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katyshannon

South Dakota Could Pass 'Bathroom Bill' Affecting Transgender Students | TIME - 0 views

  • South Dakota is on the cusp of becoming the first state in the nation to require public school students to use facilities like bathrooms based on their “chromosomes and anatomy” at birth.
  • The so-called “bathroom bill,” which passed the state House in early February and is being debated by the state Senate Tuesday, marks a revival of the charged fights that played out in states across the country in 2015.
  • At least five other states have considered similar “bathroom bills” this session, and scores of other measures that LGBT rights advocates consider discriminatory are pending in legislatures around the U.S.
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  • Among them are variations on a proposal that exploded in Indiana last year, when controversy over a so-called religious freedom law became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over religious belief and legal equality. The Hoosier State’s measure led to an estimated $60 million in lost revenue, and after weeks of economic and political pressure, Indiana Governor Mike Pence approved revisions to the law clarifying that businesses couldn’t use it to turn away LGBT patrons.
  • To many supporters, these bills are necessary to protect deeply held religious beliefs and are worth the controversy and lost revenue. To critics, however, the measures seemed aimed at allowing people to treat LGBT citizens differently, based on moral opposition to homosexuality and transgenderism, and serve as a reminder that the lessons of the Indiana fight were fleeting.
  • The fight in South Dakota echoes earlier clashes over gender identity and bathroom use of transgender people. The sponsor of the South Dakota bathroom measure, state Rep. Fred Deutsch, has argued in committee testimony that it is necessary to protect the “bodily privacy rights” of “biologic boys and girls” and that transgender students should be offered alternate accommodations if they do not wish to use the facilities that correspond to their sex assigned at birth.
  • The fight has played out at the state level largely because there is no federal law that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The Equality Act, a federal bill that would create such protections, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress.
  • Rebecca Dodds, the mother of a transgender son who recently graduated from high school in the state’s famed Black Hills, said compelling students to use a separate facility could force them to out themselves to their peers, which could lead to harassment or violence.
  • Though the bill does not specify what those accommodations would be, schools that have dealt with conflicts over bathroom use have often instructed transgender students to use staff or nurse facilities, or facilities in buildings separate from their peers. The Department of Justice has issued several rulings and opinions that say such treatment of transgender students amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX, though federal courts are still weighing the issue.
  • It extends protections for people with three moral beliefs that are laid out in the bill’s text: (1) Marriage is or should only be recognized as the union of one man and one woman (2) Sexual relations are properly reserved to marriage (3) The terms male or man and female or woman refer to distinct and immutable biological sexes that are determined by anatomy and genetics by the time of birth.
  • While critics worry about such bills being used to turn away LGBT people from housing, jobs or businesses, they also worry it could open the door to a broader insertion of personal morality in the public sphere. A pharmacist might, for instance, refuse to fill a birth control prescription for an unmarried woman or a child care agency might refuse to look after a boy or girl with gay parents, without risk of losing their state licenses.
  • Speaking in support of the bathroom bill, a representative from South Dakota Citizens for Liberty said the measure offers a good compromise: “It allows for the sensitive accommodation of students who are experiencing personal trials,” Florence Thompson testified at a hearing of the Senate education committee on Feb. 11. “And does so without giving preferential treatment to a tiny segment of the student population at the expense of the privacy rights of the vast majority.”
  • Meanwhile, the majority of states lack LGBT non-discrimination laws, although a bill in Pennsylvania will likely add sexual orientation and gender identity to the state’s non-discrimination protections.
  • In Georgia, where lawmakers are considering at least four religious freedom bills, a group of businesses—including Coca-Cola, AT&T and Delta—has formed to promote “inclusive” policies, explicitly mentioning sexual orientation and gender identity as qualities that should be respected.
  • In South Dakota, dollars and cents may determine whether the bathroom bill passes too, with the ACLU arguing that the passage of such a law would put the state in direct conflict with federal policy—and therefore all but guarantee costly litigation for school districts that are forced to choose to follow one or the other. Failing to comply with guidance from the Department of Education, which has said that students’ gender identities must be respected, could run the risk of costing local districts hundreds of millions in federal funds.
  • Yet supporters like Deutsch say that the guidance coming from the federal government is the reason such bills are needed, so that South Dakota won’t be pressured into providing facility access for transgender students that is not yet explicitly laid out in federal law.
rachelramirez

