Israel has worked hard to portray Gaza as a barren wasteland, backwater that is a terrorist stronghold. In reality, Gaza is a beautiful city/region with a rich history that has been decimated from constant bombings and strangled by the blockade. So much of what is being destroyed by Israel are restaurants, bookshops, schools, universities, houses and much of what contributes to life in Gaza and peopleâs livelihoods. Places that are attached to and filled with the memories of Palestinians in Gaza. Itâs not just about making life miserable for the people who live there, but about projecting a particular image of Gaza to the world. This is also similar to how the US has portrayed places like Afghanistan to justify its invasions.
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not all the way in yet, but i appreciate hbomberguy's continued insistence that plagiarism is done with intent and accidental plagiarism does not exist
so yeah, i'd like to thank hbomberguy for thoroughly debunking one of my strangest irrational fears (the one where i write something i'm really proud of only to find out some guy i'd never heard of wrote the exact same paragraph in 1937)
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Come here, baby gays, and let me tell you the story about how James Somerton made me so fucking angry with a single line that I had to make this post.
As I now know, most of his audience is young queers and there are things we NEED you to know.
The fight for marriage equality was a massive fucking deal and I will tell you why with a very personal story.
My mom was a nurse during the AIDS crisis. And I mean she started working as a nurse out of school in 85. My mom was on the front lines. She worked with so many AIDS patients that it genuinely altered her brain chemistry. My mother was a homophobe before her nursing career. She was a massive supporter of gay rights until she died in July because of what she saw during her career.
And what did she see?
She saw people who had been abandoned by their families dying with their partners at their side.
And then suddenlyâŚthe family would materialize, ban the partner from the room, kick them out of their homes they had lived in with their dying partners for decades, and then watched them ban their partners from even attending the funerals or visiting the graves. Imagine being denied your right to grieve.
And why was this possible? Oh simple. They werenât married. They werenât legally bound, the partners werenât considered next of kin because they werenât fucking married.
I watched my mom pass. It was horrible and painful and traumatic and terrifying. But it was closure. And I wouldnât have it any other way because I knowâŚthat who my mom wanted by her when she passed was my dad. Because she was scared, she wanted her partner by her side and she was terrified she was going to die. My dad couldnât be there. He had to work, which sounds cold but understand he had been off work for a month by that point and he was the only one who had health insurance. He wanted to be there, we had made plans to take her off the life support when he came back (we were 4 hours from him) but there was a freak accident and she passed the night after he left to return to work.
Why am I telling you this? Because I need you to understand how important this is to some people. So you can understand how big a slap to the face it is to have people say âmarriage equality isnât that importantâ. You can understand why someone like James Somerton rolling his eyes at marriage equality and implying we werenât focused on job equality and discrimination (information that is WHOLEY untrue) would make me see red.
Itâs not trivial. Itâs not meaningless. It wasnât about âassimilatingâ or âappearing normalâ (weâre already normal).
Itâs about people who had their children taken from them because they werenât the biological parent. Itâs about people who never got to comfort their loved ones in their final days. Itâs about people who werenât able to comforted by their partners in their final days.
So the next time you think âwhy waste your time on something as trivial as marriage?â Remember my mother. Look up testimony from victims of the AIDS crisis. Remember the people who advocated for marriage equality were the survivors who were torn from the love of their life.
Remember that we advocated so damn hard to give you the right to grieve.
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"download the app to continue!" what if I kill you
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seeing people (and by people I mean. not even russians) already speaking about the whole thing going on in Russia as if it were a fucking quirky joke. âOh Iâm considered an extremist in this country I donât live in at all! Uwu!â âLOLZ Iâm proud to be deemed a danger in Russia!â âPROUD ASSIGNED LGBT EXTREMIST BY RUSSIAN LAWâ You know this shit is very likely going to get people killed right. Like. You know that, right. People are very likely going to die because of this law. And you know youâre not helping in the fucking slightest right
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thanks tumblr, maybe i will try ringworm if you dont have anything else
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if were all catpeople there would be trans catboy forums devoted to how to dye over calico markings so you can pass better and another group of trans catboys who insisted that the only way to deal with it is to normalize catboys having calico markings. the discourse would be insane
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Night on the Dniepr (1882, oil on canvas) | Arkhip Kuindzhi
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