Tag: South

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Memphis Gaydar News

Report: South Has Most LGBTQ Residents In the U.S.

CREDIT: Movement Advancement Project/Campaign for Southern Equality

Movement Advancement Project/Campaign for Southern Equality

The South is really gay, y’all.

A new report from two gay rights groups says that one in three LGBTQ people in the country call the South their home, more than any other region in the country.

The report says LGBTQ people live in the South despite its “hostile policy landscape.” Of those LGBTQ Southerners, 93 percent live in states with laws that negatively impact “virtually every aspect of daily life” for them. For all of this, the group called its report, “Telling a New Southern Story: LGBTQ Resilience, Resistance, and Leadership.” Movement Advancement Project/Campaign for Southern Equality

“Contrary to media depictions of LGBTQ people primarily living in New York or California, the South is home to more LGBTQ people than any other region, as well as incredible racial diversity among LGBTQ people,” said Logan Casey, policy researcher at the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) and author of the report. “LGBTQ advocates in the South are both creative and effective in response to the political landscape and have often led the nation in working in broad coalitions and across a wide range of issues.”

The report is from Colorado-based MAP and North Carolina-based Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE). It finds that 3.6 million LGBTQ adults live in the South. The South is also home to over half a million transgender adults, more than any other region. Also, more than one in five LGBTQ Southerners are Black, more than any other region of the country.

Movement Advancement Project/Campaign for Southern Equality

Here are some other key findings from the report:

• LGBTQ Southerners are more likely than LGBTQ people outside the South to be religiously affiliated, with over half of LGBTQ Southerners being religiously affiliated.

Movement Advancement Project/Campaign for Southern Equality

• LGBTQ Southerners experience multiple challenges in economic security, health access and outcomes, as well as in daily life

• According to a survey from the CSE, 71 percent of LGBTQ Southerners have experienced harassment related to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

• 23 percent of LGBTQ Southerners have experienced physical violence, with higher rates for people who are transgender.

Movement Advancement Project/Campaign for Southern Equality

• One in three Black LGBTQ Southerners reported experiencing physical violence because they are LGBTQ, the highest rate of any racial or ethnic group.

Progress has been made across the South in the last 10 years, according to the report, despite harsh state policies. LGBTQ people are innovative, focusing on building community and providing direct support to address community needs without waiting for state legislatures, the report says.

“It’s true that LGBTQ Southerners experience a lot of barriers to equality and full inclusion, from a difficult policy landscape to the cultural realities of the South,” said Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the CSE. “These forces often require that we organize in different ways, dreaming up new strategies, finding ways to work the seams and the fault lines — in other words, that we approach organizing in ways that are both queer and Southern.

“There’s a deep sense of resolve and hopefulness, even as we also carry significant pain and grief. The impact of LGBTQ people staying in the South, being out, sharing our stories, being in public leadership – all of this is changing old notions of what’s possible in the South. This is our home, and to claim it as such is an act of both resistance and reclamation.”
Movement Advancement Project/Campaign for Southern Equality


Read the entire report for yourself right here:
[pdf-1]

Categories
News

Global Warming to Have Worst Impact on the South

From The Washington Post: “Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe’s citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture.

“Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years — along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts — will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet’s lower latitudes, where most of the world’s poor live …”

In the U.S., that means the South’s agriculture will be most affected. Read the whole story here.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Carsten Reisinger | dreamstime.com

The League of the South met recently in Chattanooga. Like its liberal cousin to the north, The Vermont Republic, the League of the South wants to secede from the Union. While it is not necessarily a bad idea, I vaguely remember a Ken Burns PBS documentary that makes me think that this has been tried before.

The League of the South says that it is not racially motivated. (And what better way to demonstrate this than to have the Confederate Flag as your symbol on your Web site?)

The liberal secessionists in Vermont want out of the federal government for other reasons. They want gays to be able to marry and accessorize freely — and they do not want to fight wars.

The South, and in particular my home state of Tennessee, the Volunteer State, enjoys fighting and will do so at the drop of a hat. In fact, most Southern men will sign up and be on the battlefield well before they ask what the war is about — and that includes bar fights. Our warring predisposition will certainly serve the South well when we inevitably invade Vermont someday.

If you think about it, breaking up the United States into a different alignment makes sense. Corporations make markets and companies more efficient by buying them and breaking them up into more cost-effective pieces. The rock-and-roll group Grand Funk Railroad, for example, could be bought and broken up into several more valuable bands, perhaps ones that employ less cow bell in their music.

The possibilities are endless. We need to ask ourselves, for example, do we really need both a North and a South Dakota?

And Southerners can quickly get past being split off from the North as long as it does not affect the SEC football playoffs. Another plus for us is that a secession might finally eliminate the Bowl Championship Series.

The real reason there is a movement in the liberal North and the conservative South to secede is a simple one: We disagree on everything.

We in the South do not think that Congress always has our best interest at heart, like when they are in session making laws. We believe that the fundamental failure of the federal government and Congress (with its 11 percent approval rating) is its unstoppable propensity to spend our money.

Hillary Clinton, for example, recently made a campaign proposition to give $5,000 to every child born in the U.S., including illegals. (Not to be outdone, and in an effort to jumpstart his failing campaign, John Edwards said he would match the $5,000 per year and throw in a lifetime supply of Robitussin.) Offering just any “tussin” would be viewed as unacceptable by the Democrats since, if the rich get Robitussin, no generic form of “tussin” should be forced upon the poor.

When you get down to it, the South and North differ fundamentally on two issues: abortion and guns. Southerners think abortion should not be legal after the first trimester. Northern liberals think abortion should be legal up to age 12.

On guns, we Southerners want our assault weapons in the glove compartment of our trucks, ready to blow away anyone who poses a threat to us, real or imagined.

Northerners believe that only the police, gangs, and the Mafia should have guns.

If we do split, the South could finally realize its dream of no separation of church and state and govern by religious denominations instead of political parties. The Baptists would be like the Shiites and the Methodists like the Sunnis. That has worked well in Iraq.

As we in the South know, as long as our leaders go to church and sing hymns on Sundays (and especially if they tell us about it enough), they prove both their moral superiority and leadership credentials. We will need no laws, just the Ten Commandments. And we certainly do not need zoning laws, as proven by driving through Panama City, Florida, or any Atlanta suburb.

The North will be aligned and beholden to every half-assed organized special-interest group that can afford a microphone. The overriding theme will be that if enough special interests — be they teachers’ unions, cab drivers or plaintiffs’ lawyers — get together in any seemingly victimized fashion, they can get something free from the government. Liberal Democrats love this country, much like O. J. Simpson loved his ex-wife and his sports memorabilia.

The North can keep the United Nations, and we in the South can learn about the rest of the world the way we always have — by visiting Epcot Center in Orlando.

Ron Hart is a libertarian columnist who lives in Atlanta.