that unmarried SSI recipients have.  

By taking these bold steps, the Biden administration will be acting in defense of marriage and in support of religion. Using the authority of RFRA to undo marriage penalties is the right public policy and politics. It is pro-marriage, pro-religion, and pro-Social Security.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Nancy J. Altman.

An abortion rights demonstrator holds a sign near the U.S. Capitol during the annual Women’s March in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 8, 2022.

Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

If marriage is (putatively) about devotion to another person, abortion protects other devotions: to art, work, friendship, solitude.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Judith Levine.

Civil rights proponents cheered Thursday after all 219 House Democrats and 39 Republicans voted to pass legislation enshrining recognition of same-sex and interracial partnerships, just over a week after the Senate did the same.

The Respect for Marriage Act, which President Joe Biden is expected to sign into law as soon as this week, jettisons the definition of marriage as "between a man and a woman" and requires all states to recognize the validity of legally obtained marriage licenses regardless of gender or race. However, the bill stops short of codifying the right of same-sex and interracial couples to marry nationwide.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws barring interracial and same-sex marriages were unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia in 1967 and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, respectively, the Respect for Marriage Act does not prevent states from prohibiting such partnerships in the event the high court overturns those precedents—something Justice Clarence Thomas signaled is a possibility in his concurring opinion for the June decision that eliminated federal abortion rights.

"In 2022, no person should have to fight for their government to recognize their marriage based on who they love," NAACP president Derrick Johnson said Thursday in a statement. "With the Loving v. Virginia and Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decisions at risk of reversal, our country has reached a pivotal juncture in the fight for marriage equality."

The House had already passed an earlier iteration of the Respect for Marriage Act in July, but the Senate postponed its vote on the measure until after the midterm elections. Last week, the Senate passed an amended version of the bill, which clarifies that the federal government would not recognize polygamous marriages and confirms that religious organizations would not be required "to provide goods or services to formally recognize or celebrate a marriage."

The last-minute changes were key to securing enough Republican support in the Senate and triggered a new vote in the House. While some have criticized the legislation as insufficiently protective and overly deferential to religious groups, Thursday's 258-169 House vote and last week's 61-26 Senate vote have been celebrated as significant achievements.

"By passing the Respect for Marriage Act, Congress has reaffirmed that the government cannot and should not interfere with individuals' right to marry the person they love," said Caroline Medina, director of LGBTQ+ policy at the Center for American Progress. Although 169 Republicans refused to support the legislation, "Thursday's bipartisan vote is a historic victory for couples, families, and children nationwide."

In a joint statement, Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), author of the Respect for Marriage Act, said that "Congress finally righted the injustices of the Defense of Marriage Act and Jim Crow—and tonight, millions of same-sex and interracial couples can go to sleep knowing their partnerships will be protected under federal law."

"Thanks to the action of House Democrats, led by CPC members on the House Judiciary Committee, and Senate negotiators, we are sending a bill to President Biden's desk to ensure that legal protections for same-sex and interracial couples will continue for every family across America, no matter what state they live in," said Jayapal and Nadler.

The pair acknowledged that "it might seem impossible that we've come so far in just a decade" since the nation's chief judicial body ruled in United States v. Windsor that the Defense of Marriage Act, enacted 26 years ago, is unconstitutional. "But those of us who come from progressive movements are not so surprised."

"Every inch of progress in American history has been won by ordinary Americans seeking justice, and today's victory is no different," they continued. "We are here today because of civil rights and LGBTQ movements who never stopped pushing for equal treatment under law. We are here because of activists who died for the right to be recognized in their full humanity by the United States government."

"Even as we celebrate this historic achievement, we know that the fight for equality and justice for LGBTQ people and communities of color has a long way to go," added Jayapal and Nadler. "We will continue to fight for the Equality Act to become law, and to push, as progressives always have, to address the crises of discrimination [against] Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and LGBTQ, particularly transgender, Americans."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• House gives final Congressional approval to federal law protecting same sex marriage
• Russia releases WNBA star Brittney Griner in prisoner swap
• Federal marshals seize KPFA bank account to pay defamation judgment against its New York sister station
• Tribes and officials celebrate impending removal of four Klamath River dams
• House Democrats urge binding ethics rules for Supreme Court justices

Image: Lorie Shaull, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The post Same sex marriage bill heads to President Biden for signature; WNBA star Brittney Griner freed in prisoner swap; Federal marshals seize KPFA assets to satisfy a judgment against its parent Pacifica Foundation: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – December 8, 2022 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

With a new Congress being sworn in next month, Democratic lawmakers have a busy lame-duck session during which they will try to pass as many bills as possible before losing their majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate has just passed the historic Respect for Marriage Act in a 61-36 vote that protects marriage equality, and lawmakers are also moving to impose a controversial contract on the freight rail industry to avert a possible strike by thousands of rail workers who are demanding sick days and other improvements. Meanwhile, a fight is looming over a funding bill to avoid a government shutdown. For more, we speak with journalist David Dayen, whose recent piece for The American Prospect is headlined “Reconciliation Is Available to End Debt Limit Hostage-Taking.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Senate approves bill to enshrine same sex marriage in federal law — 12 Republicans vote yes
• Railroad unions denounce President Biden’s call for Congress to impose a contract and block a potential strike
• Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes convicted of seditious conspiracy for a violent plot to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results
• Some striking academic workers reach agreement tentative agreement with the University of California

Image:  rawpixel.com

The post Senate votes to enshrine same sex marriage into law; Railway workers protest pending Congressional vote to impose a contract; Some of the striking U.C. academic workers reach tentative deal: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – November 29, 2022 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The post “Respect for Marriage?” Not Really. appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

A law that would codify federal protections for same-sex marriages cleared a procedural hurdle in the U.S Senate on Wednesday, overcoming the 60-vote filibuster threshold and setting the stage for approval.

Senators voted 62-37 in favor of ending debate on the Respect for Marriage Act and advancing it to the floor for an up-or-down vote. Twelve Republicans joined the Democratic caucus in support of the bill.

"This is huge," advocacy group Public Citizen tweeted. "The vote on final passage could happen as soon as this week."

The marriage equality legislation comes months after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sparked outrage over his Dobbs v. Jackson concurring opinion that suggested the reversal of the 2015 landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision—which recognizes same-sex unions—while also attacking precedents that protect the rights to contraception and interracial marriage.

"The right to marry the person you love shouldn't be up for debate," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted. "But Justice Clarence Thomas warned that he'd put it at risk—so the Senate is taking action to protect marriage equality no matter what the Supreme Court does. We're going to get this done."

Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), who is one of nine openly gay members of the U.S. House, previously denounced Thomas' remarks on the chamber floor and called on the Senate to pass the Respect for Marriage Act on Wednesday.

