morteamore

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"What do I do if my marriage gets dissolved?"

SO, your state is trying to overturn gay marriage, huh? Wish I could say I'm surprised, buuuuuuuut, I'm not. Good-ish news: I'm a medical social worker. I'm semi prepared for this!

If the state you currently reside in outlaws and dissolves your marriage, you are going to need DOCUMENTS. Documents documents DOCUMENTS!!

"What documents, Jay?" Durable Power of Attorney for Healthcare. Durable Power of Attorney for Finances. Living Will. Actual Will. There are probably more but boy howdy these are the BIG ONES. Why? Because these documents are what we in healthcare, those in law enforcement, and those in the court/property law system use to designate your Next Of Kin.

NEXT OF KIN means a lot of things SOCIALLY, but legally? Your next of kin is the person who is LEGALLY RECOGNIZED as having default decision-making power for you. Documents specifying a Decision Maker are often called ADVANCED DIRECTIVES. This means you complete these documents, under your own volition, as set of instructions to be followed if you later become incapacitated.

"What the hell does incapacitated mean?" It means you aren't clinically dead BUT it has been determined that you are unable to safely make your own decisions. Examples of incapacitation include being: unconscious or in a coma; being conscious but permanently mentally unsound due to dementia or a traumatic brain injury; being temporarily mentally incapacitated due to a psychiatric episode.

"What does my decision maker do?" Simply put, they make decisions on your behalf. And actually, if the precious, precious documents are completed correctly and thoroughly, they mostly give voice to your wishes. They are the one (or ones) who decide:

"Burial or cremation?"

"Do you want an autopsy?"

"Who is to be informed of this death and invited to the funerary service?"

OR

"Will you be suspending curative efforts or switching to hospice?"

"Will you be placing [patient] into a care home or keeping them with you?"

"Do you consent to homecare services?"

"Do you accept the current diagnosis or do you wish to hear additional opinions?"

OR

"Do you want to try an organ transplant?"

"Do you want to enroll in a clinical trial?"

"Are we permitted to perform blood transfusions on this patient?"

"Are we permitted to provide this patient with psychiatric interventions?"

OR

"Are we putting this money into a trust or dividing it among family members?"

"Are we selling this house or gifting it to an heir?"

"Are we selling the deceased patient's furniture or donating it?"

"Are we burying this body or giving it to science?"

That is for Durable Powers of Attorney, both healthcare and financial.

"What's a living will, then?" is a detailed list of instructions left regarding care during your period of incapacitation, especially when Death is the expected outcome. Where as a DPOA might specify only a few short things: "No ventilator" or "Don't donate my heart, take everything else" or "No pig valves, not even to save me", a living will can be more elaborate, and doesn't necessarily name a singular decision maker. Many states in the US do not treat living wills as legally binding. But, in the absence of more concrete documents, they can be a valuable guide for family members and key members of your care team. We encourage these often in palliative and end of life care, due to those patients being at risk for extended periods of incapacitation.

If you have MS, Huntingtons, Cerebral Palsy, HiV, Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder or a history of psychosis, a family history of Alzheimers and/or Parkinsons and/or Vascular Dementia, I urge you to consider a living will. If you do extreme sports or otherwise frequently risk severe head trauma and/or prolonged oxygen deprivation, I strongly urge you to consider a living will. If you have a history of severe substance abuse and/or suicide attempts, I strongly urge you to consider a living will.

"Ha! No WAY man, I ain't signing away my rights to NOBODY. I'm staying in control 'til the moment I die." Unfortunately, no. You will not. If you are unconscious, you cannot make choices. If you become too psychotic to find your way outside and collapse from dehydration because you think your tap water is poison, they will not let you make your own decisions. If you begin suffering from dementia and believe your are seven years old and still in your hometown, they will not let you make your own decisions. If you are effectively brain-dead but breathing on your own, you cannot make your own decisions.

I have had many patients who thought it worked like this, and I have needed to explain to them that their logic is flawed. Your refusal to acknowledge these laws does not exempt you from them, and if you do not choose an advocate/decision-maker ahead of time and then are determined to need one, The System will simply choose for you.

