STONEWALLED: POLICE ABUSE AND MISCONDUCT AGAINST LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER PEOPLE IN THE U.S.
Nearly four decades after Stonewall, and despite significant progress in the recognition of the human rights of LGBT people, the targeting of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals for police abuse and misconduct remains a persistent and widespread problem in the US.A new report by Amnesty International, Stonewalled: Police abuse and misconduct against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the US, documents serious patterns of police abuse, including incidents amounting to torture and ill-treatment.
With the release of it’s report Stonewalled, Amnesty International called on police departments to sign a pledge affirming their commitment to combat discrimination and violence against LGBT people, and to review AI’s recommendations in the report and take steps to address problems within their departments.
Read the report: STONEWALLED POLICE ABUSE AND MISCONDUCT AGAINST LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER PEOPLE IN THE U.S. ~ by Amnesty International
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How to Stop Hate in Your Hometown
Humans hate. Apparently it’s a significant component of our emotional “palette.” At the risk of sounding naïve, or visionary, someday maybe we’ll evolve out of it. Hate may become unnecessary like our tonsils — unused and serving no purpose but still there, only occasionally becoming infected. Or maybe we’ll learn to focus and harness hate so that it is only directed usefully at injustice and cruelty. It’s not inconceivable at all that medicine will find a cure, much as progress continues to be made on curing depression.
For now though, hate can rear its ugly head in social as well as individual and family settings. Mistrust, fear, hatred of the “other” race, the “other” gender, the “other” religion, the “other” nationality, or the “other” sexual orientation can escape the boundaries of civil order. Then vandalism and violence, up to and including murder, result. At that point a community faces a crisis.
Since we don’t have a cure for hate, the best we can do is an antidote. There is one. It was “invented” 10 years ago in Billings, Mont. It’s called Not In Our Town (NIOT).
Read the article: How to Stop Hate in Your Hometown by Frank Joyce ~ AlterNet ~ September 29, 2006
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The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence homepage …
and: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in Wikipedia