A Curious Eye

“Nothing happens just because we are aware of modern-day slavery,” the group says on its website, “but nothing will EVER happen until we are.”

(CNN) — In the next few days, the Boy Scouts of America is expected to announce whether it plans to change its longstandingnational policy against openly gay members.

Many parents of Scouts have voiced their concerns, saying homosexuality goes against the teachings of their faith. But many others find the ban on gays out of sync with the ideals of scouting — and of the nation as a whole.

The Boy Scouts controversy perhaps illustrates where America stands on gay rights.

Divided, still. But many more Americans empathize with gay Americans today. Many of those who have been crusading for decades to win more rights now say they have reached a precipice.

Political activists must watch what they say on the likes of Facebook and Twitter, sites which will become the “next big thing in law enforcement”, a leading human rights lawyer has warned.

John Cooper QC said that police are monitoring key activists online and that officers and the courts are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to social media. But, speaking toThe Independent, he added that he also expected that to drive an increase in the number of criminals being brought to justice in the coming months.

“People involved in public protest should use social media to their strengths, like getting their message across. But they should not use them for things like discussing tactics. They might as well be having a tactical meeting with their opponents sitting in and listening.

tudents and their supporters throughout the Canadian province of Quebec are celebrating the ousting of Liberal Premier Jean Charest, the promise of the withdrawal of Bill 78 and most importantly the freeze in tuition fees. This victory comes after six months of student strike involving more than 190 000 students.

Quebec students who already paid the lowest tuition fees across North America were faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Even if the planned increase had gone ahead, Quebec students still would have pay less than in any other Canadian province. Why? Quebec students have a strong tradition of fighting for free education since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. And if you fight you can win!

Read more at EducationActivistNetwork.com

For years, gay rights organizations and major civil rights organizations viewed each other warily. African American leaders often saw the gay rights groups as insensitive to racial concerns, and some resented the movement’s use of civil rights language to make the case for same-sex marriage. Advocates for gay rights, in turn, sometimes blamed socially conservative African Americans for their defeat in crucial electoral battles.

But since the relationship reached something of a crisis with the passage ofProposition8, California’s ballot initiative against same-sex marriage, in 2008, leaders in both movements have made an effort to bring their groups closer together.

Now, a series of conversations among leaders in the gay, black and Latino communities have borne significant fruit: On May 19, the board of the NAACP formally voted to endorse same-sex marriage.

And then, Tuesday, representatives of several national gay rights organizations gathered at New York City’s Stonewall Inn, often described as the birthplace of their movement, to announce that they would march to protest the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practice, under which the police each year have been stopping hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, most of them black or Latino, in an effort to prevent crime.

Keep reading at SFGate.com

• Politically active, young progressives most often find themselves in the work as a result of family influences. They aren’t having grand epiphanies at lectures by prominent people or even recruited heavily by their friends. Their understanding and commitments come from observing or experiencing daily struggle.
• People active in Occupy and those active in community organizations are similarly disenchanted with the electoral system. Their frustration was less about the Obama administration than it was about the dysfunctionality of the electoral and legislative systems generally.
• All our participants named a dominant doctrine of individualism as a critical barrier to progressive change, but people involved with Occupy had a more explicit critique of capitalism as a system than those involved in other organizations.
• Most respondents felt the need to address the racial dimensions of inequality, but they both wanted to include other systems in that analysis, and had few tools with which to bring in race with any combination of other systems like class, gender and sexuality.

Keep reading for advise on how to work with young organizers at ColorLines.com

A new report from the Applied Research Center concludes that young progressive activists care about racial justice, class divides, and gender issues. They’re worried about widespread ignorance, complacency, and the danger of unchecked capitalism. They also don’t have much faith in Obama—or much use for the upcoming election.

The report was compiled using information from several focus groups of progressive activists in Portland, Oakland, Atlanta, Baltimore, and New York. The ARC chose participants (about half of them white, half people of color) with “experience as a paid employee, volunteer, or small donor of a social justice or community organization,” or who had participated in the Occupy movement.

