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I have no idea where his hate is coming from. But it’s neither bigoted nor thuggish to say BYU should treat openly LGBT students the same way the school does straight ones. No one wants “separate but equal” facilities and no one wants straight people to suffer, physically or otherwise, as a result. |
The LGBT community — true victims for so long — raced right past “equality” and in some circles is enjoying a status now of supremacy. Any group that seeks to interrupt business practices, college athletic conference membership, military service, Hollywood movie casting, grade school curricula, public bathroom use policies, and every other avenue of significant endeavor — with the politics of sexual identity and attraction — you can bet, is not seeking to be mere equals. After all, nobody goes into a contest aiming for a tie. |
How the hell is asking for fair treatment a call for gay “supremacy”? This is the flip side of the argument we often hear from Christian conservatives: Their religion deserves special rights, and anyone who calls for religious neutrality is really out to persecute Christians. LGBT people want equal rights and it’s a bridge too far. |
So what does Larson think LGBT people want? |
Perhaps we have different definitions of equality. We had assumed they meant equals in just the present era. Instead, they possibly meant historical equals — getting even. They don’t, personally, want to be equal. They want the SCORE to be equal. |
They just want the same opportunities as everyone else without having to look over their shoulders to see if their own university is going to expel them for being “out” athletes. That’s what this conversation is about. Even beyond the university setting, they don’t want to be punished because of who they love. Why is that so hard to understand? |
Larson says all this, by the way, as someone who freely admits he doesn’t know too many LGBT people: |
I won’t lie and say I have “lots” of gay friends. I have a few, and they are for the most part genuine, caring, and kind, even if we disagree. I’m guessing that many gays quietly cringe at the incessant tempestuous demands made by their most vocal national surrogates. |
He guesses wrong. You won’t find many LGBT people or allies cringing at a request not to reward a school that openly discriminates against them. |
Larson doesn’t get why LGBT people can’t just deal with a bit of discrimination: |
I ask genuinely, what is so important about making sure every last square millimeter of mainstream culture is overtly gay friendly?… |
Because the goddamn alternative has always been a culture that’s hostile to gay people. I welcome the day when we no longer care about someone’s sexual orientation, but we’re obviously not there yet. Too many people think there’s something wrong with any family that doesn’t look like a 1950s sitcom. Until they’re willing to let go of their bigotry, the rest of us will work to create a culture of acceptance. |
The Big 12 hasn’t announced whether or not it’ll accept BYU, but they should absolutely consider what saying yes would mean for a large number of students and athletes who stand to be punished for being out of the closet. |
(Image via Shutterstock)<|endoftext|>This item has been updated since it was initially posted.]A 17-year-old male Nimitz High School student has been arrested in connection with the death of a fellow student, a 16-year-old girl.Irving police say that shortly before 5 p.m. Monday officers were called to investigate someone found unconscious along the 300 block of E. Sixth Street . When they got there, they discovered 10th-grader Racheal Jean Wiest unconscious on the floor of a garage, which has been converted into a living space with a bed. The teen later identified as her estranged boyfriend, 11th-grader Jacob Lee Boyd, was also there.Wiest was transported to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where she died.Irving police spokesman James McLellan says detectives initially thought that perhaps she might have overdosed. But McLellan says that investigators learned that Wiest and Boyd had met at a friend's house on Memorial Day "to discuss their relationship." McLellan says the couple, which has recently broken up, had been arguing and that Wiest tried to leave -- at which point, police say, Boyd "began choking the victim until she stopped moving."McLellan says the owner of the house found out what had happened from Boyd and tried to perform CPR on Wiest. The homeowner also had her son, a friend of Boyd and Wiest's, dial 911. McLellan says Boyd told police what happened, but that he'd made the "unsolicited" comment without having been read his rights. When officers realized what had happened, he was taken into custody without incident based at that point on circumstantial evidence.Boyd is currently being held in the Irving City Jail on a murder charge, but because he hasn't been arraigned, no bond has been set.McLellan says an autopsy has not yet been performed, and the investigation remains ongoing as detectives continue to interview other witnesses.Irving ISD spokesperson Lesley Weaver tells The Dallas Morning News district officials learned about the incident on social media early this morning."Because the safety and well-being of our students is always our top priority, we are offering counseling and other support to students who may be affected by this situation," the district says in a statement sent to media Tuesday. "Crisis counselors have been on campus all day, and they will remain at Nimitz for as long as needed. We are shocked and saddened by this tragic news, and we will keep the families in our thoughts and prayers. In addition, Irving ISD officials and school staff are cooperating fully with the police investigation."