¡Alto Arizona!

A Lesson for Americans: Reaping the Consequences of Hate

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Hrafnkell Haraldsson

on Politicususa.com

We have all heard the old saying, “You reap what you sow.” This lesson was recently learned by an Arkansas school board district member, Clint McCance, vice-president of the Midland School District in Pleasant Plains. Posting on Facebook, McCance said, in response to a campaign sponsored by GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) that people should wear purple to honor suicide victims of anti-gay bullying,

“Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers committed suicide. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed therselves because of their sin.” (sic)

McCance now realizes he went too far.

“I’m reaping what I’ve sown,” he told CNN. “I’ve had a lot of hate speech thrown at me and my family on every level.”

DREAM Movement: Challenges With the Social Justice Elite's Military Option Arguments and the Immigration Reform "Leaders"

Tuesday 21 September 2010
by: Jonathan Perez, Jorge Guitierrez, Nancy Meza, and Neidi Dominguez Zamorano, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

. . . We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

-- Martin Luther King, Letter From the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

We are undocumented youth activists and we refuse to be silent any longer. The DREAM Act movement has inspired and re-energized undocumented and immigrant youth around the country. In a time when the entire immigrant community is under attack, and increasingly demoralized, stripped of our rights, the DREAM movement has injected life, resistance and creativity into the broader immigrant rights struggle.

Until we organized this movement, we had been caught in a paralyzing stranglehold of inactivity across the country. We were told that the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, or CIRA, was still possible. Yet we continued to endure ICE raids and we witnessed the toxic Arizona SB1070. Meanwhile, CIRA had lost bipartisan support and there was no longer meaningful Congressional or executive support for real reform.

Youth DREAM Act activists stopped waiting. We organized ourselves and created our own strategy, used new tactics and we rejected the passivity of the nonprofit industrial complex. At a moment when hope seemed scarce, we forged new networks of solidarity. We declared ourselves UNDOCUMENTED AND UNAFRAID!

What Prop 8 And #SB1070 Have In Common

by Naima Ramos-Chapman
Monday, August 9 2010, 5:04 PM EST

Sandip Roy, an editor and a gay immigrant, expressed why the fight in Arizona against SB 1070 and the fight in California against Proposition 8 may be one in the same. He writes at New America Media:

Both issues are resulting in a patchwork of laws, happening state by state. In one case, it is because of the lack of comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level. In the other it’s because of the Defense of Marriage Act at the federal level. Democrats are nervous about both issues, trying to walk a fine political line. Both have become electoral tripwires even when they are not on the ballot. And as Out4Immigration’s Amos Lim points out, binational gay and lesbian couples are caught in the gap between the two. Gay marriage in California will not help them until there is immigration reform in Washington.

The fight over Prop 8 in California rested on the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. What Judge Walker found was Prop 8 violated the due process and equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.