The Good

The Illinois legislature has passed a bill approving civil unions. Governor Quinn is expected to sign it into law by the end of the year. Hurrah Illinois! One step closer to actual equality for LGBTs.

The Pope has made a tiny concession to people who use condoms — they may no longer be headed straight to hell! Baby steps, I guess, although as tigtog points out, there are a lot more steps to go toward making the Catholic Church the loving kind of body it purports to be for members and non-members alike.

This news is very late, but Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from her house arrest in Burma. That Feministing article has links to her speech, which is definitely worth checking out. This woman is a human rights hero and has been a vocal activist for decades, not to mention a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Amnesty International has been advocating for her release for years. Congratulations and I wish her a safe and productive future.

The Bad

Instead of extended unemployment benefits as they usually do, members of Congress have got into the Grinchy spirit and stalled in partisan politics. A lot of people are going to lose their homes (aren’t we done with that yet?) and more from this.

It’s no secret that the intersectionality of identities and abuses based on those identities is a huge part of the discussion of human rights among contemporary social justice groups. Being black isn’t worse or better than being a woman, and vice versa, for example. Unfortunately, mainstream organizations and the government haven’t caught on to this idea yet, and so it is that one group’s needs is determined as less important than another’s. This kind of bargaining is what resulted in black women’s concerns being shunted aside in the 2nd wave of the feminist movement, and it’s what makes many civil rights historians look at the civil rights movement from one angle only, instead of taking into account women’s particular experiences. This great article takes a quick look at how many white men raped and abused black women, and how recent attempts to rectify past wrongs do not allow for pursuing justice in those cases. Also, check it out — Rosa Parks was the main NAACP investigator in the case study presented in the article. Rosa Parks did an awful lot of amazing things!

The Silly

Sessily sent me this cool link: posters made up of the text of a book! I don’t see any book on there that I want in poster form, although The Wizard of Oz and Moby-Dick look really cool. I think an Ursula K. LeGuin novel would be great — Shevek boarding the spaceship in The Dispossessed or just about any scene from the Earthsea series.