#molly ivins

[mswyrr]

Progressive journalist Molly Ivins did this hilarious peace about the nasty anti-sodomy laws the Texas legislature passed in the 1990s. I was reminded of it and it gave me a laugh and some relief re: the current rise of bastards like this. They can be fought and driven back into their miserable little holes.

Here's a description of the docu-series this clip is from, written in 2003, just after Supreme Court found anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional (a decision the current SCOTUS is set to overturn...):

"Given the Supreme Court's landmark decision invalidating state sodomy laws, docu "Dildo Diaries" is stuck in the unfortunate position of beating a newly dead horse. Nonetheless, this look at ridiculous governmental anti-sex measures--particularly in the Lone Star State--is an amusing item that, one hopes, will someday soon make young viewers scratch their heads in amazement at the Bad Old Days described therein."

It's just staggering. All of this has happened within my lifetime. It's scary and ugly to think about, but it's also good to see how people got around these laws before.

The bit where a queer person talks about having to ask the sex shop employee about a better "educational model" for "safe sex demonstrations" because "i was worried about losing my audience" had me in stitches lol

[liquidlightandrunningtrees]

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cat, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.

Molly Ivins

[emperornorton47]

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[spotlightstory]

I miss Molly Ivins. Here she is talking about Truth and Journalism in 1991.

[somethingtocallmine]

[fuckyeahquotesposts]

The first rule of holes: when you're in one, stop digging.

Molly Ivins

[mayra-quijotescx]

real No Children hours in the Lege rn

the Texas Tribune made a whole page for this latest shit

[stinkahny]

Missing my Texas liberal ladies

How I miss Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas, and Molly Ivins, a reporter for I think a Dallas paper, but I'm not sure about that. Both of them had very quick wits, and would use their wit to pin right wing idiots against the nearest wall.

[malsperanza]

The great Molly Ivins once said, "Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doing it. Be outrageous... rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through celebrating the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was!"

On June 26, 2015, eight years ago, the US Supreme Court issued its ruling making same-gender marriage legal. That evening I went over to Stonewall on Sheridan Square to join the impromptu party. The World Trade Center, visible down 6th Ave., was in full drag.

[mariacallous]

We are at a time in our national life where the political system is pretty frankly corrupt. I know that many of you despise organized politics. You’re young and idealistic and entitled to do that. But the corruption can be fixed and the heritage is too important to be let go. We are all of us collectively the heirs to the most magnificent political tradition any people has ever received. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men (and women) are created equal, that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We hold that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights and that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”

Those principles are so profoundly revolutionary that they still echo with great force around the world after more that 200 years. There are people today who are dying for the chance to live under those principles. They died in South Africa. They died at Tiananmen Square. They are dying today in Myanmar. And in this country we are in some danger of throwing away that entire legacy out of boredom, and cynicism and inanition. And I hear constantly people say, “Well, I really just don’t care much for politics;” “Ah well, they’re all crooks, there’s nothing I can do.” People have a million reasons for not getting involved. The thing is, you can’t back out of it, it’s not your choice. You can’t look at politics in this country as though it were a television program, or a picture on a wall that you could stand back and look at and decide whether or not you liked it.

Your entire life—the warp and woof of your life—is going to be bounded by political decisions made in city halls and state capitals and the White House, and the Capitol in Washington. How deep you will be buried when you die, the qualifications of the people who prescribe your eyeglasses, whether or not the dye you use on your hair will cause cancer. All of those, and many, many more things that touch your life everyday in a thousand ways. Whether or not your car is safe when you get into it, all of these things are affected by government. You are involved, whether you like the picture or not. And if you don’t like it, you really have an obligation to change it.

Molly Ivins, from her commencement speech to Scripps College graduates in May of 2003

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Every once in awhile I remember I'm old...