Transgender Bathroom Bills Are a Statewide Trend | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

  • The growing trend of transgender ‘bathroom bully’ bills
  • When she was a senior in high school, she worked to help craft California’s School Success and Opportunity Act, a 2013 law — the first of its kind in the nation — that requires the state’s public schools to allow trans students to use the bathrooms and play on the sports teams that correspond with their gender identities.
  • Nevada Assemblywoman Victoria Dooling, a Republican, proposed a bill on March 19 that would require kids at public schools to use the restrooms and showers that correspond to their biological sex at birth.
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  • Opponents of the Kentucky legislation call it the “bathroom bully” bill because they say it would open the door for children to judge each other based on perceived gender identity.
  • Lawmakers in Florida proposed a bill in February that applies to any sex-segregated public facility, not just in public schools, and calls for a $1,000 fine for violators and a potential prison term of up to a year.
  • A bill introduced in the Texas legislature in February would bar someone from entering a locker room or bathroom meant for women if that person has a Y chromosome. Violating the law would be a felony, and attendants who repeatedly allow trans people to enter could be charged with a felony and do jail time, according to the bill’s text.
  • Gender identity and expression is included in Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, a 1972 law that protects all public school students from gender discrimination.
johnsonma23

Mississippi to join states' suit against Obama's transgender bathroom policy | MSNBC - 0 views

  • Mississippi to join states’ suit against Obama’s transgender bathroom policy
  • Mississippi plans to back the 11 other states that filed a lawsuit Wednesday to block the Obama administration’s transgender bathroom policy at public schools
  • Texas is leading the lawsuit, and governors from Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Utah are also on board.
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  • ordered all of the nation’s public schools to honor transgender students’ bathroom of choice.
  • “into laboratories for a massive social experiment.”
  • denying workers from using a bathroom based on their gender identity amounts to sex discrimination.
cjlee29

Ted Cruz, Attacking Donald Trump, Uses Transgender Bathroom Access as Cudgel - The New ... - 0 views

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  • As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seeks every possible edge to stop Donald J. Trump, he has seized on a once-obscure issue with a proven power to inflame conservatives: letting transgender women use women’s bathrooms.
  • a state with many social conservatives that is all but a last stand for him in his fight to deprive Mr. Trump of the Republican presidential nomination.
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  • Mr. Cruz has alternated between mockery and outrage nearly every day in highlighting Mr. Trump’s stance
  • Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree that grown men should be allowed to use the little girls’ restroom
  • campaign’s private polling indicates that the bathroom issue has the power to help close the gap
  • In leveraging the issue, Mr. Cruz has raised the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms
  • conservatives around the country have effectively invoked to defeat anti-discrimination laws
  • The topic could surface in July at the Republican convention, where a fight is already brewing in the platform committee to overturn the party’s historical objection to same-sex marriage.
  • Even with the transgender protections deleted, the bill died.
  • Social conservatives in Indiana have been on high alert since last year, when Gov. Mike Pence and fellow Republican lawmakers amended a so-called religious freedom law
  • He said Mr. Cruz’s attack on Mr. Trump was meant to show that Mr. Trump is a liberal who supports the right of transgender people to “choose the bathroom that aligns with their identity that day.”
  • But it was North Carolina that thrust the issue into the nation’s consciousness last month, after state lawmakers passed a law prohibiting transgender people from using a public restroom that does not correspond to the gender on their birth certificate.
  • Later, Mr. Trump amended his stance, saying it was up to cities and states to decide on their own.
  • That did not stop Mr. Cruz from saying the country had gone “stark raving nuts
  • She added that 85 to 90 percent of sexual assault victims know their attackers. “Pay attention, read the news, get an understanding,” she said. “This whole argument about going to the bathroom is just ridiculous.”
carolinehayter

14-hour days and no bathroom breaks: Amazon's overworked delivery drivers | Amazon | Th... - 0 views