Responses to several questions were divided along racial lines; for instance, 81 percent of people of color said their activism was influenced by a personal or family experience, as opposed to 52 percent of white participants. Some answers were also split according to whether or not people were OWS-affiliated. Occupiers ranked racial justice as a lower priority than non-Occupiers. But one sentiment was virtually universal: The 2012 presidential election wasn’t a major motivator for their work.

Keep Reading at Good.is

Co-founder of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries, longtime Los Angeles resident Harry Hay would have turned 100 years old on Saturday, April 7. He is widely regarded as the father of the American gay rights movement.

By all accounts, Hay was amajor league rebel, holding close to his principles and left-wing political beliefs and sometimes clashing with the gay rights movement as it became more organized over the decades. “I condemn the national gay press for its emphasis on consumerism,” he once said.

Hay was born in 1912 in England and moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1919. By 1923, he realized he was attracted to other boys. In 1950, he helped found the Mattachine Society, one of the first organized gay rights groups in the United States.

Hay was not only a gay rights activist but a labor union advocate and Communist. His interest in political activism would continue throughout his life, taking up a water rights cause, for example, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lived for a period of time.

The activist was also an “anti-assimilationist,” believing that joining American mainstream society would be harmful to the gay community.

Keep reading at LAWeekly.com

It’s almost six years since Twitter was founded. What’s the next web tool poised for explosive growth? It may be Change.org, which boasts almost 10 million active users and is adding more than a million users a month. The big question is not whether its investors and about 100 employees will get rich off social entrepreneurship. It’s whether Change.org will change the world.

That URL went through several lame incarnations in recent years before becoming, in its own words, “a social action platform that empowers anyone, anywhere, to start, join and win campaigns for social change.” The site is neutral — think YouTube — and hosts about 10,000 campaigns a month from more than 150 countries. Some of them are sponsored by organizations such as Amnesty International and the Humane Society that pay the site to host their petitions; most, however, are homegrown efforts focused on local issues.

So far, the online petitions have garnered anywhere from a few dozen signatures to more than a million. The biggest — with more than 1.3 million signatures — is one calling for passage of Caylee’s Law, named after Caylee Anthony, which would make it a felony for parents or guardians not to notify law enforcement of a missing child within 24 hours.

Read More- Bloomberg.com

Undercover police officers routinely adopted a tactic of “promiscuity” with the blessing of senior commanders, according to a former agent who worked in a secretive unit of the Metropolitan police for four years.

The former undercover policeman claims that sexual relationships with activists were sanctioned for both men and women officers infiltrating anarchist, leftwing and environmental groups.

Sex was a tool to help officers blend in, the officer claimed, and was widely used as a technique to glean intelligence. His comments contradict claims last week from the Association of Chief Police Officers that operatives were absolutely forbidden to sleep with activists.

The one stipulation, according to the officer from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a secret unit formed to prevent violent disorder on the streets of London, was that falling in love was considered highly unprofessional because it might compromise an investigation. He said undercover officers, particularly those infiltrating environmental and leftwing groups, viewed having sex with a large number of partners “as part of the job”.

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Both communities live under laws that treat them as less-than-human.

Of course, as we all know, queer folks are effectively treated as second-class citizens. Or so our rhetoric says. Queer folks are clearly denied certain critical rights, and in the heterosexist culture in which we live, heterosexuality and heteronormativity are certainly privileged. Queer folks face job discrimination and discrimination which privileges heterosexual partnerships over theirs. But I get very frustrated when the queer community posits that it is somehow inherently second-class. Not to discount the injustice that the queer community faces, but I believe the immigrant community has even more claim to the term than we do.

Not only is it exceptionally difficult for immigrants (especially those who come to the US undocumented) to become citizens in the first place, but undocumented immigrants, for the fact that they lack a green card or social security number, are effectively legally, politically, and economically screwed in the US. They work jobs that those privileged enough to be citizens wouldn’t dream of; they work for pay and in conditions which we’d never accept; and to top it all off, they don’t even get to vote out of office all the politicians who keep screwing them. And they can’t report anything to the police, if they are maltreated or abused or robbed, for fear of deportation. So one could say the “second-class citizen” identity, if we truly believe it’s an honest representation of the queer community, is, in fact, a shared identity with the immigrant community.

Both communities are often scapegoated as the cause of the problems in US society and are often framed as “anti-American” or a threat to “American values.”…

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