The House approved the Respect for Marriage Act in July. However, if it passes the Senate with a bipartisan amendment, it will have to return to the House for another vote before it goes to President Joe Biden's desk.

After the Senate vote Wednesday, Biden said he would "promptly sign it into law."

"Love is love and Americans should have the right to marry the person they love," Biden tweeted. "Today's bipartisan Senate vote gets us closer to protecting that right. The Respect for Marriage Act protects all couples under law—I urge Congress to send the bill to my desk so I can make it law."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jenna McGuire.

Media execs and concerned citizens alike aired their fears about the government’s public media plan — and the commercial clout TVNZ will bring to the new entity — in parliamentary hearings this week.

Mediawatch talks to TVNZ’s Simon Power about that, and the culture clash symbolised by this week’s FBoy Island controversy.

The Herald on Sunday’s revelations about the unpleasant backstory of a contestant on a new reality show last weekend jolted TVNZ in more ways than one.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: The boss of the big beast in the merger
• FBoy Island vs public interest media: the culture clash at the heart of the TVNZ-RNZ merger
• Other TVNZ-RNZ merger reports

FBoy Island pits “three stunning Kiwi women searching for the guy of their dreams” against 10 “FBoys” — blokes looking for sex but not a relationship.

Wayde Moore had appeared in court charged with suffocating a woman after luring her to his home for sex when she was drunk. He was found not guilty but The Herald reported the judge had said targeting the vulnerable woman was “deeply inappropriate and disrespectful”.

“The question I keep hearing from people is  … whether this is the sort of thing that one has a state broadcaster for,” investigative reporter David Fisher told The Herald’s Front Page podcast this week.

In TVNZ’s latest annual report published last week, chief executive Simon Power listed “responsible broadcasting” as one of three key pillars of TVNZ’s strategy for a sustainable future.

Is FBoy Island responsible — or reprehensible?

“The power in the programme is very much in the hands of the three women involved as contestants. It’s also part of a broader strategy for rangatahi which includes documentaries, factual programming and scripted programming,” Power told Mediawatch.

“I accept the title is provocative, but the show is essentially looking to create some very important conversations — and it may just help equip younger people with tools to navigate a new era of online dating,” Power said (… though most people’s online dates aren’t arranged by TV producers sending FBoys their way on tropical islands)

Some also said FBoy Island was a symbol of commercial culture at TVNZ which means the government’s arranged marriage at first sight with RNZ might end in tears (or on Heartbreak Island, perhaps).

Will the new public media entity air shows like FBoy Island to attract the ad revenue it will still need to supplement public funding?

“That will be a matter for the new entity as to how it wishes to interpret the charter. But for us, it’s an HBO Max format from the US with Dutch, Danish and Swedish versions created to attract younger audiences. It has been picked up by the likes of the BBC for that very reason,” he said.

I’m a commercial TV company. Get me out of here?
At the first of the select committee hearings about the creation of Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM) earlier this month, the Broadcasting and Media Minister Willie Jackson said TVNZ needed to “change its attitude” to the public media entity project.

Some commentators speculated TVNZ was stalling, possibly hoping a change of government in 2023 might scupper the plan.

“No. We’re not even contemplating that. We understand who our shareholders are and that (they) wish to progress with the merger. As I’ve said publicly many times, TVNZ is very supportive and very enthusiastic about the opportunity,” Power told Mediawatch.

He also made that clear at this week’s Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee (EDSI) hearings at Parliament.

Much of TVNZ’s submission on the ANZPM legislation is about possible political interference or editorial influence if ANZPM is set up as an Autonomous Crown Entity (ACE)  — and Power’s claim that could enable “Muldoon-era control” made headlines.

“The ACE model is the wrong model. It allows for direction. The use of media is currency in politics — and the [tension] between media and politics is very different to some of these other (crown) entities,” Power told Mediawatch.

Independence, interference and financial vulnerability

But a more immediate problem is short-term funding. $109 million year was set in Budget 2022 — but only until 2026.

RNZ board member Jane Wrightson told the EDSI committee on Thursday that a commitment of at least five years was essential. Members of the E Tu trade union endorsed that subsequently.

Two previous attempts by Labour-led governments to deliver public service via TVNZ withered and died when funds ran out and the government changed. Opposition parties have repeatedly described ANZPM as wasteful spending which should be cut.

Power was a minister in the National-led government which repealed the TVNZ Charter and discontinued the funding of TVNZ’s non-commercial digital channels established under Labour.

Is history about to repeat?

“It’s for the government of the day to signal any permanency around that funding. That’s democracy at work,” Power said.

“If you want legislation to endure beyond governments, it’s really important you have cross-party understanding of what you’re trying to achieve — but more particularly that the model itself doesn’t allow any future leverage.”

New services? Give us a clue . . .
The FBoy Island controversy inadvertently highlighted a gap that a joined-up public media outfit could fill.

Earlier this year the Ministry for Social Development proposed engaging an offshore publisher for media content about safe relationships for young people. That angered local producers, including The Spinoff which broke that story.

If New Zealand had a public broadcaster that reached younger people, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to look elsewhere in the first place.

RNZ’s proposed youth service didn’t happen after a backlash over the impact it would have had on RNZ Concert in 2020.  A pared-back online service based on streaming music — Tahi — was later launched instead. TVNZ has an online service for a younger audience — Re: — but there is still no comprehensive national service for younger people.

When the select committee asked TVNZ’s head of content Cate Slater how she would deploy public funding if given a free hand, she identified that as the outstanding opportunity.

But the ANZPM Bill currently before Parliament does not oblige the new media entity to provide any specific services beyond the commercial-free ones already provided by RNZ.

That makes it impossible for the public to know what public service they’re likely to get from ANZPM — or what it will offer that commercial broadcasters cannot provide.

Yet TVNZ is calling for a “less prescriptive” charter.

“My view is that legislation works best when it’s principle-based rather than highly prescriptive, because it’s easy with prescription to omit by error. Whereas in a principle based approach, you end up debating at the margins rather than ‘what’s in’ and ‘out’.

“As things change, as markets change, as viewer trends change the way people use media changes. If the legislation is too prescriptive, it can become out of date,” Power said.

“It’s not RNZ or TVNZ that’s designed this legislation. We’re just trying to make it work. We’re doing our best to try and assist with getting the right tension in those discussions to make sure we get the right outcome.”

Power told the EDSI committee that ANZPM would “create a new culture” of its own. But media academic and public broadcasting advocate Dr Peter Thompson said in his submission the previous public service TVNZ Charter introduced in 2002 “was opposed by many within the company.”

”There is no obvious reason to suppose the ANZPM initiative will be different. Changes in organisational culture and identity requires more than legislation and a public charter stuck on the wall,” he wrote.