"If I don't pick somebody, who gets to make decisions about my care?" Your next of kin. Who your next of kin is determined be goes like this:

Do you have a LEGALLY MARRIED SPOUSE? If yes, that is your next of kin. Marriage trumps everything else. Keep in mind, if you are living apart from a person you are not "with" but are still LEGALLY married to, that person is still next of kin. Even you no longer speak to them regularly, they can absolutely seize power over your healthcare and your finances. Even if you are currently legally married to your first choice decision maker, fill it out anyway. They are actively working to strip us of our rights, so dig your heels in.

If there is no spouse, they will seek out any adult children you may have, and assign Next of Kin to the eldest one.

If there are no adult children, they will seek out your parents. Yes, even if you are an out and proud trans lesbian, and they are aggressively cruel MAGA cultists who exclusively refer to you through the use of slurs.

If there are no parents, they will seek out your siblings and give decision making over to the either the oldest one. Or, more often at this point, whoever picks up the phone first. Yes, even if you hate your siblings, they have a much firmer claim over you than your friends or your partner in a world without marriage equality.

If there is NO biological family willing to step up and make choices for you, THEN they will turn to friends and unmarried partners, but, the bio family can sue to reclaim their rights at any time.

"Jay, that's not true!! When I was in the hospital and couldn't speak for myself, I didn't have that filled out and they still knew to call my girlfriend instead of my mom. Doctors understand that families are complicated, they wouldn't do this!"

I have watched this happen. I have watched lovers and friends and "chosen family members" who lived with the patient for years be tossed out like fucking trash in favor of blood relatives the patient despised, all because those same lovers and friends couldn't be bothered to sign two sheets of paper one time. While I am thrilled for those of you who have escaped this sort of nightmare, not everyone will be as astronomically lucky as you were. Doctors are fully capable of picking and choosing their moment when it comes to using "protocol" to hurt you, and the sheer number of institutions meekly showing Trump their belly should make you think twice before trusting a bureaucratic machine to protect your rights out of compassion.

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fatass cat

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Pride 2025

These Colors Don't Run!

this Pride remember your roots, fight the fuck back, remember your allies and friends and don't get distracted.

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weeks 11-20 on my weekly poster challenge this year, crazy I've actually managed almost half a year of getting these done. 1-10 here.

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Happy Pride Month.

Hi-Res Prints and Editable PSDs: https://ko-fi.com/s/c16fb83091

Prints: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/mxmorgan/

Tees and More: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com

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Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!

Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It's me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here's the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.

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Wall Street has a new shorthand about President Donald Trump — and he’s not happy about it.

Traders have reportedly come up with the acronym TACO, which stands for “Trump always chickens out,” to take advantage of the trade environment created by the president’s habit of threatening to impose tariffs on countries, and then backing off at the last moment.

He bristled when asked about it Wednesday in an Oval Office press conference.

“Don’t ever say what you say, that’s a nasty question,” Trump told a journalist who asked for his response to the acronym. “To me that’s the nastiest question.”

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My followers know I hate talking about politics and current events, and generally refuse to do so, but this is important.

A bill has been introduced in the US that would make all pornography a federal crime. Owning it. Creating it. Distributing it.

Under this law, fanart of nude characters would be a federal crime.

Under this law, depictions of homosexuality or simply being transgender, would be considered pornography and a federal crime.

This bill is not going to pass.

However, the reason for this bill is to continue to push the "overton window". The reason for this bill is to make banning pornography seem more and more normal to everyone until they can actually do that.

And remember, they consider depictions of gay characters and transgenders characters "pornography" in any context, including platonic.

They have been working on this for a decade now and it has been working.

If you are one of the people in fandom who thinks that "nasty" porn on AO3 should be banned because it's "icky" or "immoral", then this mental scam is working on you.

Censorship is never about protecting people.

Censorship is always about control.

Do not let the rising moral panic affect your mind and make you weak to propaganda that lets others control you and control what you watch and read.

Do not fall for the scam.

When they say they are going to ban "pornography" it means they're going to ban anything they don't like by calling it "pornography" and they don't like you!!

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Link

Trump wants to take your porn away.

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fanfic writing culture isn’t “oh dang! I wanted to write about this prompt with this character but someone else already wrote it, so now I can’t”.

fanfic writing culture is always “two cakes is better than one. the more the merrier. there can ever be enough fics of this character with this prompt!”

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