Is the Gay Rights Movement Anti-Immigrants Rights?

There is certainly room for a discussion about the relationships between the glbt movement and the new, rising immigrants rights movement. But the author of this article doesn't sign their name after accusing the glbt rights movement of ignoring immigrant rights. It doesn't measure up. The issue of glbt immigration has been on the agenda of the gay movement for decades. Besides is the glbt movement a monolith? I don't think so.

Let's all work together and move forward and get the people out onto the streets on April 10, 5PM at 16th and Mission!

The fact that group "X" chooses to concentrate on issue "A" (which is of direct concern to themselves) instead of merging with, working as allies with, or otherwise aiding whose working for issue "B" does NOT make X anti-B.

They are not anti-B even if they end up allied with people working against issue B if those people are willing to provide mutual support but you are not (you consider issue A a distraction from "what is really important" and your conception of working "with" other people/groups is "first we fight my (more important) battle and then when that fight is won I'll help you with yours")

You CAN'T draft allies.

You have NO good reason to assume that the LGBT community is at all unified on any particualr posiiton with regard to immigration issues and it is unreasonable on your part to expect that they rip themsleves apart over taking sides on an issue of minor importance to theselves (collectively).

Haves and have-nots, it's just that simple.

Castro merchants love immigrant money as much as anyone else's, and they will demand a police response, wherever the person sleeping in the doorway is from.

Castro merchants don't represent the GLBT community, they simply profit from it. Most of the glbt community is working class, even if the media, including the gay media, prefers to focus on well-off glbt-ites.

They set the agenda, fund it, and are the spokespeople for it.

Like it or not, there they are-- business owners, homeowners, and campaign contributors. All of them Proud to Be Your Bud(tm).

04/08/06-04/10/06

Gay activists fight for immigrant rights

As the U.S. Senate adjourned Friday for a two-week break without passing final legislation on immigration reform, gay and lesbian immigrants and their supporters were planning rallies and actions to raise awareness about the specific struggles they face.

Many are taking part in a planned "day for immigrant justice" on April 10 and a national immigrant strike on May 1. "We are calling on LGBTQ immigrants and supporters to march together in a contingent," said Leslie Bulbuk, cofounder of the pro-gay immigration group Love Sees No Borders. "The anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant rhetoric dehumanizes people. LGBTQ immigrants are dehumanized not once, but twice."

To show their opposition to congressional immigration proposals, Bulbuk was organizing a gay contingent for a planned immigrant rights march in San Jose, Calif., as part of the April 10 event.

The gay rights group Immigration Equality also has been chiming in on the congressional efforts to stem illegal immigration. "Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender immigrants and their families are uniquely vulnerable," said executive director Rachel B. Tiven. "Detaining more immigrants, with less judicial review, will put the lives of innocent people at risk."

The group recently joined a new coalition of 18 state and national gay rights groups and community centers in calling for fair and equal treatment of gay and lesbian immigrants by Congress. "We all agree that our current immigration system needs reform and share the concerns about safety and security, but we believe reform can be accomplished best through the vision articulated by Cesar Chavez," a coalition statement read, "a vision of a nation and a world where the values of liberty, dignity, fairness, and justice occupy center stage; where persecution, oppression, and discrimination are not political tools that are proudly claimed, but instead, are moral wrongs to be made right." (The Advocate)

LGBT "community" "leaders" aren't intervening here for immigrants, or against their criminalization. Rather, they are intervening for LGBT immigrants, and for citizens who have chosen immigrant partners, to have the right to be within whatever law is eventually established.

If they changed the laws to allow gay partners to stay, but kicked out anyone who (say) didn't have a certain household income, how do you think the above article would read-- if it ran in the Advocate at all?

Look, there's nothing wrong with pursuing your own agenda. But to wrap it up in someone else's, without bringing some kind of aid in its own right.... well, it does seem kind of opportunistic and exploitative, doesn't it?

It sounds very, in a word, bourgeois.