  • Fourteen-hour shifts were common because delivery service providers wouldn’t allow drivers to return any packages from their routes and the pressure to meet delivery rates meant Meyers used a plastic bottle to go to the bathroom on a daily basis.
  • “Any time a van is off route or stops for longer than three minutes, it notifies the delivery service provider. Amazon encourages the delivery service owners to cut down on said stops
  • Amazon uses contractors for delivery services, a move Meyers said makes it exceedingly difficult for workers to organize, and he said, contributes to drivers being overworked and underpaid by the delivery service providers who are paid bonuses on metrics such as route completion percentages.
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  • “If Amazon decides to take millions of jobs and essentially cut their labor costs in half, that only comes out of workers’ pockets,” added Korgan. “That creates a major economic problem in an industry that for the last 50 years has done a good job of supporting millions of middle-class jobs.”
  • “This sort of model is problematic for the entire industry,” said Randy Korgan, the director of the Teamster’s Amazon Project. “They’re willing to loan these small subcontractors money, get them access to their vans and help them advertise for employees to offload all the responsibility that would normally fall on Amazon.”
  • Amazon has been publicly opposed to unionization and organizing among their employees, most recently through an anti-union campaign launched ahead of a union election vote at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, which has included anti-union captive audience meetings and sending mass texts and ads to workers encouraging them to vote against the union.
  • Drivers for Amazon contractors have complained of the surveillance and pressure they receive through cameras and a tracking app, Mentor.
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  • Drivers for Amazon delivery service providers also face fear of retaliation for trying to organize in their workplaces.
  • Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have gone back and forth every week about who is the wealthiest person in the world and I can’t even pay my rentDerrick Flournoy
  • “Sixteen dollars an hour isn’t enough for the amount of work that we have to do. We’re a representation of the wealthiest company in the world and we’re barely making enough money to live,”
  • An Amazon spokesperson claimed drivers have built-in time through their routes for breaks and provide a list of nearby restrooms in the delivery app. They did not comment on the unfair labor practice charge or on organizing efforts by drivers.
marleymorton

Trump expected to revoke rules on transgender bathrooms: draft document - 0 views

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    Republican President Donald Trump's administration was expected to revoke landmark guidelines issued to public schools in defense of transgender student rights, according to a draft document seen by Reuters. The draft reverses former Democratic President Barack Obama's signature initiative on transgender rights, which instructed public schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.
nataliedepaulo1

Fight Erupts in Trump Administration Over Transgender Students' Rights - 0 views

  • Fight Erupts in Trump Administration Over Transgender Students’ Rights
  • One filing deadline is coming up this Thursday in the case before the Supreme Court involving the Virginia transgender boy, Gavin Grimm. He sued the Gloucester County School Board two years ago after the board refused to allow him to use the boys’ bathroom and told him he could use a separate bathroom in a converted janitors closet. The Obama administration had rejected that type of accommodation as unacceptable and discriminatory.
Javier E

Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • WeWork locations in New York, where the throw pillows implore busy tenants to “Do what you love.” Neon signs demand they “Hustle harder,” and murals spread the gospel of T.G.I.M. Even the cucumbers in WeWork’s water coolers have an agenda. “Don’t stop when you’re tired,” someone recently carved into the floating vegetables’ flesh. “Stop when you are done.”
  • Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape. “Rise and Grind” is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a “Shark Tank” shark. New media upstarts like the Hustle, which produces a popular business newsletter and conference series, and One37pm, a content company created by the patron saint of hustling, Gary Vaynerchuk, glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.
  • From this point of view, not only does one never stop hustling — one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk.
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  • “Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers. Why else would LinkedIn build its own version of Snapchat Stories?
  • Most visibly, WeWork — which investors recently valued at $47 billion — is on its way to becoming the Starbucks of office culture. It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.
  • hymns to the virtues of relentless work remind me of nothing so much as Soviet-era propaganda, which promoted impossible-seeming feats of worker productivity to motivate the labor force
  • Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.
  • Elon Musk
  • He tweeted in November that there are easier places to work than Tesla, “but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”
  • This is toil glamour, and it is going mainstream.
  • Today’s messages glorify personal profit, even if bosses and investors — not workers — are the ones capturing most of the gains. Wage growth has been essentially stagnant for years.
  • the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all. Therefore any life hack or company perk that optimizes their day, allowing them to fit in even more work, is not just desirable but inherently good.
  • this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,
  • Jonathan Crawford, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, told me that he sacrificed his relationships and gained more than 40 pounds while working on Storenvy, his e-commerce start-up. If he socialized, it was at a networking event. If he read, it was a business book. He rarely did anything that didn’t have a “direct R.O.I.,” or return on investment, for his company.
  • Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, said he tried to limit himself to five 11-hour days per week, which adds up to an extra day of productivity. “If your peers are competitive, working a ‘normal workweek’ will make you look like a slacker,” he wrote in an email
  • Millennials, Ms. Petersen argues, are just desperately striving to meet their own high expectations. An entire generation was raised to expect that good grades and extracurricular overachievement would reward them with fulfilling jobs that feed their passions. Instead, they wound up with precarious, meaningless work and a mountain of student loan debt.
  • In 17th-century England, work was lauded as a cure for vice, Mr. Spencer said, but the unrewarding truth just drove workers to drink more.
  • “People aren’t going to stand for this,” he said, using an expletive, “or buy the propaganda that eternal bliss lies at monitoring your own bathroom breaks.” He was referring to an interview that the former chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, gave in 2016, in which she said that working 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”
  • Ms. Mayer’s comments were widely panned on social media when the interview ran, but since then, Quora users have eagerly shared their own strategies for mimicking her schedule. Likewise, Mr. Musk’s “pain level” tweets drew plenty of critical takes, but they also garnered just as many accolades and requests for jobs.
  • The grim reality of 2019 is that begging a billionaire for employment via Twitter is not considered embarrassing, but a perfectly plausible way to get ahead. On some level, you have to respect the hustlers who see a dismal system and understand that success in it requires total, shameless buy-in. If we’re doomed to toil away until we die, we may as well pretend to like it. Even on Mondays.
Javier E

I Practiced Social Distancing Before Coronavirus. It Works. - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Many people are starting to talk about social distancing as a strategy to combat the virus, which means limiting activities outside the home to obtaining health care, acquiring food and essential supplies and going to work, if working from home isn’t an option.
  • This approach most likely sounds novel to many, and possibly even draconian to some, but it is very familiar to me.
  • And it works.I should know. I am a physician who practiced social distancing for 18 months to protect my premature babies.
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  • The concept is simple: Those practicing social distancing should stay home as much as possible and look to keep a gap of six feet or more between themselves and others if they do leave the house.
  • The reasoning: Fewer interactions with people and the added distance when you must interact means less chance of exposure and hence infection with the virus. If you do get infected, social distancing lowers your chance of spreading the infection to someone else.
  • In 2003, my triplets were born extremely early. Aidan died at birth and my two surviving boys, Oliver and Victor, born at 26 weeks, were admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit
  • After almost three months, the boys were ready to come home on oxygen. My husband and I were told to limit their interactions with society — especially with other children. Even a cold could be devastating, never mind influenza. The best medical advice was to do everything possible to keep them from getting an infection in their first year of life.
  • How did I do it?I never shook hands, I nodded and smiled.
  • I used a lot of hand sanitizer — getting a twin stroller laden with oxygen tanks in and out of a public bathroom made hand washing a challenge.
  • Grocery shopping took place primarily late at night, long after my partner came home.
  • Everyone who entered the house — whether medical professional, friend or family — was required to be fully vaccinated and to either use hand sanitizer at the door or head straight to the bathroom to wash their hands
  • We declined visits from people with children in day care or school.
  • Some friends drifted away. A few stuck around.
  • This was pre-Facebook. Smartphones and home Wi-Fi didn’t exist. There were no video chats. I called friends and family from our landline
  • I coped by going for drives with my boys after medical appointments — they were already loaded in the car with their oxygen tank
  • I took them for long walks in the double stroller.
  • When the boys came off oxygen at 9 months, we relaxed a little and occasionally went to restaurants.
  • Social distancing is an effective infection-control practice for those at high risk
  • During our 18 months of social distancing, I kept two weeks’ worth of food at home in case one of us got sick. Assuming most illnesses run their course in a week or less, this was enough backup so the sick parent could quarantine in the basement and the other wouldn’t have to take the boys to the grocery store
  • I never hoarded toilet paper (honestly, I have no idea what’s up with that). As a gynecologist, I can confidently tell you that if you do run out of toilet paper, a bottle of tap water squeezed on your anus is a fine hygiene hack for a bidet
  • Just blot dry with a face cloth, which can be laundered for reuse. The panic-buying of hand sanitizer also stumps me, given the effectiveness of a 20-second wash with soap and water.
  • Social distancing is a privilege, but it shouldn’t be. It should be supported by the government as a public health measure. The faster and the more efficiently a society can practice social distancing in the face of a viral pandemic, the less severe the eventual impact for everyone.
abbykleman