<|endoftext|>NEW DELHI: Here's a startup with a difference - a group of senior corporate executives, headed by a former Microsoft heavy hitter, has launched an online shop for adult products.The products on sale on the site include erotic lingerie, lubricants, creams, literature, accessories and so on. Thatspersonal.com has tied up with several global brands to exclusively sell their products in India. Samir Saraiya , CEO of Digital E-Life which runs the site, was formerly lead (business development) at Microsoft Singapore . He had worked with Microsoft and Yahoo! in India as well. Other co-founders and investors are Neville Taraporewalla , senior director (emerging markets), Microsoft India; Jaspreet Bindra , formerly regional director (retail, entertainment and devices), Microsoft India; Vikram Varma , head of Internet solutions firm Digital Driftwood; Abhay Bhalerao , chairman of Amrut Software; and Internet lawyer Lekhesh Dholakia Says Saraiya: "The sheer size of the business opportunity was the biggest driver for me to leave the high-paying job in Singapore with an amazing expat life." He pegs the current size of the sex products industry in India - mostly run illegally from crowded markets such as Delhi's Palika Bazaar and Mumbai's Manish Market - at Rs 1,200-1,500 crore. He expects the industry to grow manifold as people look to become "more adventurous with their sex lives and at the same time stay discreet".Dholakia explains that while certain sex toys may attract punishment for obscenity under Indian laws, the ones that sell won't. "As long as the products are not 'obscene' and/or displayed or exhibited in a manner which is not 'obscene', there ought not to be any serious concerns in the sale of such products," he notes.Taraporewalla, who was earlier director and country general manager at Yahoo! India, says he agreed to be an angel investor immediately after going through Saraiya's project plan."The confidence comes from the team that he (Saraiya) has assembled and with India being on the threshold to have one of the largest online audiences in a couple of years ... it is the right move in the right direction," says Taraporewalla, the Internet industry veteran.The unique selling proposition of the online shop is its stress on keeping secret the identity of the buyer. "Besides the fact that I have asked my employees to sign a bond in this regard to keep the names of our clients secret, I have also tied up with (logistics services firm) Aramex International to ensure that customers can collect the products from Aramex offices in their hometown," says Saraiya.Which means a customer residing with, say, his/her parents can collect the "tamper-proof, unmarked package" from an Aramex office that he/she has specified while placing her order. "As soon as he (Saraiya) came up with the idea, we agreed for this arrangement," says Percy Avari , regional manager ( South Asia ) at Aramex.As of now, payments on the site - which was soft-launched recently - are to be made through credit/debit cards or via Net-banking. Saraiya said he soon plans to introduce cash-on-delivery services and extend the reach to small towns.Among others, Digital E-Life has entered into exclusive agreements with well-known global brands such as Shirley of Hollywood, the American lingerie brand. Similar pacts are in place with companies selling adult products such as PJUR ( Germany ), Sensuva (US), Shunga ( Canada ), Male Basics (US) and Premium Bodywear (Germany).<|endoftext|>Susan Collins, president of the Container Recycling Institute in Los Angeles, wants to correct a fairy tale many of us like to believe about recycling. |
“The public has been trained to put their stuff in their bin at the curb, and for the stuff to just go away. And of course there is no such thing as away, away is always somewhere,” Collins says. |
Somewhere, for more than a decade, has most often been China. Chinese recycling plants have made a lot of money reprocessing our trash and selling the raw materials. |
But around a quarter of the bottles, cans, and paper we were sending there were getting mixed in with too much food and trash, or even comingled with the wrong type of recycling. The bottles, cans, and cardboard that couldn’t be recycled ended up in Chinese landfills. |