Commercial clout

Reporting of this week’s ANZPM hearings zeroed in on the main mutual concern of their own executives — the commercial clout ANZPM could carry.

The legislation does not limit the commercial activities ANZPM might undertake or revenue it might attract — and rival media companies fear it could corner the market in content, advertising and staff.

“The opportunity to be as commercially strong as possible is one that should be taken,” Power told Mediawatch.  

“The new organisation has been described as not-for-profit (but) that doesn’t mean an operating surplus wouldn’t be available — and there’s an opportunity to reinvest in local content, infrastructure and platforms that other listeners and viewers might use to access content from the new entity,” he said.

“If that at some point manages to help relieve the burden on taxpayers, then that’s something that the drafters of the legislation should think about,” he said.

TVNZ’s submission notes that when Budget 2022 was unveiled, the government estimated ANZPM to be a $400 million a year operation, with roughly half the funding from public sources and half from commercial revenue.

TVNZ’s submission said that was “unambitious”

“I’d be worried if somebody had worked that out in advance, because this should be a matter for the new entity to work out,” Power told Mediawatch.

Work in progress — or fait accompli?
“Advertising agencies and media agencies represent 900 businesses across New Zealand who have used TVNZ to access their customers to sell the goods and services to employ people and make a contribution to the economy. This is not something that you can just put a box around and put a number across,” he said.

That relationship is important to TVNZ staff. The recently-released annual report says 300 of TVNZ’s 733 full-time staff earn six-figure salaries.

But many Kiwis will care more about the public service they get from the state-owned media they pay for.

“I think that’s a slightly negative lens to put on the potential here. The legislation is clear that the primary driver of this new organisation is the public media outcomes,” Power told Mediawatch.

“If the commercial arm of the new entity can aid in gaining more revenue to reinvest into local content and to reinvest into public media outcomes, all the better.”

Another flaw in the plan came to light recently when the government’s broadcasting funding agency NZ on Air announced it was “urgently reshaping” its funding policies after being told on September 7 that more than half of its current budget would in future go to ANZPM.

This development had been foreseen long ago, and should have been highlighted by the consultants who worked on the business case and the minister officials overseeing the government’s Strong Public Media programme.

Dr Peter Thompson pointed out that the Joint Innovation Fund run by NZ on Air and RNZ in the past was a precedent that showed co-ordination was possible.

“I think the silence around NZ on Air is one of the things where clarification needs to be sought pretty quickly,” Power said.

The ANZPM plan was hatched behind closed doors and without public input — until the select committee process and this week’s hearings aired concerns.

Does TVNZ believe the government will make any significant changes to the legislation — or the plan cabinet has approved?

“I think all good policy makers  … want the public policy and legislation to endure. There are some changes that need to be made to the legislation to ensure that, and I sincerely hope those with the ability to influence that listen carefully and make some of those changes,” Power said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

We speak to Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío about U.S.-Cuba relations, sanctions and more. He is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where countries are expected to vote again in favor of lifting the 60-year economic blockade imposed by the U.S. on Cuba. “The aim of the United States policy since 1960 has been to make life as difficult and as unbearable as possible for the people of Cuba with the ambition that that would lead to the overthrow of the government,” says Fernández de Cossío. He also discusses Cuba’s abstentions in U.N. votes critical of Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, saying that while Cuba “cannot and does not support” a violation of another country’s sovereignty, the U.S. still bears “huge responsibility” for the conflict because of its push to expand NATO into Eastern Europe.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Progressive U.S. lawmakers joined LGBTQ+ advocates Thursday in condemning the Senate's postponement of a vote on proposed legislation that would codify protection for the constitutionally guaranteed right to same-sex marriage.

"You should be able to marry who you love. This shouldn't be controversial."

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said senators would delay action on the Respect for Marriage Act, of which she is the lead sponsor, until "after the election" in November.

Baldwin explained that the chances of getting the 10 Republican votes needed to pass the measure in an evenly split Senate would increase after the midterm elections. In July, House lawmakers passed a version of the bill by a vote of 267-157, with 47 Republicans joining their Democratic colleagues in voting yes.

"We're very confident that the bill will pass," Baldwin said, according to The New York Times. "But we will need a little more time."

However, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) countered that "we need to vote on equal marriage today."

"Every single member of Congress should be willing to go on the record," she continued. "If there are Republicans who don't want to vote on that before the election, I assume it is because they are on the wrong side of history."

"Equal marriage has been a part of who we are as a nation. We've lived with it for years now," she added. "And protecting it by statute is something every single senator and every single member of Congress should be willing to vote for. And if they're not, they need to go on the record and say so."

"You should be able to marry who you love," tweeted Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). "This shouldn't be controversial. Protect marriage equality now."

Rights groups also blasted the postponement.

"The Respect for Marriage Act is an incredibly necessary, popular, and bipartisan bill—and the lack of 10 Republican yes votes right now is extremely disappointing," Human Rights Campaign interim president Joni Madison said in a statement. "Marriage equality—for both LGBTQ+ and interracial couples—is not and should not be a partisan issue, and to treat it as such is an insult to the millions of families who are impacted."

Madison asserted that the proposed legislation "must be brought to a vote at the earliest possible moment."

In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, "it is clear there's a timely, urgent need to declare that the days of debate around marriage equality are over," she said, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court's June reversal of Roe v. Wade—a ruling that voided half a century of federal abortion rights.

The Respect for Marriage Act was born from fears that the high court's right-wing supermajority would not stop at rolling back abortion rights and could—as Justice Clarence Thomas suggested in a concurring opinion in Dobbs—revisit cases that enshrined constitutional rights to same-sex and even interracial marriage.

"Our fight is not over," Madison vowed. "When the Senate returns, they will have a lot of unfinished business to attend to—including both the Respect for Marriage Act and the Equality Act—to ensure that everyone's rights are protected."

"And with the midterm elections on the horizon," she added, "equality voters—LGBTQ+ voters and our allies—will make our voices heard."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Senate Democrats on Thursday opted to delay a vote on legislation codifying same-sex marriage rights into federal law until after the November midterms, seeking more time to get the 10 Republican supporters needed for final passage.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the first openly gay person to be elected to the U.S. Senate and the lead Democratic negotiator for the Respect for Marriage Act, told reporters she remains "very confident" that the bill will ultimately pass after the high-stakes midterm contests.

Baldwin added that she wants the bill put on the floor for a vote "the day after the election."

Thus far, just three Republicans—Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—have said they will support the Respect for Marriage Act, and Baldwin has been working with the GOP trio to attract more supporters to overcome the 60-vote filibuster.

