[Ratmagiclady]

@Ratmagiclady if you never stop to reflect upon how good your life is compared to what it would be like 100 years ago, if you would have made it this far with your health problems, and how you are able to live openly in society with someone that you love I suggest that you do.

You've got a lot of nerve saying that to *me.* Cause I am neither able to live openly nor be with the one right *now,* never mind simply wave away extra complications *you* see fit to think it's OK to impose. On my relationship now, or on any other. Frankly, we never could take the chance that our landlord would fully legally say, 'You're evicted for not being straight.' I don't *think* that of him, but I am in no position to risk it.

You think this is all trivial and about 'definitions' and 'Well, we should collect genetic information on everyone to make Romney's actions and the injustices somehow right, "you should be glad how 'good you have it' after being kicked around so hard you're pretty much at the end of your tether in a generally-hostile region without basic civil rights, never mind having gone without the basic health care your straight sisters took for granted...."

Then you try and tell me I don't know what bureaucracy can do to complicate and deprive lives for LGBT families? Seriously? Both these things got complicated enough that I couldn't *stay* in one marriage, just *because* we couldn't make the practicalities work out. Never mind the legal vulnerabilities.

Thats all I was trying to say. Speculating on the potential of using vital records as a way to make connections between medical records for everyone virtually for free compared to services like 23AndMe is just my way of comparing how we could make the world a better place for people who live here 100 years from now.

Making LGBT couples go through extra legal proceedings for a crossed-out-looking blank on a form that says 'Father' on it doesn't help either genetic science or any such *thing.* Cause who your biological 'father' is was never part of that dataset to begin with, never mind for straight married people. Stuff happens.

BIrth certificates aren't about your theoretical gene bank database, and the idea would be obsolete before you could even employ it, honestly. My sweetie could run our DNA in an off hour at the lab, and we *still* wouldn't have equal housing rights in this state, never mind be safe from relatives beggaring us with legal claims on any child we for some reason had.

If you *really* want your public record to include your genetic profile just to prove some point or something.

Consider that it's well known what my paternal grandmother died of: always was. No one even looked in that direction till I had a diagnosis anyway, and the simple fact is some chemistry we were exposed to prenatally, my sisters and I is a firmer connection to what's happened than a genetic illness that they didn't even understand well enough to diagnose reliably at the time. Why City Hall and anyone who cares to look these things up should be involved, I really just don't know why you think that's a good thing, never mind a justification for Romney's actions or for legal inequality to begin with.

You claim LGBT people got it so good, then why is it we have Governors of Massachusetts pulling bureucratic slime to deny us rights even as recognized in our home states?

You think this is trivial? You've never had to deal with it, is what it is.

Maybe it's just 'semantics' to *you,* but then why are you so worried, in the face of all this?

There are plenty of ways that these vital records could be improved so that they benefit society and be more PC in a world where homosexual relationships are more common and are used as vehicles for raising children. Personally, the biggest shortcoming I see with birth certificates (at least in my state I don't know if any state allows you to do this) is that they don't let you designate guardianship in the case that both parents pass away. That has to be done through a will. It would be nice to be able to do this for free I don't think it is something that needs to be required as I can also see the benefits of having it decoupled from the birth certificate.

You really think my legal citizenship and equal protection under the law is about 'PC' even when the real legal problems are shown?

Are you really trying to ignore the fact that for all your claims, you're supporting a man who is overtly *and* covertly proven hostile to basic human and civil rights, while trying to play everyone up one side and down the other about even the ....legitimacy of our childrens' *birth certificates?*

These are not genetic documents. They, as the Baggers so amply showed over a President with more-detailed birth documentation than I had in Southie.... are about our *citizenship.* And most *definitely* those legal semantics you feel you can blithely say don't matter, but must reflect, yes, homophobia. Even on our children.

Don't you get that?

I didn't survive because of modern medicine. I survived in spite of the lack of it, mostly. Precisely cause of the things you think are 'just PC' to not have some 'bishop' go out of his way to perpetuate.

That *is* bigoted, Mikemike. Whatever your little dystopian vision of gene-tracking by City Hall may promise to you.

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Last edited by Ratmagiclady; 10-26-2012 at 02:10 PM.

[gokenin]

But you don't 'approve' of 'homosexuals,' so that makes this not-have-happened? Or do you just like it?
.