North Carolina Lawmakers Reach Deal to Repeal So-Called Bathroom Bill - 0 views

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    RALEIGH, N.C. - North Carolina Republican lawmakers said late on Wednesday that they had reached a deal to repeal the state's controversial law prohibiting transgender people from using restrooms in accordance with their gender identities.
clairemann

Heavily Armed Man In Body Armor Arrested After Walking Into Atlanta Grocery Store | Huf... - 0 views

  • Police arrested a man who walked into an Atlanta grocery store with five guns and body armor on Wednesday, just days after a mass shooting at a Colorado supermarket, authorities said.
  • Police were called shortly after 1:30 p.m. to the Atlantic Station Publix where the manager told them an armed man had entered the store and headed straight to the bathroom, police spokesman Officer Anthony Grant said.
  • “A witness observed the male and alerted store management, who then notified police,” Grant told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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  • Officers saw the man leave the bathroom and quickly held him for questioning. According to police, his weapons included two long guns and three pistols, all of which were concealed.
mimiterranova

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Signs Transgender Athlete Bill Into Law : NPR - 0 views

  • Florida's Republican governor signed a bill Tuesday barring transgender females from playing on public school teams intended for student athletes born as girls, plunging the state into the national culture war over transgender rights.
  • "In Florida, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports,"
  • The NCAA, which oversees college athletics, has said it has "a long-standing policy that provides a more inclusive path for transgender participation in college sports." The NCAA currently requires transgender women to get treatment to lower their testosterone levels before they can compete in women's sports.
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  • The measure approved by the GOP-led Legislature takes effect July 1. It says a transgender student athlete can't participate without first showing a birth certificate saying she was a girl when she was born
  • The law would not bar female athletes from playing on boys or men's teams.
  • Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David said the new law would not only harm transgender girls. "All Floridians will have to face the consequences of this anti-transgender legislation — including economic harm, expensive taxpayer-funded legal battles, and a tarnished reputation."
  • The Florida law mirrors an Idaho law, the first of its kind when enacted last year, that is now mired in legal challenges. GOP governors in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee recently signed similar measures.
  • North Carolina stood to lose $3.8 billion over a dozen years because of a so-called "bathroom bill." Those losses were averted when a 2019 settlement kept the state from barring transgender people from using bathrooms that conformed to their gender identity.
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aleija