The bipartisan group had originally planned to release legislative text as soon as Thursday ahead of a potential procedural vote early next week. Meanwhile, Republicans who have yet to back the measure pushed for a delay.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) agreed Thursday to push the vote back after Baldwin, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), and the three GOP supporters requested more time to win additional Republican votes for the bill, which would codify same-sex marriage rights in the face of a potential attack from the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Through bipartisan collaboration, we've crafted commonsense language that respects religious liberty and Americans' diverse beliefs, while upholding our view that marriage embodies the highest ideals of love, devotion, and family," the five lawmakers said in a joint statement Thursday. "We've asked Leader Schumer for additional time and we appreciate he has agreed."

Justin Goodman, a spokesperson for Schumer, subsequently released a statement saying the Democratic leader is "extremely disappointed that there aren't 10 Republicans in the Senate willing to vote yes on marriage equality legislation at this time."

"Because Leader Schumer's main objective is to pass this important legislation, he will adhere to the bipartisan group of senators' request to delay floor action, and he is 100% committed to holding a vote on the legislation this year before Justice [Clarence] Thomas has a chance to make good on his threat to overturn Obergefell."

There's no guarantee of a successful vote in the wake of the November midterms, elections in which Democrats hope to maintain and expand their narrow Senate majority. A recent survey showed that 62% of U.S. voters support enshrining same-sex marriage rights into federal law.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told reporters Thursday that he had hoped "to put everyone on the record" ahead of the midterms, in which GOP opponents of the Respect for Marriage Act such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) are facing off against champions of marriage equality.

"But I understand the decisions that are made about when the prospects are best for passing the measure," Blumenthal added. "I want a law, not just a bill."

Outside progressives have been more adamant in their calls for a preelection vote.

"Chuck Schumer needs to hold this vote now. No 'religious liberty' amendments, no more whipping of votes," Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report wrote on Twitter Thursday morning. "Make Republicans go on record about marriage equality. Make Ron Johnson vote 'no' on codifying gay marriage as he trails in the polls."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, facing a tough reelection contest in November, said during a recent meeting with constituents that he opposes a bill to codify same-sex marriage rights into federal law as the Senate Democratic leadership plans to hold a vote in the coming weeks, warning the protections are under threat from the Supreme Court's conservative majority.

Speaking at a Common Sense Citizens of Washington County meeting last week, Johnson said his comment in July signaling that he saw "no reason to oppose" the Respect for Marriage Act was issued just to get reporters to stop pressing him.

"I would not support it in its current state," Johnson said at the meeting, according to audio obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and posted online Wednesday by the Heartland Signal.

The Wisconsin Republican went on to express his view that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas "is probably right" that Obergefell v. Hodges—a landmark 2015 ruling that requires states to license same-sex marriages—was "wrongly decided."

In his concurring opinion in the June decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, Thomas suggested the Supreme Court should revisit and potentially overturn Obergefell and other rulings, prompting Democrats to respond with legislation aimed at shielding same-sex marriage rights.

Johnson's remarks last week also included a swipe at Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the first openly gay person to be elected to the U.S. Senate and the lawmaker leading efforts to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, which will need at least 10 Republican votes to get through the upper chamber.

The House passed the measure in July with the support of 47 Republicans.

"I'm not happy with the Baldwins of the world who are just opening that wound and opening that debate," Johnson complained Thursday.

Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, Johnson's Democratic challenger in the key battleground state, tweeted in response that the Republican incumbent is "a disgrace and doesn't believe in protecting our rights and freedoms."

"There you have it," Barnes wrote. "Ron Johnson says the 2015 same-sex marriage ruling was wrongly decided and that he won't support the same-sex marriage bill... He's unfit for public office."

Johnson's comments surfaced Wednesday as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that "a vote on marriage equality will happen on the Senate floor in the coming weeks" as a bipartisan group of lawmakers negotiates the bill's final details.

The Associated Press reported that "to win over more Senate Republicans, negotiators are planning to introduce amendments aimed at addressing concerns from some about 'religious liberty'—the rights of religious institutions or religious business owners to oppose same-sex marriage, for example."

"Supporters say such religious liberty is already enshrined in law, but new language would simply make that clear," AP added. "Another proposed tweak to the bill would make clear that a marriage is between two people, an effort to ward off some far-right criticism that the legislation could endorse polygamy."

There was initially some talk among Democrats of attaching the same-sex marriage bill to a must-pass spending measure, but that idea drew criticism from members of both parties and appears to be off the table.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Baldwin expressed confidence that senators are "darn close" to 60 votes for the legislation and said she wants a vote "sooner rather than later."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Twitter user Kajal Hindustani tweeted this video, claiming that a ‘love jihadi’ was entrapping Hindu girls by force. Hindu fundamentalists often use the word ‘Jihadi’ on social media to target Muslims.

Mukesh Kumar, channel head of Sudarshan News, quote-tweeted Kajal’s post, calling for the castration of such individuals. At the same time, he used a pejorative word for transgenders in the tweet. (Archived link).

A user named ‘Yogi Yogesh Agarwal’ also tweeted this video with the same communal claim. (Archived link)

यह देखो लव जिहादी हिंदू बच्चियों को केसे डरा धमका कर अपने जाल में फंसाते हैअगर किसी भी बच्ची को कोई भी इस प्रकार से धमकाए तो डरने की जरूरत नही है तुरंत अपने घर वालो को जानकारी देकर पुलिस में रिपोर्ट दर्ज कराए*तो यह लोग अपने मकसद में कामयाब नही हो पाएंगे pic.twitter.com/9FTTZ9Xnio

— योगी योगेश अग्रवाल (धर्मसेना) (@yogeshDharmSena) July 27, 2022

One Rajesh Keshri also tweeted the footage with the same claim. (Archived link)

Various other users amplified the video with the accompanying claim. 

Fact-check 

Alt News noticed the word ‘Indore’ on the screen. Using this as a clue, we performed a keyword search on Twitter, which led us to a July 26 tweet by Vikas Singh Chauhan, a Network18 journalist. He tweeted the video as an incident from the MIG police station area of Indore. He also mentioned that the name of the accused threatening the girl with a knife outside a cafe in broad daylight is Piyush alias Sanu, who has been arrested by the police.

#इंदौर के एमआईजी थाना क्षेत्र में बदमाश की करतूत कैमरे में कैद, दिनदहाड़े कैफे के बाहर युवती को चाकू से धमकाते कैमरे में कैद, #पुलिस ने सिरफिरे युवक को किया गिरफ्तार,युवती को धमकाने के बाद आरोपी ने खुद के गले पर भी रखा चाकू,आरोपी का नाम पीयूष उर्फ शानू, pic.twitter.com/a0vWQKRJvw

— vikas singh Chauhan (@vikassingh218) July 26, 2022

We performed a keyword search on Google and came across a News18 article dated July 27 covering the attack. According to the report, the incident occurred in the MIG police station area of ​​Indore. The assailant wanted to marry the girl by threatening her with a knife. After the video went viral, the police took cognizance of the matter, registered a case and arrested the accused. The police identified the accused as Piyush alias Sanu, who also confessed to his crime. They also recovered the knife that was used to threaten the woman. The article also contained a picture of the accused after he was arrested by the police. It further confirms that this is indeed the youth seen in the viral video.