So yet again you are making a huge assumption like you usually do when it comes to someone that makes a statement that you do not agree with. I have friends that are homosexual and have even attended one of their weddings so for you to tell me I dont approve of homosexuals as you put it please keep your uniformed and completely incorrect assumptions to yourself from now own about my own political opions and who i assosciate with and consider as friends, I love how you simply side stepped the fact that this is happening in other states as well but you feel thats not important because you are using your narrow range of vision to single in on one particular candidate and attacking him because the state has not ammended the certificate to show multiple same sex parents on the form. By the way the believed Deval Patrick (a democrat and huge supporter of the current President) has not changed the cerficicate as well so that must mean the he is Homophobic as well or does it only apply to Romney? so if you are going to label people continue labeling the entire state legislature as well this is not something that a single person can be blamed for so again you are singling out one person that you have an axe to grind with so who is really being the narrow minded one here in this conversation?

[Ratmagiclady]

So yet again you are making a huge assumption like you usually do when it comes to someone that makes a statement that you do not agree with.

No, you're just trying to recast it that way when you make statements that claim there's some kind of substantive 'reason' for some very nasty and overtly-prejudiced legal injustices you dismiss as 'PC' and about how people feel about 'homosexuals.'

I have friends that are homosexual and have even attended one of their weddings so for you to tell me I dont approve of homosexuals as you put it please keep your uniformed and completely incorrect assumptions to yourself from now own about my own political opions and who i assosciate with and consider as friends,

Did you refer to these friends as 'homosexuals?' Or just think the legalities of their lives are 'non-starters' when pretty-egregiously violated by someone who promised the exact opposite while being elected Governor of their state?

I love how you simply side stepped the fact that this is happening in other states

A lot of things happen in a lot of states. That doesn't make *this* OK. Cause you vaguely claim 'Others are doing it.' This is about what *Romney* has done. Especially in light of promises and prevarications to the contrary.

If it's not OK there, too, then you should be talking about fixing it, not trying to tell me to shut up about my *own* home state, eh?

as well but you feel thats not important because you are using your narrow range of vision to single in on one particular candidate and attacking him because the state has not ammended the certificate to show multiple same sex parents on the form.

No, that's not what happened: Romney *blocked* making the forms *neutral* regarding the sexes of the parents according to the law he's supposed to have been upholding, rather, putting people through expensive delays, hassles, and *demanding* same sex couples count on having crossed-out words and legal counsel to enjoy the thing straight people take for granted, just cause of him wanting 'father' on a form.

It's a very simple matter. Birth mother. Other parent. Baddabing. Run off the forms. *Romney* went to trying to make it elaborate, legally-dubious, slow, insecure, and more expensive... Just to not treat LGBT couples like other citizens. Period.

Diversions don't change that. Or the effects or importance.


However you try to recast it, this was doing real things to real people he said he wouldn't. And if you think it's trivial or not as interesting as making it about a genetics project retroactively, or "I have friends who are 'homosectuals," (Did those friends tell you that's just not a polite way to speak of them?) ...then it's not that this is a 'non-starter' issue, just that you wish it so. Whoever the actual actions hurt, and whoever the actual candidate promises overtly to do worse to.


How many times do I have to say it? This isn't about 'PC.' This is about people's *lives.* Under the law. In our own government. Yes, these bureaucratic things hurt people. Really.


Just if you stilll don't get it, or what it has to do with Romney's character or hatreds: this kind of spells it out:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/romney-some-gays-are-ac...ref=gay-voices

[Ratmagiclady]

I'm just kind of wondering why the 'small government' people seem to find Mitt using his office to bothe make more government intrusion, enforce his religious authority, and muck up birth certificates is apparently of no concern to the 'Baggers here.

That link may be instructive to some who think our lives are of no concern, or that GOP policies don't actively suppress the lives of millions of real Americans for... No good reason at all : Also this one:


Rob Watson: The 10 Greatest Indignities Committed Against LGBT People


But on the first instance, it was mighty white of some of the cons here to say "Oh, don't feel bad, just pay lawyers to appeal to Governor Romney for his permission to make your child's birth certificate look dodgy. If he allows. Otherwise, you're just not a legal family despite your marriage-which-should-be-left-to-the-states-unless-it's-not-hurting LGBT families... There's no inequality here, obviously gay people should just pay more for less rights, 'not be offended' and accept this is as it 'should be.' This is religious liberty and values and 'small government' and us only wanting clear birth documentation. For some. Because if birth certificate forms don't insist everyone is straight, God will tell his preachers to insist Hawaii is not a state again, or something."