Last year, China decided it’d had enough of being the world’s trash dump. They enacted a new policy: they call it the “Green Fence.” |
“They would reject shipments at ports if they were too contaminated,” explains Collins. “So from the perspective of the recyclers that were operating in the United States that meant that they had paid money and put materials on a ship, the materials came back to them, which meant that they didn’t receive the revenue from selling the scrap materials.” |
Besides lost revenue and shipping costs, American recyclers also had to pay demurrage charges, fees assigned at the ports for storage of the material while it was awaiting inspection. |
All this meant trouble for many American recycling companies and materials recovery facilities (MRF’s) in the short term. But Collins says China’s Green Fence also quickly began pushing big changes in the business. |
“This has sort of raised the bar for everybody, and has said to everybody: slow everything down a little bit, so you get everything sorted properly, produce higher quality materials.” |
“There are buyers in the United States that will buy that material. And certainly there is not another buyer out there that is accepting this lower quality material,” says Collins. |
One of the buyers in the US is CarbonLITE in Riverside, Calif., just east of Los Angeles. CEO Leon Farahnik took me on a step by step tour of the company’s plastic bottle reprocessing plant. |
To simplify: Used bottles come in, the bottles get washed, and finally the bottles are ground down into flakes and eventually small pellets. Inside a laboratory, samples of the finished product are tested for purity. |
The plant processes about 2 billion bottles a year like this. |
Still, the factory has been running under capacity. Farahnik is excited about China’s Green Fence though: A lot of those bales of plastic that used to get shipped to China are now coming to recyclers like him. In this case, better standards from China mean better practices, as well as more jobs here in the US. |
CarbonLITE Ceo Leon Farahnik holds bags of plastic pellets made from old bottles. CarbonLITE sells these pellets to bottle manufacturers. Credit: Jason Margolis |
CarbonLITE also benefits from being in California, one of 11 states with a container deposit law. Californians get charged an extra nickel or dime, depending on the size of the container, when they buy a can or bottle. Consumers can get that deposit back when they recycle it. |
Companies like CarbonLITE reap the benefits of this law, with more containers available, and more containers in generally good condition. (Farahnik says a lot of homeless people in California actually do the recycling.) |
The 11 states with deposit laws all have significantly higher recycling rates than the national average. China’s Green Fence may push the other 39 states to adopt deposit laws of their own, as now they’re having to deal with more of their own garbage. |
Beyond the business benefits for American recyclers, Farahnik also emphasizes that recycling more bottles here in the US translates into greater savings in energy and greenhouse gas pollution. |
“I use 1/8th the energy of virgin material [for bottles],” says Farahnik. “And I save 60,000 tons [of carbon dioxide emissions] just in this factory alone. That’s like 40,000 trips between Los Angles and New York on an airplane.” |
Of course players in the global economy are always adjusting in search of the lowest-cost option, so this story could yet take a dark turn. With China tightening its controls on imported trash, what’s to stop Americans or Europeans from just sending their old bottles and cans to the next country down the line, say in Africa? |
“I think that is already happening,” says Susan Collins. “But it’s not Africa, it’s probably India.” |
As well as Vietnam and Turkey. |
But Collins says these countries also know what China did erecting its Green Fence. And she hopes other countries will follow that example and only accept recyclables that can actually be recycled.<|endoftext|>Everything Podcasting |
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As a dedicated commuter cyclist, I feel like a minority of one when it comes to discussing our city planners' efforts to make Adelaide bicycle friendly. |
In particular, I feel badgered to go along with the call for more bike lanes, but I refuse to give in to the hi-viz-jacket-wearing, pump-wielding mob. |
Simply put, I hate bike lanes. |
Not for the reasons that snarling, ham-thick-armed men in four-wheel drives hate bike lanes (and bikes), but because bike lanes are bad for cyclists. |
Take the bog-standard roadside bike lane: a strip of white painted a few feet from the gutter. As if laid down by a bike hater, it shunts cyclists off to the side of the road to deal with the constantly stopping buses, pedestrians who think bike lanes are for standing in, illegally parked cars, roadside debris and drain grates. |
Cyclists in a bike lane can't ensure they stay visible to traffic, nor can they prevent cars overtaking or turning left at an unsafe time. |