We reached out to Gopal Meena, Head Constable of the MIG police station in Indore. He clarified that there was no communal or ‘love jihad’ angle in the matter. He identified the accused as Piyush Rawat, son of Bharat Singh Rawat. Head Constable Meena also confirmed that both the accused and the victim are Hindus, and the former was in police custody.

To sum it up, a video of a young man threatening a woman at knifepoint to force her into marriage was shared by social media users with a communal claim. In reality, both the victim and the accused are Hindus and there is no communal angle in the case.

The post Fact-Check: Muslim youth with a knife threatens a Hindu woman for marriage in Indore? appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Members of Congress alarmed by the U.S. Supreme Court's recent reversal on abortion rights and threats to other basic freedoms on Monday introduced legislation intended to ensure protections for LGBTQ+ and interracial marriages.

"The far-right Supreme Court is waging war on the freedoms of the American people, including the rights of the LGBTQ+ community."

"The Respect for Marriage Act will protect same-sex and interracial marriages from any radical or bigoted decision that may come from the current extreme Supreme Court majority," said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), one of the bill's sponsors, in a statement.

"As chairman of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, I want the LGBTQ+ community to know that this caucus is fighting for them and their right to live freely," he added. "This legislation will protect their marriages and ensure they continue to be recognized, even if a future Supreme Court overturns landmark marriage equality decisions. I am proud of this bill, and I urge Congress to promptly pass this legislation."

Concerns about marriage equality have mounted since Justice Clarence Thomas penned a concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization suggesting that in addition to overturning Roe v. Wade, the court should reconsider the decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges—the last of which legalized same-sex marriages nationwide.

As the bill's sponsors explained, the Respect for Marriage Act would:

• Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA): The Supreme Court effectively rendered DOMA inert with its landmark decisions in United States v. Windsor and Obergefell. This unconstitutional and discriminatory law, however, still officially remains on the books. The bill would repeal this statute once and for all.
• Enshrine marriage equality for federal law purposes: The bill requires, for federal law purposes, that an individual be considered married if the marriage was valid in the state where it was performed. This gives same-sex and interracial couples additional certainty that they will continue to enjoy equal treatment under federal law as all other married couples—as the Constitution requires.
• Provide additional legal protections: The bill prohibits any person acting under the color of state law from denying full faith and credit to an out-of-state marriage based on the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of the individuals in the marriage, provides the attorney general with the authority to pursue enforcement actions, and creates a private right of action for any individual harmed by a violation of this provision.

The push for the bill is being led by Cicilline and the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus' eight co-chairs; House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.); Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.); Tri-Caucus Chairs Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), and Judy Chu (D-Calif.); and Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

"We will not sit idly by as Republicans and their activist judges take our country backward. They started with reproductive rights and they're targeting protections for same-sex marriage next," declared Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.).

Maloney and other Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus co-chairs noted how their own lives could be impacted if Thomas' opinion—which has fueled fresh demands from progressives for his impeachment, expanding the court, and other potential action by Congress—foreshadows a future ruling by the right-wing justices.

"I've been with my husband Randy for 30 years, but we've only spent eight of them as a legally married couple," Maloney explained. "For families like mine, the Respect for Marriage Act is a necessary step to protect our fundamental rights."

Reps. Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones, both New York Democrats, were the first openly gay Black men elected to Congress.

"Justice Thomas' concurring opinion in Dobbs made clear that marriage equality is next on the chopping block."

"Justice Thomas' concurring opinion in Dobbs made clear that marriage equality is next on the chopping block," said Jones. "As the first openly gay, Black member of Congress, this fight is personal to me. I still remember where I was when the New York Legislature passed marriage equality, and when Obergefell was decided years later."

"Progress must be fought for and protected," he continued. "To protect fundamental rights, Congress must use its legislative powers. That's why I'm proud to introduce the Respect for Marriage Act today. It's past time for Congress to establish that marriage equality is the law of the land and ensure Americans across the country can continue to marry who they love without discrimination."

While the Respect for Marriage Act is expected to be voted on in the Democrat-controlled House this week, the legislation would have to make it through an evenly split Senate—in which the filibuster rule enables the GOP to block progressive priorities—to reach President Joe Biden's desk.

The bill's introduction comes after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) came under fire for saying—as some other Republicans in Congress have recently suggested—that the high court was "overreaching" in its 2015 Obergefell decision, which "was clearly wrong."

Among those who criticized Cruz was Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), one of the caucus members backing the new bill.

"This is deeply personal to me. My husband, Phil, and I have been married for more than 15 years," Pocan said. "The House and Senate need to pass the Respect for Marriage Act immediately to protect marriage equality."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade that the high court has no intention of stopping its rollback of Americans' rights, naming cases that centered on marriage equality and the right to obtain contraception as previous rulings that should be revisited.

"This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."

"It does not end at abortion. Republicans will not stop until they have stripped away every freedom they can't load with bullets," said MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting, referring to this week's ruling by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority that New York's restrictions on carrying concealed weapons were unconstitutional.

In his concurrence, quoting Justice Samuel Alito's opinion, Thomas wrote, "I agree that 'nothing in [the court's] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.'"

"For that reason," Thomas wrote, "in future cases, we should reconsider all of the Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."

The 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling affirmed that the government cannot interfere in people's procurement of contraceptives, while Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 overturned a Texas law which had effectively made sexual relationships between people of the same sex illegal in the state. Obergefell v. Hodges, decided in 2015, affirmed that same-sex couples can legally marry.

Like the court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on Friday, the overruling of the decisions listed by Thomas would be deeply unpopular with the American public.

That is unlikely to stop the right-wing majority from overturning those rulings, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

"It is clear he and the court's majority have no respect for other precedents that have been won in recent decades," said Jayapal. "This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."

The three liberal justices who dissented against the ruling denounced Alito's claim that the decision would not have an effect on other rights previously protected by the court.

"They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decision-making over the most personal of life decisions," the dissent reads. "The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not 'deeply rooted in history.'"

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer added:

The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with... So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

Economist Umair Haque said the ruling handed down Friday was "just the beginning, sadly, of the theocratic fascist project reaching its culmination in earnest now."

As progressives called for legislative and executive action to codify the right to abortion care into federal law, attorney and Democratic U.S. House candidate Suraj Patel called on Congress to "move now" to ensure the right to contraception, same-sex relationships, and marriage equality are protected.