Opinion | The Sound of Silence on Abortion - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Back in 2014, when the Arizona Legislature passed a bill to provide business owners with a religious excuse to discriminate against gay people, the N.F.L. threatened to move Super Bowl XLIX out of the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the bill.
  • In 2015, when the N.C.A.A. led a pushback from its Indianapolis headquarters against a similar bill that the Indiana Legislature passed, Gov. Mike Pence said it was all a “great misunderstanding” and eventually signed a watered-down version that met the demands of the N.C.A.A. and other sports organizations that had protested.
  • In 2017, the North Carolina Legislature repealed an anti-transgender “bathroom bill” after the loss of the N.B.A. All-Star Game plus convention and tourism business cost the state millions of dollars in revenue and companies canceled plans to relocate there.
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  • This April, prodded or perhaps even shamed by prominent Black business leaders, 170 executives of major companies signed a statement protesting a vote-suppression measure enacted in Georgia and ones pending in other states.
  • And this brings us to a subject that corporate America would evidently prefer not to talk about: abortion. It’s possible I’ve missed something, but I’ve been listening hard, and so far all I’ve heard is the sound of silence.
  • . The article pointed out that in the four days between April 26 and April 29, 28 new abortion restrictions were signed into law in seven states. As of mid-May, bills proposing 549 separate abortion restrictions had been introduced in 47 states, including 165 that would ban abortion.
  • Much of this activity might have been shrugged off as just so much political theater had the Supreme Court not agreed last month to hear Mississippi’s defense of its ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that under current doctrine is unconstitutional. While the country may not learn until a year from now how receptive the court is to revising or abandoning its abortion precedents, its acceptance of the Mississippi case for argument in the fall serves as a welcome mat to states trying to outdo one another in anti-abortion zealotry.
  • But nothing can compete with the law that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed last month. Not only does it ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women realize they are pregnant — but it effectively deputizes the entire world’s population to enforce the ban, authorizing “any person” to sue anyone who performs or facilitates an abortion outside that time frame
  • All would be subject to a $10,000 fine plus the plaintiff’s court costs for each successful lawsuit. At the same time, the law strips the state itself of enforcement power. The purpose of that novel provision is to prevent abortion providers from going to court, because there is no entity they can sue.
  • Abortion may be an uncomfortable subject to talk about, but don’t misunderstand the silence. Abortion is not rare. It is, in fact, a common female experience, although I’ll grant that it is not as common as voting. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and some 40 percent of those end in abortion. This is life as women live it, even in Texas.
  • Your silence is acquiescence; it’s a decision. You’re making a decision. Your silence is a decision. And when you recognize that, some of these issues are so salient and so critical that you have to take a position.
Javier E

Airplanes don't make you sick. Really. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • You don’t get sick on airplanes any more than anywhere else. Really, you don’t.
  • consider this fact: The ventilation system requirements for airplanes meet the levels recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for u
  • There are fairly simple things you can do, if you do need to travel, to reduce the odds of getting sick.
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  • the fact that airplanes help spread disease across geographies does not mean that you are necessarily at risk during flight.
  • If planes made you sick, we would expect to see millions of people sick every year attributable to flights. We haven’t seen it because it’s just not happening.
  • Consider one study that examined a passenger with tuberculosis on an airplane. It found that the median risk of infection to the other 169 passengers on the airplane was between 1 in 10,000 to 1 in a million.
  • Wearing a mask, as some airlines now require, reduced the incidence of infection another 10-fold.
  • The required aircraft systems do a really good job of controlling airborne bacteria and viruses.
  • To get technical, airplanes deliver 10 to 12 air changes per hour. In a hospital isolation room, the minimum target is six air changes per hour for existing facilities and 12 air changes per hour for new.
  • Airplanes also use the same air filter — a HEPA filter — recommended by the CDC for isolation rooms with recirculated air. Such filters capture 99.97 percent of airborne particles.
  • What’s more, airplanes are essentially designed to isolate airflow. Even if someone coughs on your flight without a mask, it is likely those virus particles will travel one or two rows,
  • To guard against transmission via large droplets and contaminated surfaces, we do need to take some additional steps. Wearing a mask on planes should be mandated, and wiping down tables and arm rests with a disinfectant provides an additional layer of defense.
  • you are more at risk of getting sick when traveling, but it’s not the airplane that’s making you sick.
  • Every time you fly, you may also take a cab, bus or subway; stand in long lines in the airport; eat unhealthy foods; sit for extended durations; spend time in spaces with hundreds or thousands of other travelers; stay at a hotel or friend’s home; arrive in a different climate and change time zones, disrupting your sleep. All of these factors are known to affect your immune system.
  • In 2013, I was one of the lead authors of a report for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies on infectious disease mitigation in airports and airplanes. Let me distill some of the recommendations from that report
  • For starters, airports should mandate mask wearing; increase ventilation rates; make bathrooms touchless; consider deploying upper-room germicidal UV fixtures in areas with high-occupant density; institute temperature screening; deploy hand-sanitizer stations; and, once passengers arrive at their gates, require that they stay in their designated area except for bathroom usage.
  • Airlines should ensure gate-based ventilation is operating during boarding and disembarkation; carefully choreograph the loading of airplanes; mandate mask use; and provide meals and bottled water during boarding and discontinue in-flight meal and drink service.
  • Individuals have an important role to play, too. First, stay home and do not travel if sick. Comply with rules for mask wearing; wash hands before and after each step at the airport; keep the personal overhead ventilation on and pointed down; and maintain physical distancing to the extent possible.
Javier E