And if people are worried about identity papers, let me tell you this much about birth certificates. I keep a lot of documentation close to hand, not because of 'big gummint,' but in fact because *as* an LGBT person I had to settle accounts and change my name to escape persecution, only to find that unaccountable private credit agencies would both insist that I still had family income, and that my very legal identity and Social Security number didn't exist and were fraudulent, any time I tried to get the most menial legit job, or a legal address, or a bill in my name.... all the while claiming my citizenship and government-issued identity papers were invalid.... They wanted 1200 dollars up front to even *talk* to me. It's a big part of why I was homeless or the next thing to it so many years. It was the early Nineties, you know?

These are the same companies that both caused the credit crisis *and* which the GOP wants to re-deregulate even about *accountability.* In our personal lives. Other 'companies' in that same sector arbitrarily decide to, say, tell Greece they must borrow a lot of money, then demand they take it out of their nation when the investment prospects don't look so good. And the ones the GOP and Rmney place so much faith in invisible hands over.

While heaping more real hardships and defamations onto people just for being LGBT, or indeed for being family to a random five to ten percent of the population, for no good reason. (Homophobia ain't cheap, either, you know. People who spend hundreds of billions to suppress LGBT people complain that they might spend a fraction of a penny on Big Bird and wonder why I can't buy a cup of coffee from their small business: and my folks wouldn't have had to pay for Catholic school if the public version hadn't turned into a personal battle royal...and I'd be helping *them* long since if any one of four things had happened: a) I had basic health care just cause of being a citizen, b) I'd not been subject to various stress and abuse just for not being what some demanded, c) I could have either had the state university education or a living wage at the time, d) Unaccountable private corporations (the same three that fed the predatory lending recently) hadn't taken it upon themselves to override my legal identity for all business purposes just because I'd done everything 'right.'


The GOP spends more trying to *deny* the harm that what they consider so crucial *does* to people, ...claim you should *fear* more taxes, while in fact demanding you spend time and money *advocating making things more expensive for you, me, and your customers,* and then try to blame Obama for higher taxes which are the opposite of the case...

And then you say, 'Oh, just hire lawyers to make sure your kids have disputable birth documentation cause Mitt Romney says that's the best some citizens deserve, and that only with his special patriarchal dispensation.' Vote for him as the small government candidate and tell the queers not to feel so 'offended' cause it's just him boldly not being PC, but he didn't do it, but it doesn't hurt anybody, but even the President supposedly doesn't deserve his job if a Fundie birther doesn't like his birth documentation.' Yah, yah.


You cons defend all this done to LGBT people as 'essential values' and then claim these actions don't actually *do* anything when the results are pointed out.

Do you think *my* folks who worked for this country and paid into our social system all our lives, as *I* did as well, got their moneys' worth out of basically converting an Ivy League student into a homeless queer person (at great expense) ...who basically beat the odds of not being dead at 20 or 25, (well, was dead at 25, Got better. Apprently only 'mostly dead' all due credit to the Lady. ) ...and *still* had my little piece of the American Dream squeezed out of possibility...after ten years of struggle and undue hassle and closed doors for myself and my sweetie, end up losing *another* home and family and in this case ....the very future we'd worked together for....

Do you think these 'family values' helped *my* parents when they spent so much trying to 'change my lifestyle' and then spent so much (by my standards, anyway, *again* just to cover for the fact that discrimination and deregulated corporations arranged things so that I couldn't even get the help I was entitled to when it would have done the most good? Do you think it's going to help them *now* while I'm in a basement in a state where I lack basic civil rights and my partner's off alone in a place we can't afford to live *together?* If anything, they'd help *me* if they could, and I likely can't. Damage done. Like the GOP has been insisting the damage be done and re-done to more and more and more years' worth of kids and families, thinking 'We can spend hundreds of billions on the next election cycle, and this will make everyone holy straight unwed poor people popping out babies to moralize at and make money off of. Vote for this, at least you're not queer, cause look how we bully them."



Do you think these 'Family Values' are helping my parents? Never mind my daughter, never mind my *partner* like others before for all this time, ...do you think certain churches taking government power to try and *continue* battering people like me into straight Christianity will somehow stop doing the obvious suppression of the real economy on false premis this will automagically start doing the opposite of what it's always done and startpaying off someday this century after so many others?


Or do you just ignore that, eh? Trivialize it? Pretend it doesn't affect your sacred business climate, never mind the deficit?


Just one more decade perhaps and real people will just motor through?