"Congress has that power right now. Hold the vote," said Patel. "For 50 years Republicans told us their playbook, they attacked Roe at the edges, we didn't codify it. Let's not be naive and not anticipate what's coming."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade that the high court has no intention of stopping its rollback of Americans' rights, naming cases that centered on marriage equality and the right to obtain contraception as previous rulings that should be revisited.

"This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."

"It does not end at abortion. Republicans will not stop until they have stripped away every freedom they can't load with bullets," said MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting, referring to this week's ruling by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority that New York's restrictions on carrying concealed weapons were unconstitutional.

In his concurrence, quoting Justice Samuel Alito's opinion, Thomas wrote, "I agree that 'nothing in [the court's] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.'"

"For that reason," Thomas wrote, "in future cases, we should reconsider all of the Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."

The 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling affirmed that the government cannot interfere in people's procurement of contraceptives, while Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 overturned a Texas law which had effectively made sexual relationships between people of the same sex illegal in the state. Obergefell v. Hodges, decided in 2015, affirmed that same-sex couples can legally marry.

Like the court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on Friday, the overruling of the decisions listed by Thomas would be deeply unpopular with the American public.

That is unlikely to stop the right-wing majority from overturning those rulings, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

"It is clear he and the court's majority have no respect for other precedents that have been won in recent decades," said Jayapal. "This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."

The three liberal justices who dissented against the ruling denounced Alito's claim that the decision would not have an effect on other rights previously protected by the court.

"They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decision-making over the most personal of life decisions," the dissent reads. "The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not 'deeply rooted in history.'"

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer added:

The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with... So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

Economist Umair Haque said the ruling handed down Friday was "just the beginning, sadly, of the theocratic fascist project reaching its culmination in earnest now."

As progressives called for legislative and executive action to codify the right to abortion care into federal law, attorney and Democratic U.S. House candidate Suraj Patel called on Congress to "move now" to ensure the right to contraception, same-sex relationships, and marriage equality are protected.

"Congress has that power right now. Hold the vote," said Patel. "For 50 years Republicans told us their playbook, they attacked Roe at the edges, we didn't codify it. Let's not be naive and not anticipate what's coming."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

The post Marjorie and Milo: A Marriage Made in…Well, Someplace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon church) works to maintain the public image of a loving-Christian religious group while simultaneously acting as an anti-queer international political organization. If you’re at all familiar with the church, you’re probably aware of their pro-nuclear family / anti-LGBTQIA2s+ politics. What you may not be as aware of is how their current anti-queer beliefs, practices, and policies are tied to 1) their past polygamous practices, as both are rooted in settler-colonial eugenic ideologies, and 2) the World Congress of Families, a known hate group founded and funded by Russian oligarchs.

Polygamy was seen as uncivilized and thus not-white by many in the late 19th century United States. In President Hayes’s 1880 State of the Union, he called out Mormon polygamy proclaiming that “marriage and the family relation are the cornerstone of our American society” and asking Congress to reorganize Utah Territory to allow more “intelligent and virtuous immigrants'' in.

Immigration, marriage, and the family were as central to the rhetoric and politics of this Euro-settler-nation then as they are now. Settler-colonialism “destroys to replace” and “intelligent and virtuous immigrants” who become married and reproductive Euro-settler-couples are essential to the “replace” half of this equation.

More

The post The Roots of the LDS Church’s Opposition to Same Sex Marriage appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by nicholas jacobsen.

[Writing about Jurgen Moltmann’s concept of “hazardous hope:”] “So then, not in trust of any progress but by insistence on just process, might we strengthen, radicalize, even socialize democracy?”

–Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth

Hesiod conceives Eros not merely as the god of sensual love, but as a power which forms the world by inner union of the separated elements; an idea very prevalent in antiquity, especially among the philosophers.

–fr. Greek & Roman Mythology Dictionary at upenn.edu website

Turning hopelessness into a beginning, not a despairing end, is the magic trick the liberal world must learn at this time if we are to invite in the spiritual rescue that is the only possible help for our progressively worsening condition. Like the “hopeless alcoholic” who can’t stop herself from picking up the bottle and will therefore die, through “hoping falsely” we foster the inevitability we are caving into. Although I’m keenly aware of the risk I take using the word love incongruously, outside its proper (church) setting, I must define this problem as a failure of love. The fact that love has come to sound like the prescription of weak minds, that I sound pathetic to myself, like a Jesus freak or half-baked acid casualty nobody wants to sound like, can’t be helped. Use it I must.

Society’s terrifying plunge into divisiveness, brutality, violence, ongoing habitat destruction, species extinction now moving at warp speed – all is beginning to feel inevitable. I recognize inevitability, along with all the valid-sounding excuses that go with it, from a particular viewpoint, having experienced it interpersonally, in my marriage with Orin, and eluded its fatalism many times over. As long as love remains unreal, which is to say, as long as the god Eros stays within the bounds we assign to him, with its winners and losers, the plunge into fragmentation and chaos is inevitable. Love’s power is only found in honesty. Hopelessness has to be confessed in order for love to do it’s work.

These thoughts came to me as Orin and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary Memorial Day weekend. Bringing my marriage into this conversation may appear as absurd as bringing love into it. But if I’m to stick to honesty, grounding my political opinion in non-negotiable reality, it is relevant. No longer are marriage or staying married, or even monogamy required in order to avoid social disapproval. It’s all good, as we say. But if we are going to drop our white man’s forked tongue when we talk about returning to local, sustainable living within our true pluralistic condition, about withdrawing from the system bent on catastrophe and building the new, etc., won’t commitments, vows, covenants become once again relevant? Won’t archaic qualities of loyalty, preservation, patience, forgiveness, etc, have to come back into vogue? But, in the society we have, shaped by secular liberal culture and its ever-expanding freedoms, such voluntary circumscription is unimaginable.

Not so much its longevity, but the energy our marriage has for anarchist or utopian aspiration is due entirely to our mutual willingness to admit hopelessness over and over, to let go, forgive. Borrowing a term from theologian Catherine Keller, we live in a respectful agonism. Moreover, we’ve taught ourselves to see ongoing creativity as the true (transcendent) goal of love over ever-ephemeral “happiness.” “Love’s reality,” then, means to us a call to both the honesty that admits antagonism and the peace-making to restore the condition necessary for creative work, for thought, for breaking out of bourgeois banality, such aliveness being antithesis to the numbing induced in neoliberal banality. As long as the poems and essays, our hymns to meaning, can be written, as long as we understand our public contribution to be advocating for art as social obligation, we feel – at least occasionally – in sync with love’s reality.

Nor perfectly, mind you. But I have come to feel that knowing one is in an agon is not as bad as the absence of such tension. The ideal of a “harmonious partnership” was not granted to me; I’ve come to see that ideal not as enviable, but as a dangerous illusion. When people view monogamy as the enemy of freedom and the cause of social misery, as a young man just did in an email to me, they likely refer to the institution as popularly conceived under that misguided ideal. The illusion of peace requires the consent of both parties never to broach honest conflict between legitimate othernesses, to discount one’s own otherness, to dissolve genuine individuality into the “solution” of bourgeois reality and thus never challenge interpersonally the sleeping giant of underlying, irresolvable antagonism.