Here's the original article that provoked the controversy;

"Gays first, then illegals

Yes, immigration reform is vitally important. But if Congress wants to debate the extension of equal civil rights to U.S. residents, let’s start with gays and lesbians who are already citizens

By Jasmyne Cannick

An Advocate.com exclusive posted, April 4, 2006

Debate around America’s illegal immigration problem has reached an all-time high. With several versions of various bills being debated in Washington and hundreds of staged protests around the country both supporting and against extending citizenship and other rights to millions of illegal immigrants, America has forgotten that there are legal, taxpaying, and voting citizens in America who don’t yet have all of their rights.

American citizens continue to be denied the right to marry because of their sexual orientation while their families are deprived of access to the 1,138 federal rights, protections, and responsibilities automatically granted to married heterosexual couples.

It’s a slap in the face to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to take up the debate on whether to give people who are in this country illegally additional rights when we haven’t even given the people who are here legally all of their rights.

If we’re going to hold 24-hour Senate sessions using taxpayers’ dollars, let those sessions be used to come up with a comprehensive plan that allows America’s same-gender-loving stakeholders to have the opportunity to have the right to make decisions on a partner’s behalf in a medical emergency or the right to receive family-related Social Security benefits.

While I agree that immigration reform is an important issue—and perhaps it could become the next leading civil rights movement—we haven’t even finished with our current civil rights movement.

Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts got it right when he said, “There is no moving to the front of the line.”

Immigration reform needs to get in line behind the LGBT civil rights movement, which has not yet realized all of its goals.

Which is not to say that I don’t recognize the plight of illegal immigrants. I do. But I didn’t break the law to come into this country. This country broke the law by not recognizing and bestowing upon me my full rights as a citizen. As a black lesbian I find it hard to jump on the immigration reform bandwagon when my own bandwagon hasn’t even left the barn.

President Bush wants a comprehensive guest worker program.

With all due respect, Mr. President, there can be no guest worker program until we resolve the issue of making sure that all lesbian and gay legal workers have the right to take up to 12 weeks of leave from work to care for a seriously ill partner or parent of a partner and the right to purchase continued health coverage for a domestic partner after the loss of a job.

Both Senator Kennedy and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas backed away from insisting that guest workers would have to leave the United States after their initial two-year visa expired, basically guaranteeing that immigrant families wouldn’t be separated.

Well, what about making sure that the children of same-sex couples are protected and not separated from the parent they know and love in the event of an untimely death? Same-sex couples make commitments and form families just like heterosexual couples and need the same protections.

So, you see, America needs to take care of its own backyard before it debates on whether to take care of its neighbor’s backyard.

Lesbians and gays should not be second-class citizens. Our issues should not get bumped to the back of the line in favor of extending rights to people who have entered this country illegally. Bottom line.

Author and poet Audre Lorde once said, “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

While I know no one wants to be viewed as a racist when it comes to immigration reform, as a lesbian I don’t want to move to the back of the bus to accommodate those who broke the law to be here. After all, immigrants aren’t the only ones who want a shot at the American dream.

Cannick is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and can be reached via her Web site, http://www.jasmynecannick.com. She lives in Los Angeles."

article @;

http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid28908.asp

response to Cannick;

"We 55 respectfully disagree

In an “open letter” to The Advocate and to LGBT people everywhere, more than four dozen prominent activists of color take issue with Jasmyne Cannick’s commentary calling for LGBT equality to take priority over rights for illegal immigrants. Quoting Audre Lorde, they remind us, “There is no hierarchy of oppression.” "

article @;

http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid29496.asp

After reading through enough mainstream corporate media the bullshit detectors will be well honed. The Advocate is so inundated with advertisments from pharmaceutical corporations hawking their latest "cure" pill for AIDS, it would seem to be a pharma product catalogue. Wouldn't be surprised to find the softcore journalism of types like Cannick on there trying to distract people from other issues..

Hey, have ya'll ever heard of a "wild goose chase"? Well, ya'll are on one, so get off it..