Norovirus is almost impossible to stop - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Disinfection is back.
  • “Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.
  • norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency announced that laboratory reports of the virus had risen to levels 66 percent higher than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”
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  • The U.S. logs fewer than 1,000 annual deaths out of millions of documented cases
  • this is more a nauseating nuisance than a public-health crisis. In most people, norovirus triggers, at most, a few miserable days of GI distress that can include vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers, then resolves on its own; the keys are to stay hydrated and avoid spreading it to anyone vulnerabl
  • norovirus is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States.)
  • the virus is far more deadly in parts of the world with limited access to sanitation and potable water.
  • Still, fighting norovirus isn’t easy, as plenty of parents can attest. The pathogen, which prompts the body to expel infectious material from both ends of the digestive tract, is seriously gross and frustratingly hardy. Even the old COVID standby, a spritz of hand sanitizer, doesn’t work against it—the virus is encased in a tough protein shell that makes it insensitive to alcohol.
  • At an extreme, a single gram of feces—roughly the heft of a jelly bean—could contain as many as 5.5 billion infectious doses, enough to send the entire population of Eurasia sprinting for the toilet.
  • norovirus mainly targets the gut, and spreads especially well when people swallow viral particles that have been released in someone else’s vomit or stool.
  • direct contact with those substances, or the food or water they contaminate, may not even be necessary: Sometimes people vomit with such force that the virus gets aerosolized; toilets, especially lidless ones, can send out plumes of infection
  • If the spittle finding holds for humans, then talking, singing, and laughing in close proximity could be risky too.
  • Once emitted into the environment, norovirus particles can persist on surfaces for days—making frequent hand-washing and surface disinfection key measures to prevent spread
  • Handshakes and shared meals tend to get dicey during outbreaks, along with frequently touched items such as utensils, door handles, and phones.
  • One 2012 study pointed to a woven plastic grocery bag as the source of a small outbreak among a group of teenage soccer players; the bag had just been sitting in a bathroom used by one of the girls when she fell sick the night before.
  • Once a norovirus transmission chain begins, it can be very difficult to break. The virus can spread before symptoms start, and then for more than a week after they resolve
  • Once the virus arrives, the entire family is almost sure to be infected. Baldridge, who has two young children, told me that her household has weathered at least four bouts of norovirus in the past several years.
  • Roughly 20 percent of European populations, for instance, are genetically resistant to common norovirus strains. “So you can hope,” Frenck told me. For the rest of us, it comes down to hygiene
  • Altan-Bonnet recommends diligent hand-washing, plus masking to ward off droplet-borne virus. Sick people should isolate themselves if they can. “And keep your saliva to yourself,” she told me.
  • The family fastidiously scrubbed their hands with hot water and soap, donned disposable gloves when touching shared surfaces, and took advantage of the virus’s susceptibility to harsh chemicals and heat. When her son threw up on the floor, Cameron sprayed it down with bleach; when he vomited on his quilt, she blasted it twice in the washing machine on the sanitizing setting, then put it through the dryer at a super high temp
  • After three years of COVID, the world has gotten used to thinking about infections in terms of airways. “We need to recalibrate,” Bhumbra told me, “and remember that other things exist.”
katieb0305