...and that I rmember things and people from decades ago vividly, as if it were, well, yesterday. It's times like this that it all catches up with me, when I realize there are at least two generations of people who have no fucking clue who Molly Ivins was, or how important she was to Texas women at the time, and to those who were aspiring writers. I was good friends with one, and remember her undying admiration for Molly Ivins, and I remember reading her pieces and just going "yeah! You go girl!" So to correct my error, here:

[whatbigotspost]

Damn, y'all. This is very, very bad news:

I have an unshakable belief that "democracy" is a joke in any place where a free media cannot exist. As I've eluded to many times, I'm a big believer in more progressive leaning sources like NPR, the Texas Tribune (the source link in that^ story), and formerly, the Texas Observer. Things are NOT in a good place right now, financially, for any of those entities.

This trend is something that anyone who cares about the threat of the rising Christofascist right wing extremists should be paying a LOT OF FUCKING ATTENTION TO. If you can, you should be donating to any entity you depend on, like this. It's why I'm a member of my local NPR station. I mean, I can't help but feel like we are about 2 seconds away from just accepting that algorithms like TikTok are going to drive all of the "information" we have, and I hopefully don't need to explain why we'll all be thoroughly fucked if that happens. Here's an Austin local writer/journalist I trust, with more behind-the-scenes input about what happened w/ the Texas Observer.

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 8.30

Beer Birthdays

Samuel Whitbread (1720)

Johan Van Dyck (1975)

Stacy Marie Fuson; St. Pauli Girl 2005 (1978)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Lewis Black; comedian (1948)

Molly Ivins; writer (1944)

Fred MacMurray; actor (1908)

John Swigert Jr.; astronaut (1931)

Ted Williams; Boston Red Sox LF (1918)

Famous Birthdays

Elizabeth Ashley; actor (1939)

Geoffrey Beene; fashion designer (1927)

Joan Blondell; actor (1909)

Shirley Booth; actor (1898)

Timothy Bottoms; actor (1951)

Warren Buffett; gazillionaire (1930)

Michael Chiklis; actor (1963)

Robert Crumb; cartoonist (1943)

Jacques-Louis David; French artist (1748)

Agoston Haraszthy de Mokcsa; vineyard importer (1812)

Cameron Diaz; actor (1972)

John Gunther; writer (1901)

Jean-Claude Killy; French skier (1943)

Peggy Lipton; actor (1947)

Huey Long; politician (1893)

Raymond Massey; actor (1896)

Tug McGraw; NY Mets/Philadelphia Phillies P (1944)

John Phillips; singer, songwriter (1935)

Andy Roddick; tennis player (1982)

Ernest Lord Rutherford; New Zealand physicist (1871)

Theodor Svedberg; Swedish chemist (1884)

Frederique van der Wal (1967)

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff; Dutch physicist (1852)

J. Alden Weir; artist (1852)

Kitty Wells; country singer (1919)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; English writer (1797)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

[Charles Kaiser] 

Even the most casual reader of this page will know that I was one of the worst prognosticators of 2024. My esteemed friend and New York Times classmate, the great liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr owned up to the same failure in a terrific column last week in which he listed the same reasons I had for being so wrong about the state of our nation: “I genuinely believed Harris would win and that she had ignited a movement among women to oppose not only the rollback of reproductive rights but also the misogyny of the Trump-Vance ticket. I also thought voters would appreciate the contrast between Harris’s unifying outreach as she closed her campaign and Trump’s angry endgame couched in violent language against his political opponents.”

It never occurred to me that the movement to restore reproductive rights could be balanced by an almost equally powerful conviction among American men AND women that no woman should ever become America’s president.

Right now I only see one significant benefit from this excruciating outcome. Unlike four years ago, dozens of secretaries of state and thousands of election workers will be sparred the disgusting libels of the MAGA propaganda machine which upended their lives and put so many of them in mortal danger, just because they had preformed their jobs so admirably.

There was a strategic element in my misplaced optimism. I did not want to spend one second longer than I had to worrying about the god awful effects of a second Trump administration, until it became undeniable that the country had chosen that direction. I could not allow myself to believe that my fellow citizens would send someone as heinous as George Wallace not once but twice to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

As the magnificent Molly Ivins wrote many years ago, “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.”