I'll tell you one thing about my family. We don't *have* that decade, Gokenin, and others. Cut-rate burial of any of us costs more than I see in a year, and that's without being buried in my own faith tradition, or transportation costs in any way. And I much worry that between my mother, father, and myself, we're going to have to bury someone before another election cycle passes. My sisters have decent lives, and children. and debt accruing accordingly.

And I used to joke, 'Bury me in my Duster' or 'Throw out my ashes at Boylston station,' but for the price of one of *their* funerals, they could bury me in six of my Volvoes. Mega-rich people spend more in a month propagandizing to make it harder on people like me than it'd take just to freaking pay the rent for people they hurt just recently, including the 40 percent of homeless youth who are LGBT... that means 40 percent of our homeless and chronically poor are homeless for *no good reason* But someone wants to feel 'Straight people are better.'
Anyone got plastic?

170 IQ (I tested at, last time I bothered. I'm smart, but I can also read into tests. I also had the aid and/or or hindrance of a bottle of Jameson's. It's part of why I don't believe in those tests, but it does show up the disparity in standards, considering how much stock is actually placed in these things. And how much less 'merit' counts for accordingly despite certain assurances and demands. )

But, and I can't help my parents, even if we are somewhat reconciled. As long as I don't say anything too public.

"Family values" ....hurts and destroys families. When it comes to those uncomfortable realities. Even if you work hard and play by the rules.

I could spring to health this very minute and they wouldn't hire me at McDonald's. Damage done.

Romney, and the GOP, insist it's worthwhile to keep hurting year after year after year of the percentage of Americans and anyone related to anyone remotely like me. And they spend a great deal of money to do it.

Reality.

Like for how much Romney talks about how 'hurting people is good for them, and 'blind bigotry is good for families, and the people should be subject to private religious charities and government endorsement of psychotic denialist "values," well, that never worked and it never has.


I didn't work in the business through my teen years so that 'family values' could make sure that I didn't see the benefit of it while paying to defend self and others from religious abuse, only to run away to spare them the 'pain' of admitting I exist and can't be beaten into otherwise, only to find that 'Just run away and make it on your own, turn down the Ivy League and work your way through school,' can fall to budget cuts even when you're already committed... And find that. Apart from my high school experience being mostly about how to help people escape the abuse, while trying to have a career that might mean I could just get away without causing utter meltdowns from admitting some things... Just when I and a partner *had* our little home and little jobs and a bit of possibility of working our way through school, (Well, her way. Friendly, if poor, family: despite my having had to run away, in high school, I was unable to get useful scholarships after rules changed. I had to 're-closet' for the sake of 'family' paying money for what merit had supposedly-earned in the first place: when that meant that I was beholden to them to save our little life from being ruined, and I was trying to cover up to my own family about post-traumatic stress symptoms from a 'corrective rape' that had really pushed things over the edge regarding PTSD I was still personally in denial of. But had to endure certain 'enhanced interrogation' in which my Dah, convinced he was wringing the fact that I was all twitchy from being 'on drugs,' according to certain 'family values' propaganda, including disinformation promulgated to Fundies about Pagans being part of some 'Satanic ritual abuse' thing,

It's forgiveable in that no one, myself included, thought PTSD happened to anyone but combat soldiers. But, as the 'family values' of the time went, especially through economic realities imposed on my little happy home, and *not* being able to just go away and be a private citizen according to our American ideals, my 'coming out story,' (really, just crossing that invisible line of admitting it) was tuned out of me, none too gently, cause my Dah thought he was beating an admission of being a drug addict out of me, demanding 'The truth,' (in fact, I was partaking of no such thing at the time, but everyone was taught to think queer kids must be on drugs and thus keep dying of 'gun cleaning accidents' and 'Sleeping Pill overdoses') etc.

Basically, theree was a little 'tough love' narrative being promoted as 'essential' there in the late 80's, early 90s, (Just the sort of thing, by the way that Mormon refugees I met when homeless were subject to all along, if not straight) Upshot of it was, though, that thanks to the real economy not being as promoted, then, my *family* paid a lot of money to come back into *my* house and torture me for *hours* demanding 'The truth' (Which was supposed to be me taking drugs I was not in fact taking.) 'You don't want to know.' I kept saying under interrogation. 'You don't want to know.' 'You don't want to know.'

I did finally admit it. I wasn't on drugs. I was raped. For not being straight.

They knew. They didn't want to know.

Yes. Beat the truth out of me.

Then the trouble started.

This, or worse, is what Romney wants to bring us back to.



