Oh Woe Is Me

Between Dick Cheney's killing all of the fish in Oregon to today's Supreme Court decision on school integration, all I can think is that we're all doomed. And that's not even taking into account twenty bodies found beheaded along the Tigris River or rumors of rioters being killed in Iran.

Doomed, I tells ya. Doomed.

On top of everything else, kayaking was cancelled tonight due to stormy weather.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

What I Did This Past Saturday

The Mermaid Parade at Coney Island!

Photo by Sarah By

Splash Gordon, Whale Ardin and their cohorts battled the evil Ming the MerSEAless for the soul of Coney Island. Only time will tell if Splash won the war!


The Splash Gordon crew consisted of 13 people including Splash himself, Whale, Ming, the invisible Dr. Zarkov, an evil Mershmaid, three evil condo converters, and several cohorts on the side of good!

Photo by Trena B.

Loving v. Virginia: 40 Years Later

Richard and Mildred Loving
From Freedom to Marry

I meant to post about this earlier, but I've been way busy with the Coney Island Mermaid Parade coming up this weekend. June of this year finds us celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the case of Loving v. Virginia, in which a mixed race couple sued for the right to marry in Virginia. The case was decided on June 12, 1967, exactly three years and three months after this miscegenated and thereby illegally born blogger was birthed.

Here's Mildred Loving's statement from June 12, 2007:

Loving for All

By Mildred Loving*

Prepared for Delivery on June 12, 2007,
The 40th Anniversary of the Loving vs. Virginia Announcement

When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn’t to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.

We didn’t get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn’t allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.

Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn’t have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” a “basic civil right.”

My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Here's the verdict.
Here's the Wiki.

Here's the place to go to help in the fight for marriage for all: Freedom to Marry. (Though why ANYONE would want to be married is still beyond my perception to understand! ;) )
h/t to the Daily Dish's link through Positive Liberty.

Headlines Change When You Use the Word "Nazi" for Christians

So earlier I was listening to my daily podcast of the Rachel Maddow Show when she mentions the story of Liberty University student, Mark Uhl. You may remember that Uhl alledgedly wanted to set off some bombs at the funeral of Jerry Falwell; he may have been aiming at a group of protestors who were going to stake out the funeral. Well, the planned threat never came about because one of Uhl's relatives called the police on him when he told the relative about the bombs he was making. (Nobody said these would be terrorists were smart.)

Well, Maddow floored me when she reported (unlike any other national news source that I've seen), that Uhl had a cache of Nazi images stored on his computer.

In fact, one of the few news sources that I could find regarding this story is from the Roanoke Times, whose headline on May 31st read, "Prosecutor: Nazi, gang ties to Falwell funeral bomb case." The headline to the now updated story reads, "Liberty student denied bond in explosives case; Mark Uhl told investigators he was going to detonate the bombs in a field and didn't plan to hurt anyone."

So, here's a freshman student at a Christian college who threatened to throw bombs, "not to hurt anyone," and yet he's got a massive amount of material on his computer that would get him thrown into jail for a very long time in Germany. I can only imagine what would have happened if Uhl had been a student at Yale. This story would have been splashed over every television station in America. "Look at those Godless liberal heathen with their bombs and their crazy stuff!" Since it's a nice Christian boy at Falwell's school... almost nothing. Expect this story to fade into the night.

Anyway, the two Roanoke Times stories are basically the same, but here's the bit about the computer images:

Davidson said a search of Uhl's computer found 25,000 stored images, about half of them pornographic. He said there were pictures of Adolf Hitler, photos of young people giving Nazi salutes, a picture of Hitler with a gun in his mouth and the caption "Follow the leader," and another simply captioned "I love Hitler."
Liberty student denied bond in explosives case
Mark Uhl told investigators he was going to detonate the bombs in a field and didn't plan to hurt anyone.

What a nice Christian fellow.

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