I belong to a generation whose best moments have all been about opposing unnecessary wars, and fighting to make our country live up to its original promises of freedom and justice for all.

We have made enormous strides in that direction in our own lifetimes. When I was born, there were essentially no black voters registered to vote in the deep south, and there were about six openly gay men or lesbians in the entire world. It has been my extraordinary privilege to live proudly and openly as a gay man without ever suffering from any significant sling or arrow because of that decision. For two thousand years before I was born, almost no one anywhere in the Western World was able to do that.

As the great architectural historian Vincent Scully pointed out, ours is “a time which, with all its agonies, has… been marked most of all by liberation… I think especially of the three great movements of liberation which have marked the past generation: black liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation. Each one of those movements liberated all of us, all the rest of us, from stereotypical ways of thinking which had imprisoned us and confined us for hundreds of years. Those movements, though they have a deep past in American history, were almost inconceivable just before they occurred. Then, all of a sudden in the 1960s, they burst out together, changing us all.”

As I wrote in The Gay Metropolis, “America’s best instincts have always been toward equality and inclusiveness. Especially in the last sixty years, the idea of a steadily widening embrace has been the genius behind the success of the American experiment. The main effects of these multiple liberations have been more openness, more honesty, and more opportunity--changes that have benefited everyone.”

The other leitmotif of my work has been to warn as often as I could about the terrible dangers of life under fascism. While my first two books celebrated the brave iconoclasts who did so much to reduce prejudice against black people and gay people and trans people in America, the third one was an homage to the Boulloches, an incredible French family I have known all my life, who paid a gigantic price for choosing to fight the Nazis during the four years the Germans occupied Paris.

So there is no election outcome that could upset me more deeply than one that essentially gives Americans a blank check to hate anyone they want as much as they want to, and moves the needle in a significant way towards a fascist regime in America. As EJ wrote, Barack Obama was not exacerbating when he declared, “Fairness is on the ballot. Decency is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Progress is on the ballot. Our democracy is on the ballot.”

A dear friend from a famous American progressive family has already written to me that he has heard people alleging that Democrats had ceded “too much ground, policy-wise and rhetorically, on things like immigration, crime and trans issues.” As a result there would now “have to be a backlash, an over correction essentially throwing immigrants and trans people under the bus, in order to become electorally viable again.” I told him I would fight that backlash with every fiber of my being. I was relieved when he replied, “I support your fight.”

As EJ wrote, “In broadening their coalition, advocates of cultural openness must remain steadfast in insisting on equal rights and equal treatment but avoid playing into the tropes and parodies created by their adversaries. Divisive culture wars are essential to Trump’s project. Harris understood this, and progressives should build on, not reject, her insistence on the values Americans hold in common.”

Donald Trump did not win in a landslide. He temporarily defeated decency because ten million Americans who voted for Joe Biden couldn’t be bothered to leave their houses to vote for a great Woman candidate, largely because of her gender.

Trump’s supporters have no idea what they have gotten themselves into.

The massive corruption, incompetence and sheer nastiness that we are about to witness will provide every decent citizen with an unprecedented opportunity: the chance to once again repair our porous ship of state, to re-point it toward the freedom and justice and equality which have always been and must always be every American’s birthright.

CC: Joseph StouterSal MateraSarah BurkeNancy ShapiroKevin SessumsRobert Scott HortonJosh MarshallJohn FlanneryMartin PengellyJane FeldmanMeg FidlerAndrew RosenthalBryan LowderTristan ChiricoCam McDonaldMichael B KaiserLaura Fisher KaiserTema K SilkMichael KurtzTomas van Houtryve ArtistVincent DemongeotPOmme DeCasey O'Brien BlondesMichelle ClunieJudy BarnettJudy WiederJon Barrett

[Charles Kaiser]