The kicker is, in neoliberal reality, this is the only peace we know. Without too much difficulty we can see how this core dishonesty makes peace a meaningless word. Stripped of that illusion of peace, I have had to wrestle not only for my R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as in Aretha’s manifesto, but for my wholeness, my otherness, the identity discarded under the rules of bourgeois peace. This, the struggle for the spiritual dimension of being, a struggle that is fundamentally social as well as individual, both Orin and I – and every person – inherit in common.

That ours may have been a particularly “tough case” we don’t deny, but this makes no difference when the entire society is a tough case, the world is a tough case, and no one is becoming wiser! Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, playing out their enmity in a televised courtroom trial, have placed on exhibition the unraveling of love in our shared market-based, soulless context in which love is surrendered to reality-as-inevitability. Does anyone wonder what happened to the Love that conditions reality instead of yielding to it?

********

I imagine others besides me have been unable to shake off the horror of those deaths in a Texas classroom, an event that occurred 10 days after the racist shooting of 10 grocery shoppers in Buffalo. The day after the massacre in Uvalde, in the afternoon, as my first-grader grandson Nico and I sat together on the front porch swing seat reading Tik-Tok of Oz, he asked me what had happened at that school in Texas. Caught off-balance, I asked him what he’d heard; he’d heard – from the lunchroom monitor – that an 18-year-old boy with a gun had shot his grandmother. The lunch monitor had apparently prudently realized – a bit late – she could or should not say more. I confirmed what he’d been told, and said – being as truthful as I could bear being – there was more to the story but he needed to ask his mother and father about it.

I’m still wondering if I was right to “chicken out;” there has to be a way, I try to convince myself, for adult guardians to carry out their obligation to truth in such instances, to tell a child about horrendous occurrences in real life, real life slaughters entirely outside the scope of Glinda’s, Ozma’s, or the Wizard’s magic, without damaging their precious innocence.

At such a moment, horrified at the destruction of actual “innocents,” one realizes how great is the desire to protect not only our children’s lives, but their innocence! Anguished letters in the Times cry out: why are we impotent to protect the children? This question surely will touch liberal indignation but will not reach to the root of the problem. It does not penetrate past formidable liberal defenses to the place of honesty, to the truth that we cannot protect the innocents because we cannot protect innocence.

The dark and terrible beast slouches toward Bethlehem, unstoppable. Our imaginations crippled, we believe in no evil from which we must pray to be delivered. Due to the repression Freud taught us is part of our socialization, we lose access to the imaginative/true story of the traumatic loss of our own hope, our personal “paradise (innocence) lost” a story that can be regained, but only by extraordinary means. We apprehend evil only objectively, in the historic evils of racism, slavery, Auschwitz, in Carthaginian slaughter, in the genocide against indigenous peoples and the plundering of the earth. We identify present evil with the right-winger second amendment-defending-stolen-election-Fox-news-watching others hugging their Jesus and his promise to save the just from the fiery Apocalyptic end. We do not believe in evil as real as the rust eating our car or the snails devouring our garden.

*********

The Depp vs Heard trial exemplifies the defiance of relatedness – the object being to win, to be vindicated in a court of law – that characterizes 21^st century American politics right down to the family. Were relatedness (love) allowed its ultimacy, the couple might have been brought through their discord to quite different realizations. Society will not go backward; we will not again accept authoritarian rules such as that of Roman Catholicism that, in defense of the Absolute of relationship, forbade divorce. However, we now can see, looking beyond the pain and suffering caused by the Church’s infallible decree, that the reality of relatedness, of interdependence, and the attendant obligations to make peace and reconcile is still real The Church’s rule was meant to enforce that obligation, but the Church did not make it: love is real and now it’s ours to defend.

As society disintegrates, it is that rule of love that calls us to let go of our convenient defenses against its imperium If we are to cease bargaining with love in the way that is now normal, both depending upon and sealing its conditionedness, we must treat its most intense encounters as if they were instances of ultimate meaning, of peace-making and allegiance to truth, and proceed from there learning the lessons we have to learn, making peace where we live. Having overthrown the absolute church, absolute monarchy, the divine rights of church and king, we have now to make direct relationship to that reality that exists and that makes our ultimate obligation as human beings to peace. Because we are freed from being slaves to tradition and custom we must choose for ourselves between conditions that sow hate and and those that foster love. We cannot narcissistically pretend relationships, community, interdependence – the social good – are in place because ours seem to be. Nor can we pretend that committed relationships bind us only until the irreconcilable difference is revealed.

The walls we encounter in intimate relationships, that which is revealed in irreconcilable difference, is the truth of the agon that, in turn has no resolution except in relation to (spiritual) reality. The rewards of such perseverance make it worth taking the chance. The evil or impossible other can be transformed back to simply human other. Evil, then, is immanent, not historic, not partisan, not confined to less-developed societies; it can be spied in that very impulse – one’s own – to enmitize the other while preserving one’s own injured innocence.. Often peace is re-established on the basis of seeing the wounds the other carries, of having one’s own pain seen with compassion. Into that breach, that momentary letting go of animosity, grace appears, and that original inspiriting wholeness (innocence) is felt by both.

Unless someone thinks, amidst this ongoing horror we’re in that we have any choice but to surrender to the rule of love – not as substitute for activism but as the vision that speaks to the human need for unmediated, stable, trustworthy connection and safety over time – then perhaps marriage can still be useful to the common good. Perhaps there are others, horrified by the gun violence but in a state of paralysis as to what to do, no longer able to believe in a political solution from either party, unable to respond to calls from our fellows to traditional hit-the-streets activism, who wait for a different call. The wait is not “an excuse,” not a failure to understand the urgency of the situation. It is due to the natural and inherent desire, long postponed, to feel completeness as a human being, to be reunited with the lost innocence, the imaginatively real that is one’s otherness, therefore one’s basis in the respectful agon of in-common social existence.

At a recent family gathering we four grandparents sat on the porch and talked about Nico’s new drum set, emblematic of his parents’ belief in the priceless value of music. We shared regrets: three of us had picked up, then given up an instrument while still in school, one gave up after several years of harmonica playing in youth bands. Similarly, of the four adult children we have between us, three had taken up instruments but then dropped, probably also left with some regret to this day. The other grandpa made a qualifying point, however, about the life of the artist. He talked about the pain of having gone “as far as you can go” knowing you never can be the best, never can reach that topmost tier.