North Carolina Reckons With its Jim Crow Past - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • n 2016, bitter and unyielding contests have placed the state at the center of national debates about race, civil rights, violence, and elections. In the span of a year, an anti-transgender bathroom bill sparked rallies and a fierce debate over civil rights, flames licked the streets of a resegregated Charlotte during protests over a police shooting, a local GOP office was firebombed, and a collection of new laws have been enacted—and promptly challenged in court. But the most contentious and sustained rift has been in the arena of voting rights, and it is there where White’s words resound most loudly.
  • Inserts in the hymnals boasted of the church’s commitment to racial, sexual, and gender inclusivity and advertised a training for sensitivity to transgender and gender non-conforming folks.
  • The latent difficulty of registering to vote compounds with some other obstacles for minorities to depress turnout even in the absence of Jim Crow laws.
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  • “The 14th Amendment says every person has a right to equal protection under the law,” he told the crowd.  “When you engage in intentional voter discrimination, you are robbing people of their equal protection under the law.” His words were both a benediction and a battle cry.
  • Even after 1965, North Carolina still struggled mightily with racial equality at the ballot. Thirty-six percent of all eligible black adults were registered to vote in North Carolina in 1963, and while that number jumped to 50 percent after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, it stalled there.
  • By 1980, the proportion of registered black voters had barely inched up to 52 percent. Adjustments made in 1982, including a new legal test for discrimination based on the effect of changes rather their intent, restored some momentum.
  • Why didn’t—or couldn’t—more black people vote once extended the franchise? One reason is that all the structural barriers to voting hadn’t been eliminated. Research indicates that polling places in minority neighborhoods tend to be less common, understaffed, and underfunded relative to those in white neighborhoods, making longer lines in minority areas much more likely.
  • Economic and social frustrations deeply affected vulnerable people of color in North Carolina.
  • That infusion of black voters—who mostly vote Democratic—helped to unseat Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole, deliver one of North Carolina’s House seats to a Democrat, and give the party the General Assembly,
ecfruchtman

Supreme Court to Rule in Transgender Access Case - 0 views

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    WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Friday entered the intense national debate over transgender rights, announcing that it would decide whether a transgender boy may use the boys' bathroom in a Virginia high school.
lindsayweber1

North Carolina Reckons With its Jim Crow Past - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In 2016, bitter and unyielding contests have placed the state at the center of national debates about race, civil rights, violence, and elections. In the span of a year, an anti-transgender bathroom bill sparked rallies and a fierce debate over civil rights, flames licked the streets of a resegregated Charlotte during protests over a police shooting, a local GOP office was firebombed, and a collection of new laws have been enacted—and promptly challenged in court. But the most contentious and sustained rift has been in the arena of voting rights, and it is there where White’s words resound most loudly.
Javier E

The End of Identity Liberalism - The New York Times - 0 views

  • how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences.
  • Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age
  • In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.
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  • One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end
  • If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
  • the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life
  • our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good
  • In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country
  • When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.”
  • How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them?
  • Fascination with the identity drama has even affected foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply. However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own.
  • it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny
  • Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton
  • A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis
  • This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns
  • It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.
  • Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored.
  • they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.”
  • the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.
  • We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them
  • As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)
  • Teachers committed to such a liberalism would refocus attention on their main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our history.
  • A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote
  • A post-identity liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and about what matters there, especially religion
  • it would take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.
lenaurick

It's time for GOP to reinvent itself - CNN.com - 0 views

  • The 2016 presidential election should have been an opportunity to improve the party's relationship with these constituencies, but now the party's entire identity has now been hijacked by Donald Trump's brand of misogyny.
  • Unfortunately, instead of debating big ideas, the most vocal leaders in today's Republican Party spend more time talking about punishing women for exercising their legally protected rights and deporting everyone else.
  • As a result, I look around today and don't see a real place in the GOP for anyone who is pro-choice, supports gay marriage and women's rights, is fine with anyone using a bathroom, believes in climate change (aka science) but also believes in a limited government, a strong national defense and in the power of free enterprise.
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  • That's why I believe the time has come for the Republican Party and its leaders to stop operating from a place of fear. To stop bending to the will of the angriest among us who are impossible to please and instead embrace a policy agenda that will create more equality, fairness and prosperity for all.
  • The frustration with the political establishment in Washington is visceral and real. "Average" Americans feel as though Washington has abandoned them and sold them out to protect or further their own personal political aspirations.
  • he effect of that fear has been a political system that now rewards gridlock and extreme rhetoric and locks out new voices who might re-animate the party. I know we can be so much more than just the party of the loudest and angriest. And in fact, if we don't evolve beyond being just that, there won't much of a party left by the presidential election of 2020.
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