Here's some news people may be missing out on. We need to change the subject once again;

from Narco News;

http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1736.html


"

Marcos: “Only With a War in the Mexican Southeast” Will They Be Able to Build the Parota Dam in Guerrero

The Zapatista Subcomandante Defies Threats from Those Who Wish to Displace 25,000 People for a Hydroelectric Mega-Project Near Acapulco


By Bertha Rodríguez Santos

The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in Guerrero

April 19, 2006

AGUA CALIENTE, GUERRERO, MEXICO, APRIL 16. 2006: The harsh state repression against members of the Council of Ejidos and Communities Opposed to the Parota Dam (CECOP in its Spanish initials), a group whose members have faced the assassination of three peasant farmers as well as threats to expropriate their land, inspired Zapatista Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos today to warn President Vicente Fox that if the Mexican army attacks these communities rejecting the hydroelectric installation, it will be considered an aggression against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. He declared “they will only be able to build the dam with a war in the Mexican southeast.”


Subcomandante Marcos with Marco Antonio Suástegui Muñoz

Photo: Victor Camacho, Enlace Zapatista

“We want to warn Vicente Fox and his yellow-and-black (colors of the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD) hand in Guerrero, Governor Zeferino Torreblanca, that if the army attacks these lands it will have to attack the mountains of the Mexican southeast as well,” said Delegate Zero before about 1,500 people who had awaited his arrival in the coastal community of Agua Caliente since early this morning.

The combative character of the people of the Guerrero coast made the meeting a special event, where shouts of ¡viva! abounded for the EZLN, the peasant farmers against the Parota Dam, as well as Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vásquez, guerrilla leaders who defended the local campesinos’ rights in the late 1960s and early 70s.

For two hours, Subcomandante Marcos listened to the peasant farmers’ representatives describe the struggle they launched three years ago.

Marco Antonio Suástegui Muñoz, this resistance movement’s spokesman, reported that the hydroelectric dam is a project that the government hopes to develop on the Papagayo River with an investment of $1 billion dollars.

If the dam is built, 42,000 acres of land will be covered with water, and the flooding would affect 25,000 peasant farmers from 36 different communities. Another 50,000 would suffer due to their location below the retaining wall. The destruction and loss of biodiversity would be incalculable as there are many species of both plants and animals native to the area. Thousands of peasant farmers would be displaced from their lands, which for them would be like “wrenching away their lives.”

(Hmm, that's alot of people displaced by dams and flooding. Has this sort of thing happened anywhere else? Think this kind of oppression (theft and/or loss of land) from imperialisto lapdog Sr. Vicente Fox could have ANYTHING to do with the large amounts of people attempting to enter the US? Huh?)



or

Ya'll wanna talk gay? I'll show ya what's gay!!

"AZT: A Medicine from Hell
Anthony Brink

arbrink [at] iafrica.com


The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars, even amongst powerful princes.

Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536), Dutch humanist.

Praise of Folly, ch. 33 (1509).


National Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma has been condemned by just about everyone recently for her heartless decision not to make a drug called AZT available at state expense to HIV-positive pregnant women. It reduces the risk, so it’s said, of the transmission of HIV from mother to child. Politicians and journalists from left to right have joined moist-eyed, hand-wringing doctors pleading for the free provision of AZT to these women, their babies cruelly deprived and doomed to die, they say.

In all the fuss about the minister’s decision on AZT, no-one seems to have stopped to ask, "So what the hell is this stuff anyway?"

In 1964, a chemist, Jerome Horwitz, synthesized a sophisticated cell poison for the treatment for leukaemia*. He called it Compound S. Its formal title is 3’-Azido-3’-deoxythymidine, or Azidothymidine for short, but everyone knows it by its nickname, AZT.

It works like this. Thymidine is one of the four nucleotides (building blocks) of DNA, the basic molecule of life. AZT is an artificial fake, a dead ringer for thymidine. As a cell synthesizes new DNA while preparing to divide in order to spawn another, AZT either steals in to take the place of the real thing, or else disrupts the delicate process by interfering with the cell’s regulation of the relative concentrations of nucleotide pools present during DNA synthesis. That’s the end of the cell line. Cell division and replication, wrecked by the presence of the plastic imposter, comes to a halt. Chemotherapeutic drugs such as AZT are described as DNA chain terminators accordingly. Their effect is wholesale cell death of every type, particularly the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system and those lining our guts. Horwitz found that the sick immune cells went, but with so many others that his poison was plainly useless as a medicine. It was akin to napalm-bombing a school to kill some roof-rats. AZT was abandoned. It wasn’t even patented. For two decades it collected dust forgotten - until the advent of the AIDS era.