My view of art is different. I take my art seriously, not imagining I can ever be great but imagining I am responding to a call. This call, not to greatness but coming from the ‘greatness’ – the “other power” in my own soul – is the gift that heals, over and over, the open wound of my lost hope. Creative self-fulfillment no longer may be kept falsely separate from the good for all. Legitimate access to love’s reality is the only empowerment that stands a chance against evil. In the historic bargain we’ve made for our individual freedom, love’s reality has to be accepted with no official guarantor, no certainty except that of, now and then, the vibe of peace.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.

The long-serving New Zealand MP Louisa Wall has fired a broadside at her own Labour Party as she leaves Parliament to take up a Pacific diplomacy role — using her valedictory speech to accuse the party president of leading a corrupt process.

Wall is leaving politics after 14 years — citing a legal battle in the lead-up to the 2020 election over the Manurewa seat as one of the reasons for leaving.

In the days leading up to her final speech at Parliament, she spoke out about a rift with the party’s leadership, claiming the Prime Minister told her directly she would never be a minister.

• READ MORE: Other Louisa Wall reports

Today she slammed the Labour Party for its handling of the Manurewa electorate.

She accused the Labour Party president, Claire Szabó, of leading a “corrupt process”.

“When I was forced out of my electorate in 2020, by the unconstitutional actions of the party president Claire Szabó and some members of council, I was devastated.

“The president accepted a late nomination, did not share the fact of the late receipt with the council until questions were asked and then retrospectively tried to justify and legitimise her actions.”

Agreed to leave
Wall told the House at the conclusion of the spat, she agreed with the Labour Party to leave politics during this Parliamentary term.

“In 2020, I agreed to leave. Because irrespective of the merits of challenging actions, being in a team where there is no appetite for your contribution is not healthy.

“I took the opportunity to complete some of my ongoing work, including in the international advocacy space. I was placed on the list just below where I had been in 2017 and accepted that I was to resign as an MP during this term.”

Wall thanked MPs Michael Wood, Nanaia Mahuta and Tim Barnett for helping her reach this agreement but told the House she was not going of her own volition.

“I stand here today fulfilling my part of the agreement but I want to be very clear that this was not entirely my choice.”

As is custom on Thursday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was not in the debating chamber but deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson watched on.

Despite never holding a ministerial position, Wall has a long list of legislative achievements, including her successful campaign to legalise same-sex marriage.

‘Rapid-fire course’
She told MPs the journey to marriage equality was “a rapid-fire course in process and procedures” not universally supported within the Labour caucus.

“While the deputy leader of the caucus at the time wanted more recognition of civil unions I believed that advocacy for marriage equality was based on fundamental human rights and that civil unions became a stop gap measure because it was not clear that marriage would get over the line,” she said.

“When I expressed this view I was told that this would be the end of my career and I would be on my own.”

Wall said throughout her time in politics she had been able to advocate on housing, period poverty, surrogacy, alcohol policies, revenge porn and abortion safe zones.

With her family watching from the packed public gallery, she finished her speech on a positive note that paid tribute to her previous sporting career.

“So while there have been obstacles to face and overcome I leave knowing I did what I could within those constraints. To use a sporting analogy, I left it all on the field.”

Louisa Wall is taking up a newly-created role as ambassador for Pacific gender equality starting next month.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

दहेज
इस कालू के कान के नीचे 10 तमाचा मारो pic.twitter.com/DPF2fm02Xl

— हम लोग We The People (@humlogindia) March 6, 2022

Dayanand Kamble, Deputy Director (News) at the Directorate General of Information and Public Relations, Government of Maharashtra, tweeted the video gaining over 8 lakh views.

इन्हे “लज्जा” क्यों नहीं आती..? pic.twitter.com/IarAkFQCRv

— Dayanand Kamble (@dayakamPR) March 6, 2022

It was also shared by IPS officer Dipanshu Kabra.

Several mainstream media organisations published reports on the video based on the viral claim. Jansatta wrote that the groom refused to marry because he was given less dowry than his demand. The Indian Express, Zee News, NDTV, DNA India, Times of India, Lokmat, India.com, IBC 24, News18 Kannada are among the news outlets that reported on the video.

The Times of India shared this video on the day of International Women’s Day and posed the question – “Would you wish her a happy women’s day”. The report stated, “Sitting next to a man on a marriage podium she is trying to negotiate her dowry so that he accepts her as his wife. The man is blatant and brazen in his illegal demand. This is the state of some women in India in 2022. So, what do you think?”

Fact-check

With a keyword search, we found this video was posted by a Facebook page called ‘Divya Vikram’ on February 25 and has been viewed more than 70 lakh times. However, the page does not clarify that the video is staged.

We noticed that the page has posted many such videos and it describes itself as a “video creator”.

We contacted the channel and found that it is run by an individual named Vikram Mishra. He told Alt News that he runs a channel called ‘Jai Mithila’ along with his team. Both the people seen in the video are actors. Their names are Amit and Rani. He also informed that the page has posted another video similar to the one viral.

Vikram Mishra also connected us with Amit and Rani who corroborated that they are actors and have worked in many such videos. They found that their video is being shared as a real incident but this isn’t true. Amit and Rani are married to each other and work together.

Two more videos of Amit and Rani were posted on March 8 from the page ‘Divya Vikram’. In the first video, the groom comes for his wedding in a drunken state and the bride refuses to go ahead with the marriage. The second video shows a clumsy Jayamala ceremony.

Several media outlets, thus, picked up a video from social media without verifying the facts of the incident. The video shows a staged drama but was believed to be true.

The post Media outlets fall for staged video of groom refusing marriage if not given dowry appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Priyanka Jha.

Image by Koushik Chowdavarapu.

When speaking of postmodernist philosophy and neoliberal capitalism, the best opening question might be which came first, the philosophy or the economic system. Both are based on an assumption that human life is essentially meaningless, mutable and, in the case of neoliberalism, a means to make a profit from every possible human action. Like Jim Morrison sang in his 1970 release “Roadhouse Blues,” “the future's uncertain and the end is always near.” Therefore, change who you are to whatever you want to be even if it's only for a year or two, privatize anything you can get away with, put a price on it and tell everyone that this is the future ordained.

One can oppose this, but doing so can easily being assimilated into the neoliberal equivalent of the borg on Star Trek—a phenomenon described in Wikipedia like this: “The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other alien species to the Collective through the process of "assimilation": forcibly transforming individual beings into "drones...." Whether one is cross-dressing a la David Bowie, Lou Reed and other so-called glam rockers in the 1970s, becoming an alien as Bowie did at least twice in his career (Ziggy Stardust and The Man Who Fell to Earth) or playing video games where one assumes a character intent on murder, the rejection of the powers that be is ultimately atomized and meaningless. In other words, resistance is futile.

More

The post The Ugly Marriage of Postmodernism and Neoliberalism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.