It's been over twenty years, though, and countless election cycles. However anyone "feels," or whatever you may say about 'PC,' boys.

Damage done.

I can't help my parents now, and they can' help me.

Bon appetit, Republican.

Are you really trying to say 'We may as well do this to more and more people cause I want an economic theory to 'win?' Really?

These are people's *lives.* Always have been. All I can say right now is *no freaking more, sporto.*

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Last edited by Ratmagiclady; 10-30-2012 at 03:08 PM.

[Ratmagiclady]

And, really, cons: if you think what ROmney or any other 'family values' candidate does doesn't hurt LGBT people in reality, ...well, there was this one time they let my 'stepdaughter and her class out an hour early from school due to an oncoming blizzard. For the sake of 'Values' they absolutely refused to let me come get her on foot.

Demanded I wait for her biological mother or else she'd be taken away from us both. Then these 'good Christians,' it turned out, just left her there for hours as the blizzard rolled in, after telling us they'd be checking IDs cause the usual procedure was disrupted. Meanwhile, while hiding from my folks, I'd stashed my car away unregistered (to avoid further 're-education,) and drove *that* unregistered through pretty appallingly-hazardous conditions just to get her.

Only to find the 'family values' people had locked up the school and left her standing out front there, not even bothering to check the very things they were so fussed over in the first place. We'd been a family for some time then, and I still remember my dear one of the time saying, as we got her back up the hill in a blizzard, and I remember my partner of the time remarking, "I don't think I ever really knew you in the way I see when you drive."

I was, at the time, like, "Got that right."


This is the kind of thing Romney wants to be able to be done to *any* of our kids, though. Any. While claiming to be 'better for gay rights than Ted Kennedy.'

So, you, cons. What do I do, let my little girl freze to death left alone in front of a dark building, then conjure lawyers out of nowhere and that makes it 'just PC?'

Gods, man. Your denial. What do you really think that buys you?


Do you think this is trivial? Really?

What do you think, here. I can 'work hard' in hopes I can pay some lawyer to unfrighten and unfreeze my little girl back in like 1994? Is that what you plan for the same kids who are six years old *now?*

Do you think this is about me being 'PC?' Sport?

Do you think any of that makes Romney not a bad guy to families like mine any time he gets the chance?

Do you think this is somehow outside your money fears?

Do you think this doesn't hurt even those who count themselves Christianly-virtuous?

Really?

Gods. Simple fact is I'd rebuilt that car, too. (While homeless) All my guy friends complained how I didn't have their feet in mind when we welded in the floorboards. And you want to vote for someone who doesn't think I even deserve full citizenship. Never mind my daughter. She'll be about out of college by now, if she made it that far. For all the good it may have done by now.

[Ratmagiclady]

So, when we get to what these links say, or assertions of 'Don't be offended' by people excusing Romney's bald-faced hatred and irresponsibility. Do you really think it's just about me being 'offended' when phobes would on multiple occasions sooner put my little girl out on the street than let me come get her from school? 'Just hire a lawyer' when at the time that would have been our monthly food budget just to consult and the laws and statutes said we had no rights anyway?

Gods, man, I tossed crackhouses with nothing but an ash staff when they drove my little girl out. What, so some bureucrat or whatever bigot that feels like it can saay 'Definition of marriage?'

And you think this is about 'Oh, you shouldn't be 'offended?'

I live alone in a state where it's *perfectly* legal for my landlord to say, 'I don't like gay people, you have no legal recourse when I kick you out. I'm kicking you out, non-straight single person, because you are LGBT. ' My landlord can do that at any moment he chooses. Even if he just wants more rent he can say, 'I don't approve of RML not being straight, therefore all fair housing bets are off.' I like to think he wouldn't. But he can.

He can also do this to me for not being Christian. Any time he wants. 'Left up to the states' the Georgia legislature has said that my civil rights as an American no longer need apply if I'm not a Christian, in the name of 'religious freedom.' Ha and ha. Right?


Frankly, I've nowhere else to go. You *bet* I'm offended, but if after all this time you think that's all it is, boys, you're very, very, wrong.

Acknowledge this?

Even living alone, people can say, 'Your're not straight, therefore a sinner, so now I will discriminate against you for not being a straight person.' Perfectly legal, despite pretenses of it being about 'sin' or 'values' or anything. They can *literally say, "I am now voiding this lease because you aren't straight." Bang. Forward mail to my Volvo.

And dismiss it as a 'rant,' but that's the real life you draw false equivalencies about, boys. You should think about it. And look.