<-->

In Europe and the US, HIV-positive ‘long term survivors’ quietly gather to form groups, having sloughed off the terror of the death sentences passed on them by their doctors. Here’s the strangest thing. Without exception, what they find they all have in common is that they all eschewed (or quickly gave up) AZT, related nucleoside analogues like 3TC, and protease inhibitors. Some have pondered the unthinkable: that nearly all medically managed AIDS cases, always terminal, represent that balefully familiar phenomenon in the history of medicine, iatrogenicide - to be killed by the cure. Their reasoning looks less obscure when one reads the AZT package insert. To do so might tempt one to wonder impertinently whether AZT wasn’t AIDS by prescription. Indeed, such perverse conjecture is actually confirmed in capitals: AZT use "MAY BE ASSOCIATED WITH HEMATOLOGIC TOXICITY INCLUDING GRANULOCYTOPENIA AND SEVERE ANEMIA" (destruction of white and red blood cells respectively), and "PROLONGED USE OF RETROVIR HAS BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH SYMPTOMATIC MYOPATHY (gross atrophy of muscle tissue) SIMILAR TO THAT PRODUCED BY HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS". As to the latter alibi, history will judge whether the thousands of healthy HIV-positive people who embarked on their metabolic poison treatment and wasted away (as the AZT insert predicted) would have died had they ignored doctor’s orders and thrown their pills away. Here the syphilis story is instructive.

Before the introduction of mercury and arsenic salts as a treatment for this clap, the organic brain damage and dementia that signaled ‘tertiary-‘ or ‘neuro-syphilis’ was quite unknown to medicine, and then disappeared when penicillin replaced the older decoctions. The moral is hard to miss.

"


http://www.aidsinfobbs.org/debate.html


or

Ya'll wanna talk African issues? I'll show ya what's African!!

"Toxic Gumbo

In the "Cancer Belt," Louisiana Black Communities
Fight Industrial Polluters

By Ron Nixon

Special to SeeingBlack.com

A string of lights illuminate the night sky over the rural, 100-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. During the day, these lights give way to clouds of smoke that rise from the giant mechanical structures that dot the area's landscape. The structures belong to 138 companies that comprise a virtually who's who of the petrochemical industry: Texaco, Borden, Occidental Chemical, Kaiser Aluminum, Chevron, IMC-Agrico, Dow, Dupont to name a few.

State and local officials call this progress. The petrochemical industry, they say, contributes billions of dollars and jobs to the state and local economies. Residents who live in the areas nearby the industry call it another name: "Cancer Alley." For them, the area's industry has yielded few jobs, destroyed the natural environment and brought a host of illnesses they attribute to emissions from the plants. Residents say the area is but one more example of what they call environmental racism—the targeting of communities of color for undesirable facilities.

A number of studies suggest that such claims are not unfounded. Nationally, a 1987 study by the United Church of Christ's Commission on Racial Justice found Blacks were four times were more likely to live in areas with toxic and hazardous waste sites than Whites. A 1992 investigation by the National Law Journal found that when government does enforce environmental regulation and fine companies, fines are much higher in White communities than in Black ones. In Louisiana, reports by the US Commission on Civil Rights and an unreleased report by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region Six, have raised concerns about the location of chemical plants and their possible impact on the health of their neighbors, who are primarily people of color."
"

http://www.seeingblack.com/x040901/toxic_gumbo.shtml

Yes, must admit i also have fallen for the meaningless 'controversial' debates found in corporate media outlets also. Everytime this happens we neglect the really important issues that need immediate and constant attention while we debate (like a dog chasing it's tail)
trivial meaningless tripe from folks like Cannick who masquerade as journalists. Maybe she trying to fill Condi Rice's myriad brands of